ABSTRACT
A common strategy that slave narrative writers employed in subverting the existence of the slave system in America was to expose the hypocrisy of Christian acceptance of this system. The slave narrative author who perhaps best recognized the importance of music to African American culture both as a survival mechanism and as a subversive medium was William Wells Brown. Martin R. Delany was another ante-bellum African American writer who recognized the importance of music in the culture of black Americans and who pioneered the representation of the music in fiction. Many of the themes and attitudes that the slave narrative authors expressed about the music surface in this fictional performance. Delany’s attack on the slave system includes an ironic recasting of American patriotic symbols and songs in order to illustrate the hypocrisy and duplicity of their professed values. The sound of the jubilee is not to be a herald of some heavenly reward but a celebration of emancipation.
