Jubilee

Salina Dutton takes pride in her household finery, particularly her china dishes. When Vyry first comes to work in the Big House, Salina threatens the child with violence should she break one of the precious dishes. On the surface, Salina’s valuation of the dishes over Vyry’s well-being demonstrates how slave owners prized some inanimate objects or animals over fellow human beings, an additional example of how they sought to dehumanize black people. However, the dishes also represent femininity and the sanctity of the domestic sphere. The delicacy of the dishes, which ultimately break near the end of the Civil War, prompts the reader to think of how fragile Southern households were held together by denial and hypocrisy. Salina uses her lofty position as mistress of the household to punish Vyry for being the living evidence of her husband’s impropriety and a reminder that her supposedly Christian principles and pretensions of refinement will not protect her when her world falls apart.

Brother Ezekiel uses the Bible, an instrument that contributed to black people’s enslavement and further oppression, as a tool of empowerment. Able to read, he interprets Scripture for himself and other slaves at Shady Oaks. He seizes on the figure of Moses. He compares the enslaved black people to the Israelites and the slave owners to the evil pharaoh in Egypt. To give his people hope, Brother Zeke tells them that they, too, will live to see a Moses deliver them from slavery. When President Lincoln issues the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, Brother Zeke goes to his deathbed believing that Lincoln is the Moses whom black people have been awaiting, though Randall Ware, skeptically, thinks of how no slaves have yet been freed from Southern plantations, due to the obstinacy of Confederates. Brother Zeke’s vision of President Lincoln is simplistic, either due to Brother Zeke’s limited awareness of Lincoln’s true sympathies (the President wanted to end slavery to end sectarian warfare, not because he thought black people were equal to whites) or because Brother Zeke’s only hope for black people’s salvation rested with Lincoln.