Literature of the United States

Margaret Walker’s Jubilee is a semi-fictional account of «Vyry Brown,» based on the life of author M. Walker's grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown.
Vyry Brown is a mixed-race slave–the unacknowledged daughter of her master–who is born onto the Dutton plantation in Georgia. The novel follows her experiences from early childhood to adult life. The story of Vyry's life in the novel spans three major periods of American history: Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction.
Jubilee draws on both history and folk traditions. The final section of Jubilee thus shifts its focus to the education of blacks during and after Reconstruction.
The ending of Jubilee suggests a connection between the events the novel has described during Reconstruction and the civil rights movement of the 1960s. The narrative ends on a train bound for Selma. As Jim and his father board the train, the conductor announces the segregated seating order-colored up front and whites in the rear.
The authors revealed the psychological and social impact of slavery, struggle of under-appreciated individuals to find their roots. The main characters face the life hardships, reaction to the unjust treatment by the white people and seeking for self-identity, the question for selfhood for them is a motivating factor.
Writers of African American literature do not have to be black. The material needs only to have connections to black culture or history. The profession of writing entails the ability to create from many different perspectives.
The book called «The Help» by Kathryn Stockett, a white author, writes from the perspectives of several different characters including two African American women working as maids in Mississippi during the 1960s. «The Help» is clearly a book that addresses issues of race and segregation.
Similarly, the classic work «Uncle Tom's Cabin» was written by another white woman, Harriet Beecher Stowe. This book would also qualify as African American literature because of its subject matter. Stowe wrote the anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851–52) in reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it illegal to assist an escaped slave. The book was quickly translated into 37 languages and sold in five years over half a million copies in the United States. Uncle Tom's Cabin was also among the most popular plays of the 19th century.
The novel was so popular that it was made into a traveling melodrama and played to audiences throughout the North. Southern journals denounced the novel declaring that its portrayal of slavery was pure fabrication, an invention of the author’s imagination.
Like most white writers of her day, H.B. Stowe could not escape the racism of the time. Because of this, her work has some serious flaws, which in turn have helped perpetuate damaging images of African Americans. However, the book, within its genre of romance, was enormously complex in character and in its plots. The book outraged the South, and in the long run, that is its significance.