Hello World!

I pray that you are safe and warm in spite of the blizzards that many of us are experiencing throughout the United States…Thankfully, here in the A, we are back to our normal temperate temperatures after our uncharacteristic snowstorm last month…

Since it is Black History Month, of course, I must dedicate some of my humble blog space to honoring those who paved the way for all that black people and the world enjoy today…One of the works of literature that all of us can enjoy today is the book Jubilee by written by Margaret Walker( July 7, 1915 – November 30, 1998). To me, the book is similar to Roots by Alex Haley. I cannot remember when I came across this book, but I LOVED it…

Here is the classic–and true–story of Vyry, the child of a white plantation owner and his black mistress, a Southern Civil War heroine to rival Scarlett O’Hara. Vyry bears witness to the South’s prewar opulence and its brutality, to its wartime ruin and the subsequent promise of Reconstruction. It is a story that Margaret Walker heard as a child from her grandmother, the real Vyry’s daughter. The author spent thirty years researching the novel so that the world might know the intelligent, strong, and brave black woman called Vyry. The phenomenal acclaim this best-selling book has achieved from readers black and white, young and old, attests to her success. – Powell’s Books website. Also, the New Georgia Encyclopedia has an entire entry about Jubilee, which is set in Georgia.

Below I will list some quotes  I have found about this great author and her work. What an American treasure!

• Dr. Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander’s contributions to American letters–four volumes of poetry, a novel, a biography, and numerous critical essays–mark her as one of this country’s most gifted black intellectuals. These accomplishments, as well as fellowships and awards that she has earned, garner her much deserved praise, but they are even more remarkable given that she achieved most of them after 1943 when she was a college professor and a wife and mother of four children. Although the cumulative demands of these pursuits would have broken the spirit of others, Walker prevailed, and in so doing reached beyond her advantaged middle class background to strengthen her race by leaving them (and all of us) a nurturing literary legacy.  – Donna Allego

• Margaret Abigail Walker was born on 7 July 1915 in Birmingham, Alabama. Her parents, the Reverend Sigismund C. Walker, a Methodist minister and an educator, and Marion Dozier Walker, a music teacher, encouraged her to read poetry and philosophy from an early age. – Tomeiko Ashford

• Walker completed her high school education at Gilbert Academy in New Orleans, Louisiana, where her family had moved in 1925. She went on to attend New Orleans University (now Dillard University) for two years. Then, after acclaimed poet Langston Hughes recognized her talent and urged her to seek training in the North, she transferred to Northwestern University in Chicago, Illinois, where she received a B.A. in English in 1935, at the age of nineteen. In 1937, she published “For My People” in Poetry magazine. Her first poem to appear in print, “For My People” became one of her most famous works and was even anthologized in 1941 in The Negro Caravan. – Tomeiko Ashford

• In 1943, Walker married Firnist James Alexander, or “Alex,” as she loving called him, an interior designer and decorator. Following the birth of their first three children (they raised a total of four during their years of marriage), the couple moved to Jackson, Mississippi, in 1949. Walker began a prosperous teaching career at Jackson State College in the same year, retiring from its English department thirty years later in 1979. In 1968 she founded the Institute for the Study of History, Life, and Culture of Black People (now the Margaret Walker Alexander National Research Center); she directed the center until her retirement. During her tenure at Jackson State, Walker also organized and chaired the Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival. Following retirement, she remained active as professor emerita until her death in the fall of 1998.- Tomeiko Ashford

• Here is a poem Margaret Walker wrote about her husband, Firnist James Alexander…

My monkey-wrench man is my sweet patootie;
the lover of my life, my youth and age.
My heart belongs to him and to him only;
the children of my flesh are his and bear his rage
Now grown to years advancing through the dozens
the honeyed kiss, the lips of wine and fire
fade blissfully into the distant years of yonder
but all my days of Happiness and wonder
are cradled in his arms and eyes entire.
They carry us under the waters of the world
out past the starposts of a distant planet
And creeping through the seaweed of the ocean
they tangle us with ropes and yarn of memories
where we have been together, you and I.

• Jubilee, a neo-slave narrative based on the collected memories of her maternal grandmother, Elvira Ware Dozier, was published in 1966, only a year after Walker completed the first version of it for her dissertation. Many scholars view the novel as an African American response to America’s fascination with Gone With the Wind (1936). Others recognize the work as an example of the historic presence that the author commands as a prophet of sorts for her people. The novel has enjoyed tremendous popularity, winning the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award (1968), having been translated into seven languages, and having never gone out of print. It has also led the author into controversy: in 1988, Walker found herself in conflict with the famed author of Roots, Alex Haley, whom she accused of infringing on her copyright of Jubilee. However, her lawsuit against him was dismissed. Walker provides further detail regarding the production of the novel in her 1972 essay, “How I Wrote Jubilee.” – Tomeiko Ashford

• Before her death in November, 1998, Walker had written more than 10 books and an unknown number of poems, short stories, essays, letters, reviews, and speeches. Walker was honored with a host of awards and accolades as well as four honorary degrees. Jackson, Mississippi, her home for much of her life, has honored her by naming July 12 “Margaret Walker Day. ” – University of Minnesota website

Don’t you just love Black History Month? Below is a YouTube video of Margaret Walker reading her poem “I Want to Write.”

Any thoughts?