Making It New: 1900–1945 499cadences learned from her preacher father and the rhythms of the new American
poetry encountered in Chicago, Walker sang, as she put it, “for my people everywhere.”
Mixing piety with prophecy, she also combined commemoration of the black past
with lively anticipation of the future. “Let a new earth arise,” she concluded the
poem, “Let the martial songs be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men
now rise and take control.”
Despite the success of For My People, Walker did not publish anything else for over
twenty years. Her novel Jubilee appeared in 1966. Based, Walker explained, on the
tales of her great-grandmother told to her by her grandmother, it tells the story of
Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress. To the extent that
the book is built around the seminal events of Southern history – the days of the old
slave order, the Civil War, and Reconstruction – Jubilee replicates the structure of the
traditional plantation romance. To the extent that it tells specifically of one powerful
woman, committed to her own passionate needs and set of values, it recollects one
famous version of plantation romance in particular, Gone With the Wind by Margaret
Mitchell. But this is a radical rewriting of plantation romance and the myths of black
and white womanhood underwritten by Mitchell’s novel. In her revisionist account
of the Southern past, Walker exposes the rigid barriers of race, gender, and class that
scarred slave society and were perpetuated after the Civil War. And the dramatic set
pieces here tend to be incidents of racial violence and oppression rather than the
traditional tableaux of, say, the banquet, the wedding party, and the hunt ball. At the
center of all this is an intelligent, energetic young woman. Unlike Scarlett O’Hara,
however, this young woman is born black and a slave. Dreaming “confused dreams
in which she struggled to be free,” Vyry has to deal with a confinement, chains that
are all too literal and brutal, but her will and determination are never defeated.
Neither is her belief, not only in herself, but in human nature. “I don’t believe the
world is full of peoples what hates everybody,” Vyry declares toward the end of
Jubilee. “I know lots of times folks doesn’t know other folks,” she adds, “and they gits
to thinking crazy things, but when you gits up to people and gits to know them, you
finds out they’s got kind hearts and tender feelings just like everybody does.” This is
a book that preaches, not so much revolution, as the imperative of black resistance
and the possibility of white redemption. As such, it helped to initiate a new tradition
in tales about the South.
Like Margaret Walker, Richard Wright was born in the South, in Natchez,
Mississippi. His childhood was spent in poverty. His formal education ended when he
left junior high school. Worse still, as he reveals in the first of his two autobiographical
volumes, Black Boy (1945), he was denied a sense of his own humanity and identity
as he grew up. “Not only had the southern whites not known me,” he explained in
retrospect, “but, more important still, as I had lived in the South I had not had the
chance to learn who I was.” Moving to Memphis in 1925, he survived by working at a
variety of odd jobs. Away from work, he began to read voraciously, people like
H. L. Mencken, Theodore Dreiser, Sinclair Lewis, and Sherwood Anderson. “These
writers seemed to me to feel that America could be shaped nearer to the hearts of
those who lived in it,” Wright declared in Black Boy. “And it was out of the novels andGGray_c04.indd 499ray_c 04 .indd 499 8 8/1/2011 7:54:05 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 05 AM