A few months after a little known group of radical black artists and intellectuals assembled to meet on Chicago’s South Side in 1936, the youngest member was inspired to write her most famous poem, “For My People.” It stunned the group, since the author, Margaret Walker, was a virtual unknown and barely twenty-two. Five years later, fresh from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Walker made history as the first African American to claim the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Those who knew Walker saw a tiny determined woman who broke more barriers by the time she was thirty than most people do in a lifetime. Because she had such early success and for more than sixty years produced work that was alternately brilliant, revolutionary, trendsetting, and inspiring, her shadow falls over much of African American literature without being clearly defined. She was a writer of poetry, fiction, essays, and a biography, all while making her living as a teacher and mentor to generations of students and writers, especially women. When she was no longer young, she became an organizer and an activist, which made her central to the rise of a visible African American literary culture in the 1960s. The range and extent of Walker’s work represents an unusual blend of classical and modernist forms and vernacular traditions, appearing in influential journals beginning in the early 1930s. She became best known as a poet, but the publication of her 1966 novel Jubilee added significantly to her reputation. It was the first modern work to reclaim the slave narrative tradition that has profoundly influenced contemporary black fiction. Walker’s literary legacy is her insistence upon intellectual depth, a certain black sound and feeling tone, and agency, the components of an aesthetic aimed at liberation and transformation.
Margaret Abigail Walker was the oldest of four children born to Sigismund and Marion Dozier Walker. Her birth on July 7, 1915, in a private home in Mason City, a poor community in the West End area of Birmingham, Alabama, was no predictor of her future. The kinetic reality of this all-black Southern community provoked a strong spiritual connection and intellectual identity that Walker retained throughout her life. Sigismund Walker, a Jamaican immigrant, was a formally educated minister, who served the United Methodist churches in Alabama and Mississippi until he began teaching at New Orleans University. In “Epitaph for My Father” published in October Journey (1973), Walker remembered “the noble princelike man … teaching daily, preaching Sundays / Tailoring at night to give us bread. / His days were all the same—/No time for fun.”1
A determined intellectual, Sigismund Walker was a quiet man, homesick for Jamaica, who gave his daughter an intellectual curiosity that accounted for her restless and rebellious youth. In contrast, Marion Dozier Walker, a talented young musician, was an assertive, demanding woman who regretted having given up a promising career to become a minister’s wife. Even though the Walkers were no better off financially than most of their barely literate neighbors, they identified strongly as New Negroes whose proudest possessions, according to Walker, were her mother’s piano and her father’s books.
Walker began school by accompanying her mother to her job as a music teacher. She moved so quickly through the primary grades that by eleven she was ready to enter high school. The family had moved to New Orleans, where her father began teaching college full time, and her mother opened a professional music studio. Walker was encouraged to write as a way to channel the uneasiness she felt as a somewhat sickly, precocious child, whose physical underdevelopment seemed to match her delayed social development. Marion Walker feared a “wild streak” in her oldest daughter and wanted to keep her out of harm’s way. Walker was encouraged to write, as long as it was something to keep her busy, her parents believed. It quickly became, however, a preoccupation.
By the time she finished high school at fourteen, Walker had begun to see herself as part of a chosen generation entrusted with the future of the race. The earliest extant essay, published when she was a sixteen-year-old college student at New Orleans University, gives a clear sense of her social awareness and the exacting nature of her judgment. “If we decide to cast our lot in the places where our native talent and equipment can be used in greatest advantage and all in the conquering faith of our fathers,” she wrote in “What Is to Become of Us?” (1932), “we may feel sure not only of a high place of intellectual and spiritual growth, but we will know the answer [to] ‘What is to become of us?’ politically, financially, and economically.”2 Walker was honing her skills as a critic and her sensitivity as an artist, while deepening her commitment to socially engaged writing. By the time she and her sister left for Northwestern University, she had completed an entire manuscript of poems in the journal that had been a cherished gift from her father.
Despite some very unpleasant racial encounters in Evanston while a student at Northwestern, where neither she nor her sister could live on campus, Walker spent her NU years reading and writing with an intensity fueled by her own internal ambitions. After graduation, she elected to remain in Chicago. It was the middle of the Depression and, like so many Americans, she joined the ranks of the unemployed. Finally, after lying about her age, Walker secured an entry-level job with the Chicago branch of the Federal Writers’ Project, one of the programs of the Works Progress Administration. For a young black woman reared according to Southern custom and convention in a deeply religious household, living in Chicago and working with the Writers’ Project was an education in itself. What she did not realize until much later was that she was a member of a new generation of writers who were giving definition to an as yet unnamed Black Chicago Renaissance. Their youthful revolutionary spirit was filled with hope, a desire for freedom, and the knowledge that these were the times of expanding opportunity for minorities and ethnic groups.
Walker would later write about her experiences in Chicago, especially her encounter with Richard Wright, who was a fellow writer on the Writers’ Project, the leader of the South Side Writers Group to which she belonged, and someone with whom she shared a close political and personal friendship between 1937 and 1939. Wright impressed her immediately because of his talent, his intense driving ambition, and discipline, even though she disagreed with many of his ideas and his tastes in books. She believed that she owed much to Wright’s influence and interest in her work but was never clear what their relationship meant to him.3
Walker saw Chicago from many different angles. She discovered Poetry magazine, a leading avant-garde journal, and became acquainted with women writers who were some of the major voices of the modernist movement. She was exposed to a new and vibrant poetry by women such as Edna St. Vincent Millay, Leonie Adams, Eleanor Wylie, and Louise Bogan. She met and read important women on the Left who helped to map a radical activist tradition in women’s literature, including Muriel Rukeyser, Genevieve Taggard, and Lola Ridge. For the first time, Walker saw women writers identifying and leading a movement, women who were being heard without having to resort to the parochial, the genteel, and the sentimental, the usual domain for the woman writer.
The most significant event in her life, however, was an invitation from Richard Wright to join a gathering of black writers and students from the University of Chicago. This turned out to be the inaugural meeting of the South Side Writers Group, which began in April 1936 with Walker as one of its founding members. The group found a common sense of purpose as they began to search for a voice with which to represent the dissatisfaction of Black America, doubly betrayed, first by Emancipation and the promise of freedom and then by migration to the North, where they were met only by massive unemployment and poverty. The rhythms of black life were changing, and it was the task of the writer and artist to document this change. At meetings they read and critiqued each other’s work, discussed the impact of the Great Depression on African American culture, and actively debated Communist politics. They developed a mission statement and together worked on a special issue of New Challenge, edited by Dorothy West and Richard Wright, who moved to New York in 1937. It was mainly the inspiration of the group that led Wright to conceive of “Blueprint for Negro Writing” (1937). The South Side Writers membership roster read like a Who’s Who of African American intellectual and cultural history: Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Bland, Theodore Ward, Marian Minus, Fern Gayden, and St. Clair Drake, among others. More importantly for Walker, when Wright left Chicago for New York, it was she who kept the group together until it disbanded in 1939.
Walker’s politicization came quickly and intensely, altering the way she viewed the world. She was captivated by Marxist ideas and Russian writers, those whom Wright encouraged her to read; and she regularly attended Communist Party– sponsored programs and associated literary events. She was no newcomer to philosophy and history, owing to the influence of her own family background, and devoured the reading lists she collected from meetings and debates. A larger circle of friendships developed as she completed various assignments for the Writers’ Project, and she came to know Nelson Algren, Frank Yerby, Arna Bontemps, Margaret Taylor Goss (Burroughs), and Gwendolyn Brooks. Growing up in the Deep South exposed Walker to assorted forms of discrimination and exploitation, which offered an authentic landscape for exploring ideas derived from the radical Left. Walker’s vision of an art “for her people” was the result of her growth and transformation within this political culture as much as it was the by-product of the close working relationship she developed with Richard Wright. Reportedly a love affair that went sour, she suffered an enduring loss that was utterly painful, one that demanded her silence until long after Wright’s death.
Nevertheless, by all accounts, the Chicago years were Walker’s most productive. Her famous poem, “For My People,” which first appeared in 1937, before it was published in a collection, is a direct reflection of the era that gave birth to a radically new literature from modern Black America. It was probably the quality and visibility of the poem in a major literary journal, and the potential that it signaled for its author, that gained Walker admission into the University of Iowa in 1939. Earlier that year, she had known her days on the Writers’ Project were numbered and with the breakup of the South Side Writers Group, she needed a new context for moving forward. Going to Iowa would give her access to world-renowned teachers and ensure a national reputation. Not surprisingly, it was in Iowa where Walker developed a stronger sense of connection to her Southern heritage. She was away from a community of black people and homesick, living without any family for the first time, and reading news about Wright and other artists who were gaining in importance. She had much to work out in her own mind about the South; she didn’t hate it as Wright did and, in fact, grew increasingly to love it. She could be critical of its savagery and brutality at the same time she was taken by the sense of community, the moral and spiritual strength that its people symbolized. This tension among these different aspects of the South and between her own academic and vernacular experiences animated her work.
Walker suffered fatigue, depression, and generally poor health throughout the year and a half at Iowa, but worked diligently to polish the manuscript she had been working on since college. She was very clear that she wanted her poetry to reflect the communal experiences of African Americans. She wanted to capture the beauty and vitality of the people she had come to know as a child in Mason City, as a teenager in New Orleans, and as a young adult living on Chicago’s South Side. By then, Walker had developed an almost intuitive connection to these people so that what might have appeared public was very private. The real problem for her as a student of poetry was finding a form that was not demeaning to African Americans, as many considered dialect poetry to be, but that would showcase her mastery of the modern lyric and the traditional English forms that her teachers demanded. Above all, she wanted to write poems that realized the vision of “I Want to Write,” an early published poem that first appeared in a 1934 issue of The Crisis magazine and was later collected in This Is My Century. “I want to frame their dreams into words: their souls into notes / I want to catch their sunshine laughter in a bowl.”4 The indication of her success came none too soon. Stephen Vincent Benet held the completed manuscript for two years before deciding in 1941 that it was the best work by any emerging younger writer, black or white. For My People, a book of twenty-eight poems—a mixture of well-honed lyrics, sonnets, and folk ballads—brought her immediate acclaim when it was published in the fall as the 1942 selection for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award.
For My People is as much a tribute to Walker’s native South as it was a discovery of her own voice in the modernist canon. The volume is a somewhat eclectic rendering that ranges from the often quoted “Lineage,” filled with nostalgia and familial piety, to briskly written sonnets like “Whores” that challenge our sense of propriety, and unforgettable ballads like “Molly Means” and “Papa Chicken” that delight as they caustically disclose closely guarded secrets gleaned from the folk past. Of the twenty-eight poems, ten are ballads, a form that gave Walker considerable difficulty at first since the ballads she had been accustomed to writing in the African American tradition were different in form from the traditional English ballad she learned about in her poetry classes at Iowa. Walker’s intent—and the ballads were essential in this regard—was to give voice to those who could not speak and, while carefully observing the rules of the craft she had learned so well at Northwestern and Iowa, to force to the surface a deep sense of collective memory. Not content to speak to memory alone, but rather to that which memory can evoke, challenge, and inspire, Walker’s inaugural volume was a shock to the conventional poetic sensibility that had an expressed preference for more feminine, romantic lyrics. It was not that Walker did not write romantic poetry—she had pages of it in her journals that would remain unpublished—but she developed in Chicago an almost ceremonial sense of who she was as an artist in relationship to the lived experiences of her people. As a result, Walker’s romantic and mystical inclinations, the passion for nature and natural details and her constant evocation of childhood memories, are given real if intangible powers as they are willed into use as powerful imagery. For My People was a forceful volume when it appeared and remains so today, making the reader aware that Walker has something to say, and that she is not simply making us privy to a moment of sheer emotion.
In 1969, Stephen Henderson considered “For My People” the most comprehensively soulful poem ever written, because thirty years after the poem’s first appearance, it was being used as a rallying cry for the insurgent Black Power Movement.5 Walker understood early that poetry was part of a sermonic tradition that formed an essential component of African American culture. Writing the poem was only part of its enduring legacy. Her visibility in response to ongoing audience demand for her readings ensured the popularity of her poetry just as it facilitated her return to public life in the late 1960s, after a twenty-five-year absence. It is not surprising that criticism of the single poem exceeds that of all of her other poetry combined. If it remains the centerpiece of her work, it also provides the best example of the formula she crafted and the art for which she is so admired.
The poem’s first appearance in Poetry gave it a prominent place in the poetry community just as it provided an auspicious beginning for a young black writer. The poem consists of nine stanzas in free verse followed by a final stanza that brings the reader to a sudden halt before changing its tone. Through the nine stanzas, the poet depicts the fragmented world of the American South, its brutal realities in sharp relief as the poem periodizes the black experience for all to see. It is an intergenerational meditation that begins each stanza with the captivating refrain, “For my people.” The contrasting scenes of black life emerge through a series of carefully narrated details and biblical cadences, capturing the pain, sorrow, joy, and pleasure that affirm the humanity of a people who refuse to succumb to inhuman conditions. The poem does not single out black people as a race, and the poet insists upon contextualizing the black experience at every turn, as she speaks of “all the adams and eves and their countless generations.”6 That it is a history of black people especially in the American South is unmistakable without ever being made explicit. The tone of the poem shifts completely in the final stanza, beginning with the apocalyptic “Let a new earth rise.” In imagining the end of one world and the beginning of a new one, Walker is not negating the past, but allowing it to signify the strength and potential necessary to bring about change.
The best poems in her first volume are those that tell a story in spare, unsentimental free verse form, made that much more powerful through internal rhyme. Typically, the movement of a poem is disrupted by the poet’s thoughtful, provocative realization near the conclusion. In “Delta,” for example, Walker creates a familiar catalog of images in successive stanzas, using incremental repetition to highlight a history of contrasts: love of land / bloody fields; buzzards / lullabies; death / birth. In the last stanza, what has been evoked through historical, tangible experience is set aside. “Only the naked arm of Time / can measure the ground we know / and thresh the air we breathe.” She concludes by allowing the reader no emotional distance. The voice asserts, “Neither earth nor star nor water’s host / can sever us from our life to be / for we are beyond your reach O mighty winnowing flail! / Infinite and free!”7 This ending invites a deeply resonating, soulful affirmation not unlike the sorrow songs that W. E. B. DuBois spoke of so articulately. “Delta,” like “For My People,” uses words synchronized with the sounds; we are hearing and feeling the images that have been laid bare before us, rather than merely seeing words arranged formally on a page.
For My People gave readers some of Walker’s most remembered poems. The volume also establishes the lineage by which Walker identifies herself as an American poet. Her first memories of poetry would have been the recitals of Paul Laurence Dunbar, the most popular African American poet who read and performed his dialect poems in the early decades of the twentieth century, and even later in parts of the South. She would have learned his poems by heart and read them at public programs where elocution and memorization were stressed. Walker also had extensive knowledge of nineteenth century English Romantic poetry early on from her father, who had gone through high school in colonial Jamaica; she, therefore, excelled in her English studies at Northwestern. She read and recited Dunbar just as she did Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth. In addition, Walker benefited from the company of modernist women poets whom she had been regularly reading in the pages of literary magazines. By the time she went to Iowa for graduate school in the late thirties, she had behind her a rich knowledge of poetry and exposure to its assorted practitioners—British, Anglo-American and African American, both men and women. She may even have considered herself part of an inner circle of contemporary poets. In the process of assimilating these multiple traditions, especially in the intense political environment of the 1930s, Walker created, as Alicia Ostriker has noted, her own distinct brand of poetry that was at once socially conscious and vernacular-based, innovative and intellectually assertive without being autobiographical.8 Walker seemed to find compatibility with many of the poets that she admired, the catalogues of Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, for example. On the other hand, it was Langston Hughes to whom she owed the most as a poetic mentor. She heard him read in New Orleans when she was sixteen, and he was the first established poet to view her unpublished work. From Hughes, she developed a healthy respect for vernacular traditions and black speech that she never lost, not believing as many in her generation did that black dialect provided limited access to the range of black feeling and thought.
All the poems in For My People are reflections, embracing sure and steady rhythms that make them highly quotable, always unpretentious, sometimes deceptively simple, and packed with the details that are the arsenal of a realist. If “For My People” is the most radical and far-reaching of the poems, there are many others that share its stylistic features, tonality, and content. In addition to “Delta,” “Southern Song,” “Since 1619,” and “Today” display a range of emotions and tensions deriving from ancestral memory and continued oppression. Walker had a fondness for the long poem, wrote more of them in later volumes, but rarely reached the quality she did with “For My People” and “Delta.” More than anything else, for this first volume she showed herself to be a gifted writer who saw the world through the controlled medium of poetry.
Walker completed her master’s degree at Iowa in 1940 and returned to New Orleans for a much-needed vacation before beginning her teaching career at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina. After a brief courtship, at twenty-seven, she met and married Firnist James Alexander and moved to High Point, North Carolina, to live with her in-laws. For three years she tried to juggle her professional career and her growing family without much success. Eventually, she took a position in the English department at Jackson State University. By the time her last child was born in 1954, Walker had all but given up any semblance of her writing career. She was teaching full time and bore the primary financial responsibility for her family. A rare essay published in 1951, “How I Told My Child about Race,” shows her efforts to infuse social consciousness into a life consumed with working and caring for children.
From her unpublished papers and journals, as well as the essays she began to publish later in life, it is clear that Walker was acutely aware of the difficulties of a woman writer and of her position as the mother of four children and wife of a disabled World War II veteran. She also had considerable influence on the campus of Jackson State, where she earned a reputation for being an exacting and exciting teacher, actively promoting curriculum changes and student involvement in the emerging Civil Rights Movement. Walker frequently invited her former friends from the 1930s and 1940s to visit the Jackson community, thus maintaining ties to a literary world that was otherwise lost to her. When Arna Bontemps, Sterling Brown, St. Clair Drake, Gwendolyn Brooks, Robert Hayden, Melvin Tolson, Dudley Randall, Ruby Dee, Ossie Davis, and others appeared in Jackson in the 1950s and early 1960s, it was usually in response to an invitation from Margaret Walker. Her passion for the classroom, where she gave her remarkable lectures on Afro-American literature and history, freely sharing personal anecdotes and memories of the many writers she knew, equaled her passion for the kitchen, where she talked intermittently while cleaning and cooking fresh collards or her renowned Louisiana Gumbo. Among the appearances of her early acquaintances, only Richard Wright was missing; she and Wright never spoke to each other again after Wright left the United States for France.
Although the poetry world heard nothing from Walker for twenty-five years, she continued to write privately and found her feminist consciousness rapidly evolving. She worked steadily on the book begun in college that recounted the story of her great-great-grandmother. She had conceived of a fictional work based on the stories told to her by Elvira Ware Dozier, with whom she had spent her earliest years. Her grandmother’s death, coupled with the desire to write herself back into existence, provided the impetus Walker needed to finish the book in the early 1960s. As if running a race with time, Walker returned once more to Iowa and worked nonstop for two years to complete the novel, which served as her PhD dissertation. Less than a year later she learned that the manuscript had won the Houghton Mifflin literary award, enabling her to quickly complete the revisions for the 1966 publication date for Jubilee.
The timing of Jubilee’s publication could not have been better. Walker was already active in the Civil Rights Movement and lived down the street from Medgar Evers, one of the movement’s early martyrs. Jackson, Mississippi, was a major site for the Southern-based movement as well as for some of the most significant events of the era. If “For My People” became redefined within the context of a movement that promoted resistance and an end to domination, Jubilee offered the literary and aesthetic continuity sorely lacking in much of the writing of the Black Arts Movement. Walker would go on to publish three collections of new poetry in the 1970s and 1980s, but none had the impact of Jubilee, with its indebtedness to a rich oral tradition, its treatment of shifting notions of power and authority, and its gendered analysis of history. In How I Wrote Jubilee, Walker said she “always intended Jubilee to be a folk novel based on folk materials: folk sayings, folk belief, folkways … I clearly envisioned the development of a folk novel … never deviated from that outline.”9 But it is more accurately described as an ancestral novel, a composite of many selves extracted through her maternal kin. Elvira Ware Dozier is the prototype for Vyry, the novel’s protagonist, who is the fictionalized equivalent of Walker’s great-grandmother in the novel. It is Minna, Vyry’s daughter in the novel, who will become Walker’s grandmother. Walker did pioneering research to establish the historical accuracy for the story’s geographical settings and time periods, since she not only wanted to portray the lives of black people before and during the Civil War, but she also wanted to use the actual sites where her own ancestors had migrated after the war.
The elements of the traditional slave narrative and the historical novel merge in Jubilee, even if the historical sections sometimes overshadow the narrative. Vyry, the mulatto slave child of the owner of the Dutton plantation, is educated in the “Big House,” through a series of violent acts inflicted mainly by an angry plantation mistress. Because she is the bastard child of the Dutton household, barely a shade darker than Dutton’s legal daughter, and hence a daily confirmation of her paternity, Vyry is a target for abuse that her father/owner is unable to stop. Nevertheless, she grows to womanhood as the companion to her unacknowledged half sister, learning from and eventually replacing the family’s much adored cook. When she falls in love with Randall Ware, a free Negro, she is introduced to the idea of freedom. After the birth of her second child, an unsuccessful escape with children in tow convinces her that she must accept her fate, as the scars from the brutal whipping she received take shape on her back. While other slaves make successful and unsuccessful escapes, Vyry remains on the plantation and vows to wait for her “freeman” to return for his family after the war. Freedom comes to her only after the war ends and Emancipation is proclaimed.
The reversals in the novel become increasingly apparent in the postwar section. Vyry becomes the head of a plantation in fact, a plantation that has suffered the loss of all the white folk except for the evil mistress, who suffers an emotional breakdown after she is raped by enemy soldiers. Walker deftly handles the decline of the Dutton family, physically and psychologically, as Vyry rises to importance and gains her own voice. Lillian’s silence and eventual disappearance from the story emphasizes Vyry’s evolution into a savvy, independent woman who refuses to carry hate in her heart.
Vyry’s strength of spirit is the driving force behind the novel. As the newly freed slaves depart one by one, Vyry remains, ostensibly to wait for Randall Ware, but also because she refuses to leave her incapacitated mistress alone. The narrative negotiates the familiar elements of the woman’s novel and historical fiction. There is, for example, a seduction and the plots are triangulated. Vyry’s mother, who dies in childbirth, has been the unwilling mistress of John Dutton. Vyry, still committed to Randall Ware, reluctantly returns the affections of Innis Brown, an illiterate black slave with unwavering devotion to her and her two children. Their journey in search of land and the home that Vyry has wanted to call her own is set against the backdrop of Reconstruction, Ku Klux Klan terror, and other acts of violence that force them to restart their lives multiple times. They finally refuse to move again and become part of a community in which everyone, black and white, learns the benefits of mutual respect and support. One of the book’s most important climaxes comes when the white neighbors help them rebuild their home and are forced to fully appreciate Vyry’s skills as a midwife and farmer.
The final section of the novel explores some of the ideological issues of Reconstruction. Just as things appear to settle down and Vyry has a home and a successful farm, Randall Ware, who has been active in the Reconstruction government, returns. Vyry must decide between the two men—the one from her past and the one from her present—the one with whom she was unable to have a life and the one with whom she has made a life. Her extended monologue about the value of love counters Randall Ware’s black, separatist politics. Walker makes sure we see the differences in the two men as choices of the head and not merely of the heart. Ware criticizes Vyry for being a midwife to white women. Brown’s belief in the importance of the land and his insistence that Jim learn the culture of the farm counters Randall Ware’s offer to send Jim away to a school that will train leaders for the race.
Walker does a lot to revise the traditions of the form within which she was working. In “The Violation of Voice: Revising the Slave Narrative,” Amy Levin suggests that Vyry’s decision to remain with Innis Brown can be seen as a critique of certain sentimental conventions just as it rewrites the nineteenth-century slave narrative. Typically, the courtship novel concludes with the heroine’s choice of a suitor who can give her the most socially acceptable identity. Harriet Jacobs, who makes the reader aware that she is revising the plot line of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl with her words “Reader, my story ends in freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage,” offered one revision of this convention. Jubilee suggests yet another alternative, according to Levin, since Vyry’s choice, like Harriet Jacobs’s, has more to do with her freedom than issues of social acceptability. In slavery choice is not possible, but Vyry’s extended monologue explains her choice of Innis Brown over Randall Ware; it is this act itself that is an explicit expression of her liberation.10
Jubilee represented reclamation of history and those forms identified with the African American past. As a multigenerational family saga, the novel draws heavily on Walker’s research into her maternal kin, the Duggans-Ware-Brown-Dozier family in Georgia, Alabama, and North Carolina. This one family’s story became African American history writ large for a generation already engaged in fierce, passionate arguments over the meaning and interpretation of the historical past. Just as For My People represented Walker’s search for creative synthesis of a rational political analysis and historical memory during the 1930s, Jubilee was a testament to Walker’s skill as a narrative writer. As a documentary novel, Jubilee’s historical accuracy could not be questioned, but it was the novel’s spirited protagonist who provided the novel’s moral center. As a novel about the excesses and abuses of slavery, it angers and sickens. Yet as a story about the human capacity to triumph over adversity, it inspires and delights. Taking what she had learned from For My People, Walker found it easy to disrupt the flow of a conventional historical narrative by exploring more creative, vernacular options, including assorted Africanisms, black folk speech, traditional sermons, folktales, spirituals, and work songs.
Walker was fortunate that her retreat from the public literary world for nearly thirty years did not eclipse her career. Had Jubilee not appeared when it did and had it not been so compatible with the new social currents, it might not have had the authority that it began to claim. And while it did not put Walker on the map with her contemporaries Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, it did allow her to reinvent herself in ways that were beneficial for the remainder of her career. The novel and the three poetry volumes that appeared in the 1970s are routinely identified with the literary productivity of the Black Arts Movement, a movement that sought to bring the arts and political activism together to serve the economic, political, and social interests of black people during the tumultuous period of the 1960s. Walker also proudly accepted responsibility for helping to usher in the era of Black Studies, a related movement and the most important transformation in higher education in the modern era. With so many contradictory cultural forces at work during the 1960s, African American literature became a broad canvas on which to paint these contradictions in sharp relief. Walker had more experience than most in synthesizing conflicting traditions and ideologies. She put her radical legacy from the 1930s and her close relationship to the Jackson, Mississippi–based movement to good use. She was, therefore, highly regarded by the younger more militant writers.
With Prophets for a New Day (1970), Walker reentered the world of poetry, which was in the 1970s one of the most highly politicized forms of black written expression. She tried to locate her voice among the fervor and enthusiasm that a particular audience of readers shared. Walker offered the volume to the Detroit-based Broadside Press, an independent black publishing company started by her friend Dudley Randall as an outlet for his own work as well as that of other Black Arts poets. The book shared the company of a large group of poets, among them Sonia Sanchez, Haki Madhubuti (Don L. Lee), and Nikki Giovanni, who were to become her close friends. Prophets is as much a memorial to the Civil Rights Movement as it was a rare second chance for Walker to speak with intellectual boldness, to insert her voice into a national conversation about race and social change. Unlike some of her generation who considered the movement too militant, full of rage, and, therefore, wrongheaded, Walker identified strongly with the younger generation. While many poets who become public figures sense a loss of the private self they need for true inspiration, Walker felt renewed in purpose and spirit. It would have been difficult not to connect the literary history of her art with the social and political history of the 1960s. Moreover, the final stanza of her 1937 poem was a true metaphorical rendering of the life of those times. “Let a new earth rise,” For My People concludes. “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 race of men now rise and take control.”11 Her own apocalyptic sensibility assured her that this was indeed a new era.
Walker successfully created a community of memory by synthesizing a consciousness of the past in For My People. Prophets for a New Day, on the other hand, is more concerned with symbolizing the present. “Street Demonstration,” “Girl Held Without Bail,” “Sit-Ins,” “Birmingham,” “At the Lincoln Monument,” “For Malcolm X,” and “For Andy Goodman, Michael Schwerner, and James Chaney,” all capture moments and celebrate heroes of the Civil Rights Movement. There is no title poem for the volume. Instead Walker recasts the well-known prophets in poems, namely “Amos,” “Jeremiah,” “Joel,” “Hosea,” and “Micah”: modern heroes of the Civil Rights Movement, all noticeably male.
The religious scaffolding is the most significant change in this volume that does not allow Walker the luxury of lingering on the more stylized form of the folk ballad, but requires a return to an explicit and deep religious faith. Walker is very much aware of the roots of the Civil Rights Movement in the black religious tradition, but the movement has incurred such losses that Walker’s mood is satisfied more by forms such as the elegy and monody, the latter noted by R. Baxter Miller in “The ‘Etched Flame’ of Margaret Walker: Literary and Biblical Re-creation in Southern History.” According to Miller, Prophets for a New Day is designed as a metaphorical quest. Walker uses poetry to re-create anthropocentric space, summoning up the courage necessary to confront and transcend the travesties of the real world in creating a more hopeful human community, one where universal freedom prevails. The result is that the poems create certain immediacy, as Walker and her readers share a sense of moral indignation at what has occurred, as well as an abiding faith in the possibility of change.12 In Prophets Walker recalls well-known biblical stories and images: Adam and Eve, Jesus of Galilee, Jacob, and most importantly, Moses, leading the Israelites out of Egypt. Juxtaposing contemporary stories and the stories of faith, or the lack thereof, Walker restores some order to a disorderly, faithless world. If the poems in For My People are more like praise songs to a people whose particular history has allowed them to envision the future as a community bound by faith, those in Prophets are a collection of cautionary tales, reminders of the trials and obstacles that face those in pursuit of liberty.
There are only two ballads in the volume. “The Ballad of the Free” shows Walker at her best in her ongoing effort to merge the secular spirit of revolution with Christian fundamentalism. The refrain is drawn from the Old Testament: “The serpent is loosed and the hour is come / The last shall be the first and first shall be none / The serpent is loosed and the hour is come.”13 Individual stanzas are devoted to Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, Denmark Vesey, Toussaint L’Ouverture, and John Brown. The contrast between the social history that is recounted and the biblical stories creates a dramatic tension that builds up toward the end of the poem. Walker has carefully controlled the flow so that the poet has reclaimed her right to prophesy that “Wars and Rumors of Wars have gone / But Freedom’s army marches on. / The hero’s list of dead is long. / And Freedom still is for the strong.”14
Walker’s third volume of poetry October Journey (1973) is her most personal. She completed it during frequent bouts of poor health, including extended hospital stays that gave her a great deal of time to think and write. Although African American writers were gaining increased access to mainstream publishing outlets and a new generation of black women writers had emerged, Walker remained faithful to Broadside Press, since by that time, she and her work had become almost a cult phenomenon. She was greatly aided by the newfound interest in southern literature. When Jackson, Mississippi, native Eudora Welty won the 1973 Pulitzer Prize, the South received renewed attention, notably because of the contrasting pictures drawn by black and white writers. Although not in the best of health, Walker responded to the demand for and interest in southern black writers. She spent most of her retirement years giving lectures and readings throughout the United States.
Her papers indicate that she had written more than five hundred poems by the early 1970s, but she carved out a slim volume of occasional poems and tributes to make up October Journey. The title poem worked extremely well as an overview of Walker’s poetic adventures, from which she could draw wisdom. The concept of “October Journey” is physical and symbolic; they denote the cycles and transformations of nature, and the poet’s revitalization by full immersion in a specific place, the South, at a specific time, October. She urges us to “take heed for journeys undertaken in the dark of the year,” noting the fall journey to be the “safest, brightest, and best.”15 The poem relives those moments when she had returned to the South, her spiritual homeland, by evoking the fear that accompanies such returns. The tributes, like “Epitaph to My Father,” and those to literary icons, like “Ballad for Phillis Wheatley,” and the poem “For Paul Laurence Dunbar,” are a bit stronger than the occasional poems, but show very little that is new or innovative.
October Journey did include, however, several important pieces that reminded readers why Walker was still a poet of considerable stature. “I Want to Write,” collected in a volume for the first time since its original appearance in The Crisis magazine under the title “Daydream,” contains all the elements that had made For My People so successful. It exhibits the tension between consciousness and experience and between human will and historical circumstance, the rhythmic repetitions and lyrical phrases that ascend with intensity, coming to a crescendo in the final two lines. It is very likely that as Walker began to review the trajectory of her life, she returned to the twelve-line poem, a typical length for her. The poem moves from the general opening refrain, “I Want to Write,” utilizing incremental repetition that had become her forte, to the specific “I Want to Write the Songs of my people.” The specificity of context, “my people,” and identification of form, “songs,” join with a collage of metaphors; these are the raw materials that she must “catch … / Then crush and mix.”16 Invoking a routinely feminine activity as a site of artistic creation affirms the importance of Walker as a female writer. Walker, in this her very first poem, reclaimed near the end of her career, has successfully inserted the female voice; her own, as she has synthesized various elements to create a work of art. “I Want to Write,” as Eleanor Traylor has noted, is a meditation and a dedication, a public acknowledgment of poetic commitment that Walker needed to be reminded that her poetic journey is nearly complete.17
Before retiring from Jackson State University in 1979, however, Walker founded the first national research center for the study of the Black South. In response to the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and the political upheaval that it generated, along with her own desire to create some kind of institutional legacy, Walker created one of the first Black Studies programs in the nation, and the first in the South. She named it the Center for the Study of the Life, History and Culture of Black People and used it as a launching pad for organizing conferences and seminars on literary and historical subjects. In 1973, she commemorated the bicentennial of Phillis Wheatley’s first volume of poetry. The mammoth conference, coming at a time when the feminist movement was in full sway and concerns about gender inequality were gaining greater visibility, gave Wheatley iconic status. Author of the first published book by a black writer in America, Wheatley signified and highlighted the importance of black women writers. Walker thus understood the timing of the event and convened an international group of black women. Three generations of black women writers came to Jackson, many of whom were only recently published, making this the first ever gathering of its kind. Today many regard the Phillis Wheatley Festival as the inaugural moment of the black women’s literary renaissance. Motivated by the sense of authority she had acquired as a 1930s radical, Walker acted in her senior role as a writer, one who brought continuity to a literary tradition, and who could think carefully, but not rigidly, about matters of great significance to black people and the whole of America. If the Black Arts Movement found Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin old school, they found in Walker a voice for the twentieth century in her expansive ideas, her philosophical depth, and her passion for socially engaged art.
During the 1970s Walker also became much more conscious of her reputation at a time when black literature was gaining in visibility and stature. While she never identified with radical feminism, her experiences during the later 1970s and the 1980s fueled her outrage at being left out, if not dismissed, by the larger literary world, the source of which she quickly determined to be sexism. The issue that triggered her bitterness and resentment and brought her a significant amount of negative publicity was her suit against Alex Haley, author of Roots, a highly influential and best selling novel. Haley capitalized on the public interest in the black historical past, which was at its height when Roots was published in 1976. Walker’s vitriolic charges against Haley, who she believed had lifted whole passages from Jubilee, became very public just as did her strong, detailed case for copyright infringement. As the only woman of the four people who sued Haley—the other three won—she saw her loss as clear evidence of society’s systematic exploitation and exclusion of black women.
Once again Walker put her anger and passion to good use. This Is My Century is a compilation of her earlier volumes and new poems that appeared in 1989. The collection, showcasing more than four decades of a life in poetry, gives readers what they had come to expect in a Walker volume: psalmlike lyrics, ballads, tributes, and moments of self-reflection. Each of the new poems moves with cameralike intensity pointed inward and outward. She shows her art to be an open-ended process, not a finished product. The poems are public and private at once. “I suffer now from stress,” Walker says in “Old Age,” “the pain of living too long, / the clash of race and sex and class / against stark hunger of the world / for freedom, peace, and bread.”18 The economic and political realities that have been central to an understanding of struggle are not ignored, and she cites police brutality, inflation, poverty, and disillusionment. For the first time, Walker shows evidence of a triadic relationship—between race, sex, and class—as conflictual and complicated. The last two poems are explicit in their evocation of a search not so much for harmony, but for “Solace,” as the title of one of the poems suggests. “Fanfare, Coda, and Finale” has an odelike quality; it is the poet’s poet who is compelled at long last to decry her “hurt and bruised dignity …” still “ … bursting in my throat [to] find melody.” The struggle of the older poet, battered and abused, unappreciated, and underrecognized, as Walker clearly saw herself in her last decade, is not so much the social struggle, but the struggle to “lift this weight of brick and stone against my neck, and … sing.”19 What is worse than lack of recognition is the fear of every poet: the loss of creativity.
Although Walker’s poetic energies seemed to wane, she had not lost all creativity, and she was in no way “finished” as a writer. She had always been interested in nonfiction and the essay and published a number of essays during her early years. Often she used the essay to signal an important transition in her life. Her first essay had been published when she was sixteen and a high-school senior during the Depression years. She answered a question that was being posed by many young people at the time: “What Is to Become of Us?” A second had come during the early years of marriage when she was struggling to manage her life as a mother, wife, teacher, and writer. In “How I told My Child about Race” Walker made a private concern more public. In the early 1970s, basking in the success of Jubilee and long before she would battle with Alex Haley, she was asked to talk about the composition of the book that had taken her so long to write. How I Wrote Jubilee published in 1972 by Third World Press was a widely circulating pamphlet authenticating the novel as a twentieth-century slave narrative, not unlike the prefatory matter that was a stock feature of the original slave narratives. The essay also illuminated Walker’s importance as a scholar, giving her greater confidence for the monumental project, the biography of Richard Wright that she would take up in her retirement.
The Black Arts Movement was especially important for expanding Walker’s interests from poetry and fiction to psychobiography. Walker was the only person living, or so she believed, who had known Wright during his earlier life other than his wife. No black writer had ever been given permission to write a biography of Richard Wright, whose death in 1960 represented the end of an era he had dominated in African American literature. Returning to Richard Wright, at least the man she knew in the 1930s, brought back a complex of emotions about her personal and political relationship to one of the world’s most renowned writers. Amistad Books published Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius in 1987, after a lengthy battle with Wright’s widow Ellen Wright. The manuscript moved from publisher to publisher, each of them finding the project too costly with legal entanglements. Walker felt she was in a battle for her life. She had fought Alex Haley and lost. Now she was taking on the whole of literary history, arguing her right to write about the man she had known, whose story she believed had yet to be told, despite Michel Fabre’s widely circulating The Unfinished Quest of Richard Wright (1973). If Walker’s intentions had not been mired in subjectivity at the beginning of the project, by the time the book was published in 1989, rescued by Amistad Press, a new imprint of Warner Books, it had suffered repeated delays. The most important had been a nasty suit over copyright infringement brought by Ellen Wright that was finally settled in Walker’s favor. Walker seemed justified in her belief that she was being persecuted. Always known as a fighter, now in her late sixties, Walker found her reputation badly damaged after the Roots fiasco. Readers and book reviewers saw her as a cynical old woman whose career was not what she wished it had been, who was lashing out against other male writers who had succeeded better than she had. The book achieved its main objective, however, as a study of a man whose imagination Walker saw as gothic and vision, tragic. It was Wright who was able to accomplish a psychological transformation of rage and suffering. “Richard Wright came out of hell,” Walker wrote, “ … anger … ambivalence … aberration … these devils lived in the hell of his daily environment…. All his life he agonized, and all his days he searched for meaning.”20 Walker never changed the book’s controversial title, Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius: A Portrait of the Man, A Critical Look at His Work, hoping to signify the tragedy and trauma—the humanity—of man she had known.
Many critics believed the Wright biography to be Walker’s least successful project. Attempting an objective assessment would be extremely difficult in any case as the entire project was an unending series of tragicomic events. The published version reflected heavy deletions, since Walker was required to stay within the provisions of “fair use.” As the book’s galleys moved from publisher to publisher, Walker became defiant and often impractical, often confusing the battles with the Wright estate and the constructive criticisms from her editors.
Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius is as much about Walker herself as it is about Wright. Walker and Wright had spent a good portion of their apprentice years together, and to expect detachment from her subject was unrealistic. Walker wrote about Wright’s anxieties, for she knew them well; she had a clear sense of what it meant to be a black southerner, who knew too much and felt too deeply. Because Wright never had a chance to face his own demons, he internalized them. Yet he lived a life of purpose and intent and sought to impose order on the chaotic psychological and emotional world he inhabited through his fiction. If Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius does not read like objective biography, it does read often, not surprisingly, like poetry. The language is condensed, and patterns of repetition abound. Writing the book was a command performance for her; she was the only remaining active member of a generation of writers and intellectuals from the 1930s. The book allowed her to speak about her generation with some of the critical tools they had been trained to use. As the first major biography of an African American writer by another African American writer, it was not what the critics wanted. The public perception that she had unresolved issues after having been rejected by Wright made her an easy target. Yet it remains one of Walker’s major accomplishments.
The continuing loss of public approval increased Walker’s belief that she was under attack. Slowly, her keen political mind and social vision combined with paranoia and renewed concerns over her financial instability. At 75, after suffering a stroke from which she barely recovered, Walker went on an extensive speaking tour, promoting This Is My Century and another book, her first compilation of essays, “How I Wrote Jubilee” and Other Essays on Life and Literature (1990). The lead essay had appeared earlier, but the entire volume gave readers much of the style they had encountered in the speeches she so often gave. They show a consistency in Walker’s method of thinking and analysis as a Marxist-trained intellectual, who was always questioning assumptions and looking to live rationally in an irrational world.
Although the first essay collection covers a wide variety of topics, including religion, family, racial consciousness, and the role of women, Walker’s final essay collection provides full disclosure. On Being Female, Black, and Free (1997) was published a year before Walker’s death after being diagnosed with cancer. Toward the end of her life, Walker was conscious of shaping an image of herself as a feminist and a radical thinker. On Being Female, Black, and Free speaks directly to the nature of Walker’s art and her activism as they evolved over her lengthy career. “What Is to Become of Us?” is collected for the first time, and because it was written before she had ever published a single poem, it provides a rare look back at the young woman who has already accepted her self-prescribed role as spokesperson for her people. What she must reconcile, the essay discloses, is the contradiction she sees between the determinism she was taught to respect in religion and the inevitability of historical change.
Walker does not see longevity as simply a blessing, but rather an opportunity to voice continually her bitter opposition to all forms of discrimination and injustice and to remind the artist of her responsibility to help bring about a new vision and a new world. Walker spared neither her home state nor her nation in leveling her criticisms. Prophetic in tone, the essays range from a discussion of Clarence Thomas, war, and fascism in America to the transformative role of education in a global society. Alternating between personal testimony and collective outrage, Walker is bolder than ever, sharing the unvarnished truth at the conclusion of the title essay, “On Being Female, Black, and Free”: “I am a black woman living in a male-oriented and male-dominated world. Moreover, I live in an American Empire where the financial tentacles of the American Octopus in the business-banking world extend around the globe, with the multinational and international conglomerates encircling everybody and impinging on the lives of every single soul. I have come through the fires of hell because I am a black woman, because I am poor, because I live in America and because I am determined to be both a creative artist and maintain my inner integrity and my instinctive need to be free.”21 She had first written that essay in 1980 after her battle with Alex Haley, the death of her husband, and after having signed the contract to do the Wright biography. It was a particularly appropriate time for her to write an autobiographical piece about life as a black woman poet, little knowing that she would be offering a manifesto for the younger generation of black women.
As the first nationally recognized African American woman poet in the twentieth century, Margaret Walker was known for her intellectual boldness and radical honesty. Coming of age in the 1930s, she gave shape and meaning to the Black Chicago Renaissance as one of its most widely published and longest living writers. In her poetry, fiction, and prose, Walker adopted a representative persona. With a single-minded intensity, she became the voice of her people, consistently affirming their humanistic vision and invincible spirit, and celebrating the dynamism and continuity of their rich literary and cultural heritage. Unlike many writers who are identified with a particular literary movement, Walker’s passion for intellectual engagement renewed itself with each artistic awakening as it mirrored her own expanding consciousness. As a result, Walker’s ten published volumes map the evolution of African American literary expression that extends from the Black Chicago Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s through the Black Arts Movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the Black Women’s Literary Renaissance of the 1980s. Walker’s concern for socially conscious art that was equally attentive to craft earned her a reputation for being a master artist, an exceptional teacher, and a highly respected public figure.
Her legacy is that of a well-trained intellectual who synthesized traditional and modern elements in her work, who read extensively in classical philosophy, revolutionary theory, psychoanalysis, existentialism, world religions, and Pan-Africanism, and who despised hypocrisy, racism, and gender chauvinism. She was a dedicated modernist, but her project was not so much about extracting language to make it new as it was appropriating through language the eloquence, texture, and soul of the people who gave it meaning. Her literary reputation rests primarily on For My People, her first published work. The appearance of Jubilee some twenty-five years later put her in the forefront of a new movement in fiction writing that reclaimed the slave narrative for contemporary writers.
Walker’s was the committed life of a literary artist; she wrote all the time, publishing only a small portion of this work during her lifetime. When all of the poetry, fiction, essays, journals, and letters are made available, Walker’s literary importance may well extend beyond those of her more highly acclaimed contemporary, Richard Wright. Nevertheless, she remains a major twentieth-century writer who never feared speaking the truth as she resisted socially imposed boundaries of race and gender. Her sometimes adversarial relationship with the literary establishment notwithstanding, Walker’s forcefulness and passion as “a juggler of words, a dreamer with spoken dreams, a fire-maker who blows the sparks into flame with magic bellows”22 always endeared her to eager listening audiences and readers alike. Her own sense of justice and the divinely human brought to American literature a vital alternative, signaling both exploration and enlightenment that continues to be one of literature’s most important strengths.
Walker was in the forefront of the movement of Afro-modernist aesthetics by creating multivoiced texts that reflected the paradoxical nature of Southern life. Both her poetry and fiction shift and alternate modalities, tonalities, and narrative structures to give voice to the spiritual, secular, and folk-based traditions that makes up the black experience in America. Her turn to the essay and creative nonfiction late in life gave her another platform for exploring ideas that were central to African American life and thought. Though lesser known, “How I Wrote Jubilee” and Other Essays on Life and Literature and On Being Female, Black, and Free, along with Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius, illuminate her further importance to twentieth-century intellectual thought, making her a worthy literary successor to early women writers Ann Plato, Anna Julia Cooper, and Frances Harper. Walker’s strategic use of her own experience as a Southern black woman—always overworked, underpaid and passed over—produced some of the earliest and most forceful critiques of racial, class, and gender discrimination. The twelve books she published are a testament to a brilliant if uneven career and to her unusual ability to capture the spirit of the age.
Criticism of Walker remains sparse. Her general reputation is that of a social poet from the 1930s, since she was absent from the literary scene by the time literary criticism began to claim a dominant place in the American academy. With the evolution of the first wave of African American literary criticism, Walker again received short shrift. Negative criticism of her work reached a consensus as a result of her biography of Wright. A generation of women critics often excluded her, since they privileged the younger writers of the 1970s whose radical feminism was more in keeping with the times. The critical assessment of her work has begun in earnest, and critics have become increasingly aware of the important connections Walker makes to gender, racial, and class consciousness.
So fully energized by the Civil Rights and Women’s Movements following the publication of Jubilee in 1966, only her death at the age of eighty-three would put an end to a Walker’s second lucrative career. Even when weak and showing visible signs of dementia, she made a last appearance in Chicago two months before she died, reading the poem that had made her famous. Her last important act was to donate her papers to Jackson State University, understanding well the importance of her exemplary life as a preeminent twentieth-century American. Walker died shortly after Thanksgiving in 1998 and is buried in Jackson, Mississippi. Margaret Walker’s life and literary career helps to complete our understanding of the lasting impact of the Black Chicago Renaissance.
1. Walker, Margaret. This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989, 103–5.
2. Walker, Margaret. “What Is to Become of Us?” In On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, edited by Maryemma Graham. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997, 171–76.
3. Walker, Margaret. “Richard Wright.” In How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature by Margaret Walker, edited by Maryemma Graham. New York: Feminist Press, 1990, 33–49.
4. Walker, This Is My Century, 113.
5. Henderson, Stephen E. “‘Survival Motion’: A Study of the Black Writer and the Black Revolution in America.” In The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States by Mercer Cook and Stephen E. Henderson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969, 68–102.
6. Walker, This Is My Century, 7.
7. Ibid., 15–20.
8. Ostriker, Alicia Suskind. Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women’s Poetry in America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986, 1–56.
9. Walker, How I Wrote Jubilee, 54.
10. Levin, Amy. “The Violation of Voice: Revising the Slave Narrative.” In Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker, edited by Maryemma Graham. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001, 283–89.
11. Walker, This Is My Century, 7.
12. Miller, R. Baxter. “The ‘Etched Flame’ of Margaret Walker: Literary and Biblical Re-Creation in Southern History.” In Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker, edited by Maryemma Graham. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001, 81–97.
13. Walker, This Is My Century, 60.
14. Ibid., 61.
15. Ibid., 91.
16. Ibid., 113.
17. Traylor, Eleanor. “‘Bolder Measures Crashing Through’: Margaret Walker’s Poem of the Century.” In Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker, edited by Maryemma Graham. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001, 110–38.
18. Walker, This Is My Century, 63.
19. Ibid., 194–95.
20. Walker, Margaret. Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner, 1989, 13.
21. Walker, On Being Female, Black and Free, 4–11.
22. Ibid., 16.
Berke, Nancy. Women Poets on the Left: Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, Margaret Walker. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001, 123–57.
Carby, Hazel. “The Historical Novel of Slavery.” In Slavery and the Literary Imagination, edited by Deborah E. McDowell and Arnold Rampersad. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989, 125–43.
Carmichael, Jacqueline Miller. Trumpeting a Fiery Sound: History and Folklore in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998.
Cook, Mercer and Stephen E. Henderson. The Militant Black Writer in Africa and the United States. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969, 68–102.
Giddings, Paula. “‘A Shoulder Hunched against a Sharp Concern’: Some Themes in the Poetry of Margaret Walker.” Black World (1971): 20–34.
Graham, Maryemma, ed. Conversations with Margaret Walker. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
———, ed. Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2001.
Walker, Margaret. For My People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942; reprint, New York: Arno Press, 1968.
———. Jubilee. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966.
———. Prophets for a New Day. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1970.
———. October Journey. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1973.
———. For Farish Street. Jackson: Jackson Arts Alliance, 1986.
———. Richard Wright, Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner, 1989.
———. This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.
———. “How I Wrote Jubilee” and Other Essays on Life and Literature, ed. Maryemma Graham. New York: Feminist Press, 1990.
———. On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker,1932–1992, edited by Maryemma Graham. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1997.
Walker, Melissa. Down from the Mountaintop: Black Women’s Novels in the Wake of the Civil Rights Movement, 1966-1989. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991, 13–26.
Williams, Delores S. “Black Women’s Literature and the Task of Feminist Theology.” In Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, edited by Clarissa Atkinson, Constance Buchanan, and Margaret Miles. Boston: Beacon, 1985, 88–110.
The Margaret Walker Alexander Papers are housed at the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center, Jackson State University Archives, Jackson, Mississippi.