I haven't found any for Jubilee by Margaret Walker, although I do remember reading it for school.
MARGARET WALKER
1915–
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DESCRIBED BY SONIA SANCHEZ as “a woman celebrating herself and a people,” Margaret Abigail Walker is one of the most distinguished and prolific writers of the twentieth century. She has produced a novel, several volumes of both poetry and nonfiction, and an extensive number of essays, interviews, and speeches. Walker's vision is a humanistic, spiritual one: although she views herself as pitted against a violent, materialistic society dominated by sexism and racism, Walker identifies “the feminine principle” of being a daughter, a sister, a mother, and a grandmother as the “inspiring agency” for her work. She views womanhood and connections with others as the source of her creativity. Groomed from childhood to appreciate literature and music, Walker, the daughter of a Methodist minister, was also taught to devote herself to a mission. She thus regards her purpose as a writer as “the healing and annealing hand,” celebrating African American history and culture and transforming society.
Walker's view of her art as emerging from her responsibility to others and her healing role is at once ancient and contemporary, and it carries on the African tradition of conjure woman. Historically occupying a high plane in African Americn culture, representing the power to transcend earthly confinement, conjure women possess superhuman powers of concentration, knowing, magic, and healing. Walker's identification with womanhood runs throughout her work. Long before “The personal is political” became a feminist commonplace, she spoke of the political integration of her life and her art.
Walker has lived through and described eras many people have only read about: post-Reconstruction, the Harlem Renaissance, and the radical thirties. She has enjoyed the companionship and friendship of many intellectual giants—W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Gwendolyn Brooks, Countee Cullen, and Richard Wright. Walker's commitment to antiracism and social justice began when she was a teenager. She has conveyed this commitment through the rhythms and language of her folk heritage, inspiring audiences with all the religious and spiritual fervor she learned from her father. Walker's signature poem, “For My People,” expresses her desire to speak directly to and about African Americans everywhere, regardless of education or class.
Walker was brought up to accept and develop her own singularity, and on the surface, gender seemed to have no impact on her introduction to literature and culture. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, on 7 July 1915, a time when most women were discouraged or ridiculed when they sought higher education, Walker knew she must finish college to gain parental approval. The daughter of university-educated, ambitious parents who surrounded her with music and books, Walker grew up linking achievement and identity. Both parents encouraged her to love literature; her mother taught her to read by the time she was four and read her poetry when she was very young. Early in life Walker was exposed to the work of Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson, and Zora Neale Hurston; she also read Homer, Shakespeare, and Jane Austen. While Walker lauds her mother for teaching her to read, she credits her father with inspiring her to write, giving her a daybook in which to keep the poems she began writing at the age of twelve. Emerging from this family, Walker, who speaks and reads many languages, both embodied the tradition of scholarly African Americans and occupied a unique station among women during the first decades she was publishing. More than once she has enunciated an awareness of her privilege in having been intellectually encouraged and financially supported during her undergraduate education.
Because her parents were instrumental to her perspective, Walker has spoken often and eloquently about them. Her father, Sigismund C. Walker, was born in Jamaica Buff Bay, Jamaica British West Indies, coming to the United States to study for the ministry. Attending Tuskegee Institute for a time, he found its emphasis upon industrial education appallingly limited, and he received his degree from Gammon Theological Seminary in Atlanta. He and Walker's mother, a music teacher named Marion Dozier, fell in love at first sight, marrying and moving to Birmingham, where Walker and her three younger siblings were born. Ten years after Walker's birth, the family relocated to New Orleans. At New Orleans University, where she was a sophomore and her parents were professors, Walker met Langston Hughes. Sixteen-year-old Walker was bold enough to approach Hughes after he read his poetry and to show him some of her own. Impressed with both her confidence and her work, Hughes encouraged her to leave the deep South, and he became a close friend.
Walker's commitment to a creative mission emerged publicly two years later when her first poem appeared in Crisis magazine in 1934. At first called “Daydreaming,” the poem was later retitled “I Want To Write” and was republished in Walker's October Journey (1973). “I Want To Write” conveys her passionate identification with African American culture, her commitment to humanism, and her spirituality. The first three lines bear one of Walker's trademarks, the evocation of her father's rhythmically inspiring sermons:
I want to write
I want to write the songs of my people
I want to hear them singing melodies in the dark.
Shortly after this first publication, and before her twentieth birthday, Walker earned a bachelor of arts degree in English from Northwestern University. Presumably this singular achievement garnered accolades from her ambitious parents. At the same time, however, Sigismund Walker expressed his wish that his daughter earn a Ph.D. by the time she was twenty-one. “Luckily,” Walker observes wryly, “neither health nor finances would permit it.” His stringent expectation dramatizes the pressure laid upon the young Margaret to satisfy him. Clearly, Walker's identity as a daughter—a role she has repeatedly defined as pivotal—hinged on an exaggerated version of success. “My father claimed he was always right,” Walker has commented. “Strangely enough, he usually was.” With her father serving as the impetus for her writing and with her own desire to please him at all costs, Walker has spent her life reconciling the sometimes conflicting demands of ambitious writer and good woman, with all that those involve.
Walker's desire to be a good daughter, a nurturing woman, and at the same time a productive writer mirrors the role conflicts many women face today. But in 1935, when she joined the Federal Writers' Project in Chicago, woman's role was even more strictly defined. Designed to subsidize promising writers, the project was funded by the Works Project Administration, but it subsidized men more generously than women. The project, according to Walker, taught her “professional tricks of the trade, if not the actual craft of writing”; moreover, it enabled her to work with other significant writers such as Arna Bontemps, Fenton Johnson, Willard Motley, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Richard Wright.
The Writers' Project also allowed Walker to observe and reflect upon discrimination and poverty in the urban North and to compare blacks' experiences in Chicago with those in the South. Thus her years in Chicago were pivotal to Walker's poetic imagination. The project also gave Walker a taste of sexual discrimination. Walker was so thrilled to be accepted on the project it never occurred to her to question her paltry salary of $85 a month despite her degree from Northwestern; later, she discovered that Wright, who had no formal education beyond eighth grade, was making $125. Her relationship with Wright, which she details in the biography Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988), was also oppressive. Trusting and giving, Walker edited Wright's work, since he had little knowledge of the conventions of writing; later, when he began Native Son, Walker helped him with the prose and did the research for the book. Not only did Wright give her no credit, he later humiliated and rejected her and ended their friendship.
When the government pulled out the funding from under the Writers' Project, Walker decided to pursue a master's degree in creative writing at the University of Iowa. There she completed her first volume of poetry, For My People (1942). The book epitomizes Walker's role as critic, healer, and annealer of society, her link with her conjuring heritage. Using elemental symbols of sun, earth, and water, she puts her audience in touch with the pain of their oppression and nurtures their hope of delivery by celebrating the power and magic of African American culture.
The three-part structure of For My People begins with a series of poems employing what Walker describes as “a strophic form of free verse.” Evocative of the sermons her father inspired her with as she was growing up, these poems introduce the motifs of bitterness, oppression, despair, and deception as well as those of delight, liberation, hope, and love that underlie the volume. The poet then moves to a series of jubilant folk ballads and concludes with a group of Petrarchan sonnets evoking the despair, the darkness blacks live with daily, and calling for “a union of the two worlds,” black and white.
According to Walker, “For My People,” the opening poem, was composed “by accident” in fifteen minutes at a typewriter except for the final strophe and stanza. It was originally published in 1937 in Poetry magazine. A lucky “accident” indeed, the poem offers a hymn of praise for the dignity, the endurance, and the superhuman strength of African Americans, “singing their slave songs repeatedly,” songs of transcendence that seek to make sense out of oppression. Walker piles up image after image, from the “bitter hours when we discovered we / were black and poor and small and different” that mark off the days of school children, to the “blundering and groping and floundering” hours consuming the lives of adults. Fully empathetic to the coping mechanisms that ease the anguish of poverty and abuse, Walker also encourages her audience's awareness of how destructive “losing time being lazy” or “drinking when hopeless” can be. But she places the blame squarely where it belongs: on a racist society that refuses to acknowledge black humanity. Her healing role in this poem lies in her insistence that black folk “rise and take control,” reclaim their power and let it “fashion a better way.”
Some of the most powerful poems in the first part of For My People embrace African American heritage. In many, Walker evokes a female consciousness embodied in the life-giving powers of nature. “Dark Blood” ponders Walker's “bizarre beginnings in old lands,” where exquisite beauty and tropical sensuality become a symbolic landscape for ancient wisdom “sucked . . . through my veins with my mother's milk.” Romantic images of “sugar sands and islands of fern and pearl” create a lush, primal vision of her father's Jamaican homeland. “Dark Blood” urges Walker's audience to mine the wealth of one's African heritage to heal the wounds imposed by racist America.
“We Have Been Believers” moves “Dark Blood” 's celebration of African heritage in another direction, rejoicing in black America's spirituality, “believing in the conjure of the humble and the faithful and the pure.” In this poem, Walker reveals African American woman's centrality in black culture, acting as conjurer and seeress. Simultaneously, Walker expresses bitterness that blacks' humility and trust have been the vehicle for white economic oppression: “With our hands we have fed a people and out of our / strength have they wrung the necessities of a nation.” “We Have Been Believers” calls for an end to the false gods of an oppressive country and asks for black Americans to heal themselves by tapping their awareness of imprisonment: “our fists bleed against the bars with a strange insistency.”
Just as America has raided the African American spiritual home, so has it robbed blacks of their southern home. The speakers of “Southern Song” and “Sorrow Home” yearn to return to empowering natural beauty, so different from the urban desert of Chicago, but bitterly deride the racist violence that blights the South and has plundered blacks' ownership of their heritage. “Southern Song” and “Sorrow Home” exult in the healing natural powers of the South, where elemental images of “rainsoaked earth” and “spring growth of wild onion” hearken back to the “tropic world” of Jamaica that “sired and weaned” Walker. All the poems in part II revere a connection with the earth that Walker seeks to recapture and communicate so that she can gain strength from a kind of maternal power. “Lineage” enunciates Walker's connection with her matrilineal heritage, a link that these other poems express symbolically. “My grandmothers,” Walker writes, “touched earth and grain grew.”
Part II of For My People contains rousing ballads exalting the power and resourcefulness that form the core of black culture. Walker's folk heroes are larger than life, and they jubilantly proclaim African Americans' belief in magic, trickery, and revenge as tools to surmount poverty and oppression. If Walker champions women's life-giving capacities, their connections with the natural world in part I, she exalts women's connections with the supernatural world in “Molly Means,” the poem that opens part II. The ballad depicts an unabashedly evil “chile of the devil, the dark, and sitch,” who turns innocent brides into animals and defies ordinary humans to retaliate. Molly suggests Walker's belief in conjure women's unparalleled power, which can not only create but destroy.
Other heroines express earthier but no less impressive abilities to hold their own in a tough, male-dominated world. Kissie Lee learns from painful experience that being good garners only beatings from her lovers. When she listens to her grandmother's advice to pack weapons to defend herself, Kissie evolves into the “meanest mama you ever seen,” who “can hold her likker and hold her man” and dies “with her boots on switching blades.” Revenge over abusive men emerges in two other ballads. May tricks the ultimate misogynist, Yalluh Hammuh, who killed his own mother, and it is women who spell the doom of Teacher. This womanizer, whose lust “included all / Women ever made,” not only the “juicy bait” he lures into his sex trade, suffers well-deserved knifings and shootings from his victims.
Single-minded revenge from women is a cultural imperative in a world peopled by the likes of Yalluh Hammuh and Teacher. But Walker's depiction of men is not entirely negative. In fact, she clearly valorizes Poppa Chicken, the pimp whose charisma commands near adoration from the legions of women “on Poppa's time.” Stagolee, whose “bullets made holes no doc could cyo,” kills a cop and escapes the lynch mob. In a culture where violence and death are meted out because of skin color, Stagolee becomes the apotheosis of justice. Some of the characters in these ballads exalt superhuman strength as a survival tool. The legendary John Henry, who significantly owes his conjuring skills to women, is “stronger than a team of oxen,” and Gus, the Lineman, another mythic figure, handles live wires and survives supposedly fatal illness. Both characters are paradigms of black men forced to work at dangerous jobs in the absence of other options. Ironically, the “juice” that kills Gus is not electrical but alcoholic, and this simple detail speaks volumes about the real danger such “mighty guys” confront in living up to a masculine code enforced by a society that relegates African American men to roles that are strictly physical.
Taken as a whole, Walker's folk heroes affirm the strength and vibrance of African American culture. Enlarging these traits to mythic proportions, Walker celebrates the sensuality, passion, and courage of black folk. Her women and men defy convention, refuse to subscribe to limitations, and consequently transcend oppression. This section of For My People foregrounds Walker's role as healer, for she clearly seeks to empower her readers to look within themselves for the qualities they possess to take control of their lives despite poverty, discrimination, and tragedy.
Part III offers a sobering contrast to the riotous rhythms and mythic characters of Walker's ballads. These stark sonnets remind the reader that, despite the humor and energy that Walker celebrates in black life, one must acknowledge the anguish of a people denied human rights in a country supposedly founded on liberty and equality. Images of poverty and despair recur, from the ragged miners, “grumbling undermining all their words,” who peopled her childhood, to the sullen-eyed whores she encountered in Chicago. “Memory,” the poem at the center of this section, distills these images: “shoulders hunched against a sharp concern,” Walker's brooding, lonely tenement dwellers in frigidly hostile Chicago mutter oaths of protest against their oppression but have no power to escape from it.
Closing the volume, “Our Need” and “The Struggle Staggers Us,” two of Walker's finest poems, tap the despair described in the rest of For My People and call for a redemptive vision, “a wholeness born of inner strength.” “Our birth and death are easy hours,” Walker remarks here. The only hope is that blacks and whites will come together, embark on “a journey from the me to you . . . from the you to me,” which will allow us to understand each other and unify our worlds divided by race. Although “For My People” opens this volume and enunciates Walker's identification with black culture—an identification central to all her work—“The Struggle Staggers Us,” the final piece, underscores her belief that the fates of black and white Americans are intertwined, that the two races must resolve their differences. Throughout her life, Walker has insisted on this position, articulated especially well at a speech she delivered at the National Urban League Conference in New Orleans in 1968:
Any notions that a wide cleavage in the American
people based on race, class, caste, sex, or age—any such notion is
unrealistic, naive, negative, and detrimental. . . . Shall we
divide and conquer? Who will conquer, and who stands to benefit from
such cleavage?
Walker was the first African American to win the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, and as a result For My People was published as part of the Yale Series. Not only is For My People Walker's first book; it also serves as an entry into her work and her vision. Walker has stated that she wanted to convey her hope for “another world, another whole earth to come into being.” This literary masterpiece fuses the cadence of sermon and folk tale with Western literary tradition. It merges her African heritage and her humanistic and Christian beliefs with a feminist consciousness that sees woman's links with nature and the earth as emblematic of her ability to create new poetic, political, and spiritual worlds.
The year following For My People's publication, Walker married Firnist James Alexander, and together they had four children: Marion Elizabeth, Firnist James, Jr., Sigismund Walker, and Margaret Elvira. At about the same time, Walker began her career as an English professor, first at West Virginia State College, then at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, where she stayed until 1946. From 1949 to 1979 she taught for twenty-six years at Jackson State University, also directing the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People. Not surprisingly, the demands of motherhood, marriage, and career interfered with Walker's publishing until Jubilee appeared in 1966. What is surprising is that while raising four children and supporting the family because her husband was disabled, she managed the extensive research and composition of the novel's early drafts. During this same period, Walker wrote poems, speeches, and essays, received the Rosenwald Fellowship for Creative Writing in 1944, a Ford Fellowship at Yale University in 1954, and completed her Ph.D. at the University of Iowa in 1965. How I Wrote Jubilee (1972) is an eloquent testimony of the obstacles women face while writing. Walker wrote the first three hundred pages of Jubilee when she was nineteen, but the arduous shaping into fiction took thirty years because of the pressures and disruptions of Walker's family and career.
Jubilee received the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship in 1966. In writing this novel, Walker transcribed her family's oral history, passed along to her from her grandmother, who often enthralled the child “way past bedtime” with stories of her forebears Vyry and Randall Ware. When Margaret's mother objected to these “tall tales,” Walker's grandmother insisted that she was telling her granddaughter the truth. Many of the chapter headings are transcriptions of her grandmother's words. Thus Walker takes on the role of African griot, or oral historian, enlarging her audience by the huge success of Jubilee: it has sold millions of copies; has been translated into six languages including French, German, and Swedish; has been made into an opera; and has remained in print since its publication.
Taken as companion volumes, Jubilee and How I Wrote Jubilee accentuate Walker's identification with womanhood, mothering, and healing, and they demonstrate how her life and art are of a piece. Celebrating her great-grandmother, Jubilee is simultaneously a paean to Walker herself, who—despite lifelong discrimination on the basis of race and gender, despite relative critical neglect, despite a negative self-image engendered by cultural animosity to diversity (“there was always something wrong with me—either ragged stockings, or nappy hair”)—has steadfastly refused to alter her vision or her image to conform to fashion.
Jubilee presents a panorama of African American history beginning with slavery and ending in Reconstruction. The daughter of her master, Vyry bears striking resemblance to her sister Lillian, the daughter of Big Missy and Marster John. Taken into the house to serve her sister and her father, Vyry suffers hideous abuse from Big Missy, who views Vyry as a symbol of her husband's sexual proclivities for Vyry's mother. Hung by her wrists in a closet for two weeks as punishment for a minor infraction, Vyry survives, typifying the extraordinary strength of African American women historically forced to endure similar treatment. Jubilee chronicles Vyry's marriage to Randall Ware, the free black who tries, without success, to liberate Vyry from slavery; Vyry's loyalty to her white family even after Emancipation; her subsequent second marriage to Innis Brown; and the overwhelmingly difficult years during Reconstruction. Jubilee ends with Vyry sending her teenage son Jim to live with Randall Ware, so that Jim can study to become a teacher, thus realizing Vyry's dream of triumphing over oppression.
In How I Wrote Jubilee, Walker discusses the genesis of her novel, eventually accepted for her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Iowa. She also defends Vyry's sometimes-criticized lack of bitterness and militance as a faithful rendering of her maternal great-grandmother, who “realized that hatred wasn't necessary and would have corroded her own spiritual well-being.” Instead of forcing her heroine into the militant model fashionable at the time Jubilee was published, Walker remains true to the spiritual vision passed down through the generations, a nurturing, healing approach to life that mirrors Walker's own attitude.
A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974) offers insight into Walker's dislike for antiwhite sentiments, her insistence on a humanitarian, loving solution to racism. “I don't know that that's necessarily great spiritual strength,” Walker argues in that book, “to have deep hatred and . . . kill some of these ‘honkies.’” Instead, Walker calls for Christian love and spiritual wholeness, the inner peace that sees Vyry through and leads eventually to her transcendence over oppression.
The significance of motherhood underpins Jubilee, serving as its core philosophy and linking it with earlier African American writers such as Frances E. W. Harper. The novel begins with Sis Hetta, Vyry's mother, dying in childbirth when Vyry is only two years old. As if losing one mother is not enough, Vyry loses two surrogate mothers, Mama Sukey, who also dies, and Aunt Sally, who is sold to another plantation. Ushering Vyry into her newly orphaned state, Big Missy slaps her, a vicious parody of the life-giving slap a newborn receives to start it breathing.
Rather than harboring bitterness, Vyry responds to her motherless state by nurturing others. She loses the chance to escape slavery because she refuses to leave her children behind, an episode that beautifully symbolizes the double burden that black women carried during slavery. Vyry cares for her sister, Lillian, even after Emancipation because she will not leave Lillian, who has lost her sanity from being attacked by Union soldiers after the war. Only after a relative arrives to take over Lillian's care does Vyry marry Innis Brown and begin the life of a free woman. Lillian serves as a foil for Vyry; she is as weak and incompetent as Vyry is strong and capable.
Vyry's nurturing constitutes a redemptive, humanitarian vision throughout the novel. Certainly her children are the center of her life, a point of view passed on to her by Aunt Sally at the onset of Vyry's menstruation, when Vyry learns that her ability to mother affirms her superiority. At a time of total despair, Vyry miscarries, symbolizing her loss of hope and vitality. Vyry also extends her nurturing beyond her family to the community. When she and Innis move into a house that starving white sharecroppers are vacating, Vyry feeds the white family before they set out on their journey. The meals Vyry prepares are described frequently in Jubilee; chosen as a child to become head cook in the Big House, Vyry possesses culinary skills that telegraph her nurturing role throughout the novel. When Vyry offers her services as a midwife and saves a white baby's life without asking for remuneration, her family receives its first safe haven during terrifying, Klan-dominated years of Reconstruction.
This episode signals Vyry's conjuring role, one Walker subtly enshrines throughout Jubilee. Vyry's conjuring powers emerge in the latter part of Jubilee, as she and Innis move from place to place trying to make a home. Vyry and Innis undergo a series of crises typifying blacks' struggles during the years following the Civil War, when white southerners fought to reinstate slavery and make the lives of black southerners miserable in every way they could. The family is robbed by the landlord for whom it sharecrops, terrorized and torched by the Klan, and intimidated by virulent bigotry. Gifted with non-Western ways of “knowing,” Vyry senses danger in Troy, Alabama, long before the Klan burns down her family's new house, and she insists that they wait until she feels the time is ripe before rebuilding. It is significant that her midwifery, the most ancient and creative of women's healing arts, turns around racist sentiment and causes the white inhabitants of Greenville, Alabama, to welcome her family into the community, which offers protection in exchange for Vyry's skill as a “granny.”
Rooted in Walker's reverence for women's connections with others—women's proclivities for nurturing, healing, and life-giving—the publication of Jubilee was also timely in supplanting the negative connotations of matriarchy that had recently been put forth by Daniel P. Moynihan and popularized by the media. Published one year after Moynihan's destructive, inaccurate study “The ***** Family: The Case for National Action” (1965), Jubilee counters Moynihan's views of the matriarchal family as fragmented, unstable, and unnatural. Vyry not only holds the family together, she makes all of the decisions, and Innis usually defers to her, though he often argues with her first. As Innis acknowledges, Vyry appears to have miraculous powers of seeing, and her decisions are the right ones. Countering popular views that the matrifocal family leads to violence and delinquency in the African American community, Jubilee honors the matriarch.
As committed as Walker was to commemorating her great-grandmother and the strength of womanhood, so too was she committed to celebrating the civil rights movement in her next major work, Prophets for a New Day (1970), a collection of poetry published just four years after Jubilee. Similar to the way Walker sees Vyry's Christian humanism as a solution to societal ills, Prophets for a New Day identifies civil rights leaders with biblical prophets, signifying that their vision fuses politics and spirituality.
Prophets for a New Day begins with two poems about young females. “Street Demonstration,” the opening piece, is a charming, comic poem based on the urgent statement of an eight-year-old girl, “Hurry up Lucille or we won't get arrested with our group.” The speaker of the second poem, “Girl Held Without Bail,” espouses passive resistance and alludes to her mother, sister, and girlfriends who share her cell. Walker, by positioning these two poems at the beginning of the volume, enshrines children and young people as symbolic of the hope for a new era. “How Many Silent Centuries Sleep in My Sultry Veins?” enunciates a similar view, finding redemption in a proud African heritage that provided us with contemporary heroes: “these modern, sensate sons” who by virtue of their ancestors are “immortal men, and free.” Thus, Walker credits women with creating children to take up the banner of freedom. Yet in “Jackson, Mississippi,” even motherhood is a lost cause, for grannies have “long since fled.”
Prophets for a New Day is a compelling, cohesive volume of memorable poems. Walker's renunciation of cities such as Jackson and Oxford, Mississippi, punctures the gentility masking a racist code. Oxford, “where all the by-gone years of chivalry and poetry and crinoline / are dead,” calls up “bright, grim” smiles as survival mechanisms for African Americans. In Jackson, where Walker has lived since 1949, the sun is “raw fire” beating down, suggesting that even nature punishes rather than heals. Juxtaposing white wealth and comfort with black poverty and hopelessness, “wide white avenues / And black alleys of filthy rendezvous,” Walker decries the years she has spent developing and passing on liberating visions in a city ruled by demagogues. These trenchant sketches reawaken the anger motivating the civil rights movement. Moreover, they throw into relief Walker's poems about the prophets seeking equal rights.
Typifying the era's hopeful mood, the poems depict exemplary men who carried on the centuries-old tradition of black revolt. “The Ballad of the Free” offers tribute to heroes familiar to African Americans through oral histories, despite their absence from “official” versions taught in schools. Walker sanctifies Nat Turner, Gabriel Prosser, and Denmark Vesey, leaders of American slave revolts; Toussaint L'Ouverture, paradigmatic for freeing slaves in Haiti; and John Brown, hanged for attacking Harper's Ferry. She includes Brown to signal her belief that African Americans and whites can join together in the struggle for racial equality. Her choice of ballad emphasizes the legendary quality of these men, all of whom were martyred for their political actions. “The Ballad of the Free” is written in quatrains followed by a refrain with biblical echoes: “The last shall be first and the first shall be none.” Their martyrdom notwithstanding, these five men set the tone of empowerment and risk that earmarks Prophets for a New Day.
Modern heroes receive equally inspired treatment. A free-verse sonnet to Malcolm X emphasizes Malcolm's messianic role when Walker queries, “When and where will another come to take your holy place?” Three civil rights workers murdered by Mississippi Klansmen are resurrected in “For Andy Goodman—Michael Schwerner—and James Chaney.” In this haunting piece, Walker employs natural imagery to mourn the interrupted youth of these three men, “Black and white together,” who relinquished their lives for their political commitment. Delicate images of humming birds, sequoias, trembling blossoms, and wild cardinal calls accentuate the ugliness of death and mutilation hinted at but never graphically mentioned in the poem. The mourning dove, “Mississippi bird of sorrow,” recurs throughout the final stanzas, as the writer hopes to discern the meaning of these senseless deaths.
Although Walker attributes prophecy to all of those committed to the civil rights movement, she links biblical prophets with certain exemplary figures. Isaiah, “a man of the court,” is perhaps Whitney Young, Roy Wilkins, or Adam Clayton Powell; Joel, who speaks “harsh and bitter words of burning Truth” may be identified with Julian Bond or Eldridge Cleaver. Micah, crying out against racist enemies, is explicitly identified as Medgar Evers. Amos, revered in two poems, doubtless represents Martin Luther King. “Amos—1963” depicts King preaching “a new gospel of love” in “seething” Selma and “bitter Birmingham.” In “Amos (Postscript-1968),” Walker transmutes King's death into eternal life.
Prophets for a New Day possesses all Walker's willingness to step aside and let others occupy the front lines. Walker reasserts her conjuring mission, continuing to inspire and support, to heal her audience and her community. By foregrounding African Americans, Walker expresses her belief that the political and spiritual impulse of the sixties originated in black America. As Walker puts it: “We are a people of spirit, we are a people of soul, we are a numinous people.”
October Journey, published in 1973, lacks the cohesiveness of the two earlier books of poetry. A collection of autobiographical and occasional pieces, it contains little memorable work aside from Walker's first poem “I Want To Write.” Significantly, however, the volume attests to Walker's lifelong desire to celebrate and support people she holds in high regard. It includes, for instance, a long epitaph for her father, sonnets to Paul Laurence Dunbar and Mary McLeod Bethune, and a piece dedicated to Gwendolyn Brooks—whom Walker has known both as a child and a woman. A lively ballad about Harriet Tubman reflects Walker's desire to recreate history and commemorate women as well as men, an impulse she also reveals in short critical pieces about Brooks, Nella Larsen, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and May Miller. Taken as a memento of Walker's commitment to promoting and appreciating others, October Journey reveals Walker's adherence to celebrating black voices.
In the 1980s, having retired from Jackson State University to allow herself to devote more time to her writing, Walker produced two major works. Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988) and This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (1989); a third book, How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays by Margaret Walker (1990), contains essays available in one volume for the first time.
The biography of Richard Wright reasserts Walker's pattern of celebrating others' works. Walker positions herself as Wright's definitive biographer, in part because of her close friendship with him in the late 1930s. Her approach is psychological, at times almost psychoanalytic, and it reveals some extraordinarily controversial views. Unfortunately the book is quite uneven. Initially compelling, full of provocative notions about the relationship between artist and work, Daemonic Genius deteriorates during the last few chapters. The latter part of the narrative reflects poor editing, weakly synthesizing previously composed pieces into the text and repeating sections from earlier chapters.
Walker argues that Wright's art derived from two impulses: the “psychic wound of racism” and his “psychosexual confusion.” These she sees as interrelated and reflected in all of his work. As evidence of Wright's confusion, Walker argues that despite his commitment to racial equality and social justice, he harbored internalized racism, hating “his own black self.” Connected with Wright's internalized racism, Walker maintains, is his hostility to black women, whom he viewed as unattractive and disloyal to black men: “they only pull you down when you're trying to get up.” Wright allegedly castigated black women as exhibiting “animal sexuality,” falling easy prey to white men. According to Walker, Wright felt nearly as much hostility for white women as he did for black women, so that his relationships with his white lovers and wives were fraught with trauma. Walker insists that Wright's misogyny emerges clearly in Native Son, when Bigger Thomas, with whom she believes Wright identified, murders and maims two women, one white and one black. It is not accidental, Walker continues, that mothers, aunts, and grandmothers appearing in Wright's fiction are negatively portrayed, for Wright used his writing as an outlet for his rage against women.
Walker's biography of Wright nevertheless expresses her reverence for his tortured genius, and she argues that his talent originated in his turbulent psychology. She maintains that Wright's rage and passion reflected his connection with higher planes of awareness, a kind of divine madness. Ambitious and intriguing, Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius sparks reconsideration of Wright's work; in that respect it accomplishes one of the aims of biography and complements Walker's “healing, annealing” role. But Daemonic Genius communicates almost as much about Walker as it does about Wright. The chapters about Walker's relationship with her subject disclose her resentment at Wright's cavalier treatment of her.
During the last decade, Walker has increasingly lamented the discrimination she has suffered as a result of being an African American woman. Her awareness of critical neglect, unequal pay, and blatant raiding of her work have emerged in interviews and essays such as “On Being Female, Black, and Free.” Walker comments there, “The higher you try to climb, the more rarified the air, the more obstacles appear.” Walker's description of Wright's cruelty toward her invites the question of whether Walker's book is an act of exorcism. Taken in conjunction with her writing as a whole, it suggests that Walker, in exposing Wright's exploitation and rejection of her, seeks to apply her healing arts to herself.
This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems reveals the full range of Walker's talents and brings her vision full circle. The title announces her reclamation and ownership of the twentieth century, reinforcing her celebratory role and her desire to criticize and shape society. Like For My People and Prophets for a New Day, the new poems in This Is My Century are cohesive, revolving around a central purpose.
In a group of poems titled “Farish Street,” a street in Jackson, Mississippi, serves as a microcosm of the African American community. The seven poems affirm various aspects of that community. The African Village represents blacks' efforts to recreate their heritage in America:
In our beginnings our Blackness was not thought so
beautiful
but out of bitterness we wrought an ancient past
here.
Imagining the homeland's pastoral spirit amid bricks and alleyways, residents seek connections with their ancestry. “Black Magic” humorously warns of the dangers inherent in meddling with that fixture of the community, the root doctor, citing the shibboleth “Lie down with dogs and get up with fleas.” The poem “Farish Street” distills the energy and despair of tavern, church, and greengrocer, likening the street to a patchwork quilt “stitched with blood and tears,” just as the street is “paved with martyred Black men's flesh and bones.” Taken as a group, the poems of “Farish Street” resonate with the anguish, power, and passion of the black community.
In This Is My Century, Walker assigns herself the role of teacher, one that allows her to pass on the healing wisdom she has accrued over seventy-five years. She contrasts her youthful and senior visions, commemorates intellectual and creative paragons, affirms Pan-Africanism, recreates significant historic moments, and revitalizes her humanistic perspective. Like all of Walker's work, the book demands—as the end of the century approaches—that her society take a hard look at itself, identify its failures, and take pleasure in its triumphs in order to move to another level of awareness and health.
Walker continues her commitment to commemoration; she lauds such figures as Frederick Douglass, Albert Einstein, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Karl Marx, and she also praises longshoremen, mothers, and “proud park-bench sleepers.” She offers a poignant poem to Alex, her late husband, and takes the liberty of applauding herself as the embodiment of African American women in “My Truth and My Flame”: “I am the spirit in all living things.”
Some of the poems contrasting youth and age in This Is My Century complain bitterly that too many years in a racist country have eroded her spirit. In “Old Age” Walker deplores the lifelong stress of dealing with “the clash of race and sex and class.” “I Hear a Rumbling” asks “How long must my children cry / to the skies?” Walker's gentle irony in “On Youth and Age” notes,
When I was a little girl
the little girl on Morton Salt was white;
She still is.
Walker's frustration at addressing the same issues for seventy-five years emerges especially powerfully in the angry “They Have Put Us on HOLD”; “Fanfare, Coda, and Finale” implores America to “remake the music stifling in my throat.”
Walker's belief in spiritual humanism as a healing agency underlies the entire volume. She decries technology, consecrates nature as the repository of spiritual wisdom, expresses faith in a union of black and white, and exalts African heritage. She enunciates her belief that the answer to racial divisions, poverty, gender discrimination, anti-Semitism, and class prejudice is to recognize our shared humanity, “providing a full measure of human dignity for everyone.”
This Is My Century encapsulates Walker's perspective: adhering to her own private, coherent vision regardless of political currents or literary fashions, identifying herself as both a black woman and a writer, Walker has survived and prevailed. In 1990, at the age of seventy-five, her energy was still unflagging. Between stints on the lecture circuit, she was hard at work on a sequel to Jubilee titled “Minna and Jim,” another novel titled “Mother Broyer,” and her autobiography. Carrying on the African tradition of conjurer, healing and celebrating the black community, she has for three-quarters of a century inspired, nurtured, and politicized her audience.
Selected Bibliography
PRIMARY WORKS
VOLUMES
For My People. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942. Poetry.
Jubilee. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Novel.
Prophets for a New Day. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1970. Poetry.
How I Wrote Jubilee. Chicago: Third World Press, 1972. Essay.
October Journey. Detroit: Broadside Press, 1973. Poetry.
A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974.
Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. New York: Warner Books, 1988. Biography.
This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989.
Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature. Edited by Maryemma Graham. New York: Feminist Press, 1990.
ESSAYS
“New Poets.” Phylon 11(4):345–354 (1950). Reprinted in Black Expression: Essays By and About Black Americans in the Creative Arts. Edited by Addison Gayle. New York: Weybright and Talley, 1969.
“Black Writer's Views on Literary Lions and Values.” ***** Digest 17:23 (January 1968).
“Black Studies: Some Personal Observations.” Afro-American Studies 1:41–43 (1970).
“The Humanistic Tradition of Afro-American Literature.” American Libraries 1:849–854 (October 1970).
“Religion, Poetry, and History: Foundations for a New Educational System.” In The Black Seventies. Edited by Floyd B. Barbour. Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970. Pp. 284–295.
“On Being Female, Black, and Free.” In The Writer on Her Work. Edited by Janet Sternburg. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1980. Pp. 95–106.
“Dr. Nick Aaron Ford: A Man in the Classic Tradition.” In Swords Upon This Hill. Edited by Burney J. Hollis. Baltimore: Morgan State University Press, 1984. Pp. 116–120.
“Foreword.” In I Wonder As I Wander: An Autobiographical Journey, by Langston Hughes. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1986.
SECONDARY WORKS
BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL STUDIES
Barksdale, Richard K. “Margaret Walker: Folk Orature and Historical Prophecy.” In Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940–1960. Edited by R. Baxter Miller. Tennessee studies in Literature 30. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. Pp. 104–117.
Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
Christian, Barbara. In Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Renaissance. Edited by Joanne M. Braxton and Andree Nicola McLaughlin. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Collier, Eugenia. “Fields Watered with Blood: Myth and Ritual in the Poetry of Margaret Walker.” In Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation. Edited by Mari Evans. New York: Doubleday, 1984. Pp. 499–509.
Egejuru, Phanuel, and Robert Elliot Fox. “An Interview with Margaret Walker.” Callaloo 2:29–35 (1979).
Freibert, Lucy M. “Southern Song: An Interview with Margaret Walker.” Frontiers 9:50–56 (1987).
Giddings, Paula. “‘A Shoulder Hunched Against a Sharp Concern’: Some Themes in the Poetry of Margaret Walker.” Black World 21:20–25 (December 1971).
Gwin, Minrose C. Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985.
Hull, Gloria T. “Black Women Poets from Wheatley to Walker.” In Sturdy Black Bridges: Visions of Black Women in Literature. Edited by Roseann P. Bell, Bettye J. Parker, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall. Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Press, 1979. Pp. 69, 86.
Klotman, Phyllis R. “‘Oh Freedom’: Women and History in Margaret Walker's Jubilee.” Black American Literature Forum 11:139–145 (Winter 1977).
McDowell, Margaret B. “The Black Woman as Artist and Critic: Four Versions.” Kentucky Review 7:19–41 (Spring 1987).
Miller, R. Baxter. “The ‘Intricate Design’ of Margaret Walker: Literary and Biblical Re-Creation in Southern History.” In Black American Poets Between Worlds, 1940–1960. Edited by R. Baxter Miller. Tennessee Studies in Literature 30. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. Pp. 118–135.
Jones, John Griffith. “Margaret Walker Alexander.” Mississippi Writers Talking 2. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1983. Pp. 121–146.
Reid, Margaret. “The Defiant Ones: Black Female Voices in Poetic Protest.” In Amid Visions and Revisions: Poetry and Criticism on Literature and the Arts. Edited by Burney J. Hollis. Baltimore: Morgan State University Press, 1985. Pp. 79–94.
Rowell, Charles H. “Poetry, History and Humanism: An Interview with Margaret Walker.” Black World 25:4–17 (December 1975).
Spears, James E. “Black Folk Elements in Margaret Walker's Jubilee.” Mississippi Folklore Register 14:13–19 (Spring 1980).
Tate, Claudia, ed. Black Women Writers at Work. New York: Continuum, 1983. Pp. 188–204.
Traylor, Eleanor W. “‘Bolder Measures Crashing Through’: Margaret Walker's Poem of the Century.” Callaloo 10:570–595 (Fall 1987).
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 W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret Ruth Miles. Boston: Beacon Press 1985. Pp. 88–110.
BIBLIOGRAPHIES
Chapman, Dorothy Hilton, ed. Index to Poetry by Black American Women. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.
Deodene, Frank, and William P. French. Black American Poetry Since 1944: A Preliminary Checklist. Chatham, N.J.: Chatham Bookseller, 1971.