For My People (1989)

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Poetry

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, bending 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 baptizing 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;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to

   be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and

   play and drink their wine and religion and success, to

   marry their playmates and bear children and then die

    of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox

   Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New

   Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy

   people filling the cabarets and taverns and other

   people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and

    land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

    being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

    burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

    and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

    who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in

    the dark of churches and schools and clubs

    and societies, associations and councils and committees and

    conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and

    devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,

    preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by

    false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

   trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

   all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

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.

(Margaret Walker, 1989)

Summary

Walker discusses the tragic past of African American slavery in this poem, first published in 1937; the horrific racism still faced by people of color and taught to their kids; the dreams this community continues to keep alive amid the odds stacked against them; and the desire for a better future.

Author

The poet and novelist Margaret Walker was born on July 7, 1915, to the Reverend Sigismund C. Walker and Marion Dozier Walker in Birmingham, Alabama. When Walker was a small child, the family relocated to New Orleans. Walker's father, a Methodist minister who was born near Buff Bay, Jamaica, was a scholar who gave his love of literature to his daughter: the classics, the Bible, Benedict de Spinoza, Arthur Schopenhauer, the classics of English, and poetry. Likewise, Walker's musician mother played ragtime and read poetry to her, selecting from such diverse writers and works as Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Snowbound," the Bible, and Shakespeare, by John Greenleaf Whittier. Walker started reading Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen's poetry at the age of 11. Walker's tales were told by Elvira Ware Dozier, her maternal grandmother, who lived with her family, including the story of her own mother, a former slave in Georgia. Walker had seen James Weldon Johnson read from God's Trombones (1927), listened to Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes sing in New Orleans until she completed college at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, in the early 1930s, and, in 1932, heard Hughes read his poetry in a lecture recital at New Orleans University, where her parents then taught. In 1932, she met Hughes and inspired her to continue composing poetry. Her first poem to be written was in Crisis in 1934.

Racism Issue

Margaret Walker first addresses historic slavery as well as a different kind of slavery in Walker's time; though the institution of slavery was abolished, the institutionalized racism of society—a society that says that black people should be doing manual labor, working for others, or serving white people—remained, and it would continue for some time. Margaret Walker recalls her creative childhood play in Alabama and then, later, going to school, where she and her friends learned that they were “black and poor and small and different.”

Margaret Walker continues, explaining how these children grew up into men and women who, despite having to face diseases and hazards that white people could usually avoid, sought to find happiness where and when they could. "She describes popular streets in black neighborhoods in different cities and how her people, despite lacking "something all [their] own, struggle to live their lives entirely and be "happy" despite lacking "something all [their] own." She describes the great variety of her people, who are compelled to behave while "shackled" by racism and who are made by these unfair constraints relatively powerless. She describes the communities her people belong to, groups in which they strive to find solace and culture, while the state continues to "prey on" them, a government that punishes discrimination and racism.

Reference

  1. Walker, Margaret. 1968. For My People. Poetry Foundation. Retrieved January 1 2020.
  2. For My People by Margaret Walker. June 2 2020. Retrieved January 1 2020.