Black and Freeis conscious of shaping an image of
a writer as a feminist and radical thinker. The
volume tells what Walker learned as an artist in
hersixty-yearcareerandcontains unabashed cri-
tiques of racist politics in her home state of Mis-
sissippi and the nation at large. Although Walker
never traveled outside the continental US—she
turned down her only Fulbright fellowship in
1971 for family reasons—she existed within a
tradition that linked the local, national, and inter-
national concerns. Derived from some of her
most popular speeches, the volume is written in
Walker’s characteristic apocalyptic and prophetic
tone, one that is immediate and accessible. Both
volumes together affirm how Walker saw herself
at the end of her career: a woman who had begun
to review the past and predict the future, calling a
nation to order lest it fear Armageddon.
While the essays are useful for identifying the
major strands of Walker’s thoughts as a radical
thinker and activist from the very beginning of
her career, Walker’s literary reputation rests pri-
marily upon the four volumes of poetry that she
published in her lifetime, andJubilee, the historical
novel that she had begun writing in college but did
not complete until mid-life.For My People,com-
pleted as her Master’s project at the University of
Iowa, became the 1942 selection for the Yale Series
of Younger Artists series. In introducing the col-
lection, Stephen Vincent Benet spoke of Walker’s
poetry as ‘‘controlled intensity of emotion and
language that, even when most modern, has some-
thing of the surge of biblical poetry.’’ Composed
of poems which Walker had worked and
reworked since her days at Northwestern, the
volume brought to the reader an understanding
of the past together with her sense of the rhythm
and ‘‘feeling tone’’ of black life. She wanted the
poetry to have its own distinctive voice, one that
was steeped in the folk tradition, but which
could express itself in both vernacular and con-
ventional literary forms. Although her training
at Northwestern had been in classical English
forms, Walker learned the forms of modern
poetry in Iowa, a tradition that emphasized the
work of Walt Whitman, Randall Jarrell, T. S.
Eliot and Ezra Pound as well as the experimen-
talism of e.e. cummings.
This training, along with her apprenticeship
with the WPA and the South Side Writers Group,
resulted in the twenty six poems ofFor My People,
where Walker demonstrated her unique talents as a
lyricist and modernist innovator who would not
abandon her roots in the folk tradition.For My
Peopletook the reader on a psychic journey into
the past, conjoining despair and hope, pride and
pain, destruction and creation, separation and
reunion. In the volume, the sacred and the profane
merge as the reader grasps the profound and subtle
significance of racial memory. Each poem becomes
part of a ‘‘collective narrative of memory’’ as told
through a black vernacular matrix which empha-
sizes the flow and rhythm of the myths, folk tales,
legends, ballads and narratives as well as free verse
forms, sonnets, odes, and elegies. Structurally, the
volume emulates the call and response pattern
inherent in traditional African American expres-
sion. Part I includes ten verse poems that explore
the historical terrain of African American history:
each stanza introduces a montage of scenes relating
various historical moments in the late 19th and
20th centuries. Part II provides a vernacular
response to the more discursive first section. Ten
more ballads, folk tales and black hero/heroine
exploits change the tone of the volume entirely.
The effect is to give the ‘‘folk’’ an opportunity to
speak for themselves in their own voice. Walker
returns to traditional poetic forms in a third part,
containing six poems which begin with a personal
memory of childhood. The collection ends by
emphasizing the importance of struggle in the
physical world—a struggle that, historically, nei-
ther overshadowed nor diminished an African
American spiritual sensibility bounded by love
and compassion, one that connects us all through
space and time. The call-and-response structure is
complemented by the way in which Walker uses
voice to establish a shift in her own poetic identity.
Dramatically intense imagery utilizing contrast-
ing metaphors is presented in the first person
singular when Walker wants to define herself as
part of the stream of history, seen, for example in
this excerpt from ‘‘Lineage’’:
My grandmothers are full of memories
Smelling of soap and onions and wet clay
With veins rolling roughly over quick hands
They have many clean words to say.
My grandmothers were strong.
Why am I not as they?
The knowledge of that history becomes the
individual poet’s song, which ‘‘Today’’ illustrates:
I sing of slum scabs on city faces, scrawny
children scarred by bombs and dying of
hunger,
wretched human scarecrows strung against
lynching stakes, those dying of pellagra
and silicosis,Lineage