masculine appropriation (‘‘Only the naked arm
of Time / can measure the ground we know’’).
The following poem, ‘‘Lineage,’’ announces
itself, like ‘‘Dark Blood,’’ as a historical inquiry;
only this time the focus of the inquiry is explicitly
gendered as feminine, beginning with ‘‘My grand-
mothers were strong,’’ and then recounting, in a
series of self-contained, periodic assertions, how
‘‘They touched earth and grain grew.’’ Yet, as if
to preempt any straightforward claim to sister-
hood as a result of distinction by sex, the speaker
concludes the poem by repeating ‘‘My grand-
mothers were strong,’’ only to add, ‘‘Why am I
not as they?’’ This can be read as another inter-
ruption, but this time as one which underscores
the disjunctionwithinthe identification between
the self and others; moreover, it is an interruption
whose effects are located and felt precisely along
the gendered axis where such an identification, in
‘‘Delta,’’ had been postulated—that is, from the
point of a critique of the gendering of history as
masculine.
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 contra-
dictions that inhabit it. If the outcome of the
historical process of racialization was initially pro-
posed as a ground of identification for the individ-
ual and collective (‘‘Dark Blood’’), its internal
(ideal) and external (geographic) coherence was
disrupted by the speaker’s consideration of class
distinctions (‘‘the one-room shacks of my old pov-
erty’’); if, next, a geographical region was proposed
as such a ground (‘‘Southern Song,’’‘‘Sorrow
Home’’), its coherence was disrupted insofar as
it was revealed to be mediated by the experience
of dispossession, displacement, and fragmenta-
tion; if, in turn, this experience was contained
and overcome in a revolutionary gesture of
appropriation that promised to serve as a com-
mon ground for both class and racial identifica-
tion (‘‘Delta’’), the coherence of this ground was
seen to depend on its essentially masculine char-
acteristics, and thus it was disrupted along the
axis of its gendered implications; and if, finally,
gender is proposed as the ultimate ground of
identification between the speaker and her people
via her grandmothers (‘‘Lineage’’), then its coher-
ence is disrupted by the force of ‘‘Time’’ whose
movement signals a discrepancy between the
speaker and her foremothers within the very
idea of a lineage. In all these instances, a reflec-
tive, critical vigilance intercedes in the poem
(usually at the end) not entirely to dismantle the
attempted idealization, but to reveal it as inad-
equate to its professed purpose—namely, to
make sense of ‘‘my people’’—by calling atten-
tion to its limits. In doing so, these disruptions
open up what one might think of as a ‘‘third
dimension, which would be a subterranean his-
tory or the genesis of ideality’’ wherein ‘‘a cer-
tain surplus of meaning over and beyond [the
poem’s] manifest or literal sense’’ becomes revealed
the moment that an awareness of historicity enters
the experience of Walker’s individual characters
(Merleau-Ponty 183)...
Source:William Scott, ‘‘Belonging to History: Margaret
Walker’sFor My People,’’ inMLN, Vol. 121, No. 5, 2007,
pp. 1083–1106.Maryemma Graham
In the following excerpt, Graham discusses Walker’s
life and work, pointing out the views on history and
the self that Walker expresses in ‘‘Lineage.’’
Margaret Abigail Walker was born in Bir-
mingham, Alabama, in 1915, into a family of
storytellers and musicians, ministers and teachers.
The Walker family—three sisters and a brother,
parents and maternal grandmother—lived as a
closely knit group during her early years in Ala-
bama and Mississippi, and finally Louisiana, the
place that Walker always called home, the South
of her memory before and after leaving it for the
first time. Strong advocates of education as a
means toward racial progress and individual
development, her parents nurtured and encour-
aged each child’s individual talents. The first-
born in the family, she was her father’s favorite
child. He gave her a daybook at age twelve; it was
her first writer’s journal, giving her a way toTHE UNEVENNESS OF HER OWN PERSONAL
HISTORY ATTESTS TO THE NEGATIVE IMPACT OF
RACE AND GENDER PREJUDICE IN THE LIVES OF
EVEN THE MOST TALENTED AFRICAN AMERICANS.
NEVERTHELESS, WALKER’S VOICE BROKE THROUGH
THE SILENCE OF WOMEN’S LIVES, HER LIFE ALWAYS
MODELING THE IDEAS SHE BELIEVED IN SO FIRMLY.’’Lineage