Poetry for Students, Volume 31

for distortions to occur, making this sort of
comparison another universal experience.

Walker’s great-grandmother was a slave, so it
is not difficult when reading her poem ‘‘Lineage’’ to
imagine that the grandmothers she addresses are
also slaves. However, people all over the world can
relate to this poem because Walker creates images
that could apply to any age of humanity, whether
one hundred years from now or more than a thou-
sand years into the past. Her poem is a collection of
universally shared experiences.

Source:Joyce Hart, Critical Essay on ‘‘Lineage,’’ in
Poetry for Students, Gale, Cengage Learning, 2010.

William Scott
In the following excerpt, Scott examines how the
poems in Part 1 ofFor My People, including ‘‘Lin-
eage,’’ portray the complex identity and history of
African Americans.

... Walker beginsFor My Peoplewith a
poem that bears the same title. ‘‘For My People,’’
originally published in 1937, consists of nine
stanzas that describe the conditions of life for
African Americans and a tenth stanza which
concludes the poem by calling for a kind of
renewal: ‘‘Let a new earth arise. Let another
world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in
the sky.’’ The descriptions take the form of serial
lists of characteristics, aspects, emotions, and
events, which are either joined together by way

of conjunctions (‘‘and’’) or, more often, by appo-

sition. The first four stanzas illustrate Walker’s

construction of serial associations throughout

the poem:

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, bend-

ing 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 bap-

tizing 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;

In these stanzas, Walker is not just presenting

a list of given ‘‘things,’’ including individual and

Golden wheat ready for harvest(Image copyright Alessio
Ponti, 2009. Used under license from Shutterstock.com)

READING THIS SERIES OF POEMS, IT IS CLEAR

THAT WALKER IS NOT WILLING TO SETTLE FOR ANY

SENSE OF HISTORY WHICH PRESUMES TO RECONCILE

ALL THE CONTRADICTIONS THAT INHABIT IT.’’

Lineage