Summary Of Elvira Dutton's Jubilee

Jubilee is a book that tells the story of Elvira Dutton, who is more known to others as Vyry. Vyry lived her life starting from the antebellum years, which were the years prior to the Civil War and the time when slavery was thriving in America, throughout the Civil War years and to the Reconstruction period. Being a mulatto and a bastard of Master John, she spent most of her youth working as a slave in the Duttons’ plantation and living throughout three of the most important and famous periods in the history of America, she witnessed and even experienced a lot of changes in politic and economy as well as social that were happening in those periods. Events in part one took place during the antebellum years. The story of Vyry’s life in Jubilee

The northern states called the Union fought against slavery and to free the black salves from the southern states called the Confederate, which also fought to defend their cause. This Civil War brought a lot of changes to the life of Vyry and the people around her. It was during these years of civil war that Vyry truly witnessed the fierceness and tenacity of the southerners’ patriotism and how it kept escalating throughout the Civil War. It can be seen by how most of the young men in the southern states answered the call to war by being soldiers and infantries. Big changes themselves were going on at the Duttons’ plantation during these Civil War years. Not long after his father’s death and the news of war reached the Duttons plantation, Johnny, Big Missy’s only son, decided to go to war as a commander along with Kevin, Miss Lillian’s husband, who at first was reluctant to go. Not only the men showed their burning patriotism by going to war, but also the women back in the Big House who were giving their contribution for the Confederate by making uniforms and Confederate flags. As if those things weren’t enough, the Duttons were also more than willing to lend their slaves to work in the southern factories, even though many managed to run away and fought for the Union

As the southerners, who lost the war, were trying to go back to their normal lives and fixing their poor economic conditions caused by the war, the newly freed black people were also trying to make a living of their own and finding a place to settle. Vyry, her children, and Innis Brown were also part of those black people. After moving from their new house in Alabama because of occasional flooding to Montgomery where the Browns were tricked by Mr. Pippins, a white man, the Browns finally reached Crenshaw County where they received job and help from the Jacobsons. With the money they got and saved from working for the Jacobsons, they finally managed to build a nice house to be settled in the area near Troy, Pike County. But unfortunately, not long after they lived there, their house was burned down by the Ku Klux Klan, a group of hostile white southerners who hated the blacks and those who supported them. Salvaging what they could, the Browns were once again in the journey to find the right place to build their house and to settle in. From those experiences, Vyry learnt that with the emancipation of the blacks, the white southerners’ discriminating attitude and hatred toward the newly freed blacks didn’t really change, even it seemed that their hatred for the blacks just burned fiercer than before and it can be