Carolyn J. Brown - Song of My Life

Song of My Life

Song of My Life

A Biography of Margaret Walker

Carolyn J. Brown

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of

American University Presses.

Copyright 2014 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2014

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, Carolyn J., author.

Song of my life : a biography of Margaret Walker / Carolyn J. Brown.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-62846-147-3 (hardback) ISBN 978-1-62846-148-0 (ebook)

1. Walker, Margaret, 19151998. 2. African American women authorsBiography. 3. African AmericansIntellectual life20th century. I. Title.

PS3545.A517Z56 2014

812.52dc23

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To Lusthank you for bringing me to Mississippi

And to Carla, for showing me the way when I got here

Margaret Walker, seated in Eudora Weltys favorite reading chair, Eudora Weltys house, Jackson, Mississippi, 1998. Photograph H. Kay Holloway.

I wonder if I can live to finish it. I keep feeling it should be the best thing Ive ever done. It should be a very good work. I wonder sometimes if the beauty I feel I have experienced in my life can be beautifully expressed there. Somebody criticized me once about Jubilee and said my style was awful, that I didnt sound like a poet. I worried about that for a while, and then I learned afterwards that this was just malicious criticism. It didnt matter too much, because other critics said I was singing a folksong in Jubilee. They heard the rhythms in the work. This book about my life will not be confessional. It wont be purely social and intellectual history. But I do want it to be a song of my life.

Margaret Walker

In 1998, in an advertisement for a film documentary about Margaret Walker, Nikki Giovanni, world-renowned poet, educator, activist, and close personal friend of Margaret Walker, described Walker as the most famous person nobody knows. I have to confess I was one of those peopleI had never heard of Walker through four years of college and six years of graduate school, and even after more than twenty years of academic teaching, reading, and writing. It was not until I moved to Jackson, Mississippi, and I was reading an article in the January 2012 edition of Southern Living magazine entitled Mississippis Literary Trail that I first came across the name Margaret Walker.

I remember the moment exactly. I had just completed my book about Eudora Welty, A Daring Life: A Biography of Eudora Welty, and was contemplating what to write next. I was excited to see the article in Southern Living because I knew it would mention the Eudora Welty House, a place near and dear to my heart as I had spent many hours there researching my book. However, after the section of the article devoted to the Welty House, the story continued and said to be sure to also visit the Margaret Walker Center, home to the nations second largest collection of a modern black female authors papers (second only to Maya Angelous). I was stunned. Who was Margaret Walker? And, why, as well read as I professed to be, did I know nothing about her?

I rushed to my Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, my trusted source for the most complete collection of women writers, and saw that she was indeed included. I then quickly looked for information about her online, and discovered there was no book biography about her. As I collected more and more bits and pieces online about this fascinating woman, I realized that I had found my next book subjecta second important woman writer from Jackson who had been sorely overlooked yet had had friendships with many of our most well-known twentieth-century African American writers, such as Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, Nikki Giovanni, and Sonia Sanchez.

My second important discovery happened upon my first visit to the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University. Archivist Angela Stewart showed me Margaret Walkers unpublished autobiography: pages and pages of her life story that had recently been digitized and was available online. Walker had hoped to share her story with the world, but poor health prevented her from finishing several books she had hoped to complete at the end of her lifeher autobiography was one of those unfinished projects.

Angela Stewart and Dr. Robert Luckett, director of the center, also recommended I contact Dr. Maryemma Graham at the University of Kansas, as she was the preeminent Walker scholar and was herself working on a biography of Walker. I contacted Dr. Graham right away, and she was extremely supportive of my book project: a shorter, more concise introduction to the life of Walker, targeting middle-school and high-school-age students as well as the general reader. Dr. Graham is currently writing the scholarly, definitive biography of Walker to be published by Oxford, and was generous with her time and support of my book.

Margaret Walkers unpublished autobiography provided me with the raw material I needed to write my book; however, I soon discovered while reading it that she repeats herself often and tells many versions of the same events and stories. The versions are never drastically different; she may add a detail in one version that is missing in another. She also gave many interviews late in her life, collected in Conversations with Margaret Walker (edited by Dr. Maryemma Graham), that include versions of these same events and provide additional details and biographical information. As a biographer, I sorted through all these different versions. It has been my intent to tell Margaret Walkers story the way she would have wanted and as much as possible in her voice; hence, a plethora of quotes are included. I also have quoted lines from her poems and excerpts from her essays where they apply. Truly, no one says it better than Margaret.

It is my hope that I have done her story justice. Margaret Walker wanted to share her life story, her song, with the world. That was my purposeto assist in the completion of that project. My secondary purpose was for this book to help erase the moniker of the most famous person nobody knows and introduce her to a new generation of readers.

Carolyn J. Brown
Jackson, Mississippi

It seems as if I have always known all my life that I wanted to be a writer.