Margaret Walker

Margaret Walker (born 1915), novelist, poet, scholar, and teacher, was best known for her Civil War novel Jubilee (1963) and for her powerful collection of poetry about racial affirmation, For My People (1942).

Margaret Abigail Walker was born on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, Alabama, to Sigismund and Marion (Dozier) Walker. In 1943 she married Firnist James Alexander (deceased 1983), and they parented four children: Marion Elizabeth, Firnist James, Sigismund Walker, and Margaret Elvira. Walker received her A.B. from Northwestern University (1935) and an M.A. (1940) and Ph.D. (1965) from the University of Iowa. For more than 30 years Walker taught literature at Livingstone College, Salisbury, North Carolina (1941-1942); West Virginia State College (1944-1945); and Jackson State University, Jackson, Mississippi (1949-1979).

In addition to teaching, Walker was a prolific writer. She wrote six books between 1942 and 1974. For My People (1942), a collection of poetry about African American racial pride and heritage, brought her instant recognition. Her Civil War novel Jubilee (1966), begun when she was 19, dramatizes actual historical events from American slavery to Reconstruction as the setting for the fictionalized life of her maternal great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans. This novel was translated into five languages and went through 43 printings. Her other book-length works include Prophets for a New Day (1970), How I Wrote Jubilee (1972), October Journey (1973), and A Poetic Equation: Conversations between Margaret Walker and Nikki Giovanni (1974). Walker also wrote numerous articles on African American literature and culture. Moreover, she recorded her own poetry, as well as selections from the work of Paul Lawrence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes, on Folkways Records.

Her literary activities won her many honors. In 1942 she received the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award for For My People, followed by the Rosenthal fellowship in 1944, Ford Foundation fellowship in 1954, Houghton Mifflin Literary fellowship in 1966 for Jubilee, Fulbright fellowship in 1971, and National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in 1972. Walker also held honorary degrees from Northwestern University, Rust College, Dennison University, and Morgan State University.

After retiring from teaching at Jackson State University, Walker devoted full-time effort to her writing. She prepared two books for publication in the 1980s—The Daemonic Genius of Richard Wright, a definitive, critical biography of Wright; and This is My Century, a collection of poetry possessing the power of For My People. Walker also worked on five other book-length manuscripts: Mother Broyer, a novel about a faith healer and cult leader; Goose Island, a collection of short stories; A New Introduction to theHumanities, a textbook; Twentieth Century Afro-American Literature, an anthology; and Minna and Jim, a sequel to Jubilee.

Walker continued to reside in Jackson, Mississippi, where she said she must stay and "write for the rest of [her] life, no matter how short or long it is." In addition to working on the Jubilee she is also writing an autobiography. When she is not writing she lectures on African American literature.

Further Reading

The following works contain biographical and critical information: Phanuel Egejuru and Robert Elliot Fox, "An Interview with Margaret Walker," in Callaloo (1979); Mari Evans, "Margaret Walker," in Black Women Writers, 1950-1980 (1983); R. Baxter Miller, "The 'Etched Flame' of Margaret Walker: Biblical and Literary Re-Creation in Southern History," in Tennessee Studies in Literature (1981); Charles H. Rowell, "An Interview with Margaret Walker," in Black World (December 1975); James E. Spears, "Black Folk Elements in Margaret Walker's Jubilee," in Mississippi Folklore Register (Spring 1980); Claudia Tate, "Margaret Walker," in Black Women Writers at Work (1983); and Margaret Walker, How I Wrote Jubilee (1972). □

Walker, Margaret Abigail (1915–), born in Birmingham and educated at Northwestern University and the University of Iowa (M.A., 1940; Ph.D., 1965). Walker was the youngest African‐American woman to win a prestigious national award for literature with For My People (1942), which received the Yale Younger Poets Series Award. It is a book of ballads, sonnets, and free verse, tales of folk heroes and heroines, and it established her reputation as well as being a commercial success. Her reputation as a poet rests also on Prophets for a New Day (1970), informed by religious faith, in which Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, and others are tandemed with Bible characters. Finally, Walker's reputation also is anchored on a book that was 30 years in the writing–the historical novel Jubilee (1965), about a slave family during and after the Civil War. The book was originally inspired by bedtime stories of “the slave time” told her by her maternal grandmother about Walker's great‐grandmother, but richly based on historical research. It was a prototype of the novel giving African‐American history from an African‐American viewpoint.

Margaret Walker 1915–1998

Poet, novelist

Published First Poem

Poetry Collection Won Yale Competition

Completed Epic Novel

Selected writings

Sources

Ithough her name is not well known outside of academic and literary spheres, Margaret Walker is widely considered a major figure in twentieth century American literature. In a career that spanned more than fifty years, Walker wrote several volumes of poetry, most notably the award-winning For My People, and an epic novel, Jubilee. Walker also wrote essays and scholarly articles, and was a professor of literature. Clarence Hunter of Tougaloo College told the Associated Press that “Margaret Walker was a woman for all seasons. She was poet, a novelist, a teacher, a mentor, a scholar, a humanitarian, an activist, a fighter for rights of people. She was everything you can expect of a great woman.”

Margaret Abigail Walker was born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1915. Her Jamaican-born father, Sigismund, was a Methodist minister. Her mother, Marion, was a music teacher. When Walker was ten years old, her family, which included three younger siblings, moved to New Orleans where both of her parents took teaching positions at New Orleans (now Dillard) University. Growing up in the 1920s in a cultured household with educated parents, Walker was introduced early to great literature. She read classic works by Homer, Shakespeare, and Victorian novelists, as well as recent works by black writers of the then-flourishing Harlem Renaissance, including Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston. Walker’s father encouraged her to keep a journal into which she recorded her own poems and other writings.

During her childhood Walker also listened enthralled to the stories told by her grandmother about life in Georgia before and after slavery. Many of the stories were retellings of stories that had been told to Walker’s grandmother by her own mother, who had been born a slave. “My grandmother talked about it all the time, and when I was a little girl, I told her, ‘When I grow up I’m going to write that story.’ I’d ask, ‘And where did you go, where did you live after that?’ I had the feeling that it was an important story. The older I got, the more I realized that I had a very great story,” Walker told Kay Bonetti of the Missouri Review.

Published First Poem

After graduating from Gilbert Academy, Walker attended New Orleans University for two years. At the end of her second year her parents met poet Langston

At a Glance…

Born Margaret Abigail Walker on July 7, 1915, in Birmingham, AL; died November 30, 1998, in Chicago, IL; daughter of Sigismund Walker (a clergyman) and Marion Dozier Walker (a music teacher); married Firnist James Alexander, 1943 (deceased 1983); children: four. Education: Northwestern University, B.A., 1935; University of lowa, M.A., 1940, Ph.D., 1965.

Career: Poet, novelist, and scholar. Livingston College, professor of literature, 1941-42; West Virginia State College, Institute, professor, 1943-45; Jackson State University, professor, 1949-79; Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People, Jackson State University, founder; First published poem appeared in Crisis magazine, 1934; poetry volumes include: For My People, 1942; Prophets for a New Day, 1970; October Journey 1973; This is My Century: New and Collected Poems, 1988; others works include Jubilee, a novel, 1966; How I Wrote ‘Jubilee,’ 1972; A Poetic Equation (with Nikki Giovanni), 1974; The Daemonic Genius of Richard Wright: A Portrait of a Man, a Critical Look at His Works, 1988.

Awards: Yale Series of Younger Poets Award, 1942; Rosenthal Fellowship, 1944; Ford Foundation grant, 1953; Houghton Mifflin Fellowship, 1966; National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship, 1972; Mississippi Arts Commission, Lifetime Achievement Award, 1992.

Hughes, who encouraged them to sent their talented daughter to a more prestigious and well-funded college outside the South. Walker transferred to Northwestern University in suburban Chicago. “It was a Methodist school and Methodist ministers could sent their children there cheaper—they’d get a rebate,” Walker told Bonetti. In 1934, during her senior year at Northwestern, Walker’s poem “Daydreaming” was published in Crisis magazine. Though all of her work with the exception of a few poems appeared in the 1940s and after, Walker felt her consciousness as writer was formed in the volatile social climate of the 1930s. “I learned then that the ivory tower was no place for a black writer… I have no desire to separate myself from what I am…from my race, from my gender, from my nationality, and from my consciousness. I’m black, woman, writer; I’m very Black Nationalist,” Walker explained to Jerry W. Ward of the Mississippi Quarterly.

Walker’s admiration for the work of Harlem Renaissance writers of the generation prior to her own was tempered by her dismay at their disregard for the political and economic problems facing African Americans. “They lacked social perspective and suffered from a kind of literary myopia,” Walker said of the Harlem Renaissance writers in an essay in Pylon. “They seemed to constantly beg the question of the Negro’s humanity…. It was a day of individual literary patronage when a rich ‘angel’ adopted a struggling poor artist and made an exotic plaything out of any ‘really brilliant Negro.’”

Receiving a bachelor’s degree in literature from Northwestern in 1935, Walker soon obtained employment with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Writer’s Project, a government program which gave work to writers during the Depression. “One learned many professional tricks of the trade, if the not the actual craft of writing,” Walker recalled of her WPA experience in How I Wrote ‘Jubilee.’ While working for the WPA in Chicago Walker became friends with Richard Wright, an unknown young author who would later write acclaimed novels such as Native Son and The Outsider. “I knew Richard Wright three years. I was always at his desk. Everybody seemed to feel that I was trying to marry the man [but] we were never romantically involved,” Walker told The Missouri Review. Walker maintained that she assisted Wright with research for Native Son, which is based on a real life incident of a black man murdering a white woman. Also, Walker said that using her university-acquired knowledge of literary technique she helped Wright develop his vision of the book. She was disappointed and angry that Wright, who died in 1960, never publicly acknowledged her contribution.

Poetry Collection Won Yale Competition

When Walker was a student at Northwestern, she began work on a novel based on her grandmother’s slave-era stories. After graduation Walker set the novel aside to concentrate on writing poetry. In the late 1930s Walker left Chicago to attend graduate school at the University of Iowa. While in Iowa she completed a volume of poetry called For My People, a three part work dealing with African-American culture, which she submitted as her master’s thesis in creative writing in 1940. She also entered the volume in the Yale Younger Poets competition three years in a row until it finally won in 1942.

Winning the prestigious Yale prize made Walker a rising star in the poetry world. For My People was published by the Yale University Press in 1942, with a foreword by well-known poet and fiction writer Stephen Vincent Benet, and was widely reviewed in literary journals and mainstream magazines. Walker was named to the 1942 Honor Roll of Race Relations, a nationwide poll conducted by the Schomberg Collection of Negro Literature at the New York Public Library. Adrianne Baytop in American Women Writers hailed For My People as “an early indication of Walker’s poetic talent.” Baytop also praised Walker for her experiments with poetic forms, observing, “There are ten occasional poems, written in unmistakably black poetic rhythms; ten ballads with superimposed jazz rhythms or blues metrics; and six sonnets, the most traditional of her poetry in substance and structure. The volume begins at a dramatic, intense pitch, continues in a relaxed tone, and ends in contemplative modulation.” Jane Campbell of African American Writers called For My People a “literary masterpiece” that “fuses the cadence of sermon and folk tale with Western literary tradition. It merges her African heritage and her humanistic and Christian beliefs with a feminist consciousness that sees woman’s links with nature and the earth as emblematic of her ability to create new poetic, political, and spiritual worlds.”

Leaving the University of Iowa with a master’s degree, Walker obtained a teaching position at Livingston College in North Carolina, then moved on to teach at West Virginia State College. In 1943, Walker married Firnist James Alexander, and eventually had four children. Walker spent many years balancing the demands of family and career. In 1949, Walker joined the faculty at Jackson State College (now University) in Jackson, Mississippi. She remained at Jackson State until her retirement from teaching in 1979 and she continued to reside in Jackson for the rest of her life. Living in the South was important to Walker’s creative process. “The South is symbolic—the violence of the South, the protest, the struggle, all of that. The South is both an historic region and a mythic ideal. All my images, in my poetry, come from out of the South, where I was a child, where my imagination was formed, and where I was an adolescent. I never felt at home anywhere but in the South,” Walker told The Missouri Review.

While a professor at Jackson State, Walker founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People, which collects, preserves and interprets 20th century African-American history. In 2000, Walker’s own papers were formally received into the Institute’s collection to create the Institute’s Margaret Walker Alexander National Resource Center.

Despite the many hours Walker gave to teaching and scholarly activities, she always considered herself primarily a writer. She continued to write poetry and to work on the novel about slave life she had begun as an undergraduate. The novel, entitled Jubilee and based on real events in the lives of Walker’s ancestors, required a great deal of historical research. “Whenever I took a job, whether in Chicago in the thirties, in West Virginia and North Carolina between 1942 and 1945, or in Jackson, Mississippi, where I began teaching in 1949, I would hound the librarians to help me find books and materials relating to my story. After I had combed books that I found through card catalogues and reference materials I sent the librarians on further hunts for obscure items and for bits of information I had picked up here and there,” Walker recalled in How I Wrote ‘Jubilee’. She also traveled to the places in Georgia and Alabama where her forebears had lived and she visited elderly relatives to gain further information on family history. “Jubilee is a folk novel and an historical novel… I used folk ways, folk sayings, folk philosophy, folk ideas, folk everything… At the same time, no one can deny the historical accuracy of what I have written - the Antebellum South, the Civil War, and the period of reconstruction and reaction,” Walker told Bonetti.

Completed Epic Novel

In 1962 she took a leave of absence from Jackson State to return to the University of Iowa for a doctorate in English, using Jubilee as her dissertation material. In the spring of 1965 the novel was completed. Jubilee tells the story of Vyry, a slave girl fathered by a plantation owner, and follows her life as a child in the slave quarters, as a young adult during the Civil War, and finally as a wife, mother, freewoman, and farm owner in the Reconstruction era. The character of Vyry is based on Walker’s great-grandmother, Margaret Duggans Ware Brown.

Published by Houghton Mifflin in 1966, Jubilee was generally well-received by critics. “To appreciate the extent of innovation Jubilee brings to a thoroughly quarried, frequently hackneyed genre of writing, it is only necessary to recall that the Civil War novel has been the source of some of the crudest stereotypes of Negro characters in American fiction… Margaret Walker has reversed the picture completely. With a fidelity to fact and detail, she presents the little-known everyday life of the slaves, their modes of behavior, patterns and rhythms of speech, emotions, frustrations, and aspirations,” wrote Abraham Chapman in the Saturday Review. Wilma Dykeman of the New York Times Book Review called Vyry “one of the memorable women of contemporary fiction” adding that “in its best episode, and in Vyry, Jubilee chronicles the triumph of a free spirit over many kinds of bondages.”

Because of its historical accuracy, Jubilee has often shown up on college and high school reading lists, and it has remained continuously in print since its publication, an achievement that few books can match. Despite its durability, Jubilee has not been promoted to the ranks of “classic” American novels; likewise Margaret Walker remained an obscure name to those not well acquainted with American literature. “Twenty years after Jubilee, Toni Morrison would write Beloved, about a woman who kills her infant daughter rather than let her grow up a slave. Set against such competition, Jubilee is merely an honest novel, not a great one. That’s the trouble with pioneers; eventually they become old fashioned,” wrote David Streitfeld of the Washington Post.

In the years following Jubilee Walker continued to write poetry, including the volumes Prophets for a New Day, October Journey, and This is My Century, non-fiction essays, and completed her biography of Richard Wright. She was also a friend and inspiration to younger writers such as Nikki Giovanni and Alice Walker. Walker sometimes thought a more pessimistic point of view might have aided her writing and placed her in the celebrated “Southern Gothic” literary tradition. Nevertheless she clung to a positive outlook throughout her long and busy life. “Everything has possibilities,” Walker told The Mississippi Quarterly. “I believe in the goodness of the future. No matter how hard things may seem at the moment…the political clouds may gather, the racial problems, poverty, even sickness and death. I’m almost a Pollyanna in my belief in life, in love, in the goodness of my fellow man.”

Selected writings

Poetry

For My People, 1942.

Prophets for a New Day, 1970.

October Journey, 1973.

This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems, 1988.

Novel

Jubilee, 1966.

Non-Fiction

How I Wrote ‘Jubilee’, 1972.

The Daemonic Genius of Richard Wright: A Portrait of a Man, a Critical Look at His Works, 1988.

Sources

Books

African American Writers, Scribner’s, 1991.

American Women Writers, Volume 4, Frederick Ungar Publishing, 1982.

Contemporary African American Novelists, Greenwood Press, 1999.

Walker, Margaret. How I Wrote ‘Jubliee’, Third World Press, 1972.

Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, Duke University Press, 1994.

Periodicals

Associated Press, December 1, 1998.

Mississippi Quarterly, Fall 1988, p. 515-527.

Missouri Review, Vol. 15, no. 1, 1992, p. 112-131.

New York Times Book Review, September 25, 1966, p. 52.

Pylon, no. 10, 1950.

Saturday Review, September 24, 1966, p. 43-44.

Washington Post, December 2, 1998, p. Dl-2.

Online

The Perspectives in American Literature website, http://www.english.uiuc.edu

The National Endowment for the Humanities website, http://www.neh.fed.us

The Voices from the Gaps: Women Writers of Color website, http://www.voices.cla.umn.edu.

—Mary Kalfatovic