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"Southern Song" from "For My People"

I want my body bathed again by southern suns, my soul
reclaimed again from southern land. I want to rest
again in southern fields, in grass and hay and clover
bloom; to lay my hand again upon the clay baked by
a southern sun, to touch the rain-soaked earth and
smell the smell of soil.

I want my rest unbroken in the fields of southern earth;
freedom to watch the corn wave silver in the sun and
mark the splashing of a brook, a pond with ducks
and frogs and count the clouds.

I want no mobs to wrench me from my southern rest; no
forms to take me in the night and burn my shack and
make for me a nightmare full of oil and flame.

I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to
stand between my body's southern song- the fusion of the
South, my body's song and me.

Margaret Walker was equally skilled as a poet, novelist, essayist, biographer, and social commentator. Born in 1915 in Birmingham, the daughter of an African Methodist Episcopal Church minister, she grew up, as Richard Wright's biographer Hazel Rowley states, "in a household full of books and music."

At twenty-one, Walker was the youngest member of the South Side Writer's Group, a regular meeting of African American writers in Illinois, possibly the first such gathering of African American writers in America. The group, often lead by fellow Mississippian and novelist Richard Wright, has been described as the "Chicago Renaissance," a prolific symbiosis and outpouring of creative work by talented African American artists.

By the late 1940's, Walker had settled in Jackson, Mississippi, teaching at Jackson State University until her retirement in 1979. By the time that Walker arrived in Jackson, she was already several years into the thirty-year journey of creating her best-known work, "Jubilee."

"Jubilee" is largely based on the life of Walker's great-grandmother, the character Vyry in the novel. In her youth, Walker was fascinated by the stories her grandmother told of Walker's great-grandmother and her life in pre-Civil War Georgia on a large and prosperous plantation.

In "How I Wrote Jubilee" Walker comments, "Long before Jubilee had a name, I was living with it and imagining its reality. Its genesis coincides with my childhood, its development grows out of a welter of raw experiences and careful research, and its final form emerged exactly one hundred years after its major events took place."

Though she did years of historical research, Walker eventually chose the format of fiction to tell the story. Much of what she had read, both fiction and non-fiction, had presented events from a white perspective. Walker commented, "In no novel had I read the substance of what I wanted to say."

"Jubilee" follows Vryr and depicts African American life in the rural South through much of the nineteenth century. Writing fiction does not appear to come easily for Walker, a reader can smell the dried sweat on each page, sense the hand-wringing over every slowly placed word, and envision the hot, orange flames in the furnace as the prose is forged. But this style fits perfectly with the story and situation, for life was far from easy or smooth. The mentality of a white field overseer in "Jubilee" is indicative of the accepted wisdom of the time, "Best thing to keep a nigger working and jumping is a good bull whip. All you got to do is flick that whip, and believe you me, they jumps."

For some this may be heresy, but "Jubilee" is a better and more truthful novel of the antebellum South than "Gone With The Wind." The prissy Scarlet O'Hara fussed over the loss of her privileged way of life, a privilege built on the bent and broken backs of the enslaved African American population. Walker tells the real story, painful and sorrowful, with more immediacy and artistry. Slavery is the American Holocaust - Walker brings the searing sting of the whip to our backs and creates a proud heroine that we can only hope we could have the courage to be.

After her retirement from teaching, Walker went on to write a fine biography, "Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius," and a book of poetry. Walker died in 1998.