SOURCE: Berke, Nancy. “The Girl Who Went to Chicago: Political Culture and Migration in Margaret Walker's For My People.” In Women Poets on the Left: Lola Ridge, Genevieve Taggard, Margaret Walker, pp. 123-56. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 2001.

[In the following chapter from her book on three poets, Berke deconstructs the text of For My People, suggesting that the themes of black northward migration and the economic and social conditions of the 1930s are important to an understanding of Walker's work.]

This is my century—
Black synthesis of time:
The freudian slip
The Marxian mind
Kierkegaardian Leap of Faith
and DuBois prophecy: the color line.
These are the comrades of Einstein,
the dawning of another Age,
new symphony of Time.

—Margaret Walker, “This Is My Century,” 1983

Looking back over fifty years of writing poetry from the vantage point of a black woman, Margaret Walker paradoxically names her “black synthesis of time” through conflicting, totalizing ideologies of the white male thinkers: Freud, Marx, Kierkegaard, and Einstein. While crossing DuBois's prophetic “color line,” Walker, a celebrated novelist, poet, essayist, and teacher, engages the discourses of class, psychology, religion, and science. Yet an important feature missing in her synthesis is gender. The gender consciousness that is absent from the twentieth-century equation that Walker sets up is more a problem of her Depression-era influences, to which the above names belong, than of her development as a black woman writer. How Walker uses these influences, and into what remaining spaces she places her gendered articulations, is the focus of this particular discussion.

Margaret Walker was twenty-seven years old when she published her first book of poems, For My People. It was the first by an African American writer to receive a national literary prize—the 1942 Yale Younger Poets Award.¹ To come of age as a black woman poet during the Depression required a peculiar sense of awareness of the social, political, and economic structures that shaped the artist's manner of seeing. Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1915. She went north to attend Northwestern University and spent the decade of the 1930s working and writing in Chicago. In 1949 she became a professor of English at Jackson State University in Mississippi and later founded the black studies program there. Critical attention to Walker's work focuses almost exclusively on her evocations of southern life. She is perhaps best known for her important best-selling novel Jubilee, which she worked on for nearly thirty years, based upon her great-grandmother's experiences as a slave during the Civil War.² The critical work on For My People has tended to emphasize the text's geographical aspects, its connection to the landscape of the American South as well as its articulation of myth and ritual within the contexts of the African diaspora.³ Though it would be inaccurate to de-emphasize the centrality of the tropes of the South in her work, Walker's participation in the northern migration—her early years in Chicago—had a significant impact on her construction of southern life in For My People and needs to be more thoroughly engaged.⁴

During her years in Chicago, Walker was exposed to the proletarian literary tradition through her close associations with Richard Wright, her participation in the South-Side Writers' Project (affiliated with the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration), and her membership in the Chicago chapter of the League of American Writers. Reading For My People should be informed by both South and North, the journey and the arrival, the rural and the urban, Walker's Chicago years, the marxist influence upon her work, and her infusion of working-class politics into African American myth and ritual. The dual importance of the Great Migration and the Depression on Walker's movement from southern “petty bourgeois” black society into the social and cultural spaces of northern cities is also noted, including her discovery “that people who worked with their brains were also workers” (How I Wrote Jubilee 7). Walker's letters to Richard Wright, written in the late 1930s, offer a glimpse of the kind of activities that she immersed herself in at the time. She attended classes and lectures at the worker's school on dialectical materialism, Marxism-Leninism, art and society, the proletarian novel, and proletarian poetry.⁵ She promoted and enlisted subscriptions for the black radical literary journal, Challenge, which Wright, Dorothy West, and others were editing on the East Coast. She wrote a novel, Goose Island, about the shattered hopes of a talented female musician from Bronzeville.⁶ She was a poetry editor of and contributed fiction to Jack Conroy's refurbished New Anvil, which he put out with Nelson Algren. Walker organized meetings in support of loyalist Spain at a local black church and was active in the union chapter formed by members of the South-Side Writers' Project. Yet in her letters she complains to Wright that her writing remained her top priority and that her organizational commitments would have to be sacrificed in order for her to get her creative work done. More closely linked to her writing than attempts at activism, Walker occupied herself by reading the white male and largely European canon of socially conscious literature: Zola, Malraux, Gide, Gorky.

As a black woman, Walker's experience of the Depression was decidedly different from and often more difficult than the realities faced by her white contemporaries. The radical culture of the 1930s encouraged Walker to struggle to represent the contemporary concerns of her people, while providing a historical record of her reading of black structures of feeling. This chapter follows Margaret Walker's journey across the color line in literary forms. As Cary Nelson suggests, For My People, with its urban laments and odes of slavery and its trickster ballads and sonnets of protest, shows “how a plural textuality can articulate the fragmented, conflicted subcultures of the social formation” (Repression and Recovery 178).

A tacit feminist awareness can be found in several important poems in For My People, even if gender is not the predominant focus in the developmental stages of Walker's career as a social poet. She does interweave gendered articulations within the more central categories of race and class. In various places throughout For My People, Walker shows interest in the complicated movements of African American women. In fact, her own fascination with the stories her maternal grandmother told of her own mother's experiences in slavery gave her an early understanding of the significance of women's labor. Many of the poems in For My People depict the strength of working women and men in the face of adversity, with their muscular bodies, knowing only exploitation. Such representations of the strong, impassive, yet exploited working-class body invoke the Depression-era tropes found in the proletarian realist manifestos of Mike Gold as well as Walker's Chicago compatriot Jack Conroy. Important to note, however, Walker's characterizations of black female labor are subtle; she is cautious of feeding the stereotyped representation of the black female laborer's superstrength. Such a line is drawn in “Lineage,” an ironic testimony of gender power created by unfree women and memorialized by a daughter of freedom:

My grandmothers were strong.
They followed plows and bent to toil.
They moved through fields sowing seed.
They touched earth and grain grew.
They were full of sturdiness and singing.
My grandmothers were strong.
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 poem explores the writer's regret at the divide created between her life as a black female intellectual and the laboring history of her female ancestors: “Why am I not as they?” she asks. Although Walker composed the poem as she discovered that intellectual labor was also “labor,” she projects an inferior status upon her manner of toil to the far superior physical work performed by her grandmothers who “moved through fields sowing seed.” The grandmothers, with their “many clean words to say,” reverse the idea of physical labor as dirty; mental labor in its distance from sweat and earth becomes dirty; it is, in a sense, ineffectual; it yields nothing. In fact Walker refigures a popular proletarian trope and writes black women into proletarian literature by subordinating intellectual desire and angst to the laboring black woman who “followed plows and bent to toil.” Indeed, with “Why am I not as they?” Walker laments her own disconnection from the real work of her ancestors and asks: How is it that women with far fewer choices than the poem's speaker were able to create and maintain unimaginable worlds against unimaginable odds?

“Lineage” restores a history to black women and anticipates the early demands for inclusion that feminists of color advocated in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a result of liberal and cultural feminism's failure to see race as a central problem within the women's movement.⁷ Walker does not entertain a separate struggle for black women in For My People as a whole. Yet in several of her poems, representations of black female experience as distinct from black community experience are clear examples of her awareness of gender difference, even if such differences remained untheorized in Depression-era black communities. Yet it is most likely that Walker hoped poems like “Lineage,” which address issues unique to African American women's experience(s), and “For My People,” which describes African Americans' historical and collective movements (and named through the masculine linguistic sign, “men,” as was standard at that time), would be understood as representations of community rather than as explorations of gender identity. Additionally, as suggested in the beginning of this chapter, Walker also filters her representations of community and gender through dominant cultural tropes such as class, psychology, and religion, which seem to play an even larger role in her articulations of African American life.

For My People is very much a text of discovery, and Walker's realization “that people who worked with their brains were also workers” allowed her to place herself within the discourse of race and class consciousness as these began to infuse African American writing in the 1930s. Whereas the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s exemplified race pride at the level of cultural trope, the radical lyrics that Walker and other African American poets began to produce in the 1930s called for a more militant expression, a demand for lyrical evocations of the need for social transformation: “Let a race of men now rise and take control” is how Walker closes “For My People.” This poem depicts the immensely complicated and arduous movements African American men and women have made through immutably hostile terrain, while searching in these movements for the possibility of social change.

The volume For My People challenges the modernist poetics of the American male left by bringing to it a black, gendered vision. The book is divided into three parts, each exploring distinct African American cultural, social, and historical tropes. The first section contains stylistically varied, experimental poems about black social history, with emphasis on the southern landscape. The second section contains rearticulations of African American folklore, from the labor hero John Henry to the infamous trickster bad boy Stagolee. Walker's insistence on representing black female social and communal agency presents some feisty heroines who refigure the folklore genre's male-centered biases. The third and final section is comprised of sonnets. Though these sonnets were criticized by several of the book's reviewers, and, as Walker claims, her friends “the black male scholars and critics” (This Is My Century xvii) also maligned them, they resist and collapse the associations that the sonnet has had in traditional discussions of the form. Like the other two poets in this study, Lola Ridge and Genevieve Taggard, Walker wrote “political” sonnets. Perhaps to emphasize the formal interventions she hoped these poems would make, she gave them blunt titles such as “Whores” and “The Struggle Staggers Us.” As Ridge desired with “Electrocution” and Taggard with “Silence in Majorca,” Walker attempted to turn the form on its head. The tension and resolution found in the first and final sections of the sonnet form, conventionally concerned with love or honor, get quite a jolt as they convey the effects of the death penalty, of fascism, and of racism.⁸

The title poem that opens For My People is perhaps the best introduction to the book as a whole, particularly in a reading that emphasizes the cultural and historical material that informed its production.⁹ As Walker would tell Alferdteen Harrison fifty years after the book's publication:

I wrote these poems … in the decade of the 1930s. It was a period of depression—black people suffered along with everyone else from lack of jobs, from lack of standard housing, from lack of appropriate schooling. We were literally outcast from the general society. But then there were poor white people too, and poor working people. It was a time when unions were struggling to have collective bargaining, to have a forty-hour week.

(9)

“For My People” is a powerful, mantralike prose verse testimonial on the experiences of African Americans. It moves chronologically from the culture of slavery to the author's bitter present of “hypocrisy and misunderstanding” to, finally, a militant resolution in the closing stanza calling for “another world to be born” in which “martial songs” replace “dirges” and a “new earth” unfolds for a new generation of people fully shaped by a revolutionary black consciousness.¹⁰ “For My People” captures an important American historical moment as the black South moves north; it is a text of migration and rural dislocation.

The poem's opening emphasis is on the cultural products of slavery—“dirges” and “ditties,” “blues” and “jubilees”—it also explains Walker's more general attraction to folk ritual, which permeates the entire book. She presents the aesthetic practice of “slave songs,” however, in contradictory fashion, creating a tension between musical settings: lamentations, devotionals, and popular balladry. Yet behind the powerful spiritual intensity created through song is the tacit reminder that such tropes are also products of domination, of a subduing of spirit and will. As the stanza closes, the songs are rounded out by “knees” bending “humbly” in prayer to an “unseen power.” Walker fuses the attitudes of her Methodist upbringing with the marxism of Chicago radicals: if resistance is to be created it must be done through an understanding of one's surroundings. As the poem proceeds, it explores the variance and incongruities of developing and maintaining race, class, and gender consciousness, keeping alive folk traditions while yearning for all the forms culture can take.

The poem's momentum is best characterized by a vocabulary of activity, while each stanza replicates a stage in the life cycle from birth, to adulthood, and finally toward regeneration. Walker laments the “strength” of her people being spent “washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending / hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching / dragging along.” The present continuous tense used in the second and seventh stanzas suggests the exhaustion of labor without any of the romanticization that certain types of proletarian poetry have used to mute the grim realities of working-class life. Walker spares us the commas; these tasks run one into the other. Endless and mindless, they describe a people “never gaining never reaping never knowing and never understanding.” Again no commas: and even then, out-of-breath readers will not know the half of it. This straining toil, evoking southern labor on the land, is matched in the seventh stanza's evocations of displacement, probably to metaphorize the disorientation caused by the northern migration: “For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when burdened, / drinking when hopeless.” In fact the poem's sixth stanza, which just precedes the above lines, speaks directly of dislocation, whether caused by the move north in which so many African Americans took part, or the equally disordering move from country to city:

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox
Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New
Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy
people filling the cabarets and taverns and other
people's pockets needing bread and shoes and milk and
land and money and something—something all our own.

The wants and needs and desires that are evoked by the use of the conjunction “and,” always a grammar of continuation, characterize the sense of being “lost disinherited dispossessed.” Yet Walker is careful to construct contradiction within the interstices of movement: “lost disinherited dispossessed and happy / people” fill “cabarets and taverns.” There is desire even in dislocation, the search for something “all our own,” a people who, in the penultimate stanza, try to “fashion a better way / from confusion”; they attempt to refashion themselves within their new surroundings.

Two million African Americans migrated from the South to the North between 1900 and 1930. Postbellum life for southern blacks continued to be limiting in every conceivable way—socially, politically, personally, and most evident, financially. Historian Jacqueline Jones provides a more concrete explanation for the migration:

[There was] … the oppressive sharecropping system, disenfranchisement, Jim Crow laws, a plague of boll weevils working its way toward the Cotton Belt. When World War I opened up employment possibilities in the industrial Northeast and Midwest, mass migration began in earnest: the lure of high wages and a freer life proved irresistible to a people limited to agricultural and domestic service in the land of neoslavery.

(153)

A prominent visual image that appeared during the period of the Great Migration was the newspaper photograph of African Americans—men, women, and children—boarding trains by the hundreds for the great northern cities: Chicago, New York, Detroit, Washington, Cleveland, Philadelphia. Chicago's preeminent black newspaper the Defender advertised jobs in hopes of luring young black men to the booming industrial city. These ads screamed opportunities that would have been inconceivable in the South. One such ad read: “Laborers wanted for foundry, warehouse and yard work. Excellent opportunity to learn trades, paying good money. Start $2.50-$2.75 per day. Extra for overtime” (quoted in Takaki 343). Although black men would benefit far more than black women in terms of job choice and financial reward, women were no less anxious to be part of the migration. In fact, men who migrated along with their wives looked forward to seeing them treated fairly—not only as workers but also as shoppers. Yet as Jacqueline Jones maintains, “[f]ew migrants, male or female, abandoned the South totally or irrevocably” (159). Individuals made frequent returns, relatives were sent for, money and goods flowed south, but southern goods were also sent north, along with the culture and lore people brought with them. One positive, irrevocable change that the northern migration affected was the cultural contact between the black South and the largely white North. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes of the important cultural significance of the migration: “Just as slavery inadvertently created a new ‘African’ culture—a New World Western, Pan-African culture and ethnicity—so, too, did the Great Migration create a new culture, one northern and urban yet thoroughly southern in its roots” (17).

Margaret Walker claimed her coming north in the early 1930s to attend Northwestern, her father's alma mater, was based on Langston Hughes's advice. Hughes, whom Walker had met while living in New Orleans as a teen, felt her writing talent could never be nurtured in the South.¹¹ Yet the North as a place of opportunity was not without its own incongruities. The discrimination she assumed would be reversed in the North, she soon discovered was an everyday reality for her northern sisters and brothers. In the essay “Growing Out of Shadow” first published in Common Ground in 1943, Walker notes her surprise that the expectations she had about northern opportunities and promises were proved wrong. She quickly understood that racism did not disappear once one crossed the Mason-Dixon line. “In the South,” she writes,

I had always thought that, naturally, white people had more money than colored people. Poor white trash signified for me the lazy scum of the marginal fringe of society with no excuse for poverty. Now I discovered there were poor white working people exploited by rich white people. I learned that all Jews were not rich. I discovered that all Negroes were not even in the same economic class. While there were no Negro multimillionaires, there were many wealthy Negroes who made money by exploiting the poor Negroes, who had some of the same attitudes toward them that rich whites had toward poor whites and that prejudiced whites have toward all Negroes.¹²

She also writes about being “refused service in restaurants in Evanston and Chicago time and time again” (6). Though this is but one of many instances of northern racist practice, it had a symbolic resonance for African Americans that would eventually give birth to actions such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee lunch-counter sit-ins during the nascent years of the Civil Rights movement.

The “people thronging 47th Street in Chicago,” the image that begins the sixth stanza of “For My People,” signifies the poet herself as witness to the migrating bodies creating a new community in the Midwestern metropolis. The need and desire, the sense of dislocation, and the urgency evoked by Walker's descriptions register a lament and longing for the South as home. However, there is also a sense of vibrancy; cities like Chicago still offered hope. “47th Street in Chicago” was a hub of African American community and must have surely given Walker a sense of identity, albeit complex and contradictory, even if she saw herself as a transplanted southerner.

The contradictions Walker found in the crowded streets of Chicago's black belt might be better understood by considering an important study of the city, which examines both the resignation of Chicago's black community and its pride and fortitude. St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton provide an exhaustive analysis of Chicago's black belt in their Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City. Richard Wright, who wrote the introduction to the first edition published in 1945, describes the book as an important “scientific report upon the state of unrest, longing, hope among urban Negroes” (xxv).¹³ Drake and Cayton describe “Bronzeville,” the name given to Chicago's South Side with 47th Street as its main thoroughfare, with a liveliness in sharp contrast to the white world surrounding and enclosing it. A “continuous eddy of faces—black, brown, olive, yellow, and white” (379) circulates through a neighborhood filled with its own newspapers, professionals, clerks, and policemen. Theaters and billboards announcing black art and entertainment, and a plethora of churches, steady streams of shoppers, agents, “irate tenants,” job seekers, and picketers create a vital atmosphere of heterodox enterprise. Yet like Walker, Drake and Cayton are aware of the temptation to romanticize the ghetto and pointedly avoid doing so. The thronging bodies of 47th Street are casualties of a Jim Crow system, and their separation and their enforced poverty are ever present and reminders of a people “preyed on by a facile force of state and fad and novelty,” as Walker tells us in “For My People.” Richard Wright, in his introduction to Drake and Cayton's book, also expressed a sense of the city's contradictions. His dialectical response was no doubt something he was able to share with Walker during the years of their friendship in Chicago:

Chicago is the city from which the most incisive and radical Negro thought has come; there is an open and raw beauty about the city that seems either to kill or endow one with the spirit of life. I felt those extremes of possibility, death and hope, while I lived half hungry and afraid in a city to which I had fled with the dumb yearning to write, to tell my story.

(xvii)

A sense of despair, of crampedness, of wonder and discovery, the contradictions and confusions that make up the bemused quest of a people cut off from their past and determined to fashion a future, set the pace for Walker's final message in “For My People.” In her forecast looms “a bloody peace written in the sky,” the birth of a “second generation full of courage,” and a “beauty full of healing and [a] strength.” But these requisites belong to a hope predicated upon a belief, shared by many radical writers of the 1930s, in social transformation: “let a new race of men now rise and take control.”¹⁴

Walker's militancy in these last lines reflects her education as a black intellectual together with her Chicago 1930s' marxist education.¹⁵ Yet it is interesting to see the dichotomy created in the radical desire of “For My People” when reading it with a later poem like “Today.” This poem, written in a similar style as “For My People,” with its enjambed, unpunctuated lines, calculates race intolerance in America with the “international” fight against racial oppression in fascist Europe. The black nation as it rises in America must gaze across the Atlantic to see a new “race” of men arising and taking control in Europe—the white “Aryan” race calling for the obliteration of the “other.” “Today” was written just as war was commencing in Europe. Like “For My People,” it transcends yet remains a creation of the Chicago years. Ideologically, Walker embraces a tacit left internationalism with an implicit prompt that racial oppression has fueled war in Europe. The poem juxtaposes “Middle America” with “Middle Europe,” and a contradiction takes shape. Because the poem was written before the United States entered the war, instead of containing images of homefront pride, the poet creates a linguistic surface on which to convey indignation at the nation's apathy in the face of world problems.

“Today” is also a radical rewriting of Walt Whitman's “I Hear America Singing” and “I Sing the Body Electric.” Yet it is closer to the pessimism and outrage expressed in the late Whitman of Democratic Vistas. Rather than celebrating the possibilities of America, Walker begins her song using Whitmanesque prose/verse form to cast a shadow of doubt on the future of humanity: “I sing of slum scabs on city / faces.” Her lamentations, in fact, reach far beyond the ghettos she has walked through, to draw a line that will connect them to the cities of Europe as they anticipate and experience bombing: “scrawny children scarred by bombs and dying of / hunger.” Then she reminds us again of the American landscape dotted with her people as “wretched human scarecrows strung against / lynching stakes.” And of course workers, black and white, “dying of pellagra and silicosis.” Their “houses” are “rotten” and “fall on slowly decaying humanity.” Whereas Whitman “sings” his “body electric” as a praise of the human body in its social engagement with the luscious body of its rich, capacious land—America—Walker sings that body struggling against decay, overwork, and exhaustion, where praise must be mediated through unrelenting pain and sorrow:

                                                                                I sing of Man's struggle to be
clean, to be useful, to be free; of need arising from our lives,
of bitter living flowing in our laughter, of cankerous mutiny
eating through the nipples of our breasts.
                                                                                I sing of our soon-to-be-dead,
of last escape: drunkard raising flasks to his lips never
tasting the solace, gambler casting his last die never
knowing the win, lover seeking lips of the beloved never
tasting fruit of his kiss, never knowing the languorous sleep.

Contradicting Whitman's texts of American abundance, the singing of “Today” represents American lack. “To be clean, to be useful,” the body here is hardly replete; its “laughter” is the “bitter” gall of living. To be human in Walker's “Today” in the U.S.A. is to be half-living or “soon to be dead”: to be drunk, but without consolation. It is wager without potential prize and romantic love without consummation. The American body which she sings has been exploited beyond pleasure. The Depression that encloses her words has paved its way to war. She ends the first section with a biblical foreboding: “I sing these fragments of living that you / may know by these presents that which we feared most has / come upon us.”

While the specter haunting Europe in Walker's “Today” is fascism, it also haunts America, as indicated in the poem's second section. The poet discontinues the Whitmanesque sorrow songs; she represents America “complacently smug in a snug somnolescence” by suggesting its removal from Europe's theater of bombs. She even points a finger: “You walking these common / neighboring streets with no disturbing drone of bombing / planes.” Though it appears the sense of desperation described in the poem's first section attempts to unite a common degraded humanity, the poem as a whole suggests how distant are those Americans from the fact that they are “fearing no severed baby arms nor naked / eyeballs hurtled in [their] hands.” Instead Americans have unappreciated advantages “riding trolley and jitney / daily, buying gas and light hourly.” Moreover, they have the distracting pleasures of popular culture (a theater without bombs): “Wild West Indian and Shooting Sam,” “Mama Loves Papa,” and “Gone by the Breeze.” The fate of Europe's war victims might also be a tacit reminder about America's denial of its own history of racial hatred and violence. Walker seems to suggest, with her representations of complacency and her attack on a certain “it can't happen here” mentality, that war in Europe stemmed from the very race hatred that is also a pernicious American disease. Although Walker's poetic critique chides complacent attitudes before the United States entered the war, a comment by her friend Richard Wright written sometime after is perhaps not far from Walker's own imaginings: Would America, when “brought face to face with the problem of the Negro, collapse in a moral spasm, as did Europe when confronted with the problem of the Jew” (xxxi)?

As Walker juxtaposes Europe's war-ravaged body with a “Middle America / distantly removed,” she upbraids the American body for busying itself with “petty personals.” She lists consumer goods unavailable to allied women in Europe such as: “eyemaline,” “henna rinse,” “dental cream.” She reproves America for its privileges and records the guilt-filled inactivity of the white middle class “washing your lives with pity, smoothing your ways with vague apologies.” The cleansing suggested by the list of personal care products and the “washing” and the “smoothing” of “lives” and “ways” tacitly represents America's isolation from the rise of fascism across the Atlantic, reflecting the apathy and denial that is placated by trivialities in a time of crisis.

In the poem's final stanza, Walker alludes to the structures of belief that appear to shelter individuals from a wider understanding of the social disenfranchisement and dislocation she sees at the center of oppression, both on the national and international scale:

                                                                                Pray the Men of Mars to
descend upon you. Pray Jehovah to send his prophets before
the avenging fire. Pray for second sight and inner ear. Pray
for bulwark against poaching patterns of dislocated days;
pray for buttressing iron against insidious termite and beetle
and locust and flies and lice and moth and rust and mold.

Here Walker seems to take on the role of preacher and prophet to curse the lukewarm. She both borrows from and challenges the religious language of black culture. She also equates the trope of Armageddon as it is preached in black churches with the bombs falling on Middle Europe. The “buttressing iron” hints at the manufacture of war; the biblical plagues of “locust and flies” ask the audience to acknowledge that war might be a wake-up call. To close “Today” with the language of religious foreboding links Walker's social consciousness to the consciousness of African Americans decidedly shaped by the Christian church.

It should be noted that religion played an important role in Margaret Walker's upbringing. She believed in religion, which sets her apart from a good many other writers on the left while it connected her to black people and many white Protestants. Both her parents were deeply religious, and her father was a biblical scholar as well as a Methodist minister. Yet two critiques of religion are prevalent in For My People: the palliative role that religion plays in communities where prayer replaces social action and political resistance, and the forcing of the white man's religion onto the slave communities in the new world. In “Since 1619,” for example, Walker, referring to the year the first slave ship reached North America, laments: “How many years since 1619 have I been singing Spirituals? / How long have I been praising God and shouting hallelujahs?” The collective voice, the poem's construction as a series of self-defining questions, speaks of a weariness and anger that the “hallelujahs” in thrall to the “money-gods” cannot quite penetrate; these are, after all, epochs of misdirected voices. Thus she asks “[w]hen will I burst from my kennel an angry mongrel. / Lean and hungry and tired of my dry bones and years?” This questioning trope, the desire to see her people develop the necessary consciousness to take action, is an important feature echoed throughout the first section of For My People. Yet Walker is also concerned here with the complicated nature of the battle to free the self from superstition, from pie-in-the-sky platitudes, and from all forms of indoctrination connected to slavery's rhetoric—its institutionalization and its aftermath.¹⁶

Walker writes the complicated nature of belief and its contradictory role as a trope of resistance in the poem “We Have Been Believers.” The poem also explores how Africans in America created a new cultural body by assimilating “the black gods of an old land” with “the white gods of a new land.” With this conflation of old and new she renders belief as dichotomy: “we have been believers / believing in the mercy of our masters and the beauty of / our brothers.” Each stanza of “We Have Been Believers” exposes the contradictions inherent in the integration of black belief into the white man's world, and it is important to see that this belief is both tenacious and transformative. For example, stanza three begins: “Neither the slave's whip nor the lynchers' rope nor the / bayonet could kill our black belief,” and ends by evoking the book of Revelations (also a radical Puritan creed): “we have been believers in the new Jerusalem.” Yet Walker is perhaps most concerned here with the relationship of faith and labor. As “silent and stolid and stubborn and / strong” as black belief has been, there is behind it the tacit question of whose new Jerusalem will be built. Black labor has certainly a tradition of building, but not a Jerusalem of its own. That the American economy could not have survived and grown as it did without the slave labor of African Americans is a fact that cannot be ignored.

We have been believers yielding substance for the world.
With our hands have we fed a people and out of our
strength have they wrung the necessities of a nation.
Our song has filled the twilight and our hope has
heralded the dawn.

Walker became quite interested in the plight of contemporary black labor during her years in Chicago. Her interest in labor issues and worker militancy seems to have been shaped by her contact with radical writers in the WPA. In letters of the period that Walker wrote to Richard Wright after he had left Chicago for New York, she discusses union matters concerning the Federal Writers' Project. By becoming an “organized” intellectual worker she was able to feel empowered in ways the generations she speaks of in her poems were not. Though Walker's participation in the Writers Project in Chicago brought her in contact with various forms of radical practices, the Communist Party being the most prominent, Walker has claimed that it was the Congress of Industrial Organizations—the CIO—rather than the party that spoke to her and other members of Chicago's black community. As Drake and Cayton write of the CIO's influence on African Americans in Chicago: “Belief in racial equality was a component part of its ideology, and was kept constantly before the membership by a vigorous left-wing minority within the CIO. Formerly skeptical of the white man's union, both the Negro workers and the Negro community became pro-CIO” (313).¹⁷ Black skepticism of unions had been traditionally maintained by companies using black laborers as strikebreakers. Employers also used race hatred and fear consistently to divide workers. As the CIO became identified with class solidarity, it also became one of the first arenas in which black workers could question and condemn racial inequality. The CIO's organizing tactics to attract African Americans were not only centered on fighting discrimination in the workplace but also in protesting segregation as well as campaigning for fair housing practices and overall improved living conditions. Of course the CIO could offer no absolute guarantee that discrimination would fade from the workplace, but as one worker admitted contemplating “the former role of [African Americans] as strikebreakers,” “[r]ace prejudice will only be overcome through a sustained campaign of education. It will take years to do this. We need the universities, the radio, the press to help us” (339).

One strike of major importance in the annals of CIO militancy in the 1930s that included the participation of African Americans, was the Republic Steel Strike. In May of 1937, twenty thousand workers at the South Chicago-based plant walked off their jobs. They struck for “union recognition and a wage increase” (321). Margaret Walker's memory is closely connected to an incident of the strike that made national headlines, the Memorial Day Massacre. In fact she confessed to Richard Wright, in a letter written a month after the event, that her attempts to produce a poem on the subject did not prove “effective.” As Drake and Cayton describe the massacre:

On Sunday, May 30, 1937, a crowd of some 5,000 people [white and black]—strikers, their wives and children, and union sympathizers—were assembled near the plant for purposes of mass picketing and demonstrations. During the afternoon a disturbance occurred and the police fired into the crowd. Ten workers were killed, and nine more persons were injured. The police were severely and widely denounced for unprovoked and excessive brutality. They claimed they were “attacked,” but impartial evidence assembled at the time contained nothing to justify their conduct.

(321)

Walker may have been unable to produce a poem that could satisfactorily represent the anger induced by the massacre. Her belief in industrial organizing that might successfully integrate blacks into American political and economic life suggests, however, a turn from a false set of hopes to acknowledging a new, albeit violent, struggle for freedom. One might read these beliefs into the strident ending of the poem “We Have Been Believers”:

We have been believers believing in our burdens and our
demigods too long. Now the needy no longer weep and
pray; the long-suffering arise, and our fists bleed
against the bars with a strange insistency.

The bleeding fists transform a passive faith connected to “burdens” and “demigods” into an active body capable of moving forward. Like the “race of men” (and women) that will “rise and take control” in the finale of “For My People,” belief becomes an insistent cry to resist both acquiescence and the oppression that has produced it.

Walker's representation of the culture of belief embedded in African American life reflects the strong spiritual influences of her southern background. It is not surprising that the South, and the conflicting set of images associated with it, permeate For My People. It is important to consider how, as a radical poet, she imagines and shapes the South's problematic history. The location of the writer is another important consideration. Walker's poems are products of the northern migration, and in their scripted distance they present a dichotomy in terms of representation. They reproduce the migration as a text, much the same way Jacob Lawrence's paintings did in his series “The Migration of the Negro.” These aesthetic documents record the experience of many.¹⁸ Moreover, they speak both longingly and angrily of the South. They also contain a sense of militancy familiar to Depression-era readers of poetry. As angry indictments of slavery and the continuation of racial exploitation in its aftermath, they concretize social and economic injustice. Walker often uses the angry linguistic codes of the labor chants from the radical literary circles in which she traveled while in Chicago, but she exchanges the northern industrial setting for the rural south. The North has always represented more relative freedom for African Americans, yet the South is kin. A kind of schizophrenia develops. The South is a place longed for, at the same time its need for transformation is acknowledged. Thus Walker finds herself creating from two places: the material realities that dictated the northern migration and the southern homeland that resides inside her heart.

The poem “Sorrow Home” exemplifies this sense of displacement. Its title alone suggests it could be an anthem for the two million African Americans who went north in the first three decades of the twentieth century. As she speaks for her people in this poem, Walker takes a glance backward. She confesses, “[m]y roots are deep in southern life. … I was sired and weaned / in a tropic world.” She continues to remind readers of the lushness in stark contrast to “steel and wood and brick far from the sky” that is Chicago. “Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood. I belong / with the smell of fresh pine, with the trail of coon, and / the spring growth of wild onion.” In fact Walker identifies her distance from this familiar territory through a trope of organicism. “I am no hothouse bulb to be reared in steam-heated flats / with the music of El and subway in my ears.” Geography for Walker is more than just the binarisms of rural and urban; it is the source of her conflict and alienation. The contradictory elements that name both the South and the North as problematic residences keep the poet above romanticizing either place. Yet as she faces homesickness for her Southland, she must always be conscious of the historical price tag sewn into the “cotton fields, tobacco and the cane.”

Perhaps Walker's most penetrating look at the southern landscape is in the long poem “Delta.” In “Delta,” Walker imagines the homeland reclaimed by those who created both its economic and historical significance. She describes a people who move “beyond your reach O mighty winnowing flail! / infinite and free” through their ability to recognize themselves as historical agents. While “Sorrow Home” possesses a resigned terseness, a South constructed through a history of racial oppression, its “Klan of hate,” its “hounds,” and its “chain gangs,” “Delta” reveals Walker's attempt to denaturalize the desire for the South as home through the left ideological perspectives she learned in Chicago. Yet, however important it is to reflect upon social being as mediated through material conditions, the acknowledgment of class conflict and class consciousness does not adequately explain the institutionalized racism endured by the people of the “Delta.” The frustrations and desires of a people whose social being is so inextricably linked to both class and race antagonism require a more complicated analysis. The marxism that influenced Walker during her Chicago years, with its European industrial origins and blindness toward gender concerns, could hardly theorize the lot of most delta women, although some women benefited from the Share Croppers' Unions that the Communist Party helped organize in Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana in the early 1930s.¹⁹ The question of race most certainly complicates an ideological framework structured to unite a working class consistently at odds with the contradictions of its own racial privileges in the case of white workers, or lack thereof, in the case of black workers. Moreover, the sexual division of labor that existed in northern working-class communities was radically different for black women of the delta; traditionally, women and men worked side by side in the fields—a phenomenon that few white workers would experience or understand. What is more, however, both black and white women shared the burden of the double shift: work in the fields or the factories, and work in the home.²⁰ Perhaps Walker did not foresee the complicated relationships black workers in the South encountered through the narrowly conceived marxist pedagogy at her disposal in Chicago; yet the poem “Delta” itself grounds such contradictions surprisingly well.

“Delta” conveys, through the lusciousness of its language and its rhythmic verse cadences, a sorrowful history that makes the poet's problematized territorial desire for the South all the more powerful. The poem lovingly renders the South as a fertile, voluptuous body, while also portraying it as a tormented and enslaved body that has cultivated itself in its own chains. “Delta” is not only a travelogue told by one of its homesick exiles but also a survey of the political economy told in verse by the offspring of its laborers. The poem constructs its South through the trajectory of birth, labor, and rising consciousness. This triad commences in the first person with the speaker being (“a child of the valley”), watching (“rivulets flow”), listening (“lullabies,” “blues”), and thinking of convergence: “If only from this valley we might rise with song! / With singing that is ours.” The poem's second section moves into the plural, the collective, the laboring body that defines itself through generations who moved in alienating similarity “in this low valley.” That “[d]aily we fill boats with cargoes of our need / and send them out to sea” is Walker's message, contained within the verdancy of the place, the richness of the soil: “We tend the crop and gather the harvest / but not for ourselves do we labor.” Walker is resolute in representing estranged labor as it rests fitfully in its haunted valley:

Out of a deep slumber truth rides upon us
and we wonder why we are helpless
and we wonder why we are dumb.

In the poem's third and final stanza, to keep with the language of the landscape, the earth, the “delta” as the poet describes it, Walker interjects the possibility of forces that will disrupt acquiescence and naturalness. Home, where the southern valleys quake with a desire for an insurrection of consciousness, begins with the sleep-shattering questions of the above lines. Seasonal metaphors, eclipsing winters and regenerative springs, are used as linguistic fortifications of a regional restructuring of consciousness. This is evidenced in the way Walker opens the section:

Now burst dams of years
and winter snows melt with an onrush of a turbulent spring.
Now rises sap in slumbering elms
and floods overwhelm us
here in this low valley.

With the “years” of servility bursting and spring a “turbulent” rather than calming season, elms sapping and “floods” overwhelming the historically docile valley, the poet attempts to denaturalize the longing for home—which in actuality has been a place of degrading hardship, dehumanizing labor, and enforced poverty, as well as ignorance. The valley is not just ripe for growing and harvesting but for “thundering” sounds that will disturb the thought process, with “cannons boom[ing] in our brains / and there is a dawning understanding / in the valleys of our spirits.” Walker contrasts the valley's growing season with the awakening of those who make it grow, while the traditionally fertile crescent continues to be represented as a site of intervention: “Into our troubled living flows the valley / flooding our lives with a passion for freedom.” What is more, as in “Sorrow Home,” she plays linguistically with the idea of organicism. The oppressed bodies of those who have made and are thus the land must reclaim it: “We with our blood have watered these fields / and they belong to us.”

While I have articulated Walker's representations of the laboring black body in the black South in poems such as “We Have Been Believers” and “Delta,” it is also important to explore the cultural material woven from laboring life, which had also influenced the way Walker saw her southern home. As Walker was writing poems in the vein of Walt Whitman and Langston Hughes, she was also looking to southern oral traditions such as folktales and folk songs as sources of poetic inspiration; these were also traditions from which to borrow in order to reinvent modern poetry from her own perspective as an African American woman. Walker's letters to Richard Wright indicate that she struggled to perfect a series of “folk tales.” Although she does not provide any specific examples in these letters, she was most likely referring to the poems that appear in the second section of For My People. In these particular poems Walker rearticulates the legacies of familiar folklife characters. Her lyrics describe the exploits of tricksters, conjurers, gamblers, bootleggers, pimps, and laborers, accentuating the nuanced lives of African American folk heroes and heroines.

Walker grew up in a household where the word was sacrosanct. Her maternal grandmother's storytelling no doubt introduced her to the rich and varied folklore produced in the antebellum South that would resurface later in the pages of the novel Jubilee. Additionally, the African American folktale is an important literary form for Walker, the poet, to be working with in the 1930s. If For My People challenges the “Anglo-Saxonness” and class biases of high modernism through its exploration of black consciousness and racial oppression, its appropriation of folk forms is central to this challenge.²¹

In his engrossing study of black culture-building in America, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, Lawrence Levine examines the development of the folktale tradition from slavery times through and beyond the period of emancipation. In the twentieth century, he notes, black communities throughout the United States were captivated by “supernatural tales, moral and didactic tales, human and animal trickster tales, tales centering on both real and apocryphal personal experiences … the entire range of tales that slaves had told and retold” (368). Storytelling, as art as well as entertainment, remained a significant source of cultural continuity. As Levine also points out, the folk heroes that surfaced after emancipation underwent a significant change from the narrow range of heroes represented in the antebellum period. “[N]ew figures appeared and old ones were frequently altered in aspect or significance. … Neither the heroes nor the consciousness that molded them remained static in the century following emancipation” (369-70).

Walker retells ten folk lyrics, including two tales, “Bad-Man Stagolee” and “Big John Henry,” whose immense popularity (though as legends they are at odds with each other) have crossed over into mainstream American popular culture.²² Walker's particular telling of “Bad-Man Stagolee” and “Kissie Lee” suggest important connections to Walker's raced, classed, and gendered poetic articulations. With the poem “Bad-Man Stagolee,” Walker reinscribes the Stagolee legend with a complicated twist coupling the policing of black communities with the hero's popularity. Then with “Kissie Lee,” Walker rewrites the folktale genre's androcentric bias, as well as the black community's identification of the trickster archetype as male, by answering the Stagolee story with the tale of a knife-wielding female tough.

As legend tells it, “Bad-Man Stagolee” (pronounced Stack'-a-lee, as Walker informs readers in a footnote) shot a man called Billy Lyons after losing to him at cards (or craps). Date, place, and stakes all vary, but in a blues version recorded by Mississippi John Hurt in 1929, “Stagolee shot Billy … [for] a five-dollar Stetson hat” (Marcus 76-77).²³ Additionally, according to folk-song collector Alan Lomax, Stagolee is generally arrested for his crimes, executed in some fashion, and sent down to hell.²⁴ Yet like the many renditions of the Stagolee tale that have circulated, Walker's version also differs. It contains a twist that refashions it for its contemporary urban audience.

That Stagolee was an all-right lad
Till he killed a cop and turned out bad,
Though some do say to this very day
He killed more'n one 'fore he killed that 'fay.

By transforming Stagolee into an “all-right lad” who kills a cop, Walker conflates a number of the versions of the tale into one that identifies Stagolee with violence as an everyday reality for African American communities throughout the nation. The cop, assumed to be white, suggests a fantasy of revenge for the police brutality that black communities have historically had visited upon them. Perhaps the resituated Stagolee was inspired by real events happening in Chicago at the time Walker appears to have worked on the tales. While helping Richard Wright reconstruct the events of the Nixon case (a young black man on trial for murder) on which much of Native Son was based, in a letter that included clippings on the trial from the local papers, she comments on the state of affairs between Chicago's black community and the police department:

You may not know all the brutal attacks of the Chicago Police since last memorial day. Police history in Chicago since that time has been one succession of brutality and intimidation after another. The Maxwell Street Station has become famous for getting confessions by the third degree method and today one Negro boy is permanently paralyzed because of police doings. These rape cases appear annually about this time to increase circulation and I know personally that 56 Negro boys were picked up on the North Side in connection with a murder last fall committed by the woman's sweetheart.²⁵

Remaining the stuff of legends, and fashioned with irony in the poem, the figure of Stagolee is a resituated metaphor for what social ills create. Walker's Stagolee contains the same invincible curiosity that all the previous tellers have given him, and she informs us “the tale ain't new,” but she stretches the legend from its celebration of Stagolee as mean individualist, to a tale with political undertones. In Walker's telling, Stagolee, after his “bullets made holes no doc could cyo,” is able to disappear without being apprehended, eluding the racist taunts and torments which then lead to lynching:

But the funniest thing about that job
Was he never got caught by no mob
And he missed the lynching meant for his hide
'Cause nobody knows how Stagolee died

To highlight Walker's retelling as seemingly political, one must see that the Stagolee story maintained its importance in the black community through its radical symbolism. The myth presents a man whose outlandish and wholly autonomous antics signify the ultimate in freedom in a nation in which that freedom has been most brutally curtailed. Walker's reinterpretation of Stagolee's transgressions further inscribes the story with a hegemonical challenge. Stagolee doesn't just kill a fellow hood, a compatriot gambler, as he does in other versions of the tale: he kills a cop. (He messes with authority; he messes with white America, and he gets away with it.) This is how he becomes a legend.

Bad-Man Stagolee ain't no more
But his ghost still walks up and down the shore
Of Old Man River round New Orleans
With her gumbo, rice, and good red beans!

Yet there is a problem in politicizing the Stagolee tale as well. The legend, apparently built around the careers of two actual turn-of-the-century criminals, Morris Slater and Railroad Bill, is not, according to Lawrence Levine's reading, one that lends itself to romanticization or sentimentalizing.²⁶ Though Walker's rendition celebrates Stagolee's elusiveness in the face of white authority, he is not Robin Hood nor even Pretty Boy Floyd; his actions never lead to any acts of genuine goodwill within the black community, and the tellers of the tale seem to have been generally conscious of this fact. As Levine maintains, “[these folk heroes] were not given any socially redeeming characteristics simply because in them there was no hope of social redemption” (419). More important, to romanticize folk legends such as Stagolee would be to play with the important dose of reality that Walker, under the tutelage of Wrightian naturalism, perhaps wanted to convey with stories about the more sordid figures of African American folklife, thus reminding her Depression audience of the complicated nature of literary representation.

If “Bad-Man Stagolee” is a tale known far and wide, whose influence has even crossed over into mainstream popular culture, Walker's tale of the female tough “Kissie Lee” recollects a folk hero from the margins. Yet mainstream popular culture, while it is able not only to tolerate but idolize a “bad man” like Stagolee, is apparently not ready to meet his female counterpart in the ballad Walker tells of this good girl turned bad.

Toughest gal I ever did see
Was a gal by the name of Kissie Lee;
The toughest gal God ever made
And she drew a dirty, wicked blade.

As in “Bad-Man Stagolee” violence in “Kissie Lee” is treated matter-of-factly. What's more, the violence depicted (but not demonized) in these tales is always connected in larger terms to the complex structures of powerlessness found in the communities of their tellers. However, where Walker depicts Stagolee's end in slippery terms as a conscious effort to problematize his legendary import, Kissie Lee lives a life of violence and dies violently as any bad man might.

She could shoot glass offa the hinges,
She could take herself on the wildest binges.
And she died with her boots on switching blades
On Talladega Mountain in the likker raids.

Perhaps what is most striking is that like the woman of another tale Walker retells, “Yalluh Hammah,” in which a female trickster outsmarts a guy who likes to “lay his jive,” Kissie Lee's story is about the fierce independence of the female folk hero in a tradition in which the “mens” seem to get all the attention. As with the poem cited in the beginning of this chapter, “Lineage,” Walker takes the unsung strength of African American women and provides a space for their recognition inside a literary genre and cultural context in which questions of black women's oppression remained as yet unarticulated. Rather than creating a separate text in which the voices of black women emerge, she acknowledges their labor alongside the men, as well as their legendary transgressions in the case of Kissie Lee, as part of a total dialogue on black structures of feeling that she has attempted to record in For My People.

Black folktale culture is decidedly masculine in outlook. Maintaining masculine heroes such as Stagolee and John Henry has been traditionally important in resisting a white racist culture, one determined if not to destroy, at least to stereotype black men through emasculation. The emergence of a folk figure such as Kissie Lee challenges the existing framework in which the bad male folk heroes appear representative.²⁷ According to Walker's telling, Kissie Lee's abuse at the hands of “a no good shine” is what shapes her character as “the toughest gal God ever made.” What is equally striking about Walker's interest in this tale is that like the poem “Lineage,” Kissie Lee's turn from victim to agent appears part of a dynamic process controlled by women. Kissie Lee is not the first in line of bad-girl heroes. Her “Grammaw,” tired of Kissie's “whinin',” offers the insight that “[p]eople don't ever treat you right,” and urges her to do as she has done:

“Whin I was a gal wasn't no soul
Could do me wrong an' still stay whole.
Ah got me a razor to talk for me
An' aftah that they let me be.”

Not only does Kissie, within the ironic boundaries of the bad folk hero convention, receive advice through a matrilineal history, but such a historical line suggests the badness of women as a form of self-preservation and pursuit of female agency en suite. Kissie Lee, taking her grandmother's advice, takes this malfeasance a step further: “‘Cause when she learned to stab and run / She got herself a little gun.” As Kissie graduates from mean gal to “[m]eanest mama you ever seen,” she also (in keeping with the superpower suggestions of the bad-man folk legends) loses her status as victim, attains the status of “woman,” while at the same time appears to maintain an independence that collapses both stated regions as sites of negotiation: “She could hold her likker and hold her man / And she went thoo life jus' raisin' san'.”

The climax of the tale is Kissie's revenge on a man who “done her dirt long time ago / [w]hen she was good and feeling low.” Not only does Kissie shoot him “to the floor,” but to reveal the determination of her vengeful spirit, she flashes her blade so that “[e]vvy livin' guy got out of her way.” Walker tells us that Kissie dies “with her boots on switching blades.” As with the other tales, we are given no moral; such is inconceivable in a community that cannot realistically hope that its acts of revenge will not provoke even graver retaliations. Thus as much as Kissie's story invokes female agency, it is not a tale of uplift for black women. Just as judgment on the activity of the men is reserved, so is such judgment reserved for the equally bad women. Walker creates with “Kissie Lee” a presence for black women as tricksters and evildoers as much as she creates a presence for those women (and men) who dared tell their stories.²⁸

“Kissie Lee” as transgressor tale bears relation to another important African American aesthetic genre that Walker would have been aware of as she worked on these tales. Blues music, which made much use of African American folktales, was also a cultural phenomenon that women not only participated in but also greatly enriched. Hazel Carby and Angela Davis have lamented the scant scholarship in the area of “women's blues.”²⁹

The predominant themes in women's blues are related to romantic and domestic preoccupations and therefore seem miles away from the independent individualism portrayed in “Kissie Lee.” Yet Angela Davis contends in her essay “I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama” that the romantic and domestic attitudes represented in the blues of pioneers such as Bessie Smith and Gertrude “Ma” Rainey complicate “the prevailing idealization of romantic love in the dominant culture” (237). Blues music, like the transformed African American folklore genre, is a phenomenon of postbellum freedom and celebrates that freedom to the extreme. The ability to work, love, and travel where and how one pleased, for the first time in the history of black America, became the signifying trope of the blues genre. The rough antics Walker describes in “Kissie Lee” are decidedly kin to this exploration of freedom. In many ways Kissie's tale is the reverse of the disheartening tunes of betrayal and abuse that Davis examines in her reading of women's blues. Yet Davis also points to the complex sexual awareness of Smith's and Rainey's music. In fact their frank knowledge and exploration of sexuality and domestic violence are some of the first glimpses we have of the cycle of abuse that women have had historically visited upon them. As previously suggested, Kissie Lee becomes the hero she is because she avenges her own (implied) physical abuse at the hands of a “no good shine.” As Davis remarks, with some relevance to Walker's reconstruction of “Kissie Lee”:

What is most significant about women's blues as they suggest emergent feminist insurgency is that they unabashedly name the problem of male violence, ushering it out of the shadows of domestic life behind which society dictated it be hidden.

(251)

The blues lovingly given to us by Smith and Rainey “allude to rejection, abuse, desertion and unfaithful lovers,” but they also persistently explore “independence … assertiveness, indeed defiance” (245). “Kissie Lee,” though not a tale that directly confronts sexuality or domestic disharmony—the predominant tropes of women's blues—embraces the celebration of a precarious freedom and places “independence,” “assertiveness,” and “defiance” above all else.

While “Kissie Lee” remains a tale of black female agency, even if from the social margins, Walker leaves her readers with a less sanguine view of black working-class female subjectivity in the poem “Whores,” which is part of a sonnet sequence that closes For My People. Whether intentional or coincidental, “Whores” represents a closing commentary on black women that is rather different from the representations found in the text's first and second sections. If “Lineage” characterizes black women's contributions to labor history as represented in the first section of For My People, while “Kissie Lee,” in the second section, entertains readers with the legendary power of the bad female folk hero, “Whores” suggests black women's powerlessness as it depicts real, not mythical, female transgressors.

When I grew up I went away to work
where painted whores were fascinating sights.
They came on like whole armies through the nights—
their sullen eyes on mine, their mouths a smirk,
and from their hands keys hung suggestively.
Old women working by an age-old plan
to make their bread in ways as best they can
would hobble past and beckon tirelessly.
Perhaps one day they'll all die in the streets
or be surprised by bombs in each wide bed;
learning too late in unaccustomed dread
that easy ways, like whores on special beats,
no longer have the gift to harbor pride
or bring men peace, or leave them satisfied.

As a poem by a young black woman, “Whores” is full of contradictions. The prostitute, as she is depicted as a “fascinating sight,” is subject to the poet's scrutiny. Yet she is also put under the watchful scrutiny of the social order that demands and purveys her services. The poem's form is important as well. Walker deconstructs the sonnet as it is conventionally associated with the romance tradition by writing about black working-class women's sex work. Walker reappropriates the Petrarchan sonneteer's convention of assessing and praising the attributes of an exalted figure (most notably a lover) by describing sympathetically in the opening octet, and then more judgmentally in the closing sestet, the woman made spectacle by the degrading and exhausting machinations of her trade.

Before analyzing the sonnet at greater length, it is important to look at the historical context that informed the poem's creation. Walker's inspiration for “Whores” came from her work on a WPA-sponsored recreation program for which she volunteered during her senior year at Northwestern. As Walker explained to poet Nikki Giovanni many years later:

They gave me a group of so-called delinquent girls to pal around with in order to see what kind of influence a person with my background and training would have on them. They were shoplifters, prostitutes, and who knows what else? It wasn't a time when you had a widespread problem with drugs, so the two main problems were shoplifting and prostitution. Division Street was the street for prostitutes. … They walked Division Street and … jangled their keys.

(Poetic Equation 90)

Not only did Walker's experience with the young prostitutes inspire her to write “Whores,” it also gave her background, and later a stipend, to start work on the unpublished novel Goose Island. The novel deals with a talented, promising young woman who eventually ends up a Division Street prostitute. The title is the name of the Italian and black neighborhood in which Walker worked with the young “so-called delinquents.”³⁰ Yet the woman of Walker's “background and training” has much to learn from her subjects. The abhorrence of prostitute life that can be gleaned from the poem suggests that the educated young poet may indeed be taught something about social imbalances within patriarchal society by her contact with the Division Street prostitutes. The details of her early attempts at social work that Walker supplies to Nikki Giovanni suggest her naiveté, which might explain the fascination turned to disdain and judgment evoked in the sonnet. Walker explains that her southern, “more provincial” background aroused her curiosity as she began to observe prostitute life in Chicago. “That's when I learned that prostitution and gambling were vices tied up with city politics” (90). Additionally, her introduction to urban social vices was linked to the very program on which she worked, as she implicates her employers: “[o]ne of the straw bosses on the project was a man who was a pimp; his brother was a smuggler dealing in narcotics and everything” (90). Yet while Walker's understanding of sex work appears limited to her work on the WPA recreation project, St. Clair Drake and Horace Cayton's discussion of prostitution in Chicago's Bronzeville sheds some additional light on the traffic in black women articulated in “Whores.” During the period in which the poem was probably composed the district's “reputation as a vice area was reinforced by the prevalence of streetwalkers in certain areas” (596).³¹ The opinions of social workers and policemen concurred. Race discrimination made the women of Bronzeville more obvious targets for arrest. While young girls without opportunity became more susceptible to the “trade,” black women who were not prostitutes were picked up because of their close proximity to it. As Drake and Cayton observe:

During the Depression years the boldness of [prostitutes'] solicitations drew bitter comments from lower-class women who were trying to maintain stable relations with their men or raise children right. Thus one lower-class housewife, when asked about the building in which she lived, replied: “Honey, this place is full of whores. They are the cheapest, nastiest set in Chicago. If I could get me another place I wouldn't be here.”

(596)

A close analysis of “Whores” suggests that Walker's sympathies lay with Drake and Cayton's disgruntled housewife. The poem maintains a sharp distance from its subject, connected, as previously suggested, to Walker's southern, middle-class, educated perceptions of the northern urban prostitute. Her religious upbringing perhaps instilled in her a sense of judgment about the uses of sexuality. Yet Walker may also be limited in her understanding of the contradictory elements at stake with regard to sex work by the rampantly uncomplicated attitude toward the prostitute she would have been exposed to in Chicago leftist circles at that time. For example, stridently accusatory tropes that linked prostitution with capitalism were popular features in Depression-era radical reportage and proletarian writing. Indeed, rather than revealing an understanding of African American social and economic disenfranchisement, “Whores” reads as a pitying response to black women's transgressions. As historian Kevin Mumford notes in his work on black/white sex districts in Chicago and New York in the early twentieth century, “Racism in the market—black women's relegation to domestic service, their vulnerability to sexual harassment, and segregated service in brothels—combined to increase the probability that African-American women would enter prostitution.” As Mumford adds to this already discouraging scenario, “[a]t the same time racism operated within the markets of commercialized sex, forcing women of color to negotiate yet another set of racial stigmas and hierarchies” (96). While Walker would most certainly have gathered that the prostitute's underemployment was due to race and gender prejudice in the North and was inextricably linked with her decision to work as a prostitute, the sympathetic gaze she gives to workers in her other poems is decidedly absent from “Whores.”

Like a number of the other sonnets in this final section, “Whores” is constructed as a memory. Not only are these prostitutes removed from the poet because of differences in lifestyle and opportunity, they are described from a historical distance—a past memory. Thus interesting ambiguities arise in the speaker's voice. The poet's naiveté makes these women “fascinating sights”; she is encountering the northern prostitute for the first time, and her work on the recreation project requires her to tune into the concerns and desires of young women whose lives and hers would not otherwise intersect. Yet the gaze Walker constructs in this poem also suggests the male gaze the prostitute receives as she presents her wares in the marketplace. “Their sullen eyes on mine” with their “keys hung suggestively” describe them the way they are seen by their potential purchasers—men whose race and class are unknown to us. The poem's disengaged tone suggests more than one possible speaking voice; however, imagining the young, college-educated Walker as speaker, we are offered an interesting contrast between the poet's intellectual work and the belittling sex work performed by the Division Street prostitutes. After all, the poet's work with young delinquent girls who have, among other things, been picked up for prostitution, prepares her to see “whores” through the eyes of a reformer. She represents, ironically in the midst of Depression, the world of real work—social work. These women are also removed from the speaker by age and class: “Old women working by an age-old plan / to make their bread in ways as best they can.”

The poem's closing sestet is more ambiguous, while retaining its judgmental tone. Walker imagines her subjects dead “in the streets” or “surprised by bombs,” which suggests a call for their destruction. To rearticulate an important point, in the poems previously discussed in this chapter, Walker explores the complicated relations of her subjects to the social praxis inscribing them. This particular poem rather dispassionately observes the labor of black women without spending much energy on the alienated confines in which they have been scripted. However, the reference to “whores on special beats” suggests an important dichotomy of prostitute life, the body that is negotiated between the police and the pimp. Walker reflects upon the complicated relationship between prostitution and the economic and social surveillance of black women by connecting the illegal trade of prostitution with the law itself. The police, those other beat walkers, become “whores on special beats”; thus Walker alludes to police involvement in the city's underworld activities, in which these women and their pimps are also intimately linked.³² These “special beats” also suggest the prostitute working the turf controlled by her pimp. She does not control her own means of employment (and production), her body. Whether on the police or pimp's “special beats,” these women “no longer have the gift to harbor pride / or bring men peace.” These final lines, which in the traditional sonnet are executed to suggest a resolution about love, negate such a possibility: the traffic in (black) working-class women continues; black intellectual workers like Walker can only observe.

If “Whores” settles upon a bleakness of experience symbolized through the prostitute and her marks upon the pavement, two poems that close For My People suggest a kind of dialectic between resignation and struggle that is also signified in the text as a whole. “Our Need” and “The Struggle Staggers Us” are sonnets of hope, even as they embrace the dismal reality of a world moved out of Depression into war. In “Our Need,” Walker hopes for “a wholeness born of inner strength,” and “the friendly feel of human forms.” Thus the humanity stripped from “Whores” returns even if, as she laments in the title of the collection's final poem, “the struggle staggers us.” For My People is a book about struggle. Given the larger social questions that Walker's years in Chicago provided her with, the struggle she acknowledges may be collective, but it is also one of daily survival and the personal, ordinary claims that inscribe the “struggle between the morning and the night.” This need and this struggle that Walker hopes to see fashioned into a “journey from the me to you” and a “journey from the you to me,” in fact anticipates the conscious rumblings of the Civil Rights era. It is rather significant that For My People appears in 1942, toward the close of a historic period that has been characterized as the end of European dominance (1492-1945). It is a text about domination, about the resistance to domination, and about the possibility of transcending domination even as “the struggle staggers us.” For My People is a collection of poems that has named and claimed a history and a movement for African American struggle before a large-scale agenda had been inaugurated. It is interesting, though not surprising from an author who was also a working mother, that Walker did not follow For My People with another book of poems until the mid-1960s. Like the 1930s and early 1940s, the period in which Margaret Walker began to publish her first important social poems, the 1960s was a time of social passion and protest. It seems that Walker's writing ground, her place to articulate the aesthetics of race and class, not to mention her interest in rearticulating the tropes of psychology, religion, and science mentioned at the opening of this chapter, were to be once again inspired by what was happening in the streets of America's cities (like Chicago) in the 1960s.

Notes

1. As Walker told Claudia Tate in an interview published in 1983, it actually took her three tries to win the award and get Yale to publish her manuscript: “Stephen Vincent Benét [himself an award-winning, neglected poet], the editor at that time, wanted to publish it the first time I sent it to him from the University of Iowa.” Walker completed a master's degree at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop in 1940. In 1965 she completed a doctorate there. Her thesis was Jubilee, which was published a year later. Walker also informs Tate that Benet had to stage a virtual coup in order to get her book published; he refused to nominate any other book. What is more, Benet came to edit the series no doubt because of the success of his Pulitzer Prize-winning, book-length Civil War poem, John Brown's Body. “I think [Benet] felt they were refusing [to publish For My People] purely on the basis of race” (192).

2. Walker's thirty-year struggle with Jubilee is exemplified in Tillie Olsen's feminist classic, Silences: “It is humanly impossible for a woman who is a wife and mother to work on a regular teaching job and write” (209). By quoting Walker's experience writing her novel, Olsen depicted one of the many “silences” belonging to women writers as part of a shared history. It is only fitting that a creative work detailing the life of a female slave should have faced so many obstacles on its road to completion.

3. An unpublished essay by Jim Werner, “Let a New Earth Rise: Landscapes of Mystery, Sorrow and Hope in Margaret Walker's For My People,” focuses upon the landscape. Eugenia Collier explores the influences of Southern black folklife and the natural world in her essay “Fields Watered with Blood: Myth and Ritual in the Poetry of Margaret Walker,” in Black Women Writers, 1950-1980: A Critical Evaluation, ed. Marie Evans (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1984). Richard K. Barksdale's “Margaret Walker: Folk Orature and Historical Prophecy,” in Black American Poets between Worlds, 1940-1960, ed. R. Baxter Miller (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986) details myth and religion in For My People. All three essays focus on Walker's evocation of racism, but do not emphasize the ideological influences of the Great Migration and the Depression on her work. A new collection of essays edited by Maryemma Graham and devoted to Walker's work is forthcoming from the University of Georgia Press. It is hoped the collection will include new readings of Walker's work within the context of race, class, and gender politics.

4. Obviously to ignore the segregated South is to deny Walker a sense of place in both the literal and figurative sense. As she wrote in the late 1980s: “The South is my home, and my adjustment or accommodation to it—whether real or imagined (mythic and legendary), violent or non-violent—is the subject and source of all my poetry. It is also my life” (This Is My Century xvii).

5. In a letter to Richard Wright dated October 9, 1937 (Richard Wright Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University), Walker excitedly remarks that a friend won a scholarship to the Workers' School and gave it to her. (Walker appears to have participated in the organizing of its “Writers and Artists” unit.) The scholarship enabled the young poet, seeming to be constantly without means, to take two courses, fundamentals of political education and political economy.

6. Walker discusses Goose Island in her book-length conversation with Nikki Giovanni, Poetic Equation, as well as in her biography of Richard Wright, The Daemoniac Genius of Richard Wright. A copy of the manuscript is housed in Walker's archive at the Margaret Walker Alexander Center for Black Studies at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi.

7. A fuller articulation of this argument can be found in the anthologies, This Bridge Called My Back: Writing by Radical Women of Color, Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, eds. (Watertown, Mass.: Persephone Press, 1981); and All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, Patricia Bell-Scott, Gloria T. Hull, and Barbara Smith, eds. (Old Westbury: Feminist Press, 1982).

8. It is important to mention the work of Gwendolyn Brooks, a Chicago poet whose first book of poems, A Street in Bronzeville (1945), is an important evocation of black Chicago. It is not clear how well Walker and Brooks knew each other in those days, and whether any rivalries existed between them as young, talented black women. Brooks's second book, Annie Allen, published in 1949 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, contained a number of sonnets, and according to Walker herself, the technical polish of these poems evidenced “racial vindication” for black poets under the scrutiny of white critics who thought their work lacked “form and intellectual acumen” (110). See Walker's essay originally published in Phylon in 1950, “New Poets of the Forties,” in How I Wrote Jubilee.

9. To suggest the importance of this book of poems to the African American community, this interview accompanied photographs taken by Ronald Freeman in honor of the text and its author.

10. Walker claims that it was Nelson Algren, whom she knew from the Chicago Writers' Project, who suggested the urgency of the last stanza and urged her to state her vision of the future. The use of the word earth to begin the final stanza also merits mention, for it is a word connected to people's fights for land, for resistance to domination. Thus Walker suggests with it a kind of self-determination for African Americans. One might also recall texts like Pearl Buck's The Good Earth, about the plight of Chinese peasants, or Joris Ivens's cinematic portrait of the Spanish Republic's resistance to Franco, The Spanish Earth.

11. For a discussion of Walker's friendship with and admiration for Langston Hughes, see her essay “A Literary Legacy from Dunbar to Baraka,” in How I Wrote Jubilee.

12. Walker continues with an important contradiction:

    Imagine my amazement to hear a white girl tell me she was forced to leave Northwestern because she had no money. But I, a poor Negro girl, had stayed even when I had no money. They never threatened me with expulsion. Yet I did not find a white school in the Middle West free of prejudice. All around me was prejudice. To understand the issues out of which it grew became my life's preoccupation.

    (“Growing Out of Shadow,” How I Wrote Jubilee 7)

13. Richard Wright's ethnic construction of Chicago is examined in Carla Capetti's Writing Chicago: Modernism, Ethnography, and the Novel (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). The book also explores the ethnic identification of two other Chicago radical writers, Nelson Algren and James T. Farrell.

14. Because she is writing in an age before a specific consciousness about inclusive language had developed, Walker uses “men,” though she implies women too. Walker was certainly aware of the sexism within her own community, but was also fully aware of the improbability of making any social gains without the full participation of both sexes. Yet it is also worth noting again that the influence of the white male left and the absence of an articulated feminist consciousness amongst its female members may have led the poet to disregard whether the new race of “men” in control would be willing to share its power with women, particularly black women.

15. In the early 1930s, during the Communist Party's Third Period dedication to the revolutionary working class, calls for a new black nation in the South influenced a number of pro-party black intellectuals and workers. For differing views on blacks and the Communist Party see the revisionist histories of Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe, and Mark Naison, Communists in Harlem during the Depression (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983). For an anticommunist perspective see Harold Cruse, Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow, 1967).

16. Horace Cayton remarks to Studs Terkel, years after he co-authored Black Metropolis, about the significant impact the black church had on sustaining its community. He claims the Communist Party “raised issues that Negroes were interested in,” but they “made very little inroads.” According to Cayton, “[o]ne of the reasons the Communists flopped is they didn't know how to deal with the Negro church. The church was the first Negro institution, preceding even the family in stability” (quoted in Terkel 434-38). While Cayton is critical of the Communist Party in Black Metropolis, he maintains the important role the communists played in promoting black leadership within the CIO and pushing the organization's commitment to racial equality.

17. Race politics and the industrial unions have been a subject of much debate, especially in reference to the United Auto Workers. See Michael Goldfield, The Color of Politics (New York: New Press, 1997). And on meatpackers in Chicago, Roger Horowitz, Negro and White, Unite and Fight (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997); and Rick Halpern and Roger Horowitz, Meatpackers: An Oral History of Black Packinghouse Workers and Their Struggle for Racial and Economic Equality (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1999). (I am indebted to Ethan Young for these references.)

18. Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), only a few years Walker's junior, also began his artistic career with the help of the WPA's Federal Artists' Project. “The Migration of the Negro” series was completed in 1943. In many ways it is a complementary artistic testimony to For My People. It might be argued that Langston Hughes's proletarian poetry of the 1930s (that, under pressure, he later renounced in a 1949 article in Phylon) serves as companion testimony to these two previously mentioned black cultural projects. And all three should be “read” together.

19. For a discussion of African American militant labor politics in the South, see Robin D. G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe. His chapter on the Share Croppers' Union, in particular, discusses gendered aspects of working-class life and struggle in the black South.

20. Jacqueline Jones notes the important distinction between black and white female workers. Even as white women were disproportionately represented on the shop floor in comparison to white men, after their migration north, black women found most factory jobs completely closed to them. Instead, most black women found work in laundries or as domestics in the homes of middle- and upper-class white women.

21. Folklorist Roger D. Abrahams has commented upon how most African American folktale collecting has been done by whites, with notable exceptions such as Zora Neale Hurston's Mules and Men. He does not explore, however, how African American poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Margaret Walker, writing at the same period in which much of the tale collecting occurred, were also responsible for disseminating much of these same folk materials. It is also important to note that Hughes, Brown, and Walker challenge the modern poetry canon as it has evolved with work that questions the canon's emphasis on Western “erudition” with the “folkways” important to black structures of feeling. See Abrahams's preface to Afro-American Folk Tales: Stories from Black Traditions in the New World (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985). See also Sterling A. Brown, Southern Road (1932; Boston: Beacon Press, 1974); and Langston Hughes, The Weary Blues (New York: Knopf, 1926).

22. Lawrence Levine characterizes these two seminal figures respectively as “the bad man who transgressed totally all of the moral and legal bounds of society and the strong, self-contained hero who violated not the laws or the moral code but the stereotyped roles set aside for black people in a white society” (407).

23. A plethora of musical renditions of the legend exist from the country blues of performers like Hurt in the 1920s to rhythm and blues performers like Lloyd Price in the 1950s. Even white performers such as Johnny Cash sang about “Staggerlee,” as he was also called, in addition to Stack-a-lee, after its proper pronunciation, and Stacker Lee. In the early 1980s a white, British punk band, The Clash, opened a reggae-inspired tune, “Wrong-em Boyo” with the Stagolee legend. Rock music's indebtedness to black cultural tropes no doubt found inspiration for its own bad boy, outlaw images with the Stagolee legend. For a discussion of the Stagolee tale and its connections to American popular music see Greil Marcus's Mystery Train.

24. Lomax's interest in the Stagolee story focuses upon its use in the blues music idiom, which appropriated antebellum material and adapted it to this musical genre as it developed in the postslavery period. See his The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: Delta Books, 1993).

25. Walker's mention of “memorial day” is of course a reference to the aforementioned Memorial Day Massacre. Letter dated June 6, 1938, Richard Wright Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

26. For discussion of these two figures see Levine as well as John W. Roberts, From Trickster to Badman: The Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

27. Since folktales told about women seem overwhelmingly to detail domestic issues and romantic problems, it has been difficult to locate a possible source for “Kissie Lee.” However, Lawrence Levine cites a fragment sent to Alan Lomax from a woman named Willie George King of Louisiana. This fragment is interesting not only because of its articulation of female agency, it also contains elements of prowess associated with the hypermasculinized rock and roll music inspired by black performers such as Bo Diddley:

    There is nothing in the jungle is any badder than me.
    I am the baddest woman ever come out Tenisee;
    I sleep with a panther till the break of day;
    I caught a tiger-cat in the collar and I ask him what he had to say;
    And I wore a rattlesnake for my chain,
    And a Negro man for my fob.

    (402)

28. Another interesting “womens” text is “Molly Means,” about a conjure woman. The conjurer tale has, however, received more critical attention, so I have chosen to reserve my space for the female outlaw whose exploits, for the most part, have been overlooked.

29. Zora Neale Hurston's collection Mules and Men contains prose narratives in which women's exploits are at the center. One tale does celebrate a female tough named “Ella Wall,” but her “legend” appears to be filtered through the lyrics of masculine desire: “If you want good boody / [o]h, go to Ella Wall” (146). In this tale Hurston describes Ella pulling a blade inside a gambling house. For a discussion of women's blues see Hazel Carby, “It Jus' Bes that Way Sometimes,” in Feminisms, ed. R. Warhol, 2nd ed. (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997); Angela Y. Davis, “I Used to Be Your Sweet Mama,” in Sexy Bodies; and also Davis's Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Pantheon, 1998). Davis cites as “trailblazing” Daphne Duval Harrison's study Black Pearls: The Blues Queens of the 1920s (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988). Harrison's text is the first full-length study of women blues performers.

30. Walker commented a number of times that her “black” American Tragedy, Goose Island, prefigures Richard Wright's Native Son.

31. Kevin Mumford suggests the importance of “interzones,” black/white sex districts in Chicago and New York in the early twentieth century. He connects them to a variety of sex and gender issues, including prostitution as part of the social impact of the Great Migration. He discusses racial difference within “commercialized sex,” as he refers to it, but these “interzones” were greatly changed by the Depression. Cayton and Drake examine prostitution in the context of the impact of the Depression on Chicago's black belt.

32. Kevin Mumford also maintains that historical data suggests the existence of racial bias in the policing of prostitutes: “[B]lack women were easy prey to police, who possibly were under pressure to inflate the number of arrests. Black prostitutes were more likely to be convicted and, after conviction, more likely to receive maximum sentences. After serving their sentences, black prostitutes were less successful on probation than were white women and more likely than white women to return to prostitution. Indeed, their rates of recidivism were higher” (94).