Jubilee

Hetta is Vyry’s mother. Hetta was a victim of repeated rape, taken in her teen years as the concubine of Marster John. She bore 15 children by her master, which her husband Jake, a fellow slave, reluctantly accepted as his own. In her youth, she was beautiful—slim yet shapely, and walked with the hauteur of a queen. By the age of 29, she transforms into “a sullen-looking woman with a pouting lip who rarely smiled and almost never talked” (27). Tired of her attractiveness and of what it cost her, Hetta “kept her hair wrapped in endless clean little rags” (27). Jake notices, too, how the numerous consecutive births changed Hetta’s body—making her breasts saggy and her belly distended, even when she wasn’t pregnant. While nursing Vyry, Hetta was also required to nurse Lillian, the child Marster John had with his wife, Salina. All that remained the same about Hetta over time was her “black face,” which was still “serene, dignified, sullen, and quiet by turns” (28). She also maintained her habit of keeping a “spotlessly clean” cabin and demanded from Jake the same high standard of hygiene that she maintained for herself. Hetta dies while giving birth to yet another of Marse John’s children. Vyry is only a toddler at the time.

Called “Marster John” or “Marse John” by the slaves on his plantation, when he’s introduced in the novel, Marse John is a young and boyish-looking man of 35. He is large and big-boned with “sandy hair” and “gray-blue eyes” (19). He’s also genial. He enjoys the company of friends and spends his free time hunting and fishing. His passion for life gives him a great deal of energy. He eats and drinks heartily, sometimes until late at night, but he still rises early. He enjoys travel and, before he was married, attended a Quadroon ball in New Orleans, where he considered “setting up one of [the] colored gals who had taken his fancy” (48) as his mistress. He attended Oglethorpe College in Georgia and descends from a family of politicians on both sides of his family who served in Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia.

John is wealthy and owns two plantations, but he lives in the “stately” and barely accessible manor on Shady Oaks Plantation. He keeps Hetta, a slave who dies at the age of 29, as his concubine. At Shady Oaks, John keeps 60 slaves. He lost his virginity to Hetta when he was in his teens and Hetta was slightly younger. John’s father had encouraged him to “learn life by breaking in a young nigger wench” instead of “[spoiling] a pure white virgin girl” (20). John, therefore, raped Hetta repeatedly from her early pubescent years up until her death, fathering each of her children. John attempted to disguise his exploitation of Hetta by marrying her off to Jake, a field hand on his plantation.

During adulthood, John decides to use his landholdings as leverage to run for political office—legislator for Terrell County. He becomes a representative in the Georgia State House and one of the seven wealthiest plantation owners from central Georgia. Though John relishes his wealth, he has no interest in getting involved in the disciplining of slaves, which he prefers to leave to Grimes, as long as the overseer doesn’t get too carried away. Marse John later dies from gangrene as a result of getting hurt during a carriage accident. He dies at home, increasingly angry about abolitionism, and committed to retaining the Southern tradition of slavery.

Often called “Big Missy,” Salina is John’s tall, “big-boned” wife from Savannah, Georgia (20). When they begin courting, John is very attracted to Salina, the “pretty brunette” who expresses passion for him and arouses within him a knight-like urge to protect her honor. However, during their honeymoon, Salina expresses horror at the act of intercourse, causing John to realize how sheltered she is and that she doesn’t share his desire. Salina is a Christian woman who takes solace in her Bible, using her Christian faith to feel superior to her husband, whom she regards as a moral reprobate. Grimes, Dutton’s slave driver, admires Salina for being exemplary of proper Southern white womanhood, due to her careful distinction “between niggers and white people” (40). Like many other plantation owners’ wives, she feigns ignorance of her husband’s “goings-on” (40) with enslaved women on his plantation. Once, Salina confronted John about his having sex with Hetta. She threatened to leave him, in favor of going back to her family in Savannah. John welcomed her to do so, as long as she left and kept their children in his care.

Salina is the mother of John’s two children, Lillian and John Jr. Her son grows up to develop deep admiration for Salina. Like Grimes, he believes that she is exemplary of proper white womanhood. After having her children, Salina stops having sex with her husband, believing that the act of intercourse is only for procreation. She resents John for taking slave women as his concubines—not out of sympathy for the women, but out of disgust for his race-mixing. She also dislikes his drunken carousing, arguing that it keeps him from focusing on the business of the plantation, which she takes over. Despite the fewer rights that white women had in the 19th century, Salina usurps great power in her household and is frequently able to influence her husband’s decisions. The house slaves are aware of the extent of Salina’s authority. Worse, when John isn’t present, Salina tortures Vyry out of revenge for her husband’s infidelities. Salina is a provincial woman who doesn’t share her husband’s interest in travel, unless the journey is to her hometown or to Augusta, Georgia.

During the Civil War, she takes on the persona of a Stoic matron, dedicated to the Confederate cause. At one point, Randall Ware compares her manner to that of Queen Victoria, though he says so in the context of mocking her imperious attitude. She remains committed to the war effort, investing her entire family fortune in war bonds, in honor of her now dead husband, son, and son-in-law. She dies of a stroke shortly before the Union army enters Georgia from the Chattahoochee River. 

Lillian is the daughter of Marse John Dutton and his wife, Salina. She is a delicate, blonde beauty and, in terms of looks and personality, is a foil for her brawnier and more formidable mother. During her childhood, she is close to Vyry, who is her playmate. Lillian openly acknowledges Vyry as her sister and plays with her and the other slave children until she reaches puberty, at which point her mother commands her to stop associating with black children and to behave according to Southern social mores, which require strict separation between the races. Lillian later marries the sensitive and bookish Kevin MacDougall, who opposes the Civil War but still fights and dies for the Confederacy. Lillian and Kevin have a daughter, Susan, and a son, Bob. Her husband dies during a battle at Ocean pond when he is around 30 years old. After the Civil War, she experiences rape at the hand of what was probably a Union soldier. Lillian succumbs to mental illness as a result of her traumas. She and her children end up in the care of her aunt, Miss Lucy, and live in Alabama. 

John Jr., often called Johnny, is the son of Marse John Dutton and his wife, Salina. John has his mother’s “dark coloring” (124) and his father’s broad, powerful body. Like his mother, he is also openly contemptuous of Vyry. He adores Salina and considers her an emblem of Southern womanhood. His contempt of Vyry likely has less to do with her than with his sense of needing to show loyalty to his mother, which includes shunning the product of his father’s extramarital affair. John later attends West Point and becomes an officer for the Confederate Army. He is competitive but also bound to a masculine code of honor, which behooves him to defend the Confederacy, which makes his mother proud. During the Battle of Chickamauga, he is shot through the lung. He returns home to recover and, while there, receives the attentions of Fanny Crenshaw, who has always had a crush on John Jr. One night, John begins coughing, as a result of hemorrhaging blood from his lungs. He dies several hours later and is buried on the Dutton plantation beside his father. His brother-in-law, Kevin, is later buried alongside him.

Jake is Hetta’s husband. After her death, he takes Lucy, a kitchen worker, as his partner. Marster John marries Hetta and Jake to distract others from the fact that he has fathered all 15 of Hetta’s children. Jake is a field hand whom Marster John often belittles for his amusement. Jake worries, too, about the possibility of his master selling him. Though he is a good field hand, he has a sullen demeanor. While the novel uses Hetta has an example of how black women were sexually exploited in the plantation system, Jake is an example of how black men were routinely demoralized by their white slave masters. Jake could never fully claim Hetta as his wife, given the sexual privileges that Marster John exercised over her. Similarly, he is unable to protect Lucy from being branded as a result of insubordination toward her mistress, Salina.

Grimes is Marster Dutton’s slave driver and also works as the sheriff’s deputy in Lee County. Grimes grew up near the Dutton plantation. When he became an adult, he left Georgia and “worked at odd jobs on small farms and plantations in neighboring states” (81) before becoming an overseer. Grimes, like many slave drivers, is a poor white man who feels better about his lowly class status only because he knows that he’s white, which gives him the freedom and authority that he knows a black person will never have. Grimes is “a short, thick-set man” with “shoulders big and round like a barrel” (39). He has a powerful body and “the broad flanks of a big boar”. He has small “watery blue eyes” (39), bright red hair, and freckles all over his face, neck, and arms. He has a habit of squinting, in an effort to keep an eye on the slaves in his charge. Grimes has a hard demeanor, which is a source of pride. He’s also quick to anger and resentful of Dutton, whose miscegenation he despises. Conversely, he admires Salina Dutton for being exemplary, in his view, of a proper Southern lady—that is, a Christian woman who embraces a white woman’s glorified femininity. He’s also attracted to Salina and quietly wishes that his own wife, Jane Ellen, had Salina’s “quality looks” (42). Grimes has eight children with Jane, whom he calls “Janey.” Jane dies during the Civil War, either of dysentery or while giving birth to yet another child.

Grimes despises black people, whom he views as inherently lazy and dishonest. He also has ambitions to have his own farm and slaves one day, believing that he would be far more proficient at running a plantation than his boss is. After the Civil War, he marries Lillian’s former friend Addie Barrow, the daughter of Lee County’s only banker, Smith Ambers Barrow. He also joins the Ku Klux Klan and uses their vigilante power to intimidate Randall Ware into selling him a piece of land that Ware initially doesn’t want to give up. Grimes then becomes the banker in Dawson and, in his distinguished role, plans to take over the now abandoned Shady Oaks Plantation. 

Also called “Brother Zeke,” he is a preacher to slaves on the Shady Oaks Plantation. He is also a conductor on the Underground Railroad. Brother Zeke holds secret prayer meetings and conducts baptisms deep in the woods, out of earshot of the masters. Aunt Sally takes Vyry to those meetings, with the promise that Vyry will not speak to anyone about what she has heard there. Brother Zeke baptizes Vyry after she gets “her womanhood” (63) and begins menstruating. Brother Zeke is a gifted storyteller who is especially adept at tending to the sick. He comforts sick children in the quarters and the Big House with his humorous stories. He eases Vyry’s discomforts by singing to her, telling her folktales, and quoting Scripture. During the Civil War, Brother Zeke works behind the Confederate lines as a spy for the Union Army. He dies of an illness shortly before the Emancipation Proclamation, confident that President Lincoln is the Moses whom he had always believed would deliver black people from bondage. Randall estimates that Brother Zeke might be nearly 100, given that Vyry told him that he was an old man for as long as she could remember. Randall Ware helps to bury Brother Zeke in the Union Army’s winter camp in Chattanooga.

Aunt Sally is the cook on Shady Oaks Plantation, known for “being one of the best cooks in Lee County and even in the state of Georgia” (58), given her talents in producing fine baked goods and preparing various meals with wild game. Sally was born in South Carolina. She and her mother were sold to the Dutton’s plantation when John Dutton’s father owned it. Sally looks after Vyry when it’s decided that it isn’t safe for the girl to live in the Big House, due to Missy Salina’s cruel impulses. After Mammy Sukey dies, Aunt Sally becomes Vyry’s surrogate mother. Sally, however, also has two children of her own—her sons, Big Boy and Sam, both of whom are field hands on the plantation. Vyry sleeps in Sally’s cabin and spends most of the day in the Big House’s kitchen, working with Sally and learning from her how to cook. Sally is later sold away from the plantation after Salina becomes worried about Sally’s open anger over the brutal treatment of slaves. Vyry is heartbroken over the loss but retains the lessons that the woman taught her about how to cook and manage a kitchen, thereby making Vyry the new cook. 

Randall Ware is a free black man who works as a blacksmith. However, because he is a free black residing in Georgia, he must maintain a white guardian to ensure his protection—that is, to avoid the possibility that his freedom can be revoked, thereby allowing him to be sold into slavery. Ware’s guardian is Randall Wheelwright, a Quaker whose first name Ware took as his own out of respect, shortly after Ware moved from the Caribbean to the United States. From Wheelwright, Ware inherited “two hundred and two and a half acres of land” (111). This acquisition makes him “a rich free Negro” (111), but also someone who makes the planters wary. Ware lived first in Virginia where he has other relatives “who [are] free and artisans” (111). He is literate and reads abolitionist newspapers. He uses these skills to assist Wheelwright and another Quaker friend, Bob Qualls, to shuttle slaves along the Underground Railroad. He works with fellow conductor, Brother Zeke.

Ware is a dark-skinned black man who immediately takes a liking to Vyry; though, he first suspects that her initial disinterest in him is due to her looking nearly white. It is strongly suggested that Ware’s captivation with Vyry, as well as his will to possess her, is due to her being so light-skinned. He reveres her beauty, and having her is the closest that he will ever come to having the respect of a white man, despite his free status and his money. With Vyry, he has three children—a son named Jim, whom Ware calls James; a daughter named Minna; and a third child who was stillborn. He contracts a fever while fighting the Civil War in Atlanta. The former house slave, and Ware and Vyry’s mutual friend, Jim, believes that Ware died there. However, Ware makes his way back to the Dutton family’s old plantation in search of Vyry and learns from the Dutton’s family doctor, Old Doc, that she went west to Alabama with her new husband, Innis Brown. Ware reestablishes his blacksmith shop and enters politics, using his leverage as a business and property owner to become a representative in the Georgia State House along with a man named Henry Turner.

When Ware reenters Vyry’s life, hoping to make her his wife again, he expresses hostility and mistrust toward her biracial origins, despite her fair features being the source of her appeal to him. He also reveals his contempt for the Dutton family’s pretentions and a lack of empathy for Lillian’s suffering. Despite these harsher aspects of his character, he is an honorable man who offers financial support to Vyry and Innis, should they need it. He also places his son, Jim, into a normal school in Selma so that the boy can train to be a teacher. Finally, Ware arranges for Minna to attend school near the Brown family home.