JANUARY 10 

In Memoriam: Margaret Walker 

Margaret Walker Alexander died in December at the age of eighty-three. A poet and novelist, black woman, minister's daughter, and an educator, she was born in Birmingham, Alabama, grew up in New Orleans, and went to Northwestern University and the University of Iowa in the difficult years of the Depression, Her first book, For My People, won the Yale Younger Poet's award in 1942. Here in her memory is the title poem from the book:

For My People 

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; 

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking and playhouse and concert and store and hair and Miss Choomby and company; 

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn to know the reasons why and the answers to and the people who and the places where and the days when, in memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we were black and poor and small and different and nobody cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood; 

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and play and drink their wine and religion and success, to marry their playmates and bear children and then die of consumption and anemia and lynching; 

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy people filling the cabarets and taverns and other people's pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and land and money and something-something all our own; 

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied and shackled and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures who tower over us omnisciently and laugh; 

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in the dark of churches and schools and clubs and societies, associations and councils and committees and conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by false prophet and holy believer; 

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding, trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people, all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations; 

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth.
Let a beauty full of healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now rise and take control. 

    The poem was written in 1937 when she was twenty-two years old, and it became, a quarter of a century later, a kind of anthem of the civil rights movement. One of the things that's moving to me about it is the way that the young poet has found her voice in the Midwestern poetry of the period, especially Carl Sandburg's. Another is its feel for the lives of black people in the middle of the Depression and the way it gathers up the language and the anger and the idealism of the American radicals of the 1930s. Also the way the last lines of the poem use the language of progressives of the 1930s to call the generation of the 1950s and 1960s into being.
    When Margaret Walker graduated from Northwestern in 1935 at the age of nineteen, she found work as a newspaper reporter and a social worker and joined the Federal Writers Project, where she met other Chicago writers like Gwendolyn Brooks, Nelson Algren, and Richard Wright. It was in those years and among this amazing collection of writers that the poem was written. "For My People" was published in Poetry, which was, of course, a Chicago magazine. Walker left Chicago in 1939 to get a master's degree in creative writing at the Iowa Writer's Workshop. It was her Iowa master's thesis that became her first, prize-winning book. She left Iowa in 1941 to teach at several small colleges in the South. She married in 1943 (and produced three of her four children in the next five years). In 1949 she took a job at Jackson State College in Jackson, Mississippi, and she taught there for thirty years, interrupted in the early 1960s by a return to Iowa, where she got a doctorate and worked on her long novel of black experience in the Civil War, Jubilee, which was published to wide admiration in 1968. She returned to poetry in her later years. She also wrote a biographical memoir of her friendship with Richard Wright and created the Institute for the Study of Black Life at Jackson State. In so many ways an exemplary life.
    Her poems are collected in This Is My Century: New and Selected Poems, University of Georgia Press.

Robert Hass: Now & Then [1999]