Southern Song: An Interview with Margaret Walker

Abstract

Margaret Walker first drew critical acclaim in 1942, when Stephen Vincent Ben6t selected her collection of poetry For My People for the Yale Younger Poets Series. Twenty-four years later, Jubilee, her novel of the Civil War era, became a best seller and was translated into French, Spanish, and German. Currently Walker is again headed for the spotlight. In the fall of 1987 Dodd, Mead & Co. will bring out her long-awaited critical study, Richard Wright: A Daemonic Genius. Walker's career as writer, teacher, and lecturer has carried her far from Birmingham, Alabama, where she was born in 1915. Walker received her early education in Meridian, Mississippi, Birmingham, and New Orleans. She began her college education at New Orleans-now Dillard-University. There she met Langston Hughes, who would greatly influence her writing. In her junior year Walker transferred to Northwestern University, which granted her the B.A. in 1935. She received the M.A. (1940) and the Ph.D. (1965) from the University of Iowa. While working for the Federal Writers Project in Chicago during the Depression, Walker attended meetings of the South Side Writers Group, where she developed a close relationship with Richard Wright. After Wright moved to New York in 1937, the two writers corresponded frequently. Walker regularly sent Wright newspaper clippings covering the murder case that became the basis for his novel Native Son, published in 1940, the date that marks the end of their friendship. An account of their association and breakup will be an important feature of A Daemonic Genius. From 1942 until 1946 Walker taught in colleges and universities in the South. In 1949 she began her thirty-year career at Jackson State University, where she inaugurated and directed the Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People. Walker has received numerous awards, honorary degrees, and fellowships, including a Fulbright appointment to Norway. She has also published two additional volumes of poetry, Prophets for a New Day (1970) and October Journey (1973), as well as How I Wrote Jubilee (1972), and numerous articles and stories. In 1942 Walker married Firnist James Alexander, an interior decorator. The couple had four children, and there are now eight grandchildren. Since her husband's death, Walker has continued to live in Jackson on the street that bears her name. Now retired, Walker devotes her time to writing, lecturing, and serving as mentor and friend to young black writers. The volume A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker (1974) gives insight into Walker's views of a younger generation.