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Writer Margaret Walker's voice continues to be heard

by Roger Martin

I want you to slip into the black skin of Margaret Walker.

You're now an African-American woman born in the South in 1915. Your mother's a classically trained musician, your father a formally educated Methodist minister.

He hands you a blank journal in your 13th year so that when you decide to run your mouth, which is a habit you'll never really get over, you won't run it in front of somebody who might kill you for what you say.

He knows the risks. He was, after all, chased home one night by a drunken policeman who hated the sight of the fountain pen in your father's pocket.

Imagine that you go to Northwestern University to study English. At 22, you're the first African-American with work published in the prestigious magazine Poetry. At 27, you're the first African-American to have a volume published in the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition.

Imagine that you hang with Richard Wright, who is to become the famous author of the classic "Native Son." He introduces you to Marxism; you serve as his editor so his prose won't give away his seventh-grade education. You do this longing for a deeper intimacy with the man.

Wright's career goes into orbit, but he never returns the professional favors you provide, much less opens his heart. In fact, he eventually cuts you cold with paranoid accusations. You never speak again.

Then imagine that you return to the South and marry a supportive but unschooled carpenter with whom you cannot share the treasures in your fine and restless mind because he lacks your intellectual curiosity.

Imagine, too, struggling against poverty, teaching for little money at black colleges, raising four kids. Your public voice falls silent. You stop publishing for more than two decades.

"Twenty-five years of silence will damn near kill a writer," says Maryemma Graham, a University of Kansas professor of English.

But it didn't kill Margaret Walker. In part, that's because she never completely shut up or shut down. At a time when marches and protests were integrating restaurants and schools, Walker was keeping journals Ø and keeping journals Ø and keeping journals. Graham, who helped Walker edit her final works in the 1980s and 1990s, this fall will amplify Walker's voice in the world.

Graham has edited a number of Walker's conversations for publication by the University Press of Mississippi. A couple of years from now will come Graham's biography of Walker, titled "The House Where My Soul Lives." The poem published in the journal Poetry that made Walker's career is called "For My People." That's also the title of the book that won the Yale prize for Walker back in 1942.

After the long silence came "Jubilee," a 1966 novel about the journeyto freedom by one slave and her family as seen through the eyes of Walker's own great-grandmother. The novel was the literary fruit of having a family, Graham says.

Graham has read all but 30 of the 165 long journals Walker wrote. "The journals were a kind of therapy," Graham says. "You find lines that later come into the poems. You can tell when Walker's in a rage -- and the writing helps to reshape the rage. The poems are a further mellowing of the passion."

In one of Walker's earliest poems, "I Want to Write," there is evidence of feelings so powerful that they were barely tolerable, Graham says.

"Emotionally, she could go crazy and be out of whack," Graham says. "The journals were good at those times, but they just weren't enough. She had to see therapists and psychiatrists."

Slip inside the skin of Margaret Walker's life and it's easy to see why. It's a good thing for her that when it comes to words, they can't take those away from you.

"She always spoke her mind," Graham says. "She often angered people by what she said. She would say things about younger writers, and she didn't care what people thought about it. She would read things and say, 'This is a lie.' She could not stop her thoughts from coming out."

Now here's one more thing I want you to imagine: Imagine you're Maryemma Graham. You've grown close to Walker. You've teamed up with her on books. And you've given your word that as you write her biography, you won't violate her privacy and will safeguard her reputation. And now you've got to try to write the truth about a woman driven half-crazy by the absurdly taxing circumstances of her life, a woman who is blunt to a fault. And you've got to safeguard this woman's reputation when she herself didn't much care what people thought. And you have to not violate her privacy when she herself would not be still.

Imagining all this, I don't envy Graham. But then I think, Graham can't shut up any more than Walker could. Too much pressure has built up -- from all that reading of the journals and all that personal knowledge of Walker and all that sense of the South way back when -- for Graham not to say what needs to be said.