Biography gives leading 20th-century Black writer Margaret Walker her due
LAWRENCE – After her poem “For My People” propelled Margaret Walker to fame in 1937, while she was in her early 20s, she was considered a peer by nearly every important African American writer and thinker of the mid-20th century, from Langston Hughes to John Hope Franklin.
But Walker’s fame waned while she raised four children and toiled in academia at a historically black college in the South. Her later-in-life, headline-grabbing literary and legal disputes with two of the leading Black male writers of her day, Richard Wright and Alex Haley, only reinforced to her the intersectional disadvantage – Black and female – that she fought against her whole life.
So why does her biographer call Margaret Walker "the most important person that nobody knows," and what can the first major biography of Walker do to enhance her legacy?
“Margaret Walker is every woman who is brilliant, who has ideas, but who is ahead of her time,” said Maryemma Graham, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Kansas and author of the new “The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker” (Oxford University Press). “She was a midwife for the Black women’s literary renaissance.”
Beyond recounting her triumphs, Graham hopes the previously unpublished journal entries and photographs she has brought to light will contextualize the later-life caricature of Walker – that of “an embittered old woman who was jilted” in love by Wright and who wrote an unflattering biography of him, which added to the humiliation of losing her plagiarism suit against Haley.
Connecting Walker to the present day, Graham reminds readers that in one of her last widely published essays, “Whose ‘Boy’ Is This?,” Walker excoriated both Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his former co-worker Anita Hill, whose accusation of past sexual harassment rocked Thomas’ 1991 confirmation hearing, as “complicit in a process driven by racist and sexist standards. … Thomas had placed himself on the side of a system that abused and misused Black people. Hill became a victim by playing into the system and getting burned.” It was emblematic, Graham said, of Walker’s prickly intelligence and fearlessness.
Graham details Walker’s life as a preacher’s daughter in the Jim Crow Deep South and her initial fame as a poet. Walker had completed her education at Northwestern University and was living in Chicago and working for the WPA when she won the Yale University Series of Younger Poets Award in 1941 for her volume “For My People.”
Its fame soon spread.
“You couldn't grow up in the segregated South and not know it,” said Graham, who recited the title poem herself as a young woman for church programs. “It is one of the most recited poems in the Black canon. A long poem, it stretches through the slavery and migration periods, on through urban America. It’s lyrical. It has actually been put to music. It rings in your ears so that when you hear it again, you remember the feeling you got the first time you heard it.”
Walker’s experiences in Wright’s influential Leftist writers’ group in pre-war Chicago are an important chapter of the biography. Walker and Wright fell out before his novel “Native Son” made him the man of the hour in 1940.
Walker then found love with the man she would marry, Firnist James Alexander, and a professional home on the faculty of historically Black Jackson State University. And despite the lull in her career that giving full attention to her husband and their four children caused, Walker forged on. Her career reached its zenith with the novel “Jubilee” in 1966.
“It is the first book written in the authentic voice of an enslaved Black woman in the modern period,” Graham said. “It’s a classic in that tradition. She was the precursor to an entire genre that Toni Morrison helped to consolidate in ‘Beloved,’ which today we call the neo-slave narrative. But when the book was published, there was nothing like it out there.”
Graham said “Jubliee” is “a family chronicle. It’s her great-grandmother’s story fictionalized.”
That’s why, Graham said, it hurt when Walker recognized elements of “Jubilee” in Haley’s 1976 novel “Roots: The Saga of an American Family.”
As it emerged later, Graham said, “Haley did, in fact, use her book and others, and she went ballistic when she recognized it. She took to her journals and spoke out publicly. What most people interpreted her to be saying was: Look at this Johnny-come-lately, stealing everybody else's stuff and getting all the accolades.”
So Walker sued. And lost.
“He had stolen other people's property, and when you steal that's a cardinal sin,” Graham said of Walker’s thinking. “She wanted people to know it. But she didn't have the kind of high-priced representation that she needed. That part of her life, I don't think, ever got resolved. Her reputation suffered miserably.”
That was only exacerbated by her biography, “Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius,” which came out in 1988 after delays caused by a lawsuit (later dismissed) filed by Wright’s estate claiming copyright infringement for Walker’s use of their correspondence. Graham said Walker learned her legal lesson from the Haley suit, but perhaps not any larger ones.
“She was saying basically that Wright was brilliant, yes, but crazy,” Graham said. “Life in Mississippi, for a genius like him, does distort and can cause self-hatred as much as it can be a powerful motivator for creativity. It's what segregation often did to the best and brightest of people. It represses … it suppresses … and the intensity of your experience can be beautiful. But it can also be ugly.”
Graham said Walker was an inspirational figure to a young scholar like herself when they first met in the early 1970s. By tracing the highs and lows of Walker’s life in “The House Where My Soul Lives,” Graham hopes to unravel a complicated story that can inspire a new generation.
Image: Margaret Walker signing copies of “Jubilee.” Credit: H.T. Sampson Library Collection, Jackson State University.