{"id":153000,"date":"2026-07-07T08:00:16","date_gmt":"2026-07-07T12:00:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=153000"},"modified":"2026-07-06T08:42:04","modified_gmt":"2026-07-06T12:42:04","slug":"happy-birthday-poet-margaret-walker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/?p=153000","title":{"rendered":"“There\u2019s a difference between writing about something and living through it. I did both.” — poet\/novelist Margaret Walker"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nPhoto by Carl Van Vechten<\/i><\/p>\n

Margaret Walker was born in 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama. Her parents were interesting accomplished people, and her childhood was filled with literature and music. Her father gave her a love of heavy-hitters like Schopenhauer, classic English literature, all poetry, and her mother steeped her in music, ragtime, and read poetry outloud, from early African-American writers like Paul Dunbar (my post about him here<\/a>) to Shakespeare. Walker’s great-grandmother was a slave in Georgia, and she heard stories about this from her grandmother. The diversity of all of these influences poured into Margaret Walker’s own work. She was a kid when the Harlem Renaissance started, and she read them all. She started writing poetry and submitting it for publication.<\/p>\n

Her first collection, For My People<\/i> won the Yale Younger Poets prize (she was the first Black woman to win the prize.) <\/p>\n

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\nThe title poem is perhaps one of her most famous (it’s printed below). It’s an anthem. The collection is filled with memorable character sketches, a portrait of a whole diverse community of people. “People” has its regular meaning, and then it has its higher meaning, as an identity marker – A people, MY people. She writes about legendary African-American figures, like John Henry and Stagger Lee. <\/p>\n

What Walker considered her life’s work, and she worked on it for thirty years, was the historical novel Jubilee<\/i>, published in 1966. Jubilee<\/i> was about a slave family, based on the stories her grandmother used to tell her. Walker also did extensive research into the period. The novel spans many years, from the antebellum era, through the Civil War, through the chaos of Reconstruction. I have not read Jubilee<\/i>, although I remember it being on the little display on the table in the main room of the library where I worked after school in high school. It has a very memorable cover. So this is an oversight on my part. I’ve read her poetry (I have For My People<\/i>), but not Jubilee<\/i>. It was an important book (recently released in a 50th anniversary edition), and a commercial success, important because it was black history written by a black person, not through the eyes of a white writer. Black experience is centralized. Of course, though, when the book came out many white critics compared it to Gone With the Wind<\/i>, as in “It’s the OTHER side of Gone With the Wind<\/i>!” OR, even worse, criticizing her for upholding some myth of Southern antebellum life, in the same way Gone With the Wind<\/i> did. The NERVE. Margaret Walker was so annoyed by this she wrote a couple of pieces combatting the comparison. <\/p>\n

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\nMargaret Walker was a professor of literature for almost the entirety of her life. A major figure in 20th century African-American literature. <\/p>\n

Here are a couple of her poems. And I promise I will read Jubilee<\/i>.<\/p>\n

For My People<\/strong><\/big>
\nFor my people everywhere singing their slave songs
\n repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
\n and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
\n unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
\n unseen power;<\/p>\n

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
\n gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
\n washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
\n hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
\n dragging along never gaining never reaping never
\n knowing and never understanding;<\/p>\n

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

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

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

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
\n Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
\n Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
\n people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
\n people\u2019s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and
\n land and money and something\u2014something all our own;<\/p>\n

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

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

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

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

“Sit-Ins”<\/strong><\/big>
\nGreensboro, North Carolina, in the Spring of 1960<\/em><\/p>\n

You were the first brave ones to defy their dissonance of hate<\/p>\n

With your silence<\/p>\n

With your willingness to suffer<\/p>\n

Without violence<\/p>\n

Those first bright young to fling your names across pages<\/p>\n

Of new southern history<\/p>\n

With courage and faith, convictions, and intelligence<\/p>\n

The first to blaze a flaming path for justice<\/p>\n

And awaken consciences<\/p>\n

Of these stony ones.<\/p>\n

Come, Lord Jesus, Bold Young Galilean<\/p>\n

Sit Beside this Counter, Lord, with Me!<\/p>\n

\u201cWriters should not write exclusively for black or white audiences, but most inclusively. After all, it is the business of all writers to write about the human condition, and all humanity must be involved in both the writing and in the reading.\u201d — Margaret Walker<\/big><\/p>\n

 
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\nThank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account<\/a>. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0<\/a>, if you’d like to subscribe.<\/em> <\/small><\/p>\n