Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1915, Margaret Walker was the daughter of a Methodist minister. Her parents encouraged the zeal for literature that would take her to Northwestern University and on to the University of Iowa, from which she earned both master’s and doctorate degrees. From 1936 to 1939 Walker worked for the Federal Writers’ Project in Alabama, where she met Richard Wright.
In 1942 her first volume of verse, For My People, was published as the Yale University Younger Poets award winner. The title poem of the volume is an excellent example of the poet’s strong and direct style, uniquely her own. One can see in her work a familiarity with the sonnet and the folk ballad, as well as her thematic concern with America’s southern terrain.
Before retiring in 1979, Walker taught English at Livingston College, West Virginia State College, and Jackson State College (now University) in Jackson, Mississippi. She is also the author of a novel, Jubilee (1966), the biography Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius (1988), and two other volumes of verse, Prophets for a New Day and October Journey. She died in 1998.
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the gone years and the now years and the maybe years, washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding.
For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss Choomby and company;
For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;
For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to be Man and Woman, to laugh and dance and sing and play and drink their wine and religion and success, to marry their playmates and bear children and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching;
For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy people filling the cabarets and taverns and other people’s pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and land and money and something—something all our own;
For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;
For my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty by false prophet and holy believer;
For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control.
Old Molly Means was a hag and a witch;
Chile of the devil, the dark, and sitch.
Her heavy hair hung thick in ropes
And her blazing eyes was black as pitch.
Imp at three and wench at ’leben
She counted her husbands to the number seben.
O Molly, Molly, Molly Means
There goes the ghost of Molly Means.
Some say she was born with a veil on her face
So she could look through unnatchal space
Through the future and through the past
And charm a body or an evil place
And every man could well despise
The evil look in her coal black eyes.
Old Molly, Molly, Molly Means
Dark is the ghost of Molly Means.
And when the tale begun to spread
Of evil and of holy dread:
Her black-hand arts and her evil powers
How she cast her spells and called the dead,
The younguns was afraid at night
And the farmers feared their crops would blight.
Old Molly, Molly, Molly Means
Cold is the ghost of Molly Means.
Then one dark day she put a spell
On a young gal-bride just come to dwell
In the lane just down from Molly’s shack
And when her husband come riding back
His wife was barking like a dog
And on all fours like a common hog.
O Molly, Molly, Molly Means
Where is the ghost of Molly Means?
The neighbors come and they went away
And said she’d die before break of day
But her husband held her in his arms
And swore he’d break the wicked charms;
He’d search all up and down the land
And turn the spell on Molly’s hand.
O Molly, Molly, Molly Means
Sharp is the ghost of Molly Means.
So he rode all day and he rode all night
And at the dawn he come in sight
Of a man who said he could move the spell
And cause the awful thing to dwell
On Molly Means, to bark and bleed
Till she died at the hands of her evil deed.
Old Molly, Molly, Molly Means
This is the ghost of Molly Means.
Sometimes at night through the shadowy trees
She rides along on a winter breeze.
You can hear her holler and whine and cry.
Her voice is thin and her moan is high,
And her cackling laugh or her barking cold
Bring terror to the young and old.
O Molly, Molly, Molly Means
Lean is the ghost of Molly Means.
Traveller take heed for journeys undertaken in the dark of the year.
Go in the bright blaze of Autumn’s equinox.
Carry protection against ravages of a sun-robber, a vandal, a thief.
Cross no bright expanse of water in the full of the moon.
Choose no dangerous summer nights;
no heavy tempting hours of spring;
October journeys are safest, brightest, and best.
I want to tell you what hills are like in October
when colors gush down mountainsides
and little streams are freighted with a caravan of leaves.
I want to tell you how they blush and turn in fiery shame and joy,
how their love burns with flames consuming and terrible
until we wake one morning and woods are like a smoldering plain—
a glowing caldron full of jewelled fire;
the emerald earth a dragon’s eye
the poplars drenched with yellow light
and dogwoods blazing bloody red.
Travelling southward earth changes from gray rock to green velvet.
Earth changes to red clay
with green grass growing brightly
with saffron skies of evening setting dully
with muddy rivers moving sluggishly.
In the early spring when the peach tree blooms
wearing a veil like a lavender haze
and the pear and plum in their bridal hair
gently snow their petals on earth’s grassy bosom below
then the soughing breeze is soothing
and the world seems bathed in tenderness,
blossoms have long since fallen.
A few red apples hang on leafless boughs;
wind whips bushes briskly.
And where a blue stream sings cautiously
a barren land feeds hungrily.
An evil moon bleeds drops of death.
The earth burns brown.
Grass shrivels and dries to a yellowish mass.
Earth wears a dun-colored dress
like an old woman wooing the sun to be her lover,
be her sweetheart and her husband bound in one.
Farmers heap hay in stacks and bind corn in shocks
against the big breath of frost.
The train wheels hum, “I am going home, I am going home,
I am moving toward the South.”
Soon cypress swamps and muskrat marshes
and black fields touched with cotton will appear.
I dream again of my childhood land
of a neighbor’s yard with a redbud tree
the smell of pine for turpentine
and Easter dress, a Christmas Eve
and winding roads from the top of a hill.
A music sings within my flesh
I feel the pulse within my throat
my heart fills up with hungry fear
while hills and flatlands stark and staring
before my dark eyes sad and haunting
appear and disappear.
Then when I touch this land again
the promise of a sun-lit hour dies.
The greenness of an apple seems
to dry and rot before my eyes.
The sullen winter rains
are tears of grief I cannot shed.
The windless days are static lives.
The clock runs down
The days and nights turn hours to years
and water in a gutter marks the circle of another world
hating, resentful, and afraid,
stagnant, and green, and full of slimy things.