[In the following essay written after Walker's death, Graham offers an overview of her life and work, placing Walker in the context of her literary times.]

Margaret Abigail Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1915, into a family of storytellers and musicians, ministers and teachers. The Walker family—three sisters and a brother, parents and maternal grandmother—lived as a closely knit group during her early years in Alabama and Mississippi, and finally Louisiana, the place that Walker always called home, the South of her memory before and after leaving it for the first time. Strong advocates of education as a means toward racial progress and individual development, her parents nurtured and encouraged each child's individual talents. The first-born in the family, she was her father's favorite child. He gave her a daybook at age twelve; it was her first writer's journal, giving her a way to record her thoughts and the images that formed the basis for her poetry. The daybook quickly filled with numerous “ditties” and the details of the stories of slavery that were her grandmother's forte. While her father pastored churches and taught school and her mother finished college and taught music in New Orleans, Walker completed her elementary and high school education and began college.

As Walker has reported many times, it was a visit by Langston Hughes to New Orleans University (now Dillard University) that gave her the first opportunity to meet a famous “living Negro poet.” Not only did Hughes comment upon and encourage her talent, but he also stressed the importance of formal training, which in his view could only occur outside of the South. A few years later, in 1934, Walker's first published poem appeared in Crisis magazine.

Two years after moving to Chicago, Walker graduated from Northwestern University. She was 20 years old and already had a collection of poems along with the 300 pages of Jubilee she had drafted in her first college creative writing course. Breaking from the mold of young women of her time, especially for young black women, Walker elected to remain in Chicago to pursue her writing career. She found work with the Federal Writers Project, which gave her access to an active literary community and sustained her financially during the middle years of the Great Depression. More importantly, she found herself in the midst of a renaissance among a growing group of black writers. With the Harlem Renaissance having waned some few years earlier, Chicago writers now developed a new, distinctly modern style of writing influenced by the proletarian literature of the Communist left and the populist realism of the midwestern writers Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay and Edgar Lee Masters. New fictional urban heroes and heroines emerged for whom life in the “Promised Land” had turned into a nightmare. In contrast to the Harlem Renaissance, images became less romantic and the sounds more conflicted. The rhythms of black life had changed, and new writers were needed to capture these rhythms in prose and poetry. The core of a group—led by Richard Wright—who defined this new literature began meeting as the South Side Writers Group, and included most often Margaret Walker, Frank Marshall Davis, Edward Bland, Ted Ward, Marian Minus, Fern Gaden, and St. Clair Drake. Walker's strong Christian ideals and family values that stressed a life of sacrifice and service made her sympathetic to the socialist ideas about equality that influenced the group, and further intensified her disdain for all forms of discrimination and exploitation. Like many artists and intellectuals of the 1930s, Walker became familiar with Marxist thought and regarded herself as a “fellow traveler,” although she was never a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. Almost always the youngest member of the left front organizations she associated with and often the only black woman participant, she earned an early reputation for her inquisitive nature, her intelligence, and her remarkable talent.

Between 1936 and 1939, working with the WPA, attending regular meetings of the South Side Writers Group, affiliating with left politics, and publishing in black periodicals and mainstream journals—at a time when most young women were either looking to marry and begin their families or settle into more conventional careers—Walker established herself as a leading literary voice of her generation. She completed her signature poem “For My People,” after forming friendships with writers from Poetry magazine and working closely with Wright.

Walker returned to school in 1939, this time to complete her masters degree at the University of Iowa, where For My People became a full manuscript, which she completed to satisfy the degree requirements. After teaching at Livingstone College (North Carolina) and West Virginia State College, she received the Yale Younger Series of Writers Award. Less than a year later, she met and married Firnist James Alexander, settling down in High Point, North Carolina to begin a family. The Alexanders moved to Jackson, Mississippi with three children in 1949, where she would teach for thirty years at Jackson State College (now Jackson State University). After the birth of her last child, Walker became increasingly active as a pioneer in promoting intellectual and professional ideas about education and the teaching of literature and culture, just as yet another shift was occurring in the social order. Walker's work became critical in articulating the ideological concerns of the Civil Rights Movement and beyond: her 1966 novel Jubilee was one its most important markers; and her 1973 Phillis Wheatley Festival of Black Women Writers signaled the birth of the black women's literary renaissance. The years between 1970 and her death in 1998 were her most productive. In addition to the published volumes, speeches and readings, Walker founded the Institute for the Study of Black Life and Culture, one of the earliest Black Studies formations in the nation and the first in the South. By the end of her life, Walker, a woman born of Victorian ideals, who had left the South and returned to it as one of its most radical black thinkers, had become a widely-known artist whose finely crafted prose and poetry left an indelible mark on the modern age. It is impossible to think about the Chicago Renaissance, the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movement or the Women's Movement without giving acknowledgement to her work. Perhaps her greatest legacy lies in her creative struggle as a highly conscious individual who found a way to balance a demanding professional life and full engagement as a wife and mother, challenging our contemporary conceptions of seemingly contradictory domains.

In fifty-two years, Walker published eleven books, including For My People (1942), Jubilee (1966), Prophets for a New Day (1970), How I Wrote Jubilee (1972), October Journey (1973), A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974), For Farish Street (1986), Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius (1988), This is My Century: New and Collected Poems by Margaret Walker (1989); How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays on Life and Literature (1990), and On Being Female, Black and Free: Essays by Margaret Walker 1932-1992 (1997). An untold number of poems, short stories, reviews, letters, and speeches remain to be collected. When Walker retired from teaching in 1979 at age sixty-four, she did so with the intention of continuing an active career as a writer, public speaker, and community reformer. It was at this time that she began the biography of Richard Wright, only to have the book interrupted by illness, a lengthy court battle, the death of her husband, and repeated publication delays.

Walker's two collections of essays, How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays, and On Being Female, Black and Free, published in the last decade of her life, best illuminate her importance to the history of ideas that has been reflected in black writing in America for half a century and to contemporary developments in literary and social thought. With the lead essay recounting the thirty-year journey to Jubilee, the remainder of How I Wrote Jubilee and Other Essays comments upon the culture of America and the ideas so central to it—religion, family, racial consciousness, the role of women—thereby serving as a useful introduction to Margaret Walker's thought. As much as any individual artist, Walker reflects the fusion of ideas that she inherited from the radical 1930s, tempered by her own cultural and social background, one that was rooted in a strong religious faith and belief in the ultimate goodness of humankind. In her essay “Willing to Pay the Price,” Walker points out her major concerns as a writer:

As a Negro I am perforce concerned with all aspects of the struggle for civil rights … Civil rights are part of my frame of reference, since I must of necessity write always about Negro life, segregated or integrated … I believe my role in the struggle is the role of a writer. Everything I have ever written or hope to write is dedicated to that struggle, to our hope of peace and dignity and freedom in the world, not just as Black people, or as Negroes, but as free human beings in a world community … I do not deny, however, the importance of political action and of social revolution … I believe that as a teacher my role is to stimulate my students to think; after that, all I can do is guide them.

Walker's comments bring to mind the works of three early Afro-American women, Ann Plato, Anna Julia Cooper, and Frances Harper. Like Plato, the earliest known Afro-American essayist, Cooper, a feminist intellectual, and Harper, the renowned antislavery poet/activist, Walker pursued her own sense of individual identity while at the same time committing herself to the stream of collective history. Like Cooper and Harper, Walker represented a small number of college educated women whose choice to develop and define a career put her at odds with the majority of women in her time. On the other hand, unlike her predecessors, Walker became a “working mother” who encountered throughout her life the typical social and economic hardships: poverty and unemployment, racial and sexual discrimination, and consistently poor health. The unevenness of her own personal history attests to the negative impact of race and gender prejudice in the lives of even the most talented African Americans. Nevertheless, Walker's voice broke through the silence of women's lives, her life always modeling the ideas she believed in so firmly. Frances Harper appears to be Walker's closest literary ancestor in her preoccupation with social issues while at the same time maintaining her reputation as a leading poet of her day.

The second collection of essays, published a year before Walker's death, is decidedly more autobiographical than the first. On Being, Female, Black and Free is conscious of shaping an image of a writer as a feminist and radical thinker. The volume tells what Walker learned as an artist in her sixty-year career and contains unabashed critiques of racist politics in her home state of Mississippi and the nation at large. Although Walker never traveled outside the continental US—she turned down her only Fulbright fellowship in 1971 for family reasons—she existed within a tradition that linked the local, national, and international concerns. Derived from some of her most popular speeches, the volume is written in Walker's characteristic apocalyptic and prophetic tone, one that is immediate and accessible. Both volumes together affirm how Walker saw herself at the end of her career: a woman who had begun to review the past and predict the future, calling a nation to order lest it fear Armageddon.

While the essays are useful for identifying the major strands of Walker's thoughts as a radical thinker and activist from the very beginning of her career, Walker's literary reputation rests primarily upon the four volumes of poetry that she published in her lifetime, and Jubilee, the historical novel that she had begun writing in college but did not complete until mid-life. For My People, completed as her Master's project at the University of Iowa, became the 1942 selection for the Yale Series of Younger Artists series. In introducing the collection, Stephen Vincent Benet spoke of the Walker's poetry as “controlled intensity of emotion and language that, even when most modern, has something of the surge of biblical poetry.” Composed of poems which Walker had worked and reworked since her days at Northwestern, the volume brought to the reader an understanding of the past together with her sense of the rhythm and “feeling tone”¹ of black life. She wanted the poetry to have its own distinctive voice, one that was steeped in the folk tradition, but which could express itself in both vernacular and conventional literary forms. Although her training at Northwestern had been in classical English forms, Walker learned the forms of modern poetry in Iowa, a tradition that emphasized the work of Walt Whitman, Randall Jarrell, T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound as well as the experimentalism of e.e. cummings.

This training, along with her apprenticeship with the WPA and the South Side Writers Group, resulted in the twenty six poems of For My People, where Walker demonstrated her unique talents as a lyricist and modernist innovator who would not abandon her roots in the folk tradition. For My People took the reader on a psychic journey into the past, conjoining despair and hope, pride and pain, destruction and creation, separation and reunion. In the volume, the sacred and the profane merge as the reader grasps the profound and subtle significance of racial memory. Each poem becomes part of a “collective narrative of memory” as told through a black vernacular matrix which emphasizes the flow and rhythm of the myths, folk tales, legends, ballads and narratives as well as free verse forms, sonnets, odes, and elegies. Structurally, the volume emulates the call and response pattern inherent in traditional African American expression. Part I includes ten verse poems that explore the historical terrain of African American history: each stanza introduces a montage of scenes relating various historical moments in the late 19th and 20th centuries. Part II provides a vernacular response to the more discursive first section. Ten more ballads, folk tales and black hero/heroine exploits change the tone of the volume entirely. The effect is to give the “folk” an opportunity to speak for themselves in their own voice. Walker returns to traditional poetic forms in a third part, containing six poems which begin with a personal memory of childhood. The collection ends by emphasizing the importance of struggle in the physical world—a struggle that, historically, neither overshadowed nor diminished an African American spiritual sensibility bounded by love and compassion, one that connects us all through space and time. The call-and-response structure is complemented by the way in which Walker uses voice to establish a shift in her own poetic identity. Dramatically intense imagery utilizing contrasting metaphors is presented in the first person singular when Walker wants to define herself as part of the stream of history, seen, for example in this excerpt from “Lineage”:

My grandmothers are full of memories
Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay
With veins rolling roughly over quick hands
They have many clean words to say.
My grandmothers were strong.
Why am I not as they?

The knowledge of that history becomes the individual poet's song, which “Today” illustrates:

I sing of slum scabs on city faces, scrawny children scarred by bombs and dying of hunger, wretched human scarecrows strung against lynching stakes, those dying of pellagra and silicosis, rotten houses falling on slowly decaying humanity.

The first person plural form is reserved for those moments when the self and history are completely merged, when Walker wants no separation between time and place in the collective memory, stressing instead the continuity of experience, the facts of history. “Delta” makes this shift in its second section:

We tend the crop and gather the harvest
but not for ourselves do we labor. …
here by this river we dare not claim
Yet we are an age of years in this valley;
yet we are bound til death to this valley.
We with our blood have watered these fields
and they belong to us.

Finally, Walker is at her best when adopting the representative persona of her people: she symbolizes their voice, writing for all those who are silenced through hunger, despair, hypocrisy, and death. The human spirit is never crushed, evidenced by their “dirges and their ditties, their blues and their jubilees … their prayers … their strength,” which Walker rhythmically announces, mindful of the need for this ceaseless faith to build a bridge to the future. By consistently offering before us a catalog of images that rush before us at a dizzying pace, Walker makes the volume visual and dramatic. The oft quoted final stanza of “For My People,” represents the emotionally charged climax that we have been waiting for. The tone is assertive and uplifting; we are witnessing a world emergent, a new work-in-progress.

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.

Even though Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen had produced distinctive poetry that had claimed the attention of mainstream audiences, no one before Walker had approached African American poetry with the single-minded intensity and concern for craft as Walker had. In this sense, “For My People” was a coming of age for African American poetry, as it was for the author herself, signifying the dynamism and continuity of African American poetic expression that would extend through the emergence of the Black Arts Movement and performance poetry of the 1990s. “For My People”—by far the most widely anthologized poem in the African American canon—celebrated and commemorated the past in such a way that its continuous readings for over sixty years have helped to sustain the historical identity of the African American community.

The four succeeding volumes, October Journey, Prophets for New Day, Farish Street, and the new poems in This is My Century continue to be songs of her people written in various keys corresponding to the social and historical movements of the 20th century: the Civil Rights Movement, the Anti-War Movement, and the Women's Liberation Movement. Walker's ability to provide heavily nuanced portraits of black life in her ballads and folk poems and in her odes to black heroes and heroines dignify and value a people who “had to develop compassion out of suffering.” In her poems about the South, the beauty of the natural landscape is juxtaposed with the horrors of the social landscape. This is the “voice of the South” that she inherited, growing up in a highly self-conscious and intellectual environment tempered by a strong folk sensibility. Walker believed that poetry was the ultimate humanism: poetry gives us images of who we are, what we feel and know; it is that creative source that allows for a unique interplay between our past, present and future.

Jubilee is Walker's family chronicle and a further demonstration of her humanistic philosophy. Like the poetry, the sources for the novel are folklore and history, through which Walker captures the vitality of black life in the antebellum South, the Civil War, and Reconstruction. The first novel to challenge the distorted and romanticized depiction of black life popularized by Gone With the Wind. Jubilee brought a female voice to a story of significant complexity. It asked the critical questions of slavery as it showed the survival of a woman and her family, due primarily to the strength of her character and spirit. Jubilee is Vyry's story—modeled after Walker's maternal great-grandmother. Desperately desiring her freedom, Vyry makes one unsuccessful attempt to escape. One of the most dramatic scenes in the novel is Vyry “with the baby in her arms and Jim pulling on her stuffed pantsleg, … [starting] out to make it to the swamp.”

While Vyry's flight to freedom is delayed until the war is over, Walker's real achievement in the novel is its celebration of black women's lives. As such, Jubilee helped to pave the way for black women's voices in fiction and the new literary renaissance that followed the publication of the 1966 novel. The autobiographical significance of the novel goes beyond the correspondences between the author's story and historical facts about Randall Ware and his descendants. Because Walker combined the format of the slave narrative and the historical novel, she was free to alternate between versions of family history and the fiction that she created herself. Moreover, Walker made Jubilee a record of her own journey as a woman and mother who was vocal both inside and outside of her home and community. The novel allowed Walker and Vyry a context for participating in the emerging political debates of the Civil Rights Movement, which were more intense in Mississippi than in any other state in the South. Vyry's values are driven by Christian humanism and compassion, as she says “God knows I ain't got no hate in my heart for nobody. If I is and doesn't know it, I prays to God to take it out. I ain't got no time to be hating. I believes in God and I believes in trying to love and help everybody, and I knows humble is the way” (406, Jubilee).

The novel's political message is shaped about the domestic novel plot, Vyry's continuing search for a place she could call home. Amid the torrid violence, the dehumanizing conditions of slavery and the devastation of war, Walker placed a love story between a black man and woman. This human side to slavery that is neither sentimental nor exaggerated forces the reader into dialogue with a struggling black community trying to make sense out of their post-slavery existence. Migration out of the South is surely an option, but Walker chose to present a Southern black perspective, to present options as they evolved out of the “souls of black folk” tied to a land and a heritage which they were unwilling to abandon. Vyry's rise from degraded bastard child of slave owner Jim Dutton to virtual head of the Dutton plantation parallels her belief that she must remain, after the war's end, to care for a hateful former mistress, whose loss of body and soul signify the spoils of war.

Vyry's departure from the Dutton plantation is further delayed by months of waiting for the return from the North of Randall Ware, the free man that she married during slavery and who is the father of her first two children. Having few options, Vyry eventually gives up waiting for Ware, who, tragically, returns to the Dutton plantation too late to reunite with his family. Just before leaving Georgia for Alabama, Vyry marries Innis Brown, the ex-slave who is committed to her and her children, and to the black community's search to find the road forward. The couple, with Vyry's children, moves to Alabama in search of a homestead. Together they go through five years of struggle, persecution, and wandering in Reconstruction Alabama before finally finding a safe place on which to settle down and farm. It is then that Randall Ware, having learned of their location, makes the journey to their home.

Randall Ware's reappearance forces Vyry to make a decision; her choice between two husbands—one who is on his way to becoming the black representative in a Reconstruction government and another who is content to seek his economic independence as a farmer—is a unique rendering of the Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. DuBois debates concerning the means toward black political power and equality, ideas which were immediately relevant to the 1960s generation. During the late 1960s, the leadership of the Civil Rights Movement was challenged by both the radical political action in the South—in the form of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee—and in the North—in the form of Malcolm X. Vyry's decision is to remain a farmer's wife, but she is content to give her son to the movement—by letting Randall Ware take him away to raise and educate him. Jubilee re-voices the theme from “For My People”: “Let a new earth rise and a new world be born / Let a generation of men now rise and take control,” as Vyry gives her son to the movement. As a middle-aged woman living in the wake of a tumultuous social movement in Jackson, Mississippi, Walker, through Jubilee, presented the African American perspective on slavery and its aftermath at the same time she dramatized the relationship between gender and ideology in a previous historical period that had significance for the present. Jubilee, like For My People, was her way of using culture to speak about the complex social and historical position of blacks in an era of cataclysmic change.

According to the critics, Walker's least successful book is Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius. The book clearly achieved its main objective, to present a psychological profile of a man with “bitterness and hatred and anger festered inside of him … he was full of rage—and rage boiled up inside into a raging flood out of control. It … drove him to write.” That it might be viewed as “awkward, pedantic, and repetitive,” or “appears to have been hardly edited” may have as much to do with the conditions of its publication as with Walker's abilities as a biographer. The book came out five years after it was originally scheduled for release, was sued for copyright infringement by Wright's widow Ellen and was orphaned by several publishers. It finally appeared when editor Charles Harris took the galleys with him to found a new imprint of Warner Books.

There is no question that Daemonic Genius is different from the kind of biographies that had previously been written. As an artist, Walker questioned the very possibility of “objectivity” at the outset and was more concerned about how the mind works to create and fulfill its passion, its longings, its desires. The uniqueness of the book is to show aspects of Wright's personality, one she knew well as a result of their close relationship during the 1930s. When Walker met Wright, she was a college-educated, but naive young poet from the South; Wright, a self-educated, black artist-intellectual also from the South. She had come to Chicago because her parents had listened to Langston Hughes's advice to “get her out of the South.” Wright had come, like thousands of blacks before him, to find a better life away from the violence and repression that would have condemned him to a life of eternal hunger, both physical and intellectual. Their mission, therefore, coincided; their talents blossomed in the fertile intellectual and political climate of the Chicago Renaissance. Walker quickly realized Wright to be a genius and a troubled soul, the sources of a passionate and committed art. For the book, she created her own prose style, as had been her custom. Combining a psychological approach with a historical one, personal impressions with critical ones, she wanted to show how Wright sought to ameliorate his inner conflicts through fiction and nonfiction; he was successful because he could turn “anger, ambivalence, alienation and aberration” into expressions of art. Walker did not write the book that critics wanted, and her emphasis on Wright's psychological profile as a “daemonic genius” together with the public perception that she had been rejected by Wright made her an easy target. Few critics took the book seriously. Hers was a creative biography of a creative individual, and as such, yet another literary accomplishment for Walker as a major writer.

Walker's initial appearance in the late 1930s and 1940s, her resurgence in the late 1960s and 1970s, and again in the late 1980s seems to contradict the inherent dualism common in the lives of many creative women. She celebrated her role as a reproductive woman, but she also fulfilled her need to create and assume authority outside of the domestic sphere. She would not, could not remain silent, despite lack of access to the mainstream literary establishment. Eleanor Traylor interprets Walker's continual resurgence as deliberate, suggesting that her life and work form a poetic biography of the 20th century. As Walker became increasingly more conscious of investing time and historical events with political and symbolic significance, it became more important for her to reemerge at periodic and critical moments that corresponded with the major social and cultural developments in this nation. By stepping in and out of public attention as she did, and by maintaining an extraordinarily stable home and family life, she could maintain a singular commitment to speaking in her own voice without fear of reprisal from the popular establishment.

When Margaret Walker began to write as a child, influenced by the legacy of an extremely protective middle class family whose intelligence, creativity, and innovativeness crafted for her a unique Southern education, she located the basis for a synthesis of her creative and intellectual powers. She left home for the first time to be educated into the talented tenth, but wanted most to be a poet, fulfilling her dreams before she turned thirty. But for the majority of the fifty-three remaining years, she lived quite a normal life as a woman, and a paradoxical one as a poet and writer. Recognized as gifted and given access to the mainstream at an early age, one necessarily questions why she disappeared from public notice for twenty three years, or why she took thirty years to write her single novel. The answer does not seem to lie in the simplistic explanation that her marriage put an end to her successful career or at least delayed her creative potential, as it did for many nineteenth-century women. Walker's aggressiveness seems to refute such a claim, especially since she refused the hand of one suitor who did not believe women should work and chose instead another who respected and supported her professional ambitions.

In retrospect, it appears that Margaret Walker viewed her life as part of a poem that was constantly evolving. Because she respected the values of her own era—that defined womanliness primarily in terms of first a romantic, then a nurturing, maternal love—and transcended them at the same time, her story exemplifies the importance of authorial agency for a writer whose greatest gift was her capacity to imagine possibilities where none existed. That story is more textured than most because Walker's desire for voice, for agency and for visibility operated within the multiple contexts in which she claimed her existence.

In carrying out her mission as a black woman, Margaret Walker forged a singular discourse in relationship to the multiple dialogues she engaged: first as a child, growing up in a highly self-consciousness and intellectual environment tempered by a folk sensibility; then as a young adult, finding her voice in a Depression-era Chicago dominated by labor activism and Marxist ideology; and finally as an established Southern writer and educator, whose writings anticipated as much as they mirrored the Civil Rights Movement and the tragedies that followed. Her work was very diverse, the poetry and novel followed by personal essays and scholarship and a biography of a major figure. This multi-layered vision expressed a unified voice, one that emerges by her own statement, from “an unbroken tradition of humanistic values that did not spring from Renaissance Europe but developed in Asia and Africa before the religious wars of the Middle Ages.” Walker's conscious effort to revise and expand the definition of humanism, to deconstruct humanism, if you will, allowed her to synthesize many meanings and elements. Fundamentally, this humanistic vision “embodies a recognition that we are part of nature and the historical process … that life must be richly developed in spirit rather than mere matter.”² Being part of nature not only had symbolic meaning for her writing, but for her life as well. Her family was the ultimate test of her humanity, the highest symbol of her existence.

But critics found Walker's humanism to be a limitation on her voice. The Yale Review in 1943 commended For My People as a collection of poems that “reflect the individual and a race … in which the body and spirit of a great group of people are revealed with vigor and undeviating integrity,” but criticized the “loosely rhetorical … and commonplace sonnets” and the “dialect verses,” calling them “faltering imitations of gutter blues, swaggering ballads, and hearty folkstuff.”³ On the whole, establishment critics opposed Walker's efforts to combine literary forms such as sonnets, lyrics, and odes with “flawed” folk poetry, while reviews of Jubilee were generally favorable. The synthesis that Walker tried to achieve and represent as her aesthetic vision, the conscious fusion of popular and literary forms, of spiritual and material reality, of psychic and physical worlds, was seldom explored by her critics. That which brought ideological clarity impeded her acceptance by critics. Part of the criticism derived from Walker's effort to move outside of the genre of poetry for which she had seemingly been destined. The literary establishment granted her a status as a young poet with an award-winning volume, but someone whose professional career did not necessarily live out its promise.

Margaret Walker saw herself as a creative person who was always transforming the text of her own life, synthesizing and experimenting within each genre she elected to utilize. She had an uncanny ability to pinpoint and to respond to new cultural needs—responses which often challenged accepted forms. In her later years her being ignored by mainstream critics may well have turned out to be a blessing. The Black Studies and Women's movements and the accompanying interest by publishers in promoting literature arising from them brought increased attention to her work. Those who came to know her in the last years of her life were students in the schools and colleges of the nation who found “For My People” in a standard anthology or who were lucky enough to hear her read as she carried out her role as a people's poet. This seems appropriate for a woman who had spent so much of her life in school. Margaret Walker was born 15 years into the century; she died a year before the turn of that same century whose troubled past had made her its most ardent chronicler. She had lived, fully a woman, fully a poet, and true to her own voice, wrote her final poem as a meditation on her own approaching death. She called it appropriately, “Fanfare, Coda and Finale.”

Grant me one song to sing, America, out of my hurt and
bruised dignity; let notes confused and bursting
in my throat find melody. Reprieve the doom descending on
my life. Remake the music stifling in my throat.
          Before
my song is lost resound the tune and hear my voice.
Out of my struggle I have sung my song; found hymn and
flower in field and fort and dungeon cell. Yet now I
have constriction in my heart where song is born.
          Such
bitterness is eating at my vocal chords the bells within
me, hushed, refuse to ring. Oh lift this weight of brick
and stone against my neck, and let me sing.

Notes

1. A term frequently used by Walker to denote the unique sound and rhythmic quality informed by a collective historical consciousness that characterizes African American written and oral expression.

2. How I Wrote Jubilee, p. 124.

3. Louis Untermeyer, “New Books in Review,” Yale Review XXXII:2 (Winter 1943), p. 371.