The fusion of ideas: an interview with Margaret Walker Alexander - Black South Fiction, Art, Culture - Interview

African American Review, Summer, 1993 by Maryemma Graham

Margaret Walker is the prize-winning author of For My People, the first collection by an African American writer to win a national award. Published by Yale University in 1942, the volume celebrated its fifty-year anniversary as Walker herself turned 77 in 1992. This interview took place in Jackson, Mississippi, July 14, 1992, in the home of Margaret Walker who, in addition to being a poet, is a novelist, biographer, and critical essayist. Informed by Walker's decidely historicist approach to literature, the interview covers Walker's lengthy career, politics, and current projects.

Graham: I'd like to talk about the book This Is My Century as a representative text.

Alexander: From my early adolescence, I've been dealing with the meaning of the century. I was born when it was barely fifteen years old, and now we have less than ten years left in this century. So the body of my work - whether it's Jubilee, For My People, This Is My Century, or Richard Wright - springs from my interest in a historical point of view that is central to the development of black people as we approach the 21st century. That is my theme and I have tried to express it, both in prose and poetry. I feel that, if I've learned anything about this country and century, I've expressed it already in the books I've written. There are a few more I'd like to do, and that same them is there. For example, I think that, when you look at the Civil Rights Movement and remember the violence of the 1960s and the legislation that came out of it, we make a mistake to think that the protest movement of the |60s was an isolated decade in itself. Protest, for black people in this country, is more than a century old. It began right after slavery, but particularly toward the end of the 19th century, and from the beginning of the 20th century with Du Bois and the NAACP, and the Urban League, in the first ten years of this century. The whole issue for black people was protesting the treatment received from the government and the question of whether we had equal rights. When I was born, we were in the very beginning of World War I. This country had not entered into it yet. And, basically, what we had at the beginning of World War I was reflected again in World War II.

Graham: What is it that you're saying we saw in both wars?

Alexander: Well, the problems that World War I stirred up and left started World War II. And we can go further than that During the 20th century, this country has engaged in war on four continents other than North America. The century really began with the Spanish-American War, and we were dealing with nations south of the border. I remember reading in the newspapers almost every day when I was a high school student about a new revolution taking place south of the border. We went through some fifteen years of that I don't recall the Russian Revolution, because I was only about two years old, but it was a big and important issue of the 20th century. And then World War I was fought for control of land, people, and money. Telling the folk that it was a war fought for the benefit of democracy was a slogan. This country banked the raw. They not only sent people to France to die over there - they loaned them money. And when the war was over, everybody owed this country. Some of them paid it, and some didn't. And as a result of fifteen years of bad management, the country entered the Depression.

If you look at the period in America after each world war and each foreign war, you will discover five issues: the health of the people, the education of the people, the economy, the political ideas that develop the world's economic state, and the whole nature of the state vs. the church. The issues that we face everyday in Congress are issues that have come out of these five things.

Every time we have a war, we have to change the economy. My mother said that, before World War I, you could go with a dollar and buy groceries for a family. You could take 25 cents and buy meat. Nickels and dimes counted. But, after World War I, pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters did not count anymore. I can recall that, prior to World War II (and I mention this in the poem "Youth and Age" in This Is My Century), I bought three pounds of onions for a dime; look at how much it costs to buy three pounds of onions today. You could buy a loaf of bread for a nickel or a dime. When I was a child you could buy a pint or quart of milk for 11 cents. You see the difference in the economies.

I was married during World War II, and when my husband and I came to Jackson, I could buy a week's worth of groceries for $15. When I moved into my present house after the Korean War, $100 would buy two weeks' groceries. When I came back from Iowa, I couldn't expect my grocery bill for the same family of six to be $25 or $35 anymore - it had moved up, until it got to the point where I couldn't expect to get a week's groceries for less than $100. It hasn't gotten any less than that since.

Graham: Would you say that This Is My Century is a protest against or in response to conditions that black people have faced throughout this century?