Although her career on the Depression-era left is less well known than that of Richard Wright or even Ralph Ellison, Margaret Walker was committed both to Communist activism and Marxist thought in the 1930s, and she was an active member of the Chicago literary left. However, in later years she was circumspect about this involvement. In a 1991 interview, Walker expressed her surprise to be included in Writing Red, a 1987 anthology of Depression-era women writers on the left.
I said to someone, once, “I didn’t know I was that radical. I never published in any left-wing magazines. They wouldn’t have me. I published in Crisis.” They said, “Yes, and that was black, wasn’t it? But it was considered red, too.” I didn’t realize that, but I did know that was the decade of socially conscious writers. And that is where I belong.1
Here, Walker’s reluctance to admit her inclusion in the canon of 1930s leftism is in part inaccurate: for instance, her claim that she only published in the NAACP journal Crisis is belied by the fact that she did indeed publish a short story—“The Red Satin Dress,” discussed below—in The New Anvil, a “red” proletarian magazine. She also published poetry in the single 1937 issue of New Challenge, a black left journal aligned, in no small part by Richard Wright’s editorial work, with the Communist movement. In part because of Walker’s reluctance, and in part because much of her poetry and fiction of the period was never published, scholarship has generally neglected her 1930s leftism: Carolyn J. Brown’s recent biography, for example, does not cover Walker’s involvement with the Communist left.2
Walker’s admission above that she nonetheless “belong[s]” in the ranks of Depression-era committed writers enables a new approach to Walker scholarship, one that recovers her role as one of the decade’s innovators of Marxist thought from feminist and African American cultural perspectives. First, we should note that her institutional involvement with the Communist left was sincere and multifaceted. She was close with Wright in this period, and his influence and encouragement deepened her interest in Marxism and Communist politics. Walker joined the Young Communist League and then the Communist Party in Chicago in 1937, where she was a member of the Writers Unit and attended the party’s Workers’ School.3 As an employee of the WPA Federal Writers Project, Walker was acquainted with left writers like Nelson Algren and Jack Conroy, and she participated in a planning meeting for Conroy and Algren’s The New Anvil.4 She attended Communist rallies, spoke to a meeting of African American members of the Young Communist League about proletarian literature, and chaired a “practice course in Creative Writing” at the Workers’ School.5
Beyond such institutional involvements, Walker was also committed to Marxist theory. Her letters to Wright testify to her effort to study Marxism and incorporate it in her work. In September of 1937, she announced her interest in attending lectures on “Dialectical Materialism” and “Marxist-Leninism” [sic] offered at the Worker’s School.6 She later asserted her progress in her study of “Communism and Marxism” and “the relation between the two and my work,” telling Wright that “I have begun to see all life around me with a clarity that almost stumps me.”7
Yet in a November 1937 letter, she admitted a certain frustration with her study of classical Marxism: “I haven’t done well with the Dialectical Materialism at all. I get a fair understanding of the fundamental laws but I don’t think, nor act, nor reason dialectically.”8 I propose to read this admission not as evidence that her interest in Marxism was superficial, or merely performed to impress Wright, but as an indication that her engagement with Marxism was of a revisionary nature. In an unpublished poem from the 1930s, “Radical Revolutionary,” Walker defines the essence of revolutionary activity as epistemological revision. The poem’s speaker describes “My way of breaking brackets from accepted facts / My way of willingness to learn another way.”9 Her comment about dialectical materialism is typed in the margin of her letter to Wright, a fitting indication of how Walker’s engagement with Marxism during the 1930s would expand and reshape Marxist protocols from their margins, from the perspective of the lumpenproletarian figures and practices excluded from Marxism’s consideration. Like Wright and Ellison, Walker was familiar with the tenets of Marxist thought but nonetheless used her written work to craft an African American innovation of Marxism that, like Wright’s and Ellison’s, turned around the concept and figure of the lumpenproletariat.
In a 1938 letter to Wright, Walker discusses her in-progress novel Goose Island, which examines “the problem of Juvenile delinquency” in the titular North Side Chicago slum. The key moment in realizing how to approach the problem, she claims, was realizing its structural economic determination: “the system breeds slums,” she notes, and “the whole economic system makes for juvenile delinquency and criminals are an indictment of class society.”10 This is a major recasting, based on Walker’s own familiarity with the denizens of Goose Island, of Marxism’s understanding of the lumpenproletariat. As we’ve seen, Marx and Engels saw criminality and social marginalization as the result of willed self-interest rather than structural exclusion: the lumpenproletariat is not a product of capitalism, but exists beyond production and thus beyond the considerations of Marxist epistemology. It is, for both capitalism and Marxism, that which doesn’t count, which bears no determinative or dialectical relation to production or historical transformation. Walker, however, uses her Depression-era work to reevaluate the concept of the lumpenproletariat within revolutionary theory. By designating the lumpenproletariat as a symptomatic indictment of capitalism, Walker resituates it within Marxist social and political analysis. Her poems about urban prostitutes, her unfinished novel Goose Island, and her folk ballads about African American heroic outlaws reorient both procedures.
Walker approaches the lumpenproletariat by artfully combining the concept’s realistic and romantic valences—its allusions, by turns, to both the immiseration of social exclusion and the freedom of the margins. For instance, she depicts the poverty and exploitation of the urban lumpenproletariat of Chicago as an indictment of capitalist depredation, a symptom of capital’s socioeconomic operations. She depicts her outlaw figures as the victims of intersectional economic, racial, and gender oppression. But in doing so, she relocates the lumpenproletariat from the margin to the center of Marxist epistemology: underworld and transient figures displace the proletariat as the target and embodiment of capitalist exploitation. The lumpenproletariat thus also catalyzes Walker’s sociopolitical critique of that exploitation, replacing the proletariat as the vantage point for knowledge of capitalist processes. In other words, by arguing, contra Marx, that the lumpenproletariat rank among capitalism’s oppressed and exploited, Walker accesses, in her literary treatments of the lumpenproletariat, forms of revolutionary insight typically associated with proletarian class consciousness. Accordingly, she takes the measure of the urban lumpenproletariat’s political viability, following Wright and Ellison in departing from Marxism’s alignment of the lumpenproletariat’s political leanings with mere opportunism or reaction. For Walker, the slums of Goose Island generate revolutionary activity, and black outlaws recoup their marginalization as empowerment.
Her commitment to writing about the lumpenproletariat departs from that of Wright and Ellison in some key ways, however. For one, her work examines the sociopolitical implications of the actions of a wider range of lumpenproletarian types: prostitutes, juvenile delinquents, underworld criminals, and black folk heroes all function, in her poetry and prose, to map the sociological and experiential diversity of lumpenproletarian life. Because of her attention to that diversity, Walker is able to imagine the lumpenproletarian individual as both an outside agent of resistance as well as a symptom of the damages of being socially excluded, whereas for Wright and Ellison, the tendency is to focus on, and perhaps glamorize, the lumpenproletariat’s potential for agency. Furthermore, Walker attends to the figure of the lumpenproletarian woman, supplementing the exclusively masculinist framings of the figure in Wright and Ellison. In her folk ballads, for instance, African American lumpenproletarian women access antipatriarchal agency and selfhood through criminal practices and, in doing so, disrupt racial, gender, and capitalist modes of repression.
Walker’s approach to the lumpenproletariat is, to quote “Radical Revolutionary,” “another way” for Marxism, but it is also a black Marxism firmly located within her mobilization of African American culture. The second section of For My People (1942) features ballads of various black folk heroes, and mines these tales for their radical political insights. Reframing the black outlaw hero Stagolee as an agent of antiracist resistance, Walker uses the modern criminal heroes of black culture to reimagine the political agency of the lumpenproletariat. Rather than self-interested individuals irrelevant to class struggle or prone to reactionary recruitment, Walker’s outlaw figures become revolutionary actors against capitalist, racial, and patriarchal domination. Indeed, as Southern African American criminals navigating a world shaped by Jim Crow, their exteriority to the law is by definition an act of political defiance.
Walker’s folk ballads politicize and radicalize what Cecil Brown describes as the “bad nigger” trope. “As one of the earliest examples of the antihero,” Brown writes, “Stagolee is a figure who embodies and perpetuates a counterculture.” He is a black cultural antithesis to a figure like John Henry, who did not resist “the white system” but who “sacrificed his life for that system.” In For My People, Walker constructs a similar opposition between the lumpenproletarian Stagolee and the working-class John Henry. Political potential lies with the socially marginal status and criminal agency of the former, whereas the latter represents the proletariat’s co-option by structures and rhythms of labor. Reading “Bad-Man Stagolee,” Walker’s poem in For My People, Brown notes how Walker strips this archetypal figure of his lumpenproletarian attributes and makes him a political agent: “there is no reference to the traditional Stagolee as pimp, gambler, or cold-blooded murderer. But the fact that Walker’s Stagolee kills a policeman with a pocket knife ties it in . . . with the theme of police brutality.”11 What Brown identifies is Walker’s lumpenproletarian reworking of Marxism, her relocation of revolutionary potential from labor and proletarian collectivity to the heroic acts of resistance encoded in African American vernacular culture. Walker’s Depression-era Marxism is one in which the archetype of the revolutionary agent is not the superhuman producer of surplus value John Henry, but various “bad” lumpenproletarian individuals like Stagolee, individuals marginalized by racial and economic exclusion who because they, as Eldridge Cleaver would put it, lack a place or “plug” in the system, offer a radical critique of and resistance to that system.
One of Marx’s more idiosyncratic references to the lumpenproletariat occurs in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844), in which he describes prostitution as “only a particular expression of the universal prostitution of the worker, and since prostitution is a relationship which includes not only the prostituted but also the prostitutor—whose infamy is even greater—the capitalist is also included in this category.”12 Roderick Ferguson argues that this passage positions the prostitute as the “symbol of that dehumanization” of the worker by processes of commodification. The symbol tropes “man’s feminization under capitalist relations of production”: the prostitute is a symptom of the ways in which capitalism unsettles heteropatriarchal norms and roles. The passage thus elaborates Marx and Engels’s moral scorn of the lumpenproletariat, adding sexual deviance and the scrambling of gender roles to their dismissal of these types from Marxism’s purview. Ferguson writes, “We may imagine Marx asking, ‘How could she—the prostitute—be entrusted with the revolutionary transformation of society?’”13 Ferguson’s purpose is to cite the need for a queer disidentification from Marxism, a repurposing of historical materialism conscious of its limitations by heteropatriarchy. Walker’s poems about prostitutes, as we’ll see, enact a similar revision of Marxism’s dismissal of the lumpenproletariat, and a similar reclaiming of sexual practice and desire as not perversions produced by capital, but as vehicles of anticapitalist political and theoretical sensibilities. Walker, in other words, does imagine ways of entrusting the prostitute with the revolutionary transformation of society.
Walker thus “lumpenizes” a basic tenet of classical Marxism: that the socioeconomic location and laboring conditions of the proletariat position it as the class historically destined to negate the capitalist mode of production and bring a new world into being, a world defined in part as a dialectical redefinition of the socialized production practices already experienced by workers under capitalism. As Engels explains, the proletarian revolution “transforms the socialized means of production, slipping from the hands of the bourgeoisie, into public property. By this act, the proletariat frees the means of production from the character of capital they have thus far borne, and gives their socialized character complete freedom to work itself out.”14 This dialectic is at work in Walker’s poems about prostitution, though she relocates it to the experiences and conditions of these lumpenproletarian types. In her poems, this lumpenproletarian figure’s various desires—for sexual fulfillment, consumer pleasures, money, and personal empowerment—represent the desire for capitalism’s historical negation. Her prostitutes’ desires are “queer” in that their allegorical object lies outside the bounds of the present and cannot be conceptualized except as a revolutionary alternative to that present.15
Walker’s work, however, recognizes a further contradiction in Marx’s passage about prostitution. By using a particular lumpenproletarian practice as a figure for working-class exploitation, Marx effaces, if only rhetorically, the distinction between lumpenproletariat and proletariat that he establishes in other writings, where the former is politically opposed to the latter. In his economic writings, Marx also draws a distinction between the two groups. As we saw in chapter 1, Capital delineates “vagabonds, criminals, prostitutes, in short the actual lumpenproletariat” from the relative surplus population of unemployed workers: the former are not merely out of work, but by their own volition and self-interest remain fundamentally beyond productive relations.16 Yet his remark about prostitution troubles this distinction. Apart from its gender and sexual connotations, Marx’s metaphor positions the lumpenproletariat as the product of capitalist exploitation: the actual prostitute becomes a symptom for the universal “prostitution” arising from capitalist relations.
Thus the line between what Marx otherwise understands as the self-interested, disreputable practices of the lumpenproletariat, and the historically progressive tendencies of proletarian labor, is blurred. One theoretical advantage of such a blurring is to enable the transfer of revolutionary capacity from the proletariat to the lumpenproletariat. If, for Marx, labor conditions prepare the proletariat to overthrow capitalism—the point of his famous remark about capital producing the proletariat class as “its own grave-diggers”17—and anticipate the full socialization of production after capitalism, the rhetorical instability of this comment about prostitution suggests that lumpenproletarian methods of surviving on the margins, outside of productive labor relations, could be used to enact similarly revolutionary diagnoses. Walker’s work motivates that possibility and thus anticipates the form of Eldridge Cleaver’s 1972 argument, discussed in chapter 1, that the experience of the lumpenproletariat, because it occurs outside the constraints of labor and class identity organized by labor, better presages the classlessness of socialism. For Cleaver, the lumpenproletariat’s desire for “equality in distribution and consumption” is a more radical desire than the protective, working-class demand for work or jobs.18 In Walker’s treatment of prostitution, the prostitute’s desire for pleasure and opportunity similarly figures radical alternatives to extant political orders. Walker’s repositioning of the lumpenproletariat is thus less a departure from Marxism then a deconstructive, recuperative reading of Marxism. Or rather, it stands as a revision licensed by orthodox Marxism’s own dialectical logics and textual instabilities.
Walker’s poems about prostitutes were authored at the same time as multiple poems about the working class that are unusually pessimistic, for a Marxist, about the possibility of revolutionary consciousness or change emerging from proletarian experience. While the laboring conditions of workers in her poems make them unable to grasp the possibility of structural change or socioeconomic critique, the life conditions of prostitutes often lead these figures to such forms of consciousness. In a radical reclassifying and regendering of classical Marxism’s revolutionary agent, the prostitute often functions in Walker’s Depression poetry as the heroic proletariat functions in Marx’s political texts.
Walker’s interest in Marxism is conventionally assumed to have followed from her close friendship with Wright, whom she met for the first time in 1936, in Chicago, at a planning session for the Communist-backed National Negro Congress.19 However, in an unpublished 1934 poem, Walker had already begun to question the revolutionary capacity of the proletariat. “Factory-hand” depicts the working-class woman as a mere reflection of capitalism’s exploitative relations of production. The only potential exit from those relations is neither collectivism nor class consciousness, but death. The titular subject is “a fragile little thing / All bent with toil and quivering.” The manuscript contains multiple revisions to the poem’s final lines, but in one ending the speaker concludes: “And when I saw her pale and worn / Humble in death I could have sworn / Such sweet release was God’s kind hand.”20 Death is the only escape from labor because the figure of the worker here accesses no dialectical opposition to her exploitation. Her body bears the traces of that labor to the extent that it is nothing more than its gradual destruction by labor. In a highly sympathetic anticipation of the claims of Black Panther thinkers like Cleaver, Walker’s vision of working-class status here entails not revolutionary agency but total co-option—to be a worker is to be wholly the product of one’s oppression.
Walker explores this problem in terms of political consciousness in the 1936 dialect poem “Rich Fokes Worl.” The speaker, a black worker who, like the archetypal John Henry, “aint nevah been scairt of hard work,” describes his struggles to retain consistent employment, both in the Jim Crow South and the industrial North. He accurately attributes his struggles to racism, the mechanization of the labor process, being barred from union membership, and ultimately, a work-related illness that forces him off his WPA relief job. While he grasps that his racial and class status determine his misfortunes, he never sees how capitalism and racism work together to produce class and racial difference in the name of maintaining exploitative relations of production. Instead, he chalks his lot up to fate: “po’ cullud fokes jes natchelly has a hard time in a rich fokes worl.” Walker’s manuscript revisions suggest that this line originally referenced a “white fokes worl” before she changed it to “rich fokes worl” (she also made the same change in the title)—a revision that reflects her recognition of the complicity of racism and capitalism.21 It’s clear to Walker’s reader that racial difference functions to keep oppressive working relations intact: the speaker, for instance, recollects working as a strikebreaker, a common tactic for pitting black and white workers against each other. But nothing in his experience on and off the job has provided him with an awareness of the socially fabricated nature and attendant political vulnerability of race and class lines. It’s simply nature, or fate, that he is black and working-class in a white, rich folks’ world. Like the woman in “Factory-hand,” this worker’s experience reflects a Marxist indictment of capitalist labor that he is not himself able to access or act upon. Like Jake Jackson in Lawd, Today!, or the black worker who wants to turn Bigger over to the police in order to protect his job in Native Son, the worker in these poems never reaches the heroic, world-changing capacity of Marxism’s proletarian.
Walker’s replacement of the proletariat with the lumpenproletariat as Marxism’s world-historical agent is suggested in the 1936 poem “Men At Work.” The title prepares the reader for a typical proletarian ode, but the first four stanzas characterize the titular subject in lumpenproletarian terms of transience and social dislocation: “We were the breadlines,” the “Flop house fellows; proud park bench sleepers.” They are also described as “the destitute” and “The unprepared unfortunates. / The miserables.” Peter Stallybrass notes that Victor Hugo used the title of his novel Les Misérables, to which Walker certainly refers, as a designation for the classless individuals Marx would include in the lumpenproletariat.22 But alongside these depictions of material destitution, Walker associates the declassed with political activism: “We were the stump speakers,” “fighters,” “riot radicals.” This political potential is directly correlated with their unemployment: because they are not working, because they are exterior to capitalist relations, they are able to be at once “the idlers, the slackers, the schemers” and “the dreamers.”
In the final two stanzas, Walker shifts to the present tense and to more familiar proletarian rhetoric: “We are the marching men / Bearing a pick and shovel over our shoulders,” the poem declares. “We are the men at work.”23 The proletarian imagery of these stanzas, which emphasizes labor and collectivity, might seem a contrast to the lumpenproletarian tone of the first part of the poem. However, it indicates that Walker is situating the lumpenproletariat, because of its dislocation from labor and capitalist exploitation, in the role classical Marxism assigns to the proletariat by reassigning the decor of proletarian militancy to those who, because idle, can dream of alternatives to alienated labor. The proletariat, in other words, is invoked here as a structural component of revolutionary process rather than an actual set of laborers. André Gorz argues that Marxism’s proletariat is less an empirical category than a theoretical abstraction, that “the historical role of the proletariat” in the world-historical negation of capitalism is a “transcendental guarantee” rather than a factual description of actual workers.24 Within classical Marxism, the term is perhaps best understood as a future and inherently revolutionary collective identity to which the empirical working-class is structurally suited and toward which it is developing. But the gap between the concept and its potential empirical referents allows for a certain revisionary fluidity, and the play of proletarian and lumpenproletarian associations in “Men at Work” registers Walker’s revision of Marxism. The group best positioned to initiate the historical eclipse of capitalism is in fact the one on its margins rather than at its center.
“Gun Moll,” a poem from 1936, suggests the opportunities of lumpenproletarian life as an alternative to the dead ends of labor. The speaker opens with a different invocation of socioeconomic fate than that which closes “Rich Fokes Worl”: “I was born to be a harlot / From my birth / I trod the streets / Of scarlet women.” Her childhood, lived in proximity to prostitutes, was shaped by antiheteronormative family arrangements. She indicates that the sexual licentiousness of her mother, who “could not remember / The names of all her lovers,” meant that “I never knew my father” and that “my half-brothers and sisters / Were none whole bloodied.” “Bloodied” might be an error, but its use in place of the expected “blooded” suggests that this nonpatriarchal family unit is not a sociological deviation, but an escape from the structural violence of patriarchal concerns with lineage and property, as well as racist concerns with bloodlines and purity. Because the family is not “whole blooded” it is not “bloodied” by patriarchy and racism. Walker thus situates lumpenproletarian experience on the margins not only of labor, but of racial lines, patriarchal kinship structures, and heteronormative sexual arrangements. Without occluding the poverty of her origins, and the destitution of social exclusion suffered by the lumpenproletariat more generally, Walker’s speaker finds a generative value in her childhood: “We were nurtured on the crumbs of the rich” while “the slime of the slums / Was our first playground.” This dialectical play of deprivation and sustenance suggests the restorative potential of lumpenproletarian alternatives to economic, social, and gender norms.
The speaker then enters the workforce and loses some of the freedom of lumpenproletarian life. The sites of labor here include not only “factories” and “kitchens,” but “Bawdyhouses.” Unlike the “scarlet women” whose place on the streets, outside of labor relations, inspired possibilities of freedom, the bawdyhouse is a site of labor. Walker demonstrates an awareness of prostitution as both an alternative to and a mode of labor, both a marginal practice located in the streets and an exploitative confinement located in a brothel. What seems like a contradiction, therefore, between framing prostitution as freedom and as labor, is in fact Walker’s careful attempt to refigure lumpenproletarian life as freedom without losing sight of its real limitations. Prostitution only works as a figure for freedom, in other words, when it is exterior to capitalist productive relations, an exteriority that is fragile and which the poet must then preserve.
Accordingly, after the speaker becomes a worker, she and her contemporary working-class women find pleasure only outside of work. As with the working-class poems, work itself offers nothing in terms of personal or political fulfillment, only a “sorrow” that the women “learned to drown . . . / In a glass of sparkling blood.” Again, the unexpected resituating of blood not as a sign of patriarchal lineage or the human cost of hard labor, but as a playful, “sparkling” euphemism for alcohol and its pleasures, indicates the freedom of the places and practices that thrive outside of the workplace. Like the scarlet women and unlike those who work in the bawdyhouse, “We were happy in the forgotten streets.”
The speaker soon commits to her desire for this freedom by joining the lumpenproletariat: she begins dating a gangster. This section of the manuscript is marked by various changes and deletions of unclear priority, but one version indicates how this lover provides the speaker with the pleasures and the freedoms lacking in labor:
I was pretty and young
And he was adventure,
Romance and danger that I craved.
Life with him was never a dull moment.
He bought me beautiful clothes
And jewels and a car.
He taught me to gamble
And confidence the foolish
And the wealthy of their gold.
Lumpenproletarian life provides collectivity, activity, adventure, material goods, and, beyond these pleasures, a criminal form of class-based struggle.
The pleasures of consumption, for the speaker, extend to her sex life with her lover, who was “a warm, passionate lover / He fed me rapture / And glory from a spoon.” The desire that characterizes this part of the poem—a desire whose object shifts between her lover’s body, her material goods, and the thrill of activity itself—is nowhere found in the two poems of working-class life discussed above. In finding working-class life devoid of fulfillment, “Gun Moll” anticipates the findings of sociologists Horace Cayton and St. Clair Drake in their landmark study Black Metropolis (1945). Cayton and Drake describe how the “inability to secure satisfying employment” is a significant catalyst of African American women in Chicago turning to prostitution:
Thus, one young woman in a buffet flat exclaimed: “When I see the word maid—why, girl, let me tell you, it just runs through me! I think I’d sooner starve.” Another, who lost her white-collar job during the Depression, first took work as a maid and then became a prostitute: “I didn’t want to do housework. Here I had been in some kind of office since I was fourteen years old. Now why should I start scrubbing floors at this late date in life?”25
Working-class life in “Factory-hand” and “Rich Fokes Worl” is a kind of death-in-life, a life devoid of desire and governed entirely by the necessity of laboring to survive. Desire, represented in “Gun Moll” as the motive force to transcend necessity, the impulse that carries the speaker away from labor, thus carries a distinctly Marxist political charge in itself, allegorizing revolution as another escape from capitalist relations of production. As a gangster’s girlfriend, a status on the margins of both class and sexual normativity, the speaker realizes, materially and personally, what Cleaver would later call “the ultimate revolutionary demand”: to access the fulfillment of consumption without the exploitations and compulsions of production.26
The speaker goes on to claim of her lover that “I was his slave,” but in this context the term suggests less gender or racial subordination than the kind of loss of self in a larger, postindividualized collective Marxism associates with the formation of the proletariat. For Marx, lumpenproletarian individuals, lacking a collective class status, were self-interested and thus ruthlessly individualistic. For Walker, individual alienation is negated not at the point of production but in the hustling, practical, and collaborative activity of lumpenproletarian life.
Eventually, her lover leaves her for another woman who ends up murdering him. So she uses a gun he had given her to kill her in revenge. The last lines reveal that she is delivering this monologue to the police: “Yes. Sure I did it. / I told you that already a half a dozen times!”27 The speaker ends up in the same position as Bigger Thomas, using lumpenproletarian crime to access self distinction—“I did it.” She also upsets normative gender roles by claiming the phallic agency provided by her romance with the gangster. Her liberation and empowerment is only temporary and somewhat figurative in nature: she arrives, like Bigger and like the working-class speakers, at a dead end; crime fails, as it does in Native Son, to actually substitute for activism. Furthermore, Walker’s awareness of the potential for exploitation alongside freedom in the experiences of her prostitutes, her juxtaposition of mobile “scarlet women” and confined brothel workers, indicates her awareness that the positive freedom of lumpenproletarian life is shaped in part by the imaginative license of a poet’s perspective. That means, however, that in the hands of a poet and on the blank pages of Walker’s drafts, the speaker’s experience can be temporarily refigured to allegorize revolutionary alternatives to the intersectional workings of racial difference, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and capitalism.
Walker acknowledges that a politically empowering depiction of lumpenproletarian life is in no small part a capacity of literary imagination and form. In the 1934 poem “Prostitute,” the titular speaker wonders if prostitutes “were . . . meant for this alone? / Only this: slaves to the flesh and spirit of men? / Nothing but chattel? Nothing but so much property? / Nothing but so much meat and bone—fat and skin?”28 Walker here acknowledges the exploitations of prostitution, guarding against uncomplicated romanticization. The dehumanization of the prostitute here echoes Marx’s comment in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, where “prostitution” names the alienation, under capitalism, of all individuals from their human essence. In the poem “Whores,” published in For My People, Walker refuses any distinction between the prostitute and the worker and refuses to read prostitution as socially exterior. Prostitutes are described by the speaker as “fascinating sights” but ultimately “old women working by an age-old plan / to make their bread in ways as best they can” who “[learn] too late in unaccustomed dread / that easy ways” cannot “leave them satisfied.”29 Rather than living an alternative to social norms, these prostitutes are workers who, in the era of global warfare, might “be surprised by bombs in each wide bed” just like anyone else. Nancy Berke observes how the poem contrasts with other pieces in For My People that romanticize black female resistance; “Whores” not only carries a tone of moral judgment but also “suggests black women’s powerlessness as it depicts real, not mythical, female transgressors.”30
These takes on prostitution perform an important corrective to Marx (one he realized rhetorically, at least, in his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts comment), reminding us that, despite Marx’s assumptions to the contrary, lumpenproletarian individuals do not necessarily perversely elect to live outside of productive relations: they may not work on the factory floor, but prostitutes here are just as much exploited modern workers as those who do. Realistically, Walker knows the human costs of prostitution and recognizes the presence of economic, racial, and gender exploitation in the oldest profession. This more sober analysis of lumpenproletarian life might seem to contradict the tone of “Gun Moll.” But both poems also suggest a certain imaginative opportunity, for the poet, in prostitution. In describing the prostitutes in “Whores,” the speaker notes how “from their hands keys hung suggestively.” Literally a tool of their debilitating trade, the key also is a figure of possibility that is recognized by the poet and, to a certain extent, enacted in the poem. The speaker describes them as “whores on special beats,” a phrase which, as Berke notes, “alludes to police involvement in the city’s underworld activities” and implies a critique of the structural complicity of prostitution and the law.31 As discussed above, the hardship of their sexual labor is also tied to the destruction of World War II. In this way Walker can reimagine the despised and discounted whore as not, here, an agent of political desire and change, but as still bearing the key to a suggestively extensive critique of modern capitalism, the state, and modern warfare.
In “Prostitute,” the speaker attributes her entrance into prostitution to a basic libidinal desire: “I only wanted love and men” and “Nobody wanted Purity / Nobody wanted Innocence. / Nobody wanted—God—the only things I had to give. / I was too plain—I was too poor.”32 Prostitution indexes the sexual commodification of the “pure” self, but it also functions as a symptom of the contradiction between libido and material circumstances. Similar to “Gun Moll,” the speaker’s desire for “love and men,” the fulfillment poverty denies her, allegorizes the revolutionary desire for the transcendence of economic limitations. Walker thus challenges sex-negative bourgeois moralism without romanticizing away the sufferings entailed by the prostitute. Jane Addams evinces such moralism, for example, in her 1912 book A New Conscience and an Ancient Evil, when she blames the desire of individual women for their entrance into prostitution: “a girl always prefers to think that economic pressure is the reason for her downfall, even when the immediate causes have been her love of pleasure, her desire for finery, or the influence of evil companions.”33 Walker redefines and destigmatizes the moral and sociopolitical valences of desire as manifested in prostitution. The poem thus simultaneously explores prostitution as both, realistically, a mode of economic victimization and, figuratively, an escape from such victimization.
Walker stages this dialectic of lumpenproletarian suffering and freedom later in the poem, when the speaker wonders if all prostitutes are merely “meant to be manikins only? / Human Rags? Discarded Hagars?”34 These three images chart Walker’s understanding of the rags and paper trope. Lumpenproletarian life is the dehumanizing condition of being society’s discards and outcasts, but through the literary technique of Biblical allusion, that condition is recast as potential. In Genesis, Hagar is the slave of Abraham’s wife Sarah, and gives birth to Abraham’s son Ishmael. When Abraham later casts Hagar and her son into the wilderness, God reaches out to them and promises her that her son will be the originator of a nation. Hagar’s status as a slave reflects the speaker’s exploitation, and her banishment by Abraham reflects the struggles of the lumpenproletarian social outcast. Yet in Hagar’s story, from exteriorization comes the possibility for futurity and utopian transcendence: the “human rag” is a symbol of human detritus, but the “discarded Hagar” tropes the constructive and progressive political potential of the discarded.
In these poems Walker furnishes a more sensitive understanding of the gender, racial, and economic complexities of lumpenproletarian experience than we find in the works of Wright and Ellison. If the exploits of a Bigger, Tillman, and Slick are in danger of conforming to what Madhu Dubey calls the “romance of the residual,” the tendency to read exteriorization and marginalization exclusively as conditions of empowered resistance, Walker’s representations of prostitutes preserve an awareness of the continuity of capitalism’s exploitation beyond normative economic and social relations.35 While similarly redefining lumpenproletarian experience as providing radical political potential, Walker doesn’t lose the opportunity to simultaneously represent such experience, in a different yet equally critical register, as a manifestation of intersectional oppression. By motivating both poles of the rags and paper trope, Walker can offer positive and negative revolutionary framings of lumpenproletarian experience: it is by turns a damning condemnation of social and economic injustice and the alternative to such injustice.
In an early short story, Walker uses the trope of the rag to correlate working-class identity and lumpenproletarian practice with allegorical possibilities of personal and collective empowerment. “The Red Satin Dress” appeared in 1939 in The New Anvil. The father of a working-class family brings home, for his wife, a red satin dress that he claims to have found under his seat on the train. The dress is new and expensive, and it occasions some conflict between the narrator’s parents. The mother feels they should return it to the store in hope of finding its purchaser, and her husband suspects she thinks that he “stole it.” Their dispute then turns into a sociopolitical one about the advisability of resorting to lumpenproletarian tactics in the face of economic deprivation: “Daddy said poor folks can’t afford to be so honest, being honest like that is too expensive. Mama said she thinks it’s just the other way around, poor folks have to be extra careful because folks are so quick to say we steal.” Eventually, she wears the dress to a party and slowly is reconciled to keeping it, and the dress becomes a catalyst for the strengthening of the narrator’s parents’ erotic relationship: “every time she put it on Daddy had another fit of beaming and kissing her.” When the dress starts to wear, her mother transforms it “into a ruffled cape to wear evenings over other party dresses that were cheap but were always set off by the cape.” At the end of the story, the narrator reports that her grandmother plans to make a quilt from “this red satin rag,” so that “we can look at it a long time” and “maybe one of us can even have the quilt some day in our hope-chest.”36
The dress is acquired on the margins of capitalist socioeconomic relations rather than purchased with wages that represent the exploitation of the father’s labor power. It thus symbolizes a kind of fulfillment, here figured in erotic and familial terms, that working-class life, and thus capitalist productive relations, cannot yield. It suggests the potential lying on the margins of those relations, a potential always in danger of being derided as theft and moral degradation. The satin dress, by the end of the story, is the “rag” that is repurposed as a point of departure for the future happiness of the family, and its color suggests the political tendency Walker associates with that future. If her poems about prostitutes and other outcasts often reimagine, on paper, the suffering of being discarded “human rags” as in fact a condition of future-oriented revolutionary possibility, the grandmother’s quilting in “The Red Satin Dress” allegorizes Walker’s own committed literary practice.
Walker graduated from Northwestern University in 1935, and in her final year as a student she worked for what she later characterized as a “re-creation project sponsored by the WPA” and focused on juvenile delinquency. The project she describes seems to be sociologist Clifford Shaw’s Chicago Area Project, a program to combat juvenile delinquency through neighborhood-based community-building activism and recreation.37 Shaw’s research into delinquency, in studies like The Jack-roller (1930), had suggested that, to quote Solomon Kobrin, “delinquency may often represent the efforts of the person to find and vindicate his status as a human being, rather than an abdication of his humanity or an intrinsic incapacity to experience human sentiment.” As a result, for Kobrin, the “spirit” of the project realized Shaw’s “sense of the naturalness or inevitability of violative activity in the youngster who, whether singly or in groups, is neglected, despised, or ignored as a person.”38 This recognition of the positive desire of the delinquent figure, a desire produced by socioeconomic marginalization, suggests how the project’s approach led a writer like Walker, fascinated by both Marxism and Chicago’s urban underclass, to reimagine delinquency as not a social problem but as the kernel of revolutionary political volition.
Walker’s work on the project introduced her to various lumpenproletarian types in the North Side “Italian-black neighborhood” of Goose Island:
They gave me a group of so-called delinquent girls to spend time with, to see what kind of influence a person with my background and training would have on them. Primarily, they were shoplifters and prostitutes. . . . I learned that prostitution and gambling were vices tied up with city politics. One of the straw bosses on the project was a pimp whose brother was a smuggler and a narcotics dealer.39
Walker incorporated her experiences into Goose Island, a novel she began in the 1930s but never finished. In her preface, she describes Goose Island as a place of discards: “This area is called the Low End by Negroes who live in that section. It is characterized by dirty streets and filthy alleys full of refuse garbage and swept only at election time.” Besides indicting civic government for its structural role in maintaining urban poverty, Walker also suggests the political exploitability of this “Marginal or Interstitial District.”40 The garbage of Goose Island—including the persons who, cast off from society, inhabit it as refuse themselves—is “swept” only when it serves political interests. This passage echoes Marx’s suspicion of the lumpenproletariat’s susceptibility to political bribery and suggests that Chicago’s lumpenproletarians are bribed tools of city political interests. Like the literal and human trash of Goose Island, Marx’s lumpenproletariat “may . . . be swept into the movement by a proletarian revolution” but is much more likely to be recruited by the forces of reaction.41 But unlike Marx, and like Wright or Ellison, Walker doesn’t see the political malleability of the lumpenproletariat as necessarily aligned with conservative or reactionary forces. Goose Island considers the progressive political insights and opportunities emerging from the socially marginal, interstitial spaces of urban lumpenproletarian life.
The protagonist is Henrietta, an African American woman who, after her marriage fails, gets a job working for the Experiment, a sociological project studying juvenile delinquency in Goose Island. Before working with the project, her first encounter with the lumpenproletarian “Low End” catalyzes the dissolution of her marriage. After her aunt tells her she saw Henrietta’s husband, Arthur, with a prostitute in the Low End, Henrietta investigates the neighborhood. The Low End is, for her, “a place that stood for the worst things in life. All the gambling and vice holes, the prostitution houses, the headquarters of gangs and gangsters, were clustered in the Low End.” Her apprehensions about the Low End echo the proliferative rhetoric of Marx’s catalogue of the Parisian lumpenproletariat in The Eighteenth Brumaire, a reminder that Henrietta’s moral repulsion is readable as, simultaneously, bourgeois and classically Marxist.
Yet when she enters this “Marginal or Interstitial District” she gains a degree of authority over her husband, whom she encounters on the street. He challenges her presence there: “You’ve got no business down here in the Low End.” She challenges him in turn: “What business have you got down here?” In response to his “Well, but I’M a man!” she asserts that “Yes, and dont you forget one day that I’m every inch a woman and I’ll stand every foot of my ground, you understand.”42 The gender prerogative Arthur claims, framed as his freedom to be in the Low End, is reclaimed by Henrietta as a protective and defiant resistance to the prescribed gender roles Arthur’s comment invokes. Henrietta initially perceives the Low End as a place of “vice holes,” a sexually connotative phrase that indicates how the area’s nonconformity to normative gender roles is what occasions her moral scorn. Yet her entrance into this space where gender prescriptions are less stable, her removal to the margin of those prescriptions, enables her to challenge the patriarchal authority of her husband. The criminal world of the lumpenproletariat is thus introduced as a space of freedom, and its perceived deviance redefined as potential resistance, a resistance that is lost in bourgeois as well as Marxist dismissals of the lumpenproletariat as beyond the bounds of proper consideration.
Henrietta and Arthur eventually separate, and Henrietta searches for a job in the midst of the Great Depression. The experience is again one of moving out of a stable social position and into the margin, and is here described with careful use of free indirect discourse, as Goose Island is characterized from Henrietta’s shifting perspective: “Always here in Goose Island life had moved for her easily enough without being luxurious. . . . Now she walked out into the world of hopelessness. The streets were filled with tramping people like her searching for work. She was part of the giant army of unemployed. Drunks littered the corner pavements; beggars were everywhere, and the peddlers were innumerable.” Her gaze still includes the scorn found in Marx: the rhetoric of this catalogue of the Depression dislocated references moral repulsion (drunks “littering” the streets as human trash) and Marx’s hostility to self-interested lumpenproletarian hustling (the “innumerable” peddlers). But it also includes “beggars,” a signifier invoking stark material need without clear tones of repugnance. Thus she notes how “the parks were full of men who were not yet tramps but steadily becoming demoralized. Through this maze she walked out of her dream, into a realization of the depression.” Lumpenproletarian life now appears as economic victimization, its immiseration the product of a structural crisis in capitalism—“it looked as though the whole economic system in America and the world too, for that matter had been wrecked”43—rather than the result of individual moral failings. Furthermore, the social margins of Goose Island become a “maze” that, for all its bewildering connotations, stands in contrast to the “dream” that was Henrietta’s prior, relatively stable social situation. The margin, in other words, is an interstitial space where epistemological gains can be sought and found.
The Depression makes lumpenproletarian transience visible as a consequence of structural flaws with capitalism, and that enables Henrietta to begin to work her way through the “maze” of lumpenproletarian life toward a critical awareness of capitalism: “People dared not walk the streets at night, especially women. There seemed to be a wave of purse-snatching and hold ups and murders and rapes.” In her previous visit to the Low End in search of Arthur, she had reflected how “she had always thought it would be dangerous walking these streets,” but then the perception of danger was clearly bound up, in her mind, with her moralizing aversion to the “worst things in life” contained in the Low End. Now, she reframes lumpenproletarian danger as the product of economic deprivation: “People were tense with desperation; a man might do anything for a few dollars.”44 The Depression allows Henrietta to move from the obfuscatory “dream” of seeing Goose Island as Addams saw prostitutes, as defined by willed decadence, to the more complex, “maze”-like reality of lumpenproletarian misery as a symptom of economic inadequacy—a move Marx never quite made himself. Henrietta’s experiential education is how Walker’s novel recasts the rags of lumpenproletarian misery as the blank page troping new epistemological departures.
Henrietta is eventually hired as a secretary on the Experiment, a sociological project studying juvenile delinquency in Goose Island and seeking to cure it through community organization and recreation. Henrietta begins associating with Bud Haynes, an African American underworld operator from the neighborhood who works with the Experiment. Bud is a “legend” in the neighborhood, and Henrietta had long heard of him from her aunt: “Some of the things she told her he later corroborated unconsciously. Some of the things were obviously gossip, hearsay, and near legend.” Bud had migrated from the South “upon the death of his father”; had organized gambling for Tranchina, an Italian gangster; had his wife—“one of those extremely interesting women who had made her living not only by her wits but by peddling love”—to whom he may not have been legally married, confined in an asylum; and had worked as a pimp and eventually established his own underworld enterprise comprising “Bookies, Prostitution, Gambling Dens,” which allowed him to don “good pin striped suits and [smoke] ten cent cigars.” Bud paid for police protection, and although his money filled city coffers, “there was really never any improvement in the neighborhood. The alleys were always full of refuse and filthy; the streets were swept only at election time; no garbage man removed garbage regularly and in general the whole neighborhood of Goose Island was like a dump upon which the whole city discarded everything undesirable.”45
Bud is both a lumpenproletarian operator and a sort of folkloric hero of the community, someone who uses crime, in the face of social oppression, to become economically successful and larger than life in reputation. His coming from the South after the death of his father raises the likely possibility of his having left to flee racial persecution. He foreshadows the black outlaw figures of Walker’s poetry collection For My People, who use illicit measures to resist structures of power. His legend romanticizes the underworld and glosses over his exploitation of his prostitutes, but it also encodes the possibility of criminal measures being empowering for African Americans. Walker captures this instance of the rags and paper trope through her alignment of the steady accumulation of “hearsay” about Bud with the steady accumulation of “refuse” in the Goose Island streets. The material immiseration of the slum is suggestively linked to the freedom and ingenuity of the lumpenproletarian hustler: refuse is recycled as possibility.
This dynamic is disrupted by the Depression, when Bud “went ragged,” lost connections and illicit trade and, figuratively, lost the romantic potential associated with his pre-Depression legendary status. It’s at this point that he begins working for the Experiment with Henrietta, and he provides her with insight into “all the undercurrent movements in the neighborhood”: what crimes had been committed, which gangs had been involved, etc. “At first Henrietta was horrified at the stories he told, then she gradually withdrew from her reserve and fascinated by the language he used, the jokes he cracked, and the almost unbelievable tales he told she began listening with more than professional interest.” Bud uses his storytelling arts to deconstruct Henrietta’s bourgeois, moralizing horror of lumpenproletarian life. But as he does so, he also teaches Henrietta about the complicity of capitalism in producing crime and juvenile delinquency. Critiquing the “foolish gushing women interested in charity work” whom the Experiment courts, he exclaims: “What do they care how these kids live, and how they die? . . . These kids ain’t bad because they’re born bad; they’re bad because they’re where they are.”46 While he destigmatizes the lumpenproletariat, he also doesn’t romanticize outcasts and delinquents but identifies them as symptoms of capitalism’s neglect of the slums. Rather than those who simply don’t count for Marx’s anticapitalist critique, lumpenproletarian figures are at the center of Haynes’s anticapitalist epistemology. As a result, Henrietta begins to grasp the political limitations of the Experiment’s sociological and philanthropic approach: before Colman, the Experiment’s head administrator, Henrietta and Bud “did not voice any such sentiments about the Gold Coast being the breeder of the slums, in turn devouring and regurgitating the people living in the back ways.”
As she did in some of her 1930s poems, Walker situates the lumpenproletariat of Goose Island in a manner that aligns it with the structural role played, in classical Marxism, by the industrial proletariat. “The Gold Coast depended upon these people for labor,” Henrietta and Bud know, “and they in turn depended on them for ‘a crust of bread and a corner to sleep in.’”47 For Walker, the lumpenproletarian types of the “back ways” are not, as in classical Marxism, irrelevant to capitalism’s functioning, excluded from its consideration of the factory or the market and relegated, out of sight, to back alleys. Nor, she indicates, does the lumpenproletariat categorically renounce legitimate labor. Bud and Henrietta recognize that lumpenproletarian deviance is not the result of a willed refusal of work and legitimate social status but is produced by the inadequate returns of the labor available to the denizens of Goose Island. Thus what capital offers the slums is not material sustenance but a mere allusion to it: the “crust of bread and a corner to sleep in” is a phrase from a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem.48 Discussing one youth involved with the project, Bud exclaims: “What chance has she got? Look at the house they’re living in. Look at the days they got to go hungry? And her old man finished college! A college graduate! Yes and he did post graduate work in the Penitentiary for making counterfeit money.”49 Counterfeiting works as a general figure for lumpenproletarian recourses in the face of the inadequacy of socioeconomic relations that maintain the poverty of the slum: money must be made through criminal means since it isn’t reliably provided by labor. In this way, Walker theorizes the tenuous criminal resourcefulness of the lumpenproletarian individual in the same way Marx theorized proletarian militancy: as an organic consequence and symptomatic indictment of capitalism.
Doing so, of course, allows her to position the lumpenproletariat as potentially negating capitalism. The denial of livable conditions to these persons, symbolized by the accumulation of trash in the streets of Goose Island, has the potential to dialectically empower them against capital, a process figured by the accumulation of legends about Bud as a romantic social outlaw. The Experiment cannot recognize this transformative potential, and when revolution is voiced in Goose Island, it falls outside of the project’s bounds. At neighborhood meetings held by the project, for instance, two brothers, one of whom “[gives] his name as Black” and who “were both known as crazy Reds who styled themselves as Radicals or Communists” often disrupt the discussion. Black articulates a Marxist critique of the Experiment: “As long as things go on like this where a man can’t get a piece of bread thout he begs for it and can’t get work and got to live in these no good building [sic] the Project can keepa going till doomsday they ain’t gonna cut out no devilment.”50 The brothers reiterate the critique Bud had made earlier, framed now as a “Communist” insight. They also raise the question of whether a “black” Marxism, emerging not from official institutions but from the neighborhood itself, might not be better suited to the needs of the slum than are the philanthropic efforts of the sociologists.
Events come to a head when four African American youths rob a business and, in the process, get into a shoot-out with a police officer. The officer and one of the criminals die, another is captured by the police, and the other two go on the run. Concurrent with this moment of crisis, the Experiment elects to pull out of the neighborhood. Henrietta comes to the office to discover Colman “packing papers together”: the possibilities for renewal that the Experiment sought to bring to the discarded human rags of Goose Island are being withdrawn. Henrietta tells him of the incident with the shot police officer. “Well they never seem to learn,” Colman explains. “They see what a life like that gets them everyday, yet they do the same thing over and over again.”51 Colman is giving up on the lumpenproletariat because he, like Marx or like any bourgeois moralist, sees their criminal tendencies as an inherent failing beyond organization or repair.
In response to the shooting, a “police terror” descends on Goose Island as cops comb the neighborhood and harass residents, seeking the two fugitives. The scene resembles the manhunt for Bigger in Native Son, but with a key difference: rather than neighborhood sentiment turning against Bigger for threatening the tenuous job security of working-class blacks, Goose Island organizes and resists, and with the help of the institutional left. The Communist-backed International Labor Defense gets involved in defending a victim of police brutality, and sponsors a “mass meeting” in collaboration with other radical organizations, a meeting which “half of Goose Island” attends. “After this meeting the terror abated slowly,” and the resistance of the neighborhood is the key factor in that abatement: “At the last house searching the housewife, who was an energetic worker in the neighborhood branch of the Workers’ Alliance demanded that police or no police they couldn’t search her house without a search warrant and if they didn’t get out of her house she’d made [sic] them tell the reason why. That ended the house-searching.”52 The Workers’ Alliance was a Communist-supported organization of unemployed workers: workers who don’t work and thus aren’t quite proletarians. The International Labor Defense had been instrumental in the legal defense of the Scottsboro Boys, the primary antiracist cause of the Communist left in the Depression. This confluence of organizations suggests that the resistance to the police terror is a black and red instance of lumpenproletarian militancy. After all, it is initiated by a criminal act, and the nature of that criminal act—resistance to the rule of the police—is expanded and organized into a mass movement. If Wright’s Native Son was skeptical about the ability of criminal activity to effectively disrupt racial and economic oppression, Walker’s scenario imagines a process whereby the crime of resisting arrest becomes the positive revolutionary impetus of a community resisting the state.
Even in its fragmentary and unfinished state, Goose Island demonstrates Walker’s interest in the 1930s left. It also speaks to her close interest in Marxist theory, a facility demonstrated in her attempts to resituate the lumpenproletariat as the dialectical counterpoint of capital, and it serves to put lumpenproletarian criminality in place of labor as the activity catalyzing political action. Her depiction of Bud Haynes anticipates her later efforts, in the poetry of For My People, to rethink the lumpenproletarian figure as the outlaw hero of black folklore. Her situating of Goose Island as an alternative to normative gender and sexual roles is also realized in For My People, where her outlaw figures challenge racial, patriarchal, and economic systems of oppression at once.
The title poem of Walker’s volume narrates black history in a Whitmanesque fashion, but thematizes that history as one of labor and submission: rather than yielding revolutionary consciousness and agency, labor entails subjugation. The culture of black laborers is defined by passivity and powerlessness, by a fetishization of social and material oppression. The first stanza describes “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.” This sacrifice of agency in black culture derives from the ceaselessness of labor, labor that, contrary to classical Marxist dictates, provides African Americans no class or revolutionary consciousness. Instead, Walker renders it as “washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching dragging along never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding.” The rhythmic shift that accompanies “dragging along” registers the simultaneously unending yet directionless, dragging nature of this work: for all of its activity, it leads to nothing, certainly not to “knowing” or “understanding.”
The poem continues to hold out the possibility of African American fulfillment under these conditions only to revoke it. After citing “the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to be man and woman,” the poem notes how they then “die of consumption and anemia and lynching.” The poem then charts the Great Migration, addressing itself to African Americans in Chicago and New York, but the move out of the Jim Crow South also fails to bring satisfaction, as African Americans become “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.” The “something” the community needs isn’t fulfilled by the move to the North, and the social institutions governing black urban life hold out the promise of transcendence but only in a duplicitous manner, in order to exploit African Americans.
The penultimate stanza addresses “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.” However, nothing in the narrative of black history that the poem has offered suggests how such a “better way” could be created. Oppression has not molded the black working class into the dialectical negation of capitalism and racism, but has only produced obfuscation, false consciousness, and servility. In the final stanza, therefore, the poet must invoke revolution as an abrupt, caesural break from the body of the poem. Each previous stanza consisted of a long line beginning “For my people,” but the final stanza declares, in sharp short sentences, “Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born.”53 The vision of revolution it goes on to outline is conventionally didactic, but its apparent simplicity is ironized by its unaccountable origin: if black life, organized around labor and oppression, fails to galvanize resistance, where does the possibility of thinking this revolution come from? The poem leaves this question open in order to frame it as its central political problem: where can revolutionary agency come from if, in African American experience, it doesn’t come from where classical Marxism says it should?
Walker elaborates this theme in another poem from the volume’s first section. “Lineage” characterizes the speaker’s relationship to her grandmothers as a rupture. “My grandmothers were strong. / They followed plows and bent to toil.” The human agency of their labor, however, is curiously effaced, as their work is described as an organic process, almost an extension of the natural world: “They moved through fields sowing seed. / They touched earth and grain grew.” Hence when the poet repeats “my grandmothers were strong” at the end of the first stanza, the line is ironic: it’s a strength that precludes freedom, and is defined entirely by necessity. The second stanza recollects these women with fondness and posits their strength again before ending the poem by asking, “Why am I not as they?” In this reading the poem speaks somewhat conventionally of a modern speaker’s felt alienation from her family, roots, and traditions. The speaker might lack the confidence and strength of previous generations of women in her family, who were “full of sturdiness and singing,” but this strength is what kept her grandmothers doing nothing but work: a circuitous routine that made their sturdiness indistinguishable from stasis, and their songs the songs of submission and acceptance described in “For My People.”54 The speaker thus distinguishes herself as a woman “unlike” previous generations of workingwomen, and the emergence of African American political agency is here presented as a disruption in lineages of black women’s experiences.
Accordingly, the second section of For My People features African American men and women who refuse to limit themselves to labor, sturdiness, and repetition, and who break from lineages of racial, economic, and gender submission. As Derek Furr notes, “Walker exploits the ballad tradition’s fascination with criminals and shady characters, not in the conventional interest of sensationalism, but as a means of giving a compelling, sympathetic voice to marginalized figures.”55 Nancy Berke, in language echoing Marx’s tendency to name the lumpenproletariat through a heterogeneous catalogue, writes that these poems “describe the exploits of tricksters, conjurers, gamblers, bootleggers, pimps, and laborers, accentuating the nuanced lives of African American folk heroes and heroines.”56 While this section does include one ballad devoted to John Henry, that legendary black laborer, the section continues the first section’s suspicion of work and labor. Here, the figures that find empowerment are nonworking black lumpenproletarians whom Walker presents as legendary outlaws. They opt for occult, illegitimate, or criminal tactics to survive and thrive on the margins of racist, capitalist, and patriarchal social formations. These poems redefine Marx’s lumpenproletariat within African American culture, where the socially marginal status of lumpenproletarian figures renders them neither politically irrelevant nor self-interested and reactionary. Rather, these legendary black lumpenproletarians perform resistance to normative structures of oppression; it is in their experiences, and not in the ceaseless labor of socially incorporated black workers, that the revolutionary possibility of “another world” and a “new earth” is figured.
The titular figure of “Molly Means” is “a hag and a witch” whose “heavy hair hung thick in ropes” and whose “blazing eyes was black as pitch.” Her physical features, rendered as ropes and pitch, invoke the imagery of lynching. Furthermore, “some say she was born with a veil on her face,” alluding to W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous symbol, in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), for double consciousness, the internal destabilization of self-consciousness caused by white America’s discounting of the individuality of black persons. Thus, despite her status as a singular, legendary sorceress, Molly Means embodies collective black experiences of racist violence and social exclusion. Yet she recoups such exclusion as a form of agency: her features signify not victimization but an occult power, and her veil does not disempower her, as does Du Bois’s, but allows her to “look through unnatchal space / Through the future and through the past / And charm a body or an evil place.” Molly is marginalized from mainstream society, shunned and feared, but her social exteriorization, far from anonymizing or delimiting her, allows her to become legendary for her “evil powers.”
The main action of the ballad is initiated when Molly casts a spell on a new bride who recently moves in near her: the bride’s husband discovers his wife “barking like a dog / And on all fours like a common hog.” Molly’s motive for casting this spell isn’t specified, and sexual jealousy over the woman’s husband is certainly one possible implied explanation. But the description of the spell’s effect suggests a larger, sociopolitical dimension to Molly’s act: it hints at a sexual empowerment and license provided by Molly’s spell, one that defies the husband’s ownership of his wife’s sexuality, which Molly’s arts have now made “common.” The presence of a powerful woman like Molly, who refuses to conform to social norms and whose practices actively disrupt them, challenges the normativity of patriarchal gender roles. The bride’s husband avenges himself on Molly, therefore, by finding a “man who said he could move the spell” to Molly herself, causing her “to bark and bleed / Till she died at the hands of her evil deed.” A certain ideological operation of patriarchy is allegorized here: the threat or challenge of the woman who refuses to conform to gender and sexual norms is cancelled by the derogation of her nonconformity as animalistic perversity.
The ballad concludes by describing how Molly’s ghost still “rides along on a winter breeze” and continues to inspire fear.57 The threat she posed to the social order survives her repression by that order, and continues to trouble it. “Molly Means” is a clear distillation of Walker’s Marxist feminist commitments. It outlines an African American vision of sexual freedom and female empowerment, an empowerment that, because it refuses incorporation in and redefinition by social institutions, always remains beyond their repressive grasp. Her occult arts figure the socially illegitimate recourses and practices adopted by those on the margins. Unlike Marx, Walker sees such practices as politically constructive in their ability to haunt and disrupt the structures of society.
“Bad-Man Stagolee,” as discussed above, transforms the archetypal black folk outlaw into a figure of political resistance. Nancy Berke notes that this poem performs a “twist” on the Stagolee tale by having Stagolee kill a police officer and thus “stretches the legend from its celebration of Stagolee as a mean individualist, to a tale with political undertones.” Berke finds this maneuver to be in part a “problem”: it aggrandizes a figure whose legendary acts are merely criminal rather than constructive for African Americans, and it risks glamorizing crime at the expense of a more realistic portrayal of its dialectical sociopolitical causes and consequences.58 Yet we’ve seen Walker do this before, in Goose Island, when the delinquents’ criminal acts of robbing a store and shooting a police officer catalyze community-wide resistance. Her retelling of the Stagolee story plays with a similar relationship between the criminal individual and the black community. William Scott argues of the ballads in For My People that “while they are ostensibly about individuals, they all invoke a community around these individuals in order to convey a sense of the latter’s actions and effects.”59 Their status as folk tales, in other words, implies a community that receives them, tells them, and takes instruction from them. In “Bad-Man Stagolee,” Stagolee, despite the apparently apolitical nature of his criminal acts, comes to figure the black community’s desire for revolutionary transcendence.
Walker’s redefinition of Stagolee opens the poem:
That Stagolee was an all-right lad
Till he killed a cop and turned out bad,
Though some do say to this very day
He killed more’n one ’fore he killed that ’fay.
Rather than an underworld gangster, Stagolee is “all-right” until he kills the cop, but the poem then suggests that while he was considered “all-right” he had also killed whites before, a simultaneity that suggests a tacit communal approval of Stagolee’s actions. Furthermore, the lines indicate that the image of Stagolee as an “all-right” individual brave enough to defy and even kill whites is itself a product of the community’s oral traditions. Like Ice Cream Charlie, the black folk hero who killed twelve cops in defiance of Jim Crow and whom Ellison discussed with other black drifters while riding freights in 1933, Stagolee “evoke[s] the unwritten history of the group.”60 His actions as a criminal express the community’s desire to resist the statist forms of racial oppression enacted by the police. After he kills the police officer, the poem notes the peculiarity of the story’s resolution: “the funniest thing” is that Stagolee escaped punishment and “missed the lynching meant for his hide / ’Cause nobody knows how Stagolee died.” In a circumstance as magical and inexplicable, as peculiarly “funny,” as Molly Means’s occult powers, Stagolee fails to experience the racist violence his act should precipitate. His story thus narrates the fantasy of resisting racial rule and triumphing in that resistance. His death remains a mystery, “But his ghost still walks up and down the shore / Of Old Man River round New Orleans / With her gumbo, rice, and good red beans!”61
By rendering his death mysterious and making him become a ghost, the ballad indicates how the fantasy of empowering action his story enacts cannot die: Stagolee’s ghost is the spirit of black political desire that transcends any specific historical place and time and lives on in the face of its repression. The apparent non sequitur in the final line, about the food in New Orleans, figures the utopian aim of that desire: the sensory richness of gumbo, rice, and “red” beans (a color doing double duty here as a political signifier) gestures toward the quality of life in a moment when white racial rule has been negated.
“Kissie Lee” regenders the narrative of “Bad-Man Stagolee.” Kissie Lee is “the toughest gal God ever made” and like Stagolee, who carried a “blade he wore unnerneaf his shirt,” she “drew a dirty, wicked blade.”62 As a phallic symbol, the knife here represents not patriarchal social power, but a mode of individual resistance available to lumpenproletarian men and women: Stagolee and Kissie’s knives are in this sense antiphallic symbols, symbols of their refusal of and challenge to the social order’s relations of race, gender, and power. Kissie, the poem tells us, “warn’t always tough,” and her grandmother was regarded as “the town’s sin and shame.” However, as a child, Kissie was always getting into fights, so her grandmother gave her some formative advice:
“Whin I was a gal wasn’t no soul
Could do me wrong an’ still stay whole.
Ah got me a razor to talk for me
An’ aftah that they let me be.”
Unlike in “Lineage,” where the only inheritance from previous generations of socially incorporated African American workingwomen is a passive resilience in the face of constant toil, Kissie’s socially outcast grandmother passes down to her a tactic of individual resistance. The female proletarian lineage of “Lineage” is supplanted by a lumpenproletarian and feminist lineage in “Kissie Lee”: Kissie’s grandmother gives her the ability to “hold her likker and hold her man / And she went thoo life jus’ raisin’ san’.”
One day Kissie encounters, in a bar, “a guy what spoke too soon; / He done her dirt long time ago.” Kissie shoots him and then, the poem suggests, castrates him with her knife. “Evvy livin’ guy got out of her way / Because Kissie Lee was drawin’ her pay.” Kissie strips this man of the phallic authority granted him by patriarchy with her knife, an instrument that symbolically demonstrates her resistance to the gender relations codified by patriarchy. Not the factory floor, and not the kitchens in which previous generations of women toiled in “Lineage,” but the nonlaboring space of the saloon enables Kissie to “draw her pay” in a nonproletarian manner. Marxism’s signature understanding of the wage is that it represents not the true value of a worker’s labor but a fraction of it designed to keep the worker functional and producing the surplus value that, because it is not remunerated, becomes profit for the capitalist. But in Kissie’s case, “drawin’ her pay” refers not to the exploitation of labor but to the gains of defying social power through crime. Her criminal prowess offers an escape from patriarchal gender roles, just as Stagolee’s provided an escape from white supremacy. Kissie becomes a bootlegger, and the poem concludes by stating how she “died with her boots on switching blades / On Talladega Mountain in the likker raids.”63 She dies in a legendary manner, one that thus preserves, for future folkloric retellings and for future generations of African American women, the socially illegitimate yet empowering agency that her grandmother bequeathed to her. In Stagolee and Kissie Lee’s stories, Walker offers a vision of revolutionary agency missing from poems like “For My People.” Instead of emerging dialectically at the point of production, revolutionary consciousness and capacity are simultaneously lumpenproletarian and culturally African American, accessed on the margins of society and passed down in the tales and collective wisdom of the black community.
“Big John Henry” furnishes a counterpoint to figures like Molly Means, Stagolee, and Kissie Lee. If Stagolee is the archetypal black lumpenproletarian figure, John Henry is the archetypal black worker, and as such featured in African American proletarian writing. For instance, when the black leftist writer John Oliver Killens wrote the young adult novel A Man Ain’t Nothin’ But a Man: The Adventures of John Henry (1975), he did so in part, Keith Gilyard argues, to clarify his commitment to Marxism by offering a narrative of “cross-ethnic, working-class consciousness.” In the novel, John Henry’s death while trying to demonstrate the superiority of proletarian labor to automation carries a proletarian critique of capitalism’s relations of production. As Gilyard explains, Henry feels that “the enemy is not machines but rather the unwise use of them.”64
Walker’s John Henry, however, for all of his mythical strength, is simply born to labor and never accesses an anticapitalist critique.
The day he was born in the Mississippi bottom
He made a meal on buttermilk and sorghum
A mess o’ peas and a bait o’ tunnips
And when he finished he smacked his lips
And went outside to help pick cotton.65
Derek Furr writes that the last line of this passage, about picking cotton, “falls flat—a cold, hard fact” after the mythical richness of his meal. Furr notes that the abrupt entrance of labor into the myth of John Henry’s birth foreshadows the “sober ending” of his life while laboring.66 As in “Bad-Man Stagolee,” food signifies the sensory abundance of an order of experience apart from labor, which then cancels any such fulfillment and offers only death. For all of John Henry’s heroic strength and exploits, he ends the poem “cold and dead,” with no hint of the kind of ghostly immortality accorded to the spirit of resistance embodied by Stagolee or Molly Means.67 If, as Furr argues, the ending of the poem “calls for . . . heroes who move beyond nostalgia to political action,” those heroes do not emerge from the ranks of black workers.68 Walker’s John Henry poem reiterates the problem of “For My People”: if black life is defined by labor in a racist, capitalist mode of production, and labor leads nowhere in terms of sociopolitical consciousness, then how is such consciousness discoverable? Molly Means, Stagolee, and Kissie Lee all suggest her answer: it can be found on the margins, among the lumpenproletariat rather than the proletariat.
“Two-Gun Buster and Trigger Slim” delineates this lumpenproletarian alternative to labor by offering a narrative of deproletarianization. Two-Gun Buster is a “railroad han’” whose quick aim with a gun allows him to terrorize his fellow workers, especially at meal times. Since each worker is only allowed one serving, and Two-Gun “had a belly he couldn’t fill / With what the cook had on the bill,” he bullies other men into giving him their food. The sociopolitical lesson here is obvious: capitalism keeps all workers from sufficient amounts of food, which, as we’ve seen for Walker, is aligned with the utopian qualities of a fulfilled, rich life. Two-Gun’s bullying of his fellow workers alludes to the structural exploitation of labor itself, and Two-Gun is thus aligned with the figure of the capitalist, who deprives workers of the value of their labor. One day, a worker known only as “the Lil Lad” resists Two-Gun’s attempt to take his food. Lil Lad is a strong worker like John Henry and thus “sho did earn his plate of food.” Lil Lad’s labor should entitle him to its remuneration in the form of food, which the capitalist mode of production, in the person of Two-Gun, expropriates.
Lil Lad challenges Two-Gun in a manner that is literally criminal and allegorically revolutionary, shooting him when he tries to take his meal. Lil Lad calmly finishes eating and not only leaves the labor camp, but abandons his proletarian status: “He didn’t come back to draw his pay.” Instead, he “draws his pay” as Kissie Lee did, becoming an outlaw figure who resists the relations of production in which drawing one’s pay signifies one’s exploitation and submission. He thus gains individual distinction and popular renown, joining the ranks of famous, socially ostracized and criminal individuals like Molly Means, Kissie Lee, or Stagolee: “So they gave the Lil Lad a name / And they called him Trigger Slim.”69
In these ballads, Walker brings a black cultural lens to Marxist theory, revaluing the political and intellectual gains of labor and proletarian identity from the perspective of African American historical experience, and rethinking the types Marx dismissed as lumpenproletarian scum as the heroes of a black folk culture of revolution and utopian aspiration. Walker’s Depression-era work constantly asks where African American life doesn’t align with Marxist theory, not in order to debunk or abandon Marxism, but to appropriate and transform it. The points of nonalignment she finds are often located where they were for her more well-known black leftist contemporaries, Wright and Ellison: in the theoretical and political evaluation of those persons, practices, lives, and resources lying beyond relations of production and on the margins of a society defined by those relations. What Marx called the lumpenproletariat and banished from the theory of revolution and postcapitalist futurity, Walker sees as the heart of an African American culture of resistance, enabling her to craft a black Marxism that is revisionary and, at the same time, a realization of the essential spirit and priorities of Marxism.