SOURCE: Walker, Margaret, and Lucy M. Freibert. “Southern Song: An Interview with Margaret Walker.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women's Studies 9, no. 3 (1987): 50-6.

[In the following interview, conducted in 1986 and published in 1987, Walker discusses her personal life and her working methods and compares herself with other Southern women writers.]

[Freibert]: You have been a writer, teacher, activist, homemaker, and cultural analyst. What is the unifying role in your life?

[Walker]: Well, I think that the feminine principle of being a daughter, a sister, a mother, and now a grandmother has been the motivating and inspiring agency. I think I said that first in a piece I wrote called “On Being Female, Black, and Free”—that being a woman is first, that when the doctor says “It's a she,” that's the first thing.

Would you talk about some of the people who have influenced you the most?

Well, my parents had the first influence on me. They were teachers. My mother taught music, and my father taught religion and philosophy. My father had taught in high schools before he taught in college; he had taught many different subjects. He was a fine English scholar, but he was first and foremost a theologian. Hearing my father give his sermons, watching him prepare them, and seeing him exemplify in his daily life what he preached had an effect on me. My mother was a musician—just hearing her play and hearing that music every day had a real influence on me. But equally important was my grandmother. When I think of how I grew up, I think of the three of them.

My teachers until I was almost college age were mostly women. I had only one male teacher in grade school, and then in high school I had three or four male teachers. When I was in college, my freshman English teacher was a woman, a very fine teacher who had graduated from Northwestern. She told my parents they should send me to Northwestern, where they had gone to school. And then when I was sixteen, I saw Langston Hughes for the first time. He was one of the first black male writers influential on me. … Then I went to Northwestern when I was seventeen, and I had no more women teachers. The only woman who taught me at Northwestern taught hygiene. I was surprised to discover that black women teaching in black colleges in the South had far more position, prestige, and status than white women teaching in northern coed universities. The black woman on the black college campus can be anything she wants to be, but the faculties of Northwestern and Iowa showed me the lower status of white women teachers.

Three black men influenced you?

My three black writer friends didn't teach me formally in school but influenced my work very much. I read Langston Hughes first when I was eleven years old, and I saw him when I was sixteen. I knew him for thirty-five years. He was a close friend and a real influence. W. E. B. Dubois, whom I also saw for the first time when I was about seventeen at Northwestern, published my first poem in a national magazine, Crisis. It was called “Daydream,” but it's now called “I Want to Write.” That was my dream—to write. And the third black man was Richard Wright, whom I met after I was out of college.

Did your parents directly encourage you to write?

Yes, they did. When I was twelve years old, my father gave me a daybook in which I could keep my poems, and told me to keep everything I wrote together, not to scatter my work. That motivated me to fill the book.

That became your journal, then?

Well, it wasn't really a journal. I started a journal when I was thirteen. My journals were kept in composition books. I think that I may be able to go back to them and use them for the autobiography. I have been blocking it out in my head and looking for a theme. I am sure that there will be passages from those journals that I will want to go back and remember and include in the autobiography.

Do you normally use materials from your journals in your literary works?

I think so, but it has been an unconscious thing. I was consciously writing journals. I wasn't consciously taking material from them to use in the books, except when I was working with the Richard Wright book. For that I went back to entries in my journals deliberately. I read his journals but wasn't allowed to quote directly from them. But I could quote from my own. The episode in which our friendship ended is recorded in the book in its entirety. I was a very young woman, in my very early twenties. As I look back on it now, the experience is as clear and concise and direct as I recorded it then. I have not changed a word in that journal entry. …

I am sure you are pleased to have the Wright book finished and to know that it will be coming out soon. Would you comment on the title you gave the book: Richard Wright: A Daemonic Genius.

I am using the Greek term “daemonic,” and using it in an aesthetic sense. The creative genius of Wright was not orphic, and it was not, shall I say, visionary like that of Blake. It was daemonic in the way that we speak of the shield of Achilles made by Haiphaestus as being daemonic. Daemonic genius is genius driven by devils or demons but not purely Satanic. Wright was also like the god maker, the person of character and personality like Pygmalion. It's that kind of daemonic. I am not calling him a devil, although I think his widow must believe that's what I'm up to.

Your relationship with Wright ended rather abruptly. According to one report, you said that Wright picked your brains and then dismissed you.

[laughing] Well, I think feminists will grab that, but wait a minute, let's stop there. People have made a great deal over the friendship and the breaking up, and I don't look back now with any regret. I have written the book with a great deal of hard work and some pleasure, and I hope that it is going to be available soon. I suppose that I may have gotten a great deal from the Wright friendship. I know he got a lot from me. Whether he picked my brain—he may have tried to—I doubt that he could have thoroughly picked my brain.

Would you discuss the other works that you have in progress? I saw a rather lengthy list in your file over at the Jackson State library. It starts with Minna and Jim.

That's the sequel to Jubilee. I have only blocked that out. I haven't done any work on it.

And Mother Broyer?

I'm working on that now. I've done a hundred pages, and I'm in the second section of that. It is laid in four cities: it starts in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans, moves to Los Angeles, California, and then to Harlem, New York, and ends on the West Side of Chicago. Mother Broyer spends the first twenty-two or three or maybe twenty-five years in New Orleans, then about ten or twelve years in Los Angeles, about a year, six to eight or ten, maybe twelve to eighteen months in New York, and then spends the rest of her life in Chicago.

Then there's This Is My Century.

This Is My Century is a book of my poetry. It is going to be the collected poetry. It will include five books: For My People, Prophets for a New Day, October Journey, This Is My Century, and A Poem for Farish Street.

And then you are working on the autobiography.

Yes, I have done a hundred pages on the autobiography, but I am going to have to rearrange and reorganize it in terms of the themes that I have in mind. …

Do you write on schedule, or do you just wait until the spirit moves you?

Well, I can write any time that I sit down to the typewriter or with my notebook. It depends on what I am writing. I really had a schedule that last year with Jubilee, in the last few months especially, but never before or since have I been able to get back to a schedule.

When you write poetry, do you carry the poem around in your head first, or do you start right out putting things on paper?

Regardless of the medium, whether you are a musician, a painter, a graphic artist, a plastic artist, or a sculptor, whether you are a writer or an architect, you begin the same way. Creative writing grows out of creative thinking, and nothing begins a work before the idea as a conceptualization; that is the beginning. All writers, all artists, all musicians, all people with creative talent begin with that creative thinking. They begin with conceptualization. You get an idea, and sometimes the whole process moves on mentally and unconsciously before it is given conscious artistic form, but the process begins with the idea.

Everything begins in the mind. You have an idea, and you may not know for a long time what form this idea is going to take or what you are going to say or how you are going to say it, but you have that first. For me it is intuitive. Some people are not intuitive. I'm intuitive. I in-tu-it. For me it begins with a concept, maybe before it is even an idea—a concept before it becomes thought or idea. It may begin with a picture. For the musician, I am sure it begins with a musical motif or a sound that the musician hears or senses. It is a process using the sensory perceptions, I guess you would say. You perceive or conceive. You perceive what is outside. You conceive what is inside. And you move from the perception of a concept or thought or idea to a figuration and a configuration.

The poet has nothing but words and language to be used as tools. And the poet—I think my father taught me this—the poet in my instance uses rhetorical devices. I have been told by some poets and even by some teachers that I am too rhetorical. I cannot conceive of writing poetry without metaphor and simile, synecdoche, metonymy, hyperbole. I grew up with that, and my work is rhetorical, but I think it is rhetorical in the best sense of the word. I had teachers who tried to break me of the habit. My father taught me my first lessons in rhetoric from an old English book that he had brought to this country. It gave all the rhetorical forms. I don't think a poet writes simply in grammatically correct language. I think all the greatest poets in the world were rhetoricians, and I believe in the rhetoric. Paul Engle has criticized me for it. He said, “Margaret was just too rhetorical.” I laughed, because I am still rhetorical, and I always will be.

That's what makes your voice so distinctive. What or who helped you to find your voice?

My father, really. I think Stephen Benét tells it in the introduction to For My People. It was not just that I heard the sermons my grandfather and my father preached, but it was that training my father gave me in the use of rhetoric. And I really didn't believe when I was a teenaged youngster growing up that you could write poetry without the use of simile and metaphor. I thought you had to use them. After I was older and had gained my own voice, I realized that I had read the Bible all my life and that the use of parallelism was what I had learned from the Bible: cataloguing and repetition and internal rhyme—not so much end rhyme, because that was what I had learned from ordinary poetry. I didn't think of the poetry in the Bible as ordinary. I thought it was extraordinary. And when Benét says you can feel these Biblical rhythms in my poetry, that is the greatest compliment he could give me. I think most of us in the South grew up on that Bible, the King James version of the Bible, as much as on reading Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. Because if you were a student in the South, you have read Scott, Dickens, the Bible, and Shakespeare, and you may have read Milton, because we are very Miltonic in the South. And these are the great influences in English and American literature. And just because we have learned to speak in cryptic language and monosyllabic sentences, making sentences out of monosyllabic words, that is no reason to drop rhetoric from poetry. I'm very certain that I am one of the few black writers who believes that strongly in rhetoric. But I can't help it. It's a part of my background.

I think the voices I have heard in the classics, whether it was the great English, American, or Continental poetry, carry with them not only the surge, the melody, and the rhythm of Biblical poetry, they also have power. And I have had people tell me that my words have power, the power that comes out of that Biblical background, that religious background that makes you aware that words are not just some idle spoken things but they should carry great meaning with them. My father taught me that poetry must have three qualities. It must have rhythm or music, but first it must have pictures or images, and third it must have meaning. And everything I write I test by those three standards. Are there any pictures here in the poetry? Do you see images? Do you feel the rhythms? Do you sense the power behind the meaning? Those are my three major standards. I was a long time coming to this in prose. I thought that prose was completely disconnected from poetry. I didn't grow up realizing that stories and novels and biography and autobiography had sometimes the same rhythms, the same images that poetry has. I was taught versification and scansion by masters. When I was at Northwestern, my teacher, Professor Hungerford, rigidly schooled me in versification and scansion. He has written a little book, On Remembering the Rhythms. He believed in that sweep, and he liked my poems. He said that in “JEAN LAFITTE, the Baratarian” I was writing like Keats, that I had that sensuousness that Keats had, that it came from my descriptive power in the pictures, the images, but it was also in the rhythm, because I wrote in couplets. But they were not heroic couplets; they were run-on Keatsian couplets. I was always determined to have meaning or power in these things.

The connection you made between poetry and prose shows up so well in Jubilee. Almost every chapter is like a poem in itself.

I appreciate your saying that because one critic said that my style was atrocious and that I had no poetry in Jubilee. I was amused at that. He said that the book wasn't interesting, was dull, and didn't have any sex in it. When I read that, I laughed because I said, “Millions of people do not agree with you.”

Jubilee was probably the earliest book to focus on the complexity of the relationship between black and white women.

Well, I think that's what Minrose Gwin is talking about in Black and White Women of the Old South. She says that I do express that connection, that relationship. And I am sure they must be there because my audience consists of both black and white. And I have had many, many white people in the South tell me they relate to the book. They feel with the characters in there. They recognize people. And, of course, black folks tell me, “Oh, Vyry is everybody's grandmother.” They love Vyry because they say, “She's just like my grandmother. She was like my grandmother was. Where does she come from?” They know her. They recognize her. It wasn't a simple, easy, quick task to bring her to life.

Was that perception of the black and white women's dilemma in your grandmother's story, or is that where your artistry comes in?

I think it was both. Of course, you know, I never saw Vyry. Vyry was really Margaret, my great-grandmother, and Minna, who told me the story, was really Vyry. Her name was Elvira. My grandmother was a part of my raising, my rearing. She told me the story. The story, as she told it, reflected the relationship of my great-grandmother to all people around her, black and white. I think you recognize the humanistic value of Vyry because whether it's Aunt Sally or Mammy Sukey, whether it is Miss Lillian or Miss Lucy, you see the kinship of women. When the poor white woman in the house with the children has not been fed, Vyry feeds her, and she tells Randall Ware and Innes—the night that they talk and she shows her back—she says, “If any of those people came to my door in the mornin', no matter how bad they treated me, I would feed 'em. I would feed 'em.”

One of the reviewers said that Jubilee is a powerful testament to Christianity, to Christian love, because the thing that we get from Vyry—and people don't want to believe it—is that out of outrage and violence and bitterness, she comes up with this Christian love and forgiveness. And you know, I was raised that way. My grandmother was that way. And she was Vyry's child. And I realized when I finished the book that I had never known Vyry, but I knew her daughter, and she was like Vyry. My mother said, “Oh, you've got my grandmother down. She was just like that.” I said, “But you know I was really using grandma.” Then she said, “Well Mamma was like grandma.” And I said, “And my mother was like her mother.” I'm like my mother. The older I get, the more I look like my mother and I think like my mother. My grandmother was just like her mother. Women are like their mothers.

And childbearing women—I have a daughter expecting—and I told her, “Women have their children the way their mothers had them.” That's part of being a woman—in the difficulty of going into puberty, the problems of early marriage, or even when marriages don't last (because all marriages are not made in heaven), and divorce, which is perhaps the worst thing a woman can go through short of death itself, and the whole business of estrangement—in all these instances women follow the pattern of women who have gone before them.

But then we have an interesting thing happening, which has happened with the sexual revolution. We have women who look at the pain they have suffered and who have been through some excruciating sexual pain, that is, in their relationships with men and other women so that they determine to break the shackles, to do away with the ikons, and to avoid the stereotypes. And these women are speaking out more and more, but this is what the women's movement has meant. At first it was simply to break the terrible slavery of domestic bondage, where they were under the rule of the father and the husband, and they didn't dare cross them and be independent and think for themselves. And then they decided we want to be a part of the world around us. We want to be educated. We want to have our chance at careers. We want options. We don't all want to be married. We don't all want to have children. We want to be able to make a living without this father or husband.

And then we have seen this male domination go so far that we find women who have been brutalized in their marriage relationships or in their paternal relationships, and they moved out to what may seem a perversion of love—they found a bonding with other women. This is very obvious in our society today. It existed before, but we kept it hidden. We closed it off. We didn't want this to be a part of what the world knew about us, because then we became pariahs and were thrown aside.

It is a long way up for women from the status of women in ancient times, say in the time of Jesus, when a woman could be brought before Jesus and accused: “This woman was caught in the act of adultery, and Moses said stone such a one to death. What do you say?” I think that is the first move toward woman's liberation, when Jesus says, “Well, any man who has never sinned and who is not guilty of any woman, let him pick up the stone and throw first.” He didn't say, “Where is the man who was with this woman?” He didn't say, “Well, I don't believe there should be one kind of standard or two.” He just said, “Let the man without sin cast the first stone.” And he looked around and all these men had moved away. He said to the woman, “Woman, where are your accusers?” She said, “Sir, I have none.” He said, “Well, neither do I accuse you.” In other words, “I know nothing about you. I haven't been guilty of it. So you may go on your way, but don't sin any more.”

What are the differences in black and white southern women's relationships then and now?

Well, I think we have gone through three or four stages. And I am sure that white women as well as black women have advanced. First of all, in those days of slavery, nobody thought about educating women. We didn't have women's suffrage. The women's movement in this country has paralleled the black movement or the struggle for black rights, whether they were civil or human rights. And as the women's movement became a national movement, at first the southern white women were not a part of it. And as the northern women sought to bring the southern white women into the movement, they ran into conflict over the question of race. The southern white women were the last to accept the black women into the movement.

Even important women like Susan B. Anthony and others who were friendly with Ida B. Wells wanted her to back off, saying, “Don't come and march, don't stand and speak, because our southern sisters will be offended.” The movement broke in two between the white northern and their southern white sisters who objected to the inclusion of the black women. Three or four very important black women rose up, not only Ida B. Wells and Mary McCloud Bethune later, but Sojourner Truth was a very great leader in the women's movement, and Harriet Tubman was in the movement. Ida B. Wells was one of the most outspoken, and at the turn of the century we had that kind of crisis.

Then we came to the very great drive of women all over the country, except in the South, where black people as a whole had been disenfranchised. Black men were not voting en masse, and black women had no voice. But white southern women were fighting for the vote, too, and when that vote came in 1919, black people still did not have the vote. There was friction and conflict in the women's movement over these issues. Anti-lynching was the great cause that Ida B. Wells was fighting. She was fighting lynching, but she was writing, too, along with Mary Church Terrell and Mary McCloud Bethune, great organizers of the National Council of Negro Women and the Federated Women's Clubs movement. They were talking about the lack of voting privileges of all black people.

I forgot to say that at the turn of the century Ida B. Wells was preparing to go to the first big international conference of women held in England. She expected to go as a delegate for women from this country, and there was a great protest made. The southern women were outraged, and the northern women compromised by asking Ida B. Wells not to go and not to speak. She went, of course. She was asked on another occasion when they were demonstrating for the vote not to appear, but she did appear. That is the kind of racial conflict we've had within the women's movement.

Even today the aims and imperatives of the women's movement are not the same for black women as they are for white. The white woman in the past fifty years has sought to be liberated from her husband and from a patriarchal bond. The black woman never felt that kind of pressure. The black woman was always a working woman from the days of slavery. All the days she had been in this country, all the years, she has been a working woman. We do not have the same kind of conflict between marriage and career that white women have. I remember somebody's saying to me once that marriage was nothing more than being a kept woman, and I was surprised to hear that, because women in my family had always been married women, working women, mothers with careers. I go back to my great-grandmothers. Vyry was a slave and having babies with the threat of being separated from husband and children, but always working. Then my grandmother was married to a minister. When he died my grandmother was forced to work. At first she took in sewing, and then she took in washing—washing and ironing. And these black women have always been very strong women, but not necessarily taking the places of men.

We never felt threatened in our homes by the fact that we had to work at our careers. Nowadays we hear a great deal about whether a woman should work when the children are small. My mother said she was at work teaching when I was six weeks old. At my first job I did stay home fourteen months before I went back to teaching, but with the next child my husband asked me to stay home two years. I stayed home three. At the end of those three years I had another child, and I didn't wait two years. He—the third child—was nine weeks old when I came to work at Jackson State. The fourth child was born while I was on a Ford Fellowship, and when I came back to work, I brought that child with me two weeks short of three months old.

I always had some help. I brought someone in. I had a person come in to cook and clean. I didn't like very much having someone do the cooking because I preferred to cook myself, but I would be so tired. And to this day I have always had somebody to come in and help with the cleaning. Anyway I have learned that black women have never been free to pursue the same aspirations that white women pursue. The white woman has had to fight the father and the husband for the right first to go to school, second to become a part of the professional world, third to be a working mother, and even so the pattern of the white woman is that she generally stays home with the child, with the baby, for so many months or so many years before she goes back to work. That couldn't work with the black woman. Many times there was no man in the house. There was no man there. She had these children in the fields. She had these children on the job. She had these children one day and then went back to work the next day. So the aspirations and aims of white and black women in the same women's movement have not been the same.

One thing that I think black and white women agree on is that women need to be paid the same money for the same work or the same jobs as men, but that has rarely happened in our society. I wrote a piece—I think part of it is in Claudia Tate's Black Women Writers at Work—in which I said that my mother, my sisters, and I have all suffered in academia. Men with the same degrees, the same training, made more money. Men doing the same work got more money. This has prevailed in the society. And even though there is a federal law against it now, the law is frequently violated. It is rare that a woman receives promotion, rank, and pay with men. The society still doesn't abide by that rule.

How does your experience as a black woman writer compare with that, say, of Zora Neale Hurston, Nella Larson, or Gwendolyn Brooks?

I guess I have had some of the same problems they have had. You should compare me with a white woman writer, because there is where the great difference has been. I'm not an unfulfilled person in the same sense that Zora was. Zora was certainly a very great storyteller and very bright, a brilliant woman, but she didn't graduate from Columbia with a doctorate under Papa Boaz. Not that she wasn't as smart as Margaret Mead or Ruth Benedict. They were white, and she was black. There's where the contrast is. She didn't get the doctorate in anthropology. Well, I can say that I went to school, and I got the doctorate. Very few black people had done it at Iowa before I did, and very few have since, but I went back where I had gotten a master's and, though it was difficult, I managed to fulfill the requirements. And I got it. Therefore, that's one thing that Zora was frustrated in. I've not been frustrated.

Zora was married twice very briefly. Her marriages did not work out. I was married thirty-seven years to one man, and I have four children, eight grandchildren from that union. In that sense I am not frustrated at all. I know only one other person who has been married as long as I have to the same man, and that is Gwendolyn Brooks. Gwen was married to Henry Blakely in her very early twenties when first I knew her. They had a very brief separation, but while they were separated I think Gwen must have realized that Henry was always very good for her. They had two children together, a son and a daughter, and in that respect we are alike. Gwen is still married to Blakely. My husband is dead.

I never knew Nella Larson. I saw Zora as a child, but I never saw Nella Larson and knew little about her until I was an adult. I read Zora's books as they came out. I have since read Nella Larson's Quicksand and Passing. I don't care for her as much as I do for Zora, but I think she's a fine writer. I know almost nothing of her personal life. Zora was accused of sodomy, taken into court, and although she came out of it and was vindicated and proved innocent, it literally ruined her life and career. And I have not had that kind of awful situation.

There are three women from Georgia—two white and one black—whom I put in the same bag: Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, whom I knew at Yaddo, and Alice Walker. I never knew Flannery O'Connor, but she went to the same school I went to in Iowa, and they told me about her. Those three women are from the same neck of the woods in Georgia. They are all three women of gothic imagination, all three writing of the violent South. It was Flannery O'Connor who wrote The Violent Bear It Away. Carson was writing things about grotesque people in Ballad of the Sad Café, and in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and Reflections in a Golden Eye. I would say even in Clock Without Hands. Flannery O'Connor's “Artificial Nigger,” The Violent Bear It Away, Everything That Rises Must Converge—they can all be compared with Alice Walker's Third Life of Grange Copeland, Meridian, and The Color Purple. I'm not like any of those women. Those women have a different imagination. Those women have a different perspective. They have a different philosophy. I think they are all remarkable writers. I think that it will take many more years before we say these women were great artists. They were great craftswomen, virtuosos, but I don't think any one of those women can stand up now to the test of what I consider the great test of an artist—that you are willing to go back and read their books over and over again. I don't know. I do not personally enjoy reading them over and over again. I'm repelled by Flannery O'Connor's “Artificial Nigger.” I don't think much even of The Violent Bear It Away. I think one of her best things is Everything That Rises Must Converge. Carson McCullers, who is around my age, died very much younger. I read The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and liked that, but there were things in it I didn't like. And then she came out with Reflections in a Golden Eye. I would never read that book again. When she came up with Clock Without Hands, it was so painful I could hardly bear to read the whole book.

I had great difficulty with Alice Walker's The Color Purple. I do not like the book for many reasons. I think Alice's best work is In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens. It's a very beautiful book and a book that I can relate to and understand. The Third Life of Grange Copeland for me has many problems. The book Meridian includes my name, and I'm there as a character, and I don't exactly appreciate that. I can hardly make myself go back and look at Meridian. I think I feel about those books the way I feel about Faulkner's Sanctuary. At first I was just repelled. I like the kind of macabre humor that Faulkner uses, but then again, it is that same gothic imagination.

Now I find myself able to read and reread Eudora Welty, and she has a gothic imagination and she does sometimes deal with the grotesque and with things almost gruesome, but her Delta Wedding reflects that Delta language and you can hear that speech. Her folk things are truly authentic. I think she is a great artist. You see the difference? I can read her any time. I would say that Eudora Welty's immortality is assured. I'm not sure about those three women from Georgia. I think that way up the road, they are going to be like Kate Chopin.

She's back now. My students love her. They loved Meridian, also.

A lot of people love and like Alice. I have known Alice, but I think that The Color Purple is a reflection on the black family as a whole, particularly on black men, that it is not even complimentary to black women, and certainly to black children. And I agree with those women out in California who said that it is not good reading for pre-adolescent children, that it should not be required reading in the grade schools and junior high schools.

I don't think it was intended for that.

But when the fight came up, the question came up as to censorship, and all of us are opposed to that. So you see there is a fine line there.

That is the most difficult thing to decide.

And that's what I'm saying. It is like saying Henry Miller is a great writer in Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. There is some filthy stuff there. There is some filthy vile stuff there. Now it depends on how you are judging. And I don't think literature should be judged on moral grounds. I think it should be judged on aesthetic grounds, and then you might say Henry Miller is a great writer.

Young writers like Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez rate you among the greats. Sonia calls you “a strong gust of woman.”

Sonia is like a child of mine. Nikki and Sonia and Alice are my daughters' generation. Sonia is older than they by a few years, but they are still young enough to have been my daughters. I like all three of them personally.

Alice and Nikki and Sonia can write what I cannot write. I want to write very much about the Vietnam War, the sixties, and the seventies, but I ask myself over and over again, “What am I going to do with that vocabulary?” because it is a shocking, brutal kind. And the four-letter words, the drug scene, the violence and crime, the black nationalism, all that stuff. It's really not my cup of tea. I want to write about it because it's my son's generation. He went to Vietnam, and I think there needs to be a record of that. I don't know whether I am ever going to be able to put it down, because I cannot use the four-letter words and the language, and I cannot deal with the shock bit.

To skip backward a minute, what is it about Gwendolyn Brooks's Annie Allen that so appeals to you? You have spoken so highly of that work.

Well, I'll tell you what I liked about Annie Allen when I read it. I had read A Street in Bronzeville, which shows Gwen's talent very clearly, and it's a very good first book, but Annie Allen reflects very careful discipline, hard work, knowledge of the craft, and such an understanding of that adolescent girl as she does in Maud Martha, that I think the book is nothing short of superb. “The Anniad,” which is in there, is to me a great piece. I have argued with Dudley Randell when I say it's written in rhyme royale. He says it's not the Chaucerian stanza, but I say it is. I think I know as well as Dudley. It is the Chaucerian line and stanza. And that's a very difficult stanza to write. I think Gwendolyn Brooks proved in Annie Allen that she was capable of most difficult forms, that she could write in the strictest meters and still keep the very wonderful flavor of black life and folklore. I think that's what's in Annie Allen. I think, too, that that book is a very well-crafted book. I think that Gwen is at her very best in Annie Allen. I think in this book she fulfills the promise of A Street in Bronzeville. You see in Annie Allen that she is an artist who understands the craft of poetry and the art of writing. And I think that aside from a number of the very flavorsome pieces in there, you don't see anything like it again until she comes to “Mecca.” “Mecca” is another very fine piece.

I haven't seen any recent things of Gwen's to say that I like this or that, but Gwen wrote nine volumes of poetry. She says some of the stuff was for children and then did Maud Martha, which I think is a sensitive portrait. I wish she had done more of that sort of thing, but Annie Allen is superb. I think I have said it somewhere.

I'd like to get back to your poetry for just a moment. The French feminist critics talk about “writing from the body” these days. Early in the forties you wrote,

I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to stand between my body's southern song—the fusion of the South, my body's song and me.

Is there a connection here?

Well, I don't know whether I was thinking in the feminist vein when I said that, because I have said it over and over again, in both “Southern Song” and “Sorrow Home.” What I'm saying, in a very sensuous, not sensual but sensuous, way is that I'm a creature of the South. When I wrote this I was in cold Chicago, and I didn't see grass and hay and clover in bloom. I didn't see red clay. I didn't smell the earth after the rain. All of this comes back to me, so I write about the South, and then I contrast, as I do frequently in poetry and prose. (I do it a lot in the Richard Wright book.) I contrast the ideal beauty of the land, the ambience of the South, and the horror of its violence and racial conflict. When I leave the physical beauty of the South, and when I talk about “my body's southern song—the fusion of the South, my body's song and me,” I mean that I am a part of this whole process of nature, that when we come together I am complete and it is complete because it is a part of me and I am part of it. Now I want to see the dichotomy closed, the split ended. The social horror and the physical beauty are constantly there, and I talk about that in everything I write—the beauty of the South and the horror of this other society.