Margaret Walker

I want to write.

I want to write the songs of my people.

I want to hear them singing melodies

     in the dark.

I want to catch the last floating strains from

     their sob-torn throats.

I want to frame their dreams into words;

     their souls into notes.

I want to catch their sunshine laughter

     in a bowl;

fling dark hands to a darker sky

and fill them full of stars

then crush and mix such lights

til they become a mirrored pool

of brilliance in the dawn.

Margaret Walker was born on July 7, 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama. From early childhood she kept a journal, recording her poetry and the stories of her great-grandmother. When she was 16, and already in college, her parents -- both college professors -- joined the faculty of New Orleans College (now Dillard University). While there, she met Langston Hughes who encouraged her writing, suggesting she attend college in the North. She transferred to Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, where she received a BA in English in 1935. Her graduate work was at the University of Iowa where she earned an MA in 1940 and a PhD in 1965.

Her work was first published in the NAACP's Crisis Magazine in 1934. She was a member of the Illinois WPA Writers' Project along with Saul Bellow, Studs Terkel, Arna Bontemps, Richard Wright and Gwendolyn Brooks. In 1942 she won the Yale Younger Poets award for her first published collection of poetry, For My People. Her novel Jubilee, based on her great-grandmother's stories, was published in 1966.

She taught from 1949 to 1979 at Jackson State University in Jackson, Mississippi, where she founded the Institute for the Study of the History, Life and Culture of Black People, which has been renamed in her honor. Nikki Giovanni called her "the most famous person no one ever heard of". She died November 30, 1998.

For My People

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs

     repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues

     and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an

     unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an

     unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the

    gone years and the now years and the maybe years,

    washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

    hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching

    dragging along never gaining never reaping never

    knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama

    backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor

    and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking

    and playhouse and concert and store and hair and

    Miss Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn

    to know the reasons why and the answers to and the

    people who and the places where and the days when, in

    memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we

    were black and poor and small and different and nobody

    cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to

    be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and

    play and drink their wine and religion and success, to

    marry their playmates and bear children and then die

    of consumption and anemia and lynching;

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 and needing bread and shoes and milk and

    land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

     being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

     burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

     and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

     who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in

     the dark of churches and schools and clubs

     and societies, associations and councils and committees and

     conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and

     devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,

     preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by

     false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

    all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

    bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

    generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

    loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

    healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

    in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

    be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now

    rise and take control.