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Margaret Walker
- University of Illinois Press
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Margaret Walker (July 7, 1915–november 30, 1998) Maryemma graham A few months after a little known group of radical black artists and intellectuals assembled to meet on Chicago’s South Side in 1936, the youngest member was inspired to write her most famous poem, “For My People.” It stunned the group, since the author, Margaret Walker, was a virtual unknown and barely twentytwo . Five years later, fresh from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Walker made history as the first African American to claim the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Those who knew Walker saw a tiny determined woman who broke more barriers by the time she was thirty than most people do in a lifetime. Because she had such early success and for more than sixty years produced work that was alternately brilliant, revolutionary, trendsetting, and inspiring, her shadow falls over much of African American literature without being clearly defined. She was a writer of poetry, fiction, essays, and a biography, all while making her living as a teacher and mentor to generations of students and writers, especially women. When she was no longer young, she became an organizer and an activist, which made her central to the rise of a visible African American literary culture in the 1960s. The range and extent of Walker’s work represents an unusual blend of classical and modernist forms and vernacular traditions, appearing in influential journals beginning in the early 1930s. She became best known as a poet, but the publication of her 1966 novel Jubilee added significantly to her reputation. It was the first modern work to reclaim the slave narrative tradition that has profoundly influenced contemporary black fiction. Walker’s literary legacy is her insistence upon intellectual depth, a certain black sound and feeling tone, and agency, the components of an aesthetic aimed at liberation and transformation. Margaret Abigail Walker was the oldest of four children born to Sigismund and Marion Dozier Walker. Her birth on July 7, 1915, in a private home in Mason City, a poor community in the West End area of Birmingham, Alabama, was no predictor of her future. The kinetic reality of this all-black Southern community provoked a strong spiritual connection and intellectual identity that Walker re- 298 • MaryeMMa grahaM tained throughout her life. Sigismund Walker, a Jamaican immigrant, was a formally educated minister, who served the United Methodist churches in Alabama and Mississippi until he began teaching at New Orleans University. In “Epitaph for My Father” published in October Journey (1973), Walker remembered “the noble princelike man . . . teaching daily, preaching Sundays / Tailoring at night to give us bread. / His days were all the same—/ No time for fun.”1 A determined intellectual, Sigismund Walker was a quiet man, homesick for Jamaica, who gave his daughter an intellectual curiosity that accounted for her restless and rebellious youth. In contrast, Marion Dozier Walker, a talented young musician, was an assertive, demanding woman who regretted having given up a promising career to become a minister’s wife. Even though the Walkers were no better off financially than most of their barely literate neighbors, they identified strongly as New Negroes whose proudest possessions, according to Walker, were her mother’s piano and her father’s books. Walker began school by accompanying her mother to her job as a music teacher. She moved so quickly through the primary grades that by eleven she was ready to enter high school. The family had moved to New Orleans, where her father began teaching college full time, and her mother opened a professional music studio. Walker was encouraged to write as a way to channel the uneasiness she felt as a somewhat sickly, precocious child, whose physical underdevelopment seemed to match her delayed social development. Marion Walker feared a “wild streak” in her oldest daughter and wanted to keep her out of harm’s way. Walker was encouraged to write, as long as it was something to keep her busy, her parents believed. It quickly became, however, a preoccupation. By the time she finished high school at fourteen, Walker had begun to see herself as part of a chosen generation entrusted with the future of the race. The earliest extant essay, published when she was a sixteen-year-old college student at New Orleans University, gives a clear sense of her social awareness and the exacting nature of her judgment. “If we decide to cast our lot in the places where our native talent and equipment can be...