rotten houses falling on slowly decaying
humanity.
The first person plural form is reserved for
those moments when the self and history are
completely merged, when Walker wants no sep-
aration between time and place in the collective
memory, stressing instead the continuity of expe-
rience, the facts of history. ‘‘Delta’’ makes this
shift in its second section:
We tend the crop and gather the harvest
but not for ourselves do we labor...
here by this river we dare not claim
Yet we are an age of years in this valley;
yet we are bound til death to this valley.
We with our blood have watered these fields
and they belong to us.
Finally, Walker is at her best when adopting
the representative persona of her people: she sym-
bolizes their voice, writing for all those who are
silenced through hunger, despair, hypocrisy, and
death. The human spirit is never crushed, evi-
denced by their ‘‘dirges and their ditties, their
blues and their jubilees...their prayers...their
strength,’’ which Walker rhythmically announ-
ces, mindful of the need for this ceaseless faith
to build a bridge to the future. By consistently
offering before us a catalog of images that rush
before us at a dizzying pace, Walker makes the
volume visual and dramatic. The oft quoted final
stanza of ‘‘For My People,’’ represents the emo-
tionally charged climax that we have been wait-
ing for. The tone is assertive and uplifting; we are
witnessing a world emergent, a new work-in-
progress.
Let a new earth rise. Let another world be
born. Let a bloody peace be written in the
sky. Let a
second generation full of courage issue
forth; let a people loving freedom come
to growth. Let a
beauty full of healing and a strength of final
clenching be the pulsing in our spirits and
our blood.
Let the martial songs be written, let the
dirges disappear. Let a race of men now
rise and take
control.
Even though Langston Hughes, Claude McKay,
Jean Toomer and Countee Cullen had pro-
duced distinctive poetry that had claimed the
attention of mainstream audiences, no one
before Walker had approached African Ameri-
can poetry with the single-minded intensity and
concern for craft as Walker had. In this sense,
‘‘For My People’’ was a coming of age for Afri-
can American poetry, as it was for the author
herself; signifying the dynamism and continuity
of African American poetic expression that
would extend through the emergence of the
Black Arts Movement and performance poetry
of the 1990s. ‘‘For My People’’—by far the most
widely anthologized poem in the African Amer-
ican canon—celebrated and commemorated
the past in such a way that its continuous read-
ings for over sixty years have helped to sustain
the historical identity of the African American
community...
Source:Maryemma Graham, ‘‘Margaret Walker: Fully a
Poet, Fully a Woman,’’ inBlack Scholar, Vol. 29, No. 3,
Summer 1999, pp. 37–46.Sources
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