SOURCE: Walker, Margaret, and Joanne V. Gabbin. “Conversation: Margaret Walker Alexander and Joanne V. Gabbin.” In The Furious Flowering of African American Poetry, pp. 239-51. Charlottesville, Va.: University Press of Virginia, 1999.

[In the following interview, originally conducted in 1996 and published in 1999, Walker discusses such subjects as influences on her writing, social protest poetry, the postmodernists, and her own humanistic viewpoint.]

[Gabbin]: Fifty-four years ago, you won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for your first volume of poetry, For My People, making it the first collection by an African American writer to win a national award. Now you are the dean of African American writers and respected and revered for your work. When did you begin writing and who were the people who most influenced your burgeoning literary interests?

[Walker]: I started writing poetry when I was eleven years old. My father told my mother, “Pay her no attention, don't get excited; it's just a puberty urge,” which made me very angry. By the time I had filled the date book that he gave me I was at Northwestern; I think I'd written in those three hundred and sixty five pages by the time I was eighteen. I told him, “Do you still think this is a puberty urge?” He said, “I guess you're going to write as long as you live.” When someone asked me the other day, “When are you going to retire?” I said, “Retire from what? Retire from life?” I'd retired from teaching, and I said, “I will retire from writing when I'm dead. I won't write anymore after I die, but until I do I'll keep trying.”

I think my mother's music and my father's books were my first inspiration, but I had wonderful teachers—mostly women—throughout the grade school years, and then in high school a few men. My teachers were always encouraging me. I had little composition books that I wrote in and I wrote poetry in class, but I managed to answer the questions when they asked me: I just looked up and said “so-and-so” and started writing again.

I think the earliest I can remember reading the Harlem Renaissance writers was when I was eleven. The Harlem Renaissance took place when I was a child. I saw a little booklet, Four Lincoln Poets—including Langston Hughes and Waring Cuney and Edward Silvera, when I was eleven. By the time I was sixteen I saw my very first living writer. I told my father and mother that when the white president said he didn't think people would pay a dollar to listen to a Negro read poetry, not even a few people, that he had to have Langston come to New Orleans. So we wrote eight hundred letters and we filled the auditorium of that campus. He must have sold hundreds of dollars of books that night. All the books that he had stacked up went away. I will never forget it, because it was the first time I had ever seen a living black writer. It was important for me, and it meant the beginning of my whole career.

Langston was a friend until 1967 when he died. I had seen him just the October before, when I went to New York just after Jubilee was published. Langston was the kind of person who would write you a letter of congratulations. He wrote when For My People was published, he wrote when Jubilee was published, and I still have those letters. I got a letter from Countee Cullen saying, “I understand you are one of these unusual poets who can read the poetry as well as write it.”

He said, “The next time you come to New York, my wife and I would like you to come to dinner.” I have that letter. I went to dinner and there I saw Claude McKay for the first time. Langston of course was there, and there were others. That was really the beginning of my professional career, with the publication of For My People. I had another wonderful experience at Northwestern when I met the great Dr. W. E. B. DuBois. He came to speak at Northwestern, and afterward I had the courage and the nerve to go up and tell him, “I write poetry, too.” He said, “Send me some.” I said, “Where shall I send it?” He said, “To the Crisis.” I did, and the next year in May, while I was still a teenager, the poem came out. Some of my friends who are very kind critics say that that is the poem I have fulfilled with my whole career.

I want to write
I want to write 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-torn 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.

That's wonderful—“a mirrored pool of brilliance in the dawn.” “I Want to Write,” also called “Daydream.”

It's had three or four different titles. Every time it's published, there's another title. I got tired of “Daydream”—I thought, “Oh, I don't want to use ‘Daydream’”—and then I saw a book Songs of My People, and I said, “Oh, there's my poem: ‘I want to Write the Songs of My People.’”

You mentioned Langston Hughes, and you also mentioned DuBois, but there's one other person you met when you were young.

Well, I saw Langston when I was sixteen, I saw DuBois when I was seventeen, and I met Richard Wright when I was twenty. Those three men have had tremendous influence on my thinking and on my writing. They were not members of my family and they were not my classroom teachers, but I read them. I read Langston, I read DuBois, I read Richard Wright. They were men that I always thought of in terms of a great protest movement of black people. People who were constantly writing for the sake of our people—not for art's sake, but for the people's. I think they influenced me more than any others. I had wonderful teachers, yes; and my parents encouraged me. I was fortunate to that extent. But those three men represented for me everything that we try to do when we write. They represent the humanity of black people; the fact that every individual is a human being. Nobody can be more than a human being, and nobody can be less. That is what I taught my students all those years.

A major theme in your poetry, in your fiction, your essays is freedom. Stephen Henderson says in his seminal work Understanding the New Black Poetry that the overarching theme of our literature is liberation, and you consistently use that theme in your writing. Why have you stayed with it?

When I was about eleven years old—I guess eleven and a half—I went to high school, and one of the first things I studied then was the French Revolution. I had already read about the American Revolution, but for some reason Patrick Henry and George Washington didn't excite me.

But when I read about the French Revolution—Robespierre, Danton, Marat—I was excited. I heard them saying freedom—“égalité, fraternité, liberté.” It became a motto for my life, and it began when I was only eleven. I was much older when I read about the Russian Revolution. In school they talked about “the barbaric Russians”—“the Communists,” they called them. They had pictures in the book that showed you these people with shining whiskers and they were devils; they told you these people were no-good people.

One of the first books I read after meeting Wright was Ten Days That Shook the World. If you ever read that book and you are not moved to think in terms of freedom for people who were living under the terror of the czars, even going beyond the Kerensky government—something is wrong if you aren't affected by it. I was tremendously impressed, and when I read the short stories that Wright wrote in Uncle Tom's Children, you've got the essence of what we were in the thirties, the writers of social protest. That's what he was saying in everything. Baldwin and the postmodernists look down on those writers of social protest. They're not popular anymore, and our black men are not writing social protest; they're doing … what is it, “deconstruction”?

“Deconstruction of the language,” “tropes,” “analysis of texts” …

I've been reading some of the postmodernists. One man is a marvel with language, and he doesn't ever have a plot. He doesn't believe in a plot. He says, “Language is everything.” The writer knows that the word is powerful, that it has more than emotional and intellectual meaning. But I am still a student of the old school of fiction; I believe you have to tell a story. Postmodernists are very wonderful writers, but they'd be better if they had a plot.

You know, I've been trying—and I know my story's probably like a lot of other people's—for many years to write down a story that's really important in my life. In fact, it's the story of how I met my husband … I've been trying to write this story, about our meeting, and every time I put down the facts, they don't come alive. They're just there; it's not a story. How do you do that? I know other people want to know.

That was my problem with Jubilee for years and years and years. I wrote those first 300 pages when I was nineteen at Northwestern. Then I looked at that stuff and I said, “Oh, this is not right.” I didn't know what was wrong with it, but nobody there could tell me what to do. In the fifties I went up to Yale, and I worked with Norman Holmes Pearson, who had coedited the Oxford Book of Verse with Auden. When I left in May I was still not understanding what to do, and Professor Parson said, “You're telling the story but it doesn't come alive. You're telling it but you're not showing it.” I left Yale deciding I would not stay there and try to get a Ph.D., that I'd go back where I learned to put the poetry together and had written the ballads for the first time. I'd throw my hat in and see if Paul Engle would let me come in, because we fussed all the time.

Anyway, when I went back, I spent a summer working under a man who taught me how to do it. His name was Verlin Cassill and he had a little book on writing fiction. I think he's done more potboilers than prize winners, but he absolutely is the most marvelous teacher of fiction I ever encountered. He told me, “You've got to read Chekhov. Not the plays”—I had read The Cherry Orchard and Three Sisters—“but read the short stories and see how he puts incidents together.” What you're talking about is what was one of Wright's greatest assets. That was the ability to dramatize the material. What do we mean? Well, what is a plot? A plot is a series of related incidents that tell a story. Through the actual dramatization of material, taking the facts and making fiction by showing the action, by actually getting the person reading it to see the action. What is going on? What are they saying, and what does it mean? If they're walking, if they're thinking, if they're acting—actually dramatizing that material means showing the story rather than telling the story.

I thought that I would never learn. I spent eight weeks before I could turn in to him the first chapter, the revised first chapter, of Jubilee as you know it. He said, “You got it.” I thought about: Here I was now in my late forties, and I'd been fooling around trying to learn that ever since I was nineteen years old. That's why it took so long. I did all the research, I read all the books, but until I learned how to create a scene I could not write fiction. Everybody's got a story. Everybody knows a story. Can you write the story without telling it by showing? It's not easy, and I recommend exactly who he recommended to me: Chekhov. Chekhov's stories show you line for line, page for page, what you have to do.

You know that I've worked with Sterling Brown's work for a long time, and I'm a devotee of the folk tradition. You remember Sterling Brown, don't you, out there? Sterling Brown of “Old Lem,” Sterling Brown of “Odyssey of Big Boy” and “Sister Lou.” Sterling Brown's work taught me a love for the folk tradition. I know that you are in that tradition as well, and I want you to tell us how you show your debt to that tradition in Jubilee and the other writing that you have done.

I think one of the first conversations I ever had with Richard Wright was on that folk tradition. Both of us were tremendously interested in what we thought at the time was limited to the South, but it isn't limited to the South. It's a part of black life all over this country. It's the way we live, it's the religion we believe, it's our spirit, our art, it's our music … it's our daily living, that folk life.

I know you have read Zora Hurston and have read Richard Wright. I don't think Wright ever wanted to admit that Zora had affected him, because he was so chauvinistic that he wouldn't want to say that a woman did that. But she did. You open Richard Wright and read, “Your mama don't wear no drawers.” Where did he get it? He got it from Zora. Sterling writes about the working man, the roustabout, the stevedore. Langston writes about the culture of the cities, particularly Harlem; the menials, the maids, the cooks and washerwomen. But all of us know that when we speak in the vernacular of black people we have gone to the root of black life. We are dealing with everyday living, and everyday believing, and the everyday actions of black people. “I talked to old Lem, and old Lem said: They do the so-and-so, and we carry the cross … and they get the money.”

“And they don't come by ones …”

Walker (and others): “And they don't come by twos; they come by tens.”

In your essay “The Humanistic Tradition of Afro-American Literature,” you developed a line of thinking that I think is essential to appreciate the continuity and the connections in our literature. I'm going to read this: you say that “this tradition began in the ancient Oriental world, in black Africa, in Egypt, some 3,500 years ago with The Book of the Dead. The literature of black people, like that of all people, grew out of the cosmogony and the cosmology that developed around the Nile River, and not from Greece or Rome at the end of the ancient world, nor in the Middle Ages with the European Renaissance, nor with the modern expansion of the European man. But black America is tied to her ancient African heritage in all her physical and cultural manifestations.” I want you to talk about that heritage.

I think that very few English teachers in the Western world have a tendency to tell their students that the descent into the underworld did not begin with Homer.

She's signifying, isn't she, Baraka?

They failed to say that this is an epic convention that began with The Book of the Dead; the pyramids and the coffin texts in Egypt were far earlier than anything Greece or Rome produced. You know, white professors in the white universities—when you talk about pre-Homeric epics, they say “Was there any such thing?” They don't believe that, because they never read The Book of the Dead, and it's very hard for them to bring themselves to realize that these so-called savages understood how to go from this world to the next world without the white man telling them how.

Back in 1975 you did an interview with Charles Rowell. In that interview he asked you about writing a biography of Richard Wright and he said he thought there was no person in this country more suited, more prepared to write that biography than you. Of course, we all know you wrote that biography: Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. However, because of the sensitive and controversial material, it cost you dearly writing that book. I want you to share with us some of the problems, some of the issues, that you dealt with.

Well, I tell, in the book, of the six areas that he wished to deal with, and the problems were all growing out of that. The first problem was that this man was a card-carrying Communist for twelve years, and if I proceeded to talk about this man's Communism, how was I going to know anything about it when I was never a Communist? That was the first problem.

The second problem was dealing with interracial marriage. In the friendship that Wright and I had together—that was a very close friendship—there was never a romance, never anything like a romance between us. Early in the friendship, he told me that if he ever married, he'd marry a white woman. Since I didn't look white, I knew he wasn't going to marry me.

Then there was the question of money. Richard Wright had two Book-of-the-Month Club selections. Well, did he have a lot of money? Did he make a lot of money? He lived in Europe in a very bourgeois fashion, in a nice apartment; he traveled around the world. But did he ever have a lot of money? That was another question. How did he get along with those agents and publishers and people who helped him to reach a great pinnacle of fame in this country, and in Europe, too?

Then there was the question of the Jewish-Arab conflict. If you started talking about, “This man is a pan-Africanist …” Pan-Africanism is really a black thing: most Jewish people are opposed to it, and he was married to two Jewish women. Now how are you going to deal with that?

And finally … I have to tell this little bit and then I'll be through with it. Wright's family—his second wife, Ellen—was bitterly opposed to my publishing the book. She spent close to a hundred thousand dollars and wrote letters to publishers like Harper's telling them, “Don't give her any permission to use any of his material,” and threatened three publishers with a suit: first Howard [University Press], and then Dodd Mead, and finally Warner, and told them that as sure as I published the book she was going to sue.

Howard was scared to death; they said they'd had enough suits, and they didn't need any more. Dodd Mead was perfectly willing, but they didn't have any money. So finally Warner said, “Oh, we don't mind taking her on.” They knew when they took the manuscript that Ellen Wright was going to sue, which meant that I didn't have the authority from the family to write the biography, as Michel Fabre had. Six months after the book appeared—it appeared in November of '88, and in May of '89 she sued. One of our very dear friends who's a critic, and who's been teaching in some of our white universities, said he felt sorry for me, because that was that woman's husband, and I couldn't do anything if she didn't want it done. I got word of what he said, and I had nerve enough to do what I had to do.

I wonder … we live through lots of things, and I thought in 1977 and '78 … well, Alex Haley published a book in 1976 called Roots, and I thought that thing was going to kill me. I thought I was going to die under Roots. Everybody talked about that jealous woman wanting this man's money, an agitated old woman; how she ought to go somewhere and sit down, and how “that dumb woman thinks she's going to do thus-and-so,” and I said to my husband and my sons, “I don't know what I've done to anybody to deserve this. Anybody can pick up a book of Roots, and pick up a book of Jubilee, and they can see what's happening there. All you got to do is read it: it's there.” You know, we have a saying in the black community: “We'll understand it better by and by.” Well, when I wrote the Richard Wright book, and Ellen Wright sued Warner and Margaret Walker, I “understood it better by and by.”

I had read every book I could find on fair use and copyright infringement. I told Charlie Harris, “That book is clean, there's nothing wrong there, there's nothing in there that anybody can say I've used without saying that I have a right to do this.” That's what the lawyers said, and when it went to court that's what the court said. Then despite the fact that her lawyers and her children told her not to push it, she went to the appellate court and the lawyers in the appellate agreed with the lower court. One of them wrote an additional statement about it, which if you read the paperback copy of Daemonic Genius you'll see that the appellate court and this extra statement would all be there to explain, and I “understood it better by and by.” I couldn't understand why I had to live through the horrible ordeal of Roots. I know now. Without Roots, I never would have known what “fair use” meant.

In a 1993 interview with Maryemma Graham, you talk about the responsibility of the writer. You say, “The writer's responsibility is like God's. He's supposed to, or she's supposed to, show the way.”

Well, I meant by that not that we are divine to the extent that all human personality is not potentially divine. But I'm thinking in terms of the prophetic nature of the writer. The writer is like the prophet: he has to see the future by looking at the present. He has to understand that what's happened in the past is happening now, and will happen in the future. That is the role of the writer: to write about that future that you do not see, but that is evident in everything you do and hear. You know what's going to happen tomorrow because the seeds of it are happening today.

Talk about what's happening tomorrow. I know you love to write, and you're going to continue to write. What are your projects?

I saw a young lady here just before we began—Junette Pinckney. She was the person at CBS that had Charlie Rose have an interview with me when the Richard Wright book came out. He asked me, he said, “My, you've done all these things. What are your dreams? What do you dream about for the future?” I answered very flippantly, “All my dreams have already come true.” But I will add that some of the dreams are still in the making. I would like to return to the fiction, and I have three short novels—one about education, one about sociology of religion, and one a sequel to Jubilee. If I could live long enough I'd like to write those books.

We've been talking about your life as a writer, but we know there are so many other dimensions to your life; I think we'd be remiss if we didn't talk about your work as an activist. You say in I Dream a World and elsewhere that the three enemies of black women are racism, sexism, and fascism. How have you personally done battle with these three isms?

There are three examples of actions I took in civil rights and the community that did just that. In 1964, with the sponsorship of the NAACP, we sued to get the Jackson television station WLBT to operate with a staff that is 51 percent black. I was instrumental in changing the “confederate” history book to Challenge and Change by Sallis and Loewen. I am gratified to see my grandchildren using this book. I was also one of the first witnesses in the Ayers court trial to desegregate higher education in Mississippi. We consider ourselves loyal, good Americans, and to say that we live under a fascistic system is talking about going to the devil and living in Hell. But fascism is what we have. We live with it every day. It's in every part of our lives. It's not just the judicial system, it's not just that awful Supreme Court; it's not just Congress and that man what's his name?—Newt Gingrich. It's all of it, and what we have to understand is, that's what we live with. It's racism, it's sexism, it's fascism, and it's the role—and the right—of the black writer to put it on paper, and tell the truth.

In 1988 our literary diva, the brilliant Eleanor Traylor, did an article, “Measures Crashing Through: Margaret Walker, Poem of the Century,” In this article she equates you with Ogun, or the first artist or forger. And she talks about …

I didn't know what Ogun was. I had to go and look it up.

Margaret, I did, too. You know, Eleanor coins these words—“Ogunic.” She calls your voice Ogunic, and she says in Prophets for a New Day you equate biblical heroes with modern heroes.

Eighth-century prophets.

Yes. Who are those heroes, those modern heroes, for you?

Well, you know, we went through two revolutions: I don't know whether we got all we needed from either one. Dr. Martin Luther King caused us to see the end of legal segregation—whether you admit it or not, the civil rights movement really ended legal segregation. Then Malcolm X came along and he told us, “Make something of yourself—your manhood and your womanhood are the things out there that matter.” We changed our way of dress and our hair: we did everything to deny ourselves as purely Americans and show that we are African Americans. We learned a lot from both King and Malcolm X.

We lost three men through assassination. My neighbor Medgar Evers, killed the same year that the president of the United States was assassinated. Then we lost King by assassination, and we lost Malcolm X by assassination. What greater price can you pay for heroism? Who can you think of that deserves to be a hero who has not given his life for what he believes? They are our heroes. We have had women heroes too. My mother said something one day during the civil rights movement. She said, “You know, we had great women like Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth and Mary McLeod Bethune—all these women, but we could not get a revolution going until we had intelligent, intellectual men. The world didn't listen until they heard those men.”

Now, I know you're not going to say that I'm a woman-basher. I'm not a basher of men or a basher of women. I was married thirty-seven years to a wonderful man; I have two wonderful sons; my father was a wonderful man. I admire men as much as women. I think God intended us to be partners and to get along with each other.

All of us have our weaknesses and our strengths, and we have to strive to be better, to live out our humanity as we reach toward divinity. That is the spiritual destiny of us all.

I don't think we have as many heroes or she-roes as we should have. I think about all the black men in prison who are not in the classrooms, and how many of us work for nothing when we ought to be making dollars. We have a tendency to rise above ourselves and transcend our realities. We have a tendency to think if you scrub a floor, you're the floor. Scrubbing the floor doesn't mean you're the floor. I taught my students that it's as important to know how to make a good lemon meringue pie as it is to write a poem because there is dignity in all labor.

We cry out for heroes. You walk along the street and you see them every day, and you don't credit them with being heroes. If you live in the Deep South as I do, and you go to church or you go to school, you don't know whose money keeps it going, do you? It's that washerwoman's money. She's the one that does anything that she can do honestly to send her child to school. That's what we do every day; that's part of our life, that's our living. And the day we understand that is the day we'll step a little higher up the ladder.

After all of your years, and all that you've been through—wars and the civil rights movement; attacks on our community in terms of drugs and guns and AIDS; attacks on affirmative action; and the latest assault on our churches, the very heart of our community—somehow through it all, you seem to maintain a kind of faith in humanism; a faith in humanity. I want to know: what is it that keeps you hopeful?

I think that any day you believe that every human being has a spark of divinity within him, you will not destroy yourself by trying to destroy somebody else.

You will have to believe in the goodness of the future if you believe that we are constantly striving toward a real divinity. We are black people of spirit. That spirit is the basis of animism and ancestor worship in Africa. The African believed for a while in animism, and he said, “Spirit is in everything. It's in the water; it's in the grass and the trees; it's in the wind; and it's in us.” We have the greatest amount of spirit in us, and if we don't think positively, how can that spirit live?

Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander, thank you for your poetry, your writing, your essays; for the pool of brilliance that you've mirrored in this part of the world.

This conversation took place on July 2, 1996, at the Black Arts Festival in Atlanta. It was taped in front of an audience of more than two hundred people whose response to Margaret Walker's call was electric.