Fields Watered with Blood: Critical Essays on Margaret Walker

Introduction: The Most Famous Person Nobody Knows

MARYEMMA GRAHAM AND DEBORAH WHALEY

Margaret Walker knew and understood the South intimately. It was a source of anger and righteous indignation; yet she thrived on its dual complexity: the natural beauty of its landscape in contrast to the unnatural horror of its racism. Growing up in the expanded Jim Crow era, she quickly captures for us the feeling of that experience: I knew what it was to step off the sidewalk to let a white man pass before I was ten. She was known to credit much of her success to being born into a deeply religious family that fostered excellence and placed spiritual values and integrity above money.

Her birthplace was Birmingham, Alabama. On 7 July 1915, Margaret Abigail Walker was born and named in honor of her ancestors. She went to school in New Orleans but completed college at the Methodist-affiliated Northwestern University, where her father had gone before her. Although Walker had written and published before moving to Chicago, it was there that her talent matured. Writing as a college student, as a member of the WPA, and sharing intellectual, cultural and professional interests with many black and white artists who were gathered in Chicago, the most famous of whom undoubtedly was Richard Wright, Walker found her voice. Wright and Walker shared a close friendship until Wright left for New York in the late 1930s. Their friendship abruptly ended a year later. Walker herself left Chicago for graduate school at the University of Iowa in 1939, by which time she was well on her way to becoming a major American poet. In 1942, she completed the full manuscript of a volume she entitled For My People, the title poem for which had been written and published in Poetry in 1937. The volume served as her M.A. thesis in English from the University of Iowa; more importantly, its selection for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award (1942) brought immediate recognition to her as the first African American woman, and the second African American after Richard Wright, to achieve national literary prominence. The volume along with its title poem quickly became an American classic.

Around the same time, Walker had begun work on a historical novel, based on her great-grandmother, Elvira Ware Dozier, a novel she would not finish until she returned to Iowa in the 1960s to complete her Ph.D. The book’s long gestation period shaped much of Walker’s life for thirty years. She returned to the South, began her teaching career at Livingstone College (Salisbury, N.C.), married, and had four children, all while doing intermittent research and writing on the novel. In 1949, after she settled her family in Jackson, Mississippi, so that she might join the faculty at Jackson State College, she slowly began to weave together the stories told to her by her grandmother. Unfortunately, Grandmother Dozier would not live to see the novel she had inspired; she died before Jubilee’s publication. The award-winning novel pushed Walker again to the forefront. Jubilee (1966) was enormously successful, appealing to a popular audience that her poetry could never reach. It has been translated into four languages and remains the first modern novel of slavery and the Reconstruction South, paving the way, as several critics point out, for Sherley Ann Williams’s Dessa Rose, Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, J. California Cooper’s Family, and Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Other books followed soon thereafter: Prophets for a New Day (1970), How I Wrote Jubilee (1972), October Journey (1973), and A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974).

Throughout her literary career, Walker earned awards and honors for extraordinary achievement and for her lifetime contribution to American letters as a creative artist. Her people never failed to recognize her: eight honorary degrees, numerous certificates and citations, and in 1991 a Senior Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1992, Lifetime Achievement Awards came from both the historically black College Language Association and the Governor of Mississippi.

When Walker ended her teaching career in 1979, she quickly began another as one of the nation’s most sought after black writers. After the controversial Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius, she turned her attention to poetry once again. The four volumes she had previously published and the new poems became This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems. A few years later, reflecting on the series of celebrations marking the fiftieth anniversary of For My People (1942–92), she explained:

From my early adolescence, I’ve been dealing with the meaning of the turn of the century. I was born when it was barely fifteen years old. And now we have less than ten years left in this century. So, the body of my work springs from my interest in a historical point of view that is central to the development of black people as we approach the twenty-first century. That is my theme. And I have tried to express it, both in prose and poetry. I feel that if I’ve learned anything about this country and century—I’ve expressed it already in the books I’ve been writing and the few more I’d like to write… . Giving voice to all I have come to know and understand is still the most important thing for me as a writer—that has never changed for me, nor for the people I’ve known and worked with through all these years.

Recalling the past and present as symbols and myths drawn from a collective consciousness, giving it both secular and spiritual significance, was Walker’s artistic mission. Although she turned to her imagination, her intellectual curiosity, and her training as a poet to realize that mission, she never failed to trust her emotions and the spirit that connected her to the folk.

Margaret Walker sought and acquired the necessary understanding to sustain a satisfying life early. She lived and grew old in a rather traditional way: with her children and her grandchildren, in her own home, not too far from where she was born, working hard and being severely underpaid, attending church and teaching a Bible class, enjoying the friends she had known most of her adult life. These were traditions that she revered, for they provided the balance between the intellectual and nonintellectual modes of being.

Whether it is the power of Walker’s voice or the truth of her vision that invites the rich, lyrical and precise language of her poetry, fiction, or criticism, she reaffirms the values and the cultural distinctiveness of African American life through oratory as perhaps its central and most visible feature. Writers Sonia Sanchez, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Alex Haley seem to echo this sensibility in their own revisioning of the black historical experience. And Walker has an entire following of writers who have profited from her example, including Arthenia Bates Millican, Julia Fields, the late Raymond Andrews, the late Tom Dent, Robert Dean Pharr, Tina McElroy Ansa, and Pinkie Gordon Lane.

Given her self-prescribed role as a spiritual and intellectual leader—one her readers and reviewers gladly acknowledge—Walker’s penetrating analyses and carefully constructed images of black life in America bespeak an uncompromising commitment to the integrity of an African American world view, one she considered essential for saving America from its own destruction. Perhaps no one has ever spoken as forcefully, as skillfully, or as truthfully as Walker about the range of complex problems we collectively face as Americans looking toward a common past, with full realization of the responsibility for preserving our common humanity. It is this simple truth pervading her work that has earned for her a permanent place in the cultural discourse of America.

Twenty-two essays here are all concerned to see Walker as a highly self-conscious artist, quintessentially female, black, and southern, who dared assume the burden of telling the truth of history. Intensely passionate and yet morally restrained, Walker was not content with a sentimental spiritualizing of nature, though admittedly her earliest poetry was modeled after the sentimental tradition. The heightened political awareness that she developed during the 1930s marked her for life and, together with her indigenous sensibilities, gave her a window to a world that her artistry constantly reinvented. The inter-generational, intercultural and international mix of scholars writing in this volume, representing the United States, the Caribbean, Japan, Greece and Turkey, all seem to be engaged in a critical intertextual exchange. Margaret Walker’s texts are the focus, the elements and thematic concerns in them primary, with an eye toward the visionary possibilities they portend. Taken together, these essays attend to the multiplicity of ways that Walker’s work has been interpreted by literary critics and scholars. The opening essay, I Want to Write, I Want to Write the Songs of My People: The Emergence of Margaret Walker, explores various influences upon Walker’s aesthetic vision, her initiation into the world of poetry, especially noting the subject position of Walker and her Harlem Renaissance legacy. Similarly, Jacqueline Carmichael’s ‘Rumblings’ in Folk Traditions Served Southern Style unearths the folk traditions and tropes of African American culture in Jubilee, which synchronizes African orality with material culture and cultural practices (e.g., Walker’s use and description of quilts, architecture, candlemaking, and clothing). Dilla Buckner’s Folkloric Elements in Margaret Walker’s Poetry and James E. Spears’s "Black Folk Elements in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee provide more detailed evidence of the text’s vernacular traditions as proof that she is a [fiction writer and] poet of the people, her people."

In Music as Theme: The Blues Mode in the Works of Margaret Walker, Eleanor Traylor suggests that music is not simply a vernacular tradition that enriches the text of Jubilee but sees it, more importantly, as a didactic device. Traylor’s text invites us to experience the music as she explores a dialectic that Walker’s prose creates between the characters and the reader. This verbal music, then, is a dialogic idiom that encourages her poetry not only to be read and spoken but, as Tomeiko R. Ashford argues in Performing Community: Margaret Walker’s Use of Poetic ‘Folk Voice,’ also to be heard. This poly-rhythmic quality informs and invokes the oral and vernacular traditions so prevalent in African American expressive culture, indicative of the richness of Walker’s poetry not only as spoken word but also as performance of African American culture through those words. In keeping with Walker’s commitment to mine the depths of racial and gender memory, Phyllis Klotman’s "‘Oh Freedom’: Women and History in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, Minrose Gwin’s The ‘Intricate Design’ of Margaret Walker’s ‘Humanism’: Revolution, Vision, History, Claudia Tate’s Black Women Writers at Work, Michelle Cliff’s The Black Woman as Mulatto: A Personal Response to the Character of Vyry, Joyce Pettis’s Margaret Walker: Black Woman Writer of the South, Charlotte Goodman’s From Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Vyry’s Kitchen: The Black Female Folk Tradition in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, and Amy Levin’s The Violation of Voice: Revising the Slave Narrative" all focus on women as historical subjects.

Klotman writes that Walker’s Jubilee is best understood as historical fiction and places it among those much-needed texts that record women’s historical voices—the imaginative result of Walker’s melange of African American historical processes and the part that women of African descent played in that process. Similarly, Minrose Gwin writes that Jubilee reflects the consciousness in Walker’s civil rights poetry, arguing that both forms of work are disruptive and creative, and explore and explode patriarchal spaces of racism and oppression. Levin suggests that Walker’s choices contribute to the dialogue on gender and African American cultural production by answering important questions about power, identity, family, and authenticity. While Klotman, Gwin, and Levin explore the sites of gender resistance (in Jubilee in particular) that shed light on the literary use of women’s voices, Claudia Tate and Joyce Pettis provide nuanced and personal narratives of Walker’s discussion of African American women’s lives and histories. Tate, in Black Women Writers at Work, uses a 1980 interview with Margaret Walker that enabled Walker to speak directly to gender concerns as presented in her written work, no doubt driven by Walker’s own personal commitment to racial and gender uplift.¹

Drawing from and responding to the struggle of self-representation for African American women in literature and culture, Michelle Cliff’s The Black Woman as Mulatto concentrates on the stereotypes embedded in the American ideology of the mulatto. Cliff compares works by Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larsen, and James Fenimore Cooper to challenge the stereotype of the tragic mulatto in the white literary imagination by deconstructing the common narratives used to describe her. Cliff concentrates on the ways in which language, in this case a stereotype, renders the diverse realities of African American women’s experiences invisible, but Joyce Pettis reads Walker’s personal interests as political, a fact that her writing reflects. Pettis argues that the strength in Walker’s work is not only in her allegiance to the ideologies of race women but also in her use of the South as a symbolic landscape and home for African Americans as a whole. It is precisely Walker’s attention to the everyday aesthetics of African American women’s experience that author Charlotte Goodman points to. Unlike the depictions of African American life in texts such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Goodman cites Walker’s Jubilee as an emergent text that reflects the subtle expressive forms and signifiers of African American antebellum culture and feminine subjectivity.

Margaret Walker’s poetry involved the same literary innovation inasmuch as her poetry was committed to recasting cultural forms undergirded with cultural and womanist politics. The South represented a paradox: it was a place where African Americans would revivify culture and folkways, and yet it simultaneously signified marginality, invisibility, and race hatred. Ekaterini Georgoudaki’s The South in Margaret Walker’s Poetry: Harbor and Sorrow Home shows this well: Walker’s poetry is celebration, ethnic revival, and mourning. Employing a deep structural analysis of poems such as Jackson, Mississippi and Birmingham, Georgoudaki writes of the visual imagery merged with literary allegory that makes Walker’s poetry prophetic. Esim Erdim shifts this focus on the structural aspects of Walker’s work from the poetry to the novel. Jubilee, Erdim suggests, is a multivoiced text intended to reflect the paradoxical nature of southern life. Marginality, invisibility, and race hatred are indeed double-edged. The author wants us to hear Grimes’s story, although he is the brutal overseer. Even though he is marginalized and deprivileged (in short, white trash), he invites a compassionate reading as much as the protagonist Vyry. Walker employs irony in the novel, one of several discursive strategies that complement the novel’s central tensions. The authorial voice shifts in response to Vyry’s vision of acceptance and understanding, and the novel alternates between a spiritual and a secular, a folk and a religious perspective, in order to achieve narrative closure.

The canon of Walker’s work is a literary montage of Africa, America, and the South, Eleanor W. Traylor writes in ‘Bolder Measures Crashing Through’: Margaret Walker’s Poem of the Century. A common thematic strand in Walker’s work speaks of and to the historical complexities and transformations of twentieth-century America. As Florence Howe argues in "Poet of History, Poet of Vision: A Review of This Is My Century, with prophetic and lyrical genius Walker emerges as the consciousness of a people, the poet of their history. It is indeed the attention to the expressiveness of African American culture and the quest to articulate a shared experience that makes Walker’s poetry a mythical and material statement, as Eugenia Collier remarks in Fields Watered with Blood: Myth and Ritual in the Poetry of Margaret Walker," on the use of diasporic traditions in American culture. The rituals and myths of a culture, Collier argues, are engulfed in racial memory; they form a comment on the future hopes and desires of African American men and women.

Margaret Walker’s creation of literary and metaphoric spaces place her among those authors who make conscious connections to their art while aiming to visualize a sense of place in their work. Hiroko Sato’s "The Use of Spaces in Margaret Walker’s Jubilee, R. Baxter Miller’s The ‘Etched Flame’ of Margaret Walker: Literary and Biblical Re-Creation in Southern History, Jerry Ward’s For My People: Notes on Visual Memory and Interpretation, and Melissa Walker’s Down from the Mountaintop examine Walker’s use of cultural space. Sato writes that Walker uses the concept of space in showing the reversal of power and the extent and limits of liberation," whereas R. Baxter Miller claims that the biblical references in Walker’s work create a different type of space: a spiritual one. Miller writes that texts such as For My People and Prophets for a New Day are couched within a historical sense of biblical implication, thus carving out a space for not only an emergent self but a spiritual one as well. Textual analyses of African conjure and aspects of Christianity lead Miller to conclude that the land and sense of space is analogous to Walker’s overarching concern with the spiritual struggle of African Americans.

This very same textual framework is also examined in Melissa Walker’s essay; she notes how Jubilee is representative of the historical moment in which it was created and embedded in later moments, such as 1960s cultural turmoil. Walker’s novel is not the story of a dead past but of the past as a precondition of the present, she writes. Thus civil rights metaphors of spiritual and material freedom such as the mountaintop become cultural tropes for a sense of political space, extending the notion of place to ideological spaces of contestation and cultural struggle—a common element in Margaret Walker’s work. Foregrounding the inevitably cultural perspectives that readers bring to interpretation (our visual memories and subject positions), Jerry Ward argues that the intertextuality of Walker’s poem For My People lends itself to multiple readings and meanings. For him, decoding and siting the visual space in Walker’s literary work situates it as a dialogic text, leading the readers to negotiate their visual interpretations of Walker’s poetry with their own material histories and sense of place.

This first full-length study of Margaret Walker’s work appears at an important moment in the evolution of Walker criticism. For although Walker did not enjoy the mainstream critical success of Toni Morrison or Alice Walker, she has paralleled their successs outside the mainstream as a writer of unusual intellectual boldness and literary complexity, a genius with words. These essays open the door of interpretive inquiry by excavating from Walker’s work the various elements of African American culture, threads of folk material, gender and race consciousness, prophetic poetry, prose, and place (the South), forming a cultural quilt. No matter which analytic lens one uses to view her work, Walker’s reputation rests, we are reminded in Deborah’s Whaley’s timely epilogue, on the connection between her exemplary writing life and her social practice. The portrait revealed here is by no means a final one, but it is intended to uncover the shape of Walker’s poetry and fiction and to trigger the quest to know more about an artist for whom the personal was always political. In her search to unite home and community with the world of poetry, literature, history, and theology, Margaret Walker became America’s moral touchstone. That search was her obsession and her truth. Fortunately for us as readers and critics, Walker did not measure the worth of her life’s work by institutional judgments. Being the most famous person nobody knows in the end may well have been her greatest strength.

NOTE

1. Walker began and served as the first director of the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People in 1968. In 1989, the Institute became the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center, with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the State of Mississippi.

PART ONE

The Life and Political Times of Margaret Walker

I Want to Write, I Want to Write the Songs of My People

The Emergence of Margaret Walker

MARYEMMA GRAHAM

Margaret Walker set out to be a writer at a most extraordinary time. Born in Birmingham in 1915 and growing up in New Orleans while the majority of America’s black population were recovering from the ravages of slavery, Walker came of age as part of a unique generation. By the time she was ten, the Harlem Renaissance was in full swing in the urban centers of the North. In the South, those who chose not to migrate nevertheless felt the effects of this national cultural and social movement. At a time when old traditions were giving way to new ones, the Renaissance concerned itself with cultural achievement as well as political and social access. Its great success was that it produced writers and exemplars of black excellence on an unprecedented scale. Walker’s life and conscious cultivation of a literary career followed on the heels of this Renaissance and took inspiration from it. In part, Walker’s dual role as an artist and spokesperson for her people is the result of early exposure to the canonical figures of the era, including James Weldon Johnson, Marian Anderson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Roland Hayes, and Langston Hughes; listening to educated, deeply religious parents debate Booker T. Washington’s and Du Bois’s racial ideas; being nourished by the rituals of southern black culture; and her need for self-definition as a creative, intellectual, and psychological being, unhampered by proscriptions of race and gender. Aware though she was of the codes governing the moral and social behavior of middle-class women of her time, Walker refused to allow those codes to govern her personal advancement. In time she would see herself in the tradition of African American women who worked tirelessly to improve the conditions of people’s lives. Her teachers were men, but her heroes were women like Phillis Wheatley, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Fannie Jackson Coppin, Nannie Burroughs, Angelina Weld Grimke, Georgia Douglas Johnson, Anne Spencer, Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Walker grew up, in short, a race woman, a New Negro, with a strong sense of her own power as an individual to impact the world at large. Some of this she inherited from her father, Sigismund Walker, a Jamaican who had immigrated to the United States to get a college education and an ordained minister in the Methodist Episcopal church, who taught philosophy and religion at New Orleans University (now Dillard) for most of his life. Some she got from her mother, Marion Dozier Walker, a wise woman of great musical talent, aggressive and controlling when it came to her children. Some of it was simply Margaret Walker herself, curious, intense, a lover of nature, a child whose passion for language was apparent to anyone around her. In any case, the context within which she grew to womanhood and initiated her career—before For My People—demonstrates intellectual borrowings and kinships that were invaluable to her literary apprenticeship.

As long as Walker could remember, she was enthralled in … Grandmother’s stories and recalled her grandmother being chastised by her parents for telling harrowing tales of slavery rather than more acceptable bedtime stories. Elvira Ware Dozier, who would become the protagonist Vyry in Jubilee, with indignation rising in her voice, reportedly confessed to telling the naked truth. The naked truth was available to Walker throughout her childhood because she was the first born and had the greatest access and exposure to her grandmother. The freedom of the narrative exchanges went uninterrupted for most of her early years. Learning from and listening to the stories from the oldest member of the household, a woman who had been born a slave, instilled in Walker the importance of history as told through stories.

It was her grandmother who gave Walker an early appreciation for the images and sounds of the black lived experience as they were recorded in a slave woman’s memory. She was told repeatedly the story of her great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown, who had died one month before her birth. As was the custom, she was given the name Margaret, after her maternal great-grandmother and her father’s mother, and Abigail after her maternal aunt. As I grew older and realized the importance of the story my grandmother was telling, I prodded with more questions. This was the beginning of Jubilee, which took her thirty years to write. While I was still hearing my grandmother tell old slavery-time stories and incidents from my mother’s life, I promised my grandmother that when I grew up I would write her mother’s story.¹

Her early teachers in New Orleans had sung her praises. Until she left for Chicago to complete her final two years of college, Walker had lived in the South her entire life. Reading at three, writing her first poems at eight, graduating from high school at fourteen, publishing her first essay at sixteen, writing For My People at twenty-one, and winning the nation’s top literary award at twenty-six, Walker was as extraordinary as the era in which she was born. A child prodigy, it seems apt to call her, Walker knew by the time she was five years old that she wanted to become a writer.² She entered school and made herself a vow. Everything she did would prepare her for a writing career. Walker recalled her early life being filled with opportunities to experience the joy of reading and trying to write, even though poetry eluded her at first:

I was a small child only ten years of age. I must have already felt even earlier that although I loved books and especially poetry, there was something mysterious about the process and only the elite were elected to be poets. So my first composition at age ten was prose. I wrote a Thanksgiving piece for my seventh grade English class and I still remember how it began, Picture to yourself a band of pilgrims.³

The four Walker children were taught the life of the mind. Sigismund, who distinguished himself as one of the best-trained ministers of his time, was keenly intellectual, bent on transmitting his affinity for books, ethics and philosophy, and his belief in the power of the rational to establish one’s place in the world. Margaret, who looked like her mother, wanted most to be like her father. When it became clear to Marion, herself an accomplished musician, that of the two girls only Mercedes had the propensity for music, she was eager to cultivate her older daughter’s literary abilities. Marion urged young Walker to write, circulated the resulting work to vanity presses, and actually paid for the first poems to appear in print.

To become a poet, a novelist, a scholar—as her parents intended and as she herself desired—meant rigorous and continuous training. Reading books from her father’s library brought with it his bias: nineteenth- and twentieth-century British classics were more familiar to him than the fledgling American literature she would later come to love. As the oldest, she was also assigned the task of preparing outlines for her father’s sermons, a habit that allowed her to become intimately familiar with the Bible and contemporary theological views. Years later, Walker remarked,

When I went to school, I read history books that glorified the white race and described the Negro either as a clown and a fool or at best capable of very hard work in excessive heat. I discovered the background of chattel slavery behind this madness of race prejudice. Once we were slaves and now we are not, and the South remains angry. But when I went home to the good books and the wonderful music and the gentle, intelligent parents, I could see no reason for prejudice on the basis of a previous condition of servitude.⁴

The gentle, intelligent parents that Walker remembered held firmly to the traditional values in their religious and home life. They observed the strictest standards of social behavior, believing that high morals signified a good Christian and, in the case of their two daughters, defined a virtuous woman. They believed, too, as most high-achieving blacks did at the turn of the twentieth century, that racial uplift was directly tied to literacy and would result in social mobility and economic progress. The Walkers looked for and took advantage of the opportunity to advance themselves, and saw to it that their children did the same. Each move the family made, from Birmingham to Meridian to New Orleans, represented upward mobility. Sigismund went back to get his Master’s in Theology from Northwestern, which earned him a permanent teaching position at New Orleans University. Marion returned to evening school and completed her college education so that she could teach music. The family set high expectations for their children: Margaret would be a writer; Mercedes would go to conservatory; Gwendolyn and Sigismund Jr. (Brother, they called him) would follow the parents and become teachers.

If Sigismund Walker’s high regard for the life of the mind and Marion Walker’s passion for music and the arts supported a carefully constructed bourgeois environment for the family, it was Grandmother Dozier who brought a different sensibility to bear on the young writer. Grandmother Dozier was not only the immediate link to an African American slave past, but she personified traditions—both oral and aural—that Walker would learn to transform and call her own. To understand rationally the profound and subtle significance of racial memory—as represented by her grandmother—became the test of Walker’s ability as a writer. It was therefore her grandmother’s voice that she associated with her first acts of cultural recovery, her grandmother’s memory that became a tool for regaining and reconstructing her own family history as a communal history of African Americans. As she grew older, she grew increasingly more conscious of developing her own voice, one that would both incorporate and transcend that of her grandmother. She viewed her ability to speak with her ability to exercise control over her environment. When she was puzzled about the contradictions she saw in the world around her, she could comfortably use her imagination to create the world another way. In time, Walker came to understand that her vocation was not just to be a writer but to permit her voice to be the instrument of reconciliation; she would become her people’s memory.

That voice found its first major articulation in poetry, a choice that gave her control over an intimate and personal process and that challenged her ability to deconstruct and reconstruct a wide range of narratives, those she heard as well as those she lived. The lyric poems, sonnets, ballads, and narratives, just as the later novel, became a series of discursive affirmations of a humanistic vision. What she had learned by growing up in the South enlarged her frame of reference by anchoring the racial experience in a distinctly southern context. It fueled her imagination and fed her intellect, providing an opportunity to envision the world other than the way it was.

Although some of the earliest poems are lost, the first phase of Walker’s professional poetry career dates back to her pre-Chicago experience. In 1932, in her last year at New Orleans University, she met Langston Hughes. On a tour of the South, Hughes read at her parents’ college, under the sponsorship of the Lyceum program there. Walker’s dream of becoming a writer took a giant leap forward when she met Hughes. Boldly she went up to him after his reading, pressed her poetry into his hands, and waited anxiously for his reply. Hughes was stunned; he knew the excited seventeen-year-old had talent and told her so. To Walker’s parents, he made his now famous remark, Get her out of the South. Two more years would pass before Walker would take a major first step in her publishing career. It happened in Chicago.

Walker went to Chicago to continue her education at Northwestern. Testing her wings in a northern white institution rather than the traditional black institution like Howard or Fisk affirmed the family’s sense of their daughter’s enormous potential … and their desire to push the racial barriers down a bit further. There were other reasons as well. Northwestern was a family tradition. Her father had done his graduate education there, as had her favorite teacher at Gilbert Academy. More importantly, Northwestern was affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal church (later the United Methodist Church), and it attracted Methodist families from throughout the country, offering special financial arrangements to those with needs. The Walkers knew families with whom their daughters could stay, since blacks were not allowed housing on Northwestern’s campus.⁵

For two years Walker immersed herself in a highly competitive educational environment, ever aware that she was battling against a double sense of inferiority. Not only were African Americans generally thought to be intellectually inferior, but the southern system of education was also regarded as equally inferior. For Walker, nothing could be further from the truth. Her English professor there, E. B. Hungerford, must have been impressed by this tiny eighteen-year-old, more girl than woman, far more intelligent than her years. Walker was looking for a mentor, someone who could supervise the formal training she needed. Fully aware that a fairly solid middle-class background and superior early education had made her a thinking and highly motivated young woman, she was also steeped in the oral culture of the black South. She knew its folk-based rhythms and its ritualized behaviors. But Walker also knew that the voice of the South had to be the voice of change, of truthfulness, of strength and courage. It was in this voice that she would need to learn how to speak.

Under Hungerford, she learned all the forms of English poetry and the English metrical system; she learned how to do the scansion of a poem and memorized the versification patterns. She read the English poets, focusing on the Romantic writers, and developed a keen interest in Shakespearean sonnets, the odes of Shelley and Keats, and the long poems of Wordsworth, all important influences upon her future work. Hungerford had done something else for Walker, however, that she would never forget. He had managed to get her inducted into the Poetry Society of America.⁶ During her senior year, she had taken a second course from him: creative writing. She was gaining increasing confidence in her ability to write both poetry and prose. Hungerford was more than encouraging, and she, in turn, wanted his approval. When she turned in her poems to him along with her first three hundred pages of Jubilee, she went to his office to find out her grade. Thinking that she had failed miserably, she asked what she would have to do to get an A. Hungerford not only awarded her the highest grade in the course but provided her with a host of little magazines and poetry reviews, suggesting some places where she submit some of her work. One of the magazines was Poetry; its editor, Harriet Monroe, had been one of the speakers she heard at Northwestern. She secretly vowed that she would publish there.

In 1934, when Walker was eighteen, a junior at Northwestern, and looking for opportunities to publish, it was to an invitation by W. E. B. Du Bois that she first responded. He, too, had spoken at Northwestern. And when he suggested she send some of her poetry to him for Crisis, she leaped at the chance. Appropriately, Walker titled her first officially published poem Daydream:

I want to write.

I want to write the songs of [my] people.

I want to hear them singing melodies in the dark.

I want to catch the last floating strains

From their sob-stricken throats.

I want to frame their dreams into words,

Their souls into notes.

I want to catch their sunshine laughter in a bowl;

Fling dark hands to a darker sky

And fill them full of stars,

Then crush and mix such lights till they become

A mirrored pool of brilliance in the dawn.

Crisis, 1934⁷

Eleanor Traylor notes that this poem, Walker’s dawn song, … is a compelling … recitation, … a valediction at commencement, winning its audience through its elocution of the strategies of delight.⁸ The psalmlike quality of the poem indeed offers it as a meditation, a dedication, a public acknowledgment of poetic commitment. It was the beginning of her soul journey.

In the poem, a spiral of moments from a recaptured past charged with symbolic significance inspire a creative vision. Although it is a daydream, the poem emphasizes the movement from darkness (melodies in the dark; darker sky; stars) to light. Art is viewed as that experience that changes things, and it is rooted in one’s own culture. The poem offers a vision of possibility coupled with desire, symbolized by the repetition of I want, as the poet establishes the essence of a poetic vocation. The poet must utilize all sense of feeling, thought, knowledge, and history, not only to interpret racial and cultural signs but also to change the course of history (frame … dreams into words … souls into notes). The lyrical phrases, rhythmic flow, and alliterative quality that we associate with the poems in For My People and Prophets for a New Day are prefigured in this apprentice piece, as Walker sets up the characteristic tension between consciousness and experience, between human will and historical circumstance. The underlying song motif signifies the process of transformation in which all art is engaged.

The poem is evocative as it explodes and explains the musical motif. From this ritual of music (songs of my people; melodies in the dark), the author discerns that a new kind of music can emerge from the last floating strains / From sob stricken throats. Dark hands create from the fragments of a dark past (darker sky) that which becomes a mirrored pool of brilliance in the dawn. The poet is indebted to the past for the stars and sunshine laughter, which moves the poem deductively to a climax. The movement of discovery, from the general I want to write to the specific I want to write the songs of my people, suggests that art must be purposeful and located within a definite cultural matrix. Further specificity is called for as Walker identifies a collage of metaphors, the raw materials that she wants to catch … Then crush and mix. Invoking a routinely feminine activity as a site of artistic creation affirms the importance of the female writer. Walker, in this her first poem, has successfully inserted the female voice—her own voice—as she has synthesized various elements from the past to create a work of art.

Like Langston Hughes, whom she regarded as her mentor during their thirty-five-year friendship, Walker seemed to instinctively recognize the importance of drawing upon multiple traditions in her poetry. Hughes was innovative and experimental in his use of voice and imagery to construct poetic forms appropriate for and consistent with black historical reality. Walker invokes the dynamism of southern racial history by juxtaposing the pain and sadness emerging from historical memory with the joy and excitement of cultural recovery. The experience is neither transcended nor forgotten but is transformed into art. This revisioning of the dominant cultural narrative of black history is essentially a modernist project for Walker, whose Christian humanism could easily accommodate both American and African American poetic traditions. The philosophical bent of her father and her New England–trained high school instructors bequeathed to her the tradition of Emersonian transcendentalism and romantic individualism, stressing the continuity between the self and nature. Twentieth-century American poetry instruction in the first decades of the century also acknowledged the Whitmanesque tradition, which locates the sacred in ordinary human experience. Rigorous instruction in the classical forms of poetry, which Walker undertook at Northwestern, and the practice in the modernist forms she received in the Writers Program at Iowa gave her the sophistication and experience she needed to refine her voice. But Walker was ever comfortable with the Bible, where her instruction in literature had begun, and she found few places where the imagery and controlled cadences from the Bible could not be integrated. Into this mix must be added one other influential figure: Sterling Brown. Brown made it possible to comprehend black vernacular culture without tying it to the plantation dialect poetry of the past. Inspired by Hughes and Brown, therefore, Walker could easily expand upon received traditions and rename them at the same time.

By the time Walker graduated from college in 1935, just weeks after she turned twenty, she felt that her studies had served her well. What she took from her classes in poetry was an appreciation for the poet’s ability to evoke human emotion within highly structured frameworks. When she looked to black poetry, she saw some similar structures, except that it honored a greater juxtaposition between written and oral expression and between the individual and the collective voice. Because she had grown up amid some of the most powerful expressions of human feeling imaginable, Walker had little difficulty recognizing the poetic sensibility inherent within black culture. With the South embedded in her memory, and the weight of her own personal and social history bearing down on her soul, Walker left Northwestern but remained in Chicago to honor her commitment to herself and her art.

Then began a period of Walker’s life unlike any other. Suddenly the world looked very different from the one she had known at Northwestern. Even in that less-than-cordial environment, her education was being paid for, and she had her work and a professor who believed in her. Now on her own, she had to earn a living for herself. A career as a writer seemed to be dwarfed by the contemporary economic reality. Alone and unemployed, she began to comprehend the meaning of the Great Depression. An important poem, People of Unrest and Hunger, evolved as a response to the perceived hopelessness of poverty. Like so many others in Chicago and throughout the country, she wanted to feel hope and sought to counter the intensity of a nation’s hunger and loss. When placed within the context of Walker’s complete canon, this poem appears atypical. Although the theme is reflected in the Walkeresque juxtapositions that became her trademark—the love for the natural landscape is contrasted with the social landscape with accompanying feelings of love and hate—the form is not:

Stare from your pillow into the sun.

See the disk of light in shadows.

Through fingers of morning Day is growing tall.

People of unrest and hunger

Stare from your pillow into the sun.

Cry with a loud voice after the sun.

Take his yellow arms and wrap them ’round your life.

Be glad to be washing in the sun.

Be glad to see.

The poem shows the awkwardness of Walker’s early experiments. Trying to reverse the pattern she tried in Daydream, the poem charges ahead after the title is announced, speaking directly to the people of unrest and hunger. Without setting the personal context, the poem emphasizes action as the poet assumes a certain authority over those to whom she speaks. The choice of the second person creates too much distance between the speaker and the reader, and while it is boldly affirmative, it becomes so through pronouncements. The logic of self-discovery apparent in Daydream or of cultural recovery as seen in Southern Song is lost. Instead, People of Unrest and Hunger shows a stiff lyricism, the statements undeveloped as the meaning is revealed. Each line is an independent thought, unconnected to the previous one, as we experience the metaphors (disk of light; fingers of morning; yellow arms). What Walker has attempted—to shift emphasis away from the material reality of poverty by offering compensation from nature—overstates the possibility of relief from human desperation through blind faith. The poet’s effort to offer solace to the poor seems dismissive and insensitive at best, even though the poem ends by forecasting a better day ahead, Be glad to see. On the other hand, if this piece is viewed as an apprentice work showing experimentation with voice, Walker must have realized its effect. She discontinued her use of the second person in her later work, preferring instead to find more effective ways to maintain the connection between herself as poet and the reader as other as well as between the spirit of the inner world and the reality of the outer world.

The Depression became a critical marker for Walker and a host of American and African American writers. While Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the U.S. Congress responded with a massive federal program intended to speed the recovery and restore hope to the nation, the popular response was more radical and explicit. Violent demonstrations in New York, Detroit, Los Angeles, the South, and Chicago contrasted with the decorum