I can hear the opening words of Margaret Walker’s poem “For My People” in my head, as clearly as the day my dad set me to learning them over 60 years ago.
For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;
For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;
I don’t know how many families still teach their children poems and have them recite for company.
I don’t know how many schools have poetry in their grade school curricula, but what I remember from childhood are the black poems my mom and dad used to recite, and passed on to us kids.
I wonder why, when people list the greats from the Harlem Renaissance and the Black Chicago Renaissance, she is so often overlooked?
The liner notes for a documentary film about her life and work raise that issue:
For My People: The Life and Writing of Margaret Walker gives the long-overdue recognition to one of the seminal figures of American literature. Margaret Walker has been described by scholar Jerry Ward as "a national treasure" and by Nikki Giovanni as the "most famous person nobody knows." Her signature poem, For My People, written when she was 22, set a tone and a level of commitment which African American literature has been responding to ever since.
For My People combines conversations with Margaret Walker, commentary from leading scholars and readings from her poetry to make a powerful argument for the centrality of her work to 20th century American literature. At the heart of her poetry are the rhythms of African and African American speech and music - gospel, spiritual, ballads and folktales. In contrast to most contemporary poets, she did not aspire to a "personal" poetry but "to write the songs of my people - to frame their dreams into words, their souls into notes."
Margaret Walker has participated in virtually every significant African American literary movement in this century. Born in Birmingham in 1915, she was deeply influenced by the Harlem Renaissance, receiving personal encouragement from Langston Hughes and W.E.B. Du Bois. During the Depression, she joined Illinois WPA Writers Project and worked alongside Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel, Arna Bontemps and Richard Wright, becoming Wright's close friend and biographer. In 1942, she was the first African American to win the coveted Yale Younger Poets award.
Margaret returned to the South, teaching at Jackson State for forty years and establishing there one of the first Black Studies center in the nation. Her epic novel Jubilee, published in 1966, took 30 years to write; it was based on the life of her own great grandmother and pays tribute to the solidarity of a slave family. During the '60s she was an outspoken political activist and a mentor to a new generation of writers in the Black Arts movement including Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez. Now this important film makes Margaret Walker's poetry and inspiring presence available to yet another generation of writers ad readers. Poet, teacher, activist, Margaret Walker is someone to who the over-used epithet "role model" can truly be applied.
The Margaret Walker Center is located at Jackson State University in Mississippi, one of the largest historically black colleges and universities in the U.S.
The Margaret Walker Center is an archive and museum dedicated to the preservation, interpretation, and dissemination of African American history and culture.
Founded as the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People by Margaret Walker in 1968, the Center seeks to honor her academic and artistic legacy through its archival collections, exhibits, and public programs.
Open to the public, the Center houses significant records like the papers of the late Margaret Walker; those of the former U.S. Secretary of Education, Roderick Paige; and a large oral history department that includes nearly 2000 interviews. It also offers museum and exhibit spaces that highlight the Centers collections and the history of Jackson State University.
In 1942, The New York Times announced:
NEGRO GIRL WINS YALE POETRY PRIZE
' For My People,' by Margaret Walker, Chosen by Benet
NEW HAVEN, Conn., Nov. 3 — Margaret Walker of New Orleans has been chosen by Stephen Vincent Benet as winner of this year's competition for the Yale Series of Younger Poets. She is the first Negro to win the competition since it was begun in 1919 for poets who give promise of contributing literature for the future of America.
Take some time out to watch this short, 17-minute documentary on Walker’s life and work from the Center.
That should whet your appetite for more. I suggest you start with her biography.
Song of My Life: A Biography of Margaret Walker, by Carolyn J. Brown
Margaret Walker (1915-1998) has been described as "the most famous person nobody knows." This is a shocking oversight of an award-winning poet, novelist, essayist, educator, and activist as well as friend and mentor to many prominent African American writers. Song of My Life reintroduces Margaret Walker to readers by telling her story, one that many can relate to as she overcame certain obstacles related to race, gender, and poverty.
Walker was born in 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama, to two parents who prized education above all else. Obtaining that education was not easy for either her parents or herself, but Walker went on to earn both her master's and doctorate. from the University of Iowa. Walker's journey to become a nationally known writer and educator is an incredible story of hard work and perseverance. Her years as a public figure connected her to Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Alex Haley, and a host of other important literary and historical figures.
This biography opens with her family and those who inspired her--her parents, her grandmother, her most important teachers and mentors--all significant influences on her reading and writing life. Chapters trace her path over the course of the twentieth century as she travels to Chicago and becomes a member of the South Side Writers' Group with Richard Wright. Then she is accepted into the newly created Masters of Fine Arts Program at the University of Iowa. Back in the South, she pursued and achieved her dream of becoming a writer and college educator as well as wife and mother. Walker struggled to support herself, her sister, and later her husband and children, but she overcame financial hardships, prejudice, and gender bias and achieved great success. She penned the acclaimed novel Jubilee , received numerous lifetime achievement awards, and was a beloved faculty member for three decades at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi.
Review by Amy Pardo, in The Mississippi Quarterly:
Song of My Life: A Biography of Margaret Walker
This biography just touches on the events surrounding Walker's life--enough that the reader will want to more fully explore her writings. Walker's accomplishments are indeed astounding. For example, she attended The University of Iowa's MFA program in its earliest stages, returning to complete her doctorate years later and to finish her dissertation, which would eventually be her most famous work, Jubilee. Her civil rights work began in the late 1960s; when two student protestors were killed by police at Jackson State in 1970, Walker was called to testify before the President's Commission on Campus Unrest. She would go on to become a leading Democratic voice in state and national politics. Walker also established one of the country's first African American studies programs at Jackson State at her Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People in 1968, which twenty-one years later would be renamed in her honor. Finally, Walker's commitment to African American women's writing, through the groundbreaking conference on Phillis Wheatley's life and legacy in 1973, is in and of itself a legacy worth exploring. Walker's own poetry commemorates this event, which a who's who of African American women writers attended.
Her essays, in On Being Female, Black, and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker, 1932-1992, resonate with me.
These highly personal essays, written over the course of six decades, reveal the woman as well as the artist, capturing the independent creative spirit of this literary icon. In accessible and stirring prose, Walker speaks directly about her own experiences - such as growing up in a deeply religious home, living in the Jim Crow South, marrying and raising a family, and becoming a civil rights activist. These essays also offer Walker's critical perspectives on a wide range of topics, from the role of the black woman artist to the distinctiveness of African American cultural life and to the importance of education in the fight for political change.
Maryemma Graham's introduction provides a historical context for the essays, placing Walker's work within the African American literary canon. Walker reflects on the numerous poets and writers she has known over the years, including Zora Neale Hurston, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers, and Richard Wright. A work of broad general appeal, On Being Female, Black, and Free offers a powerful introduction to the work of an essential American literary figure.
Then there are the essays on Walker, collected in Fields Watered With Blood, edited by Maryemma Graham.
Representing an international gathering of scholars, Fields Watered with Blood-now available in paperback-constituted the first critical assessment of the full scope of Margaret Walker's literary career. As they discuss Walker's work, including the landmark poetry collection For My People and the novel Jubilee, the contributors reveal the complex interplay of concerns and themes in Walker's writing: folklore and prophecy, place and space, history and politics, gender and race. In addition, the contributors remark on how Walker's emphases on spirituality and on dignity in her daily life make themselves felt in her writings and show how Walker's accomplishments as a scholar, teacher, activist, mother, and family elder influenced what and how she wrote.
A brief biography, an interview with literary critic Claudia Tate, a chronology of major events in Walker's life, and a selected bibliography round out this collection.
Most of all, there are her poetry, and her novel, Jubilee, which she discusses in this interview with Don Noble.
Noble wrote:
At the level of realistic detail, the novel is unimpeachable. We learn how people farmed, how they cooked and what they ate, at every level of society. We learn about blacksmithing and carpentry and healing with roots and herbs. We learn about the economics of plantation life and sharecropping. We learn what rich and poor wore and, in the case of the poor, how they made what they wore. We learn of slaves’ superstition and voodoo, about the Underground Railroad, how slaves escaped, or at least attempted to, and what happened when they were caught.
But, as accurate and informative as this book is, “Jubilee” is not history or sociology.
It is a novel, with a fine narrative flow. The protagonist, Vyry, is based on Margaret Walker’s great-grandmother. Vyry is born a slave near Dawson, Ga., about 1848, survives through the Civil War and then, married with children, moves first to Abbeville, Ala., then Troy, then Greenville, in search of that very elusive 40 acres and a mule. Vyry was the plantation cook, a house servant, not a field hand, and Walker examines not only the details of every rung of the social ladder among whites, from poor white to storekeeper to planter, but also the feelings among the slaves concerning both occupation and skin color.
Jubilee (50th Anniversary Edition) by Margaret Walker (Author), Nikki Giovanni (Foreword)
“Chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondage.” —New York Times Book Review
Jubilee tells the true story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. Vyry bears witness to the South’s antebellum opulence and to its brutality, its wartime ruin, and the promises of Reconstruction. Weaving her own family’s oral history with thirty years of research, Margaret Walker’s novel brings the everyday experiences of slaves to light. Jubilee churns with the hunger, the hymns, the struggles, and the very breath of American history.
From the Poetry Foundation:
The story of Jubilee’s main characters Vyry and Randall Ware was an important part of Walker’s life even before she began to write it down. As she explains in How I Wrote “Jubilee,” she first heard about the “slavery time” in bedtime stories told by her maternal grandmother. When old enough to recognize the value of her family history, Walker took initiative, “prodding” her grandmother for more details, and promising to set down on paper the story that had taken shape in her mind. Later on, she completed extensive research on every aspect of the black experience touching the Civil War, from obscure birth records to information on the history of tin cans. “Most of my life I have been involved with writing this story about my great-grandmother, and even if Jubilee were never considered an artistic or commercial success I would still be happy just to have finished it,” she claims. Critical studies of the book have emphasized the importance of its themes and its position as the prototype for novels that present black history from a black perspective. Roger Whitlow claimed in Black American Literature: A Critical History, “It serves especially well as a response to white ‘nostalgia’ fiction about the antebellum and Reconstruction South.”
A quick Google search will take you to many of her poems online.
To close on this Sunday of her birthday, here are her words as song:
FOR MY PEOPLE -- A New Musical Work by Composer Randy Klein based on the Poems of Margaret Walker. This work is presented in an exciting form of a concert with multi-media video projections that correspond to the images present in the poetry. These art songs paint musical impressions to match the poet's words. FOR MY PEOPLE performed at San Diego State University School of Music and Dance on March 24, 2013. The concert featured composer Randy Klein on piano, vocalist Aurelia Williams, the 80-voice Aztec Concert Choir under the direction of Dr. Patrick Walders. Choral arrangements by James Ballard.
Happy Birthday, Dr. Walker. Thank you.