"To a place blessed" : for Margaret Walker.

On November 30, 1998, Margaret Walker Alexander, at the age of 83, died in Chicago. Though the cause of her death was uncertain, she had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and had become so feeble as to require a constant companion. Nearly thirty years ago, I began to celebrate her poetry. Eight to ten miles from Chapel Hill, the famed players of Shaw University had just finished, for so many undergraduates at North Carolina Central University, a brilliant performance of African American poetry. In a ritualistic soliloquy, the Director had stunned the audience in a resonant baritone, "For my people, everywhere . . . ."

By the time I graduated with a doctorate in English from Brown University in 1974, my enthusiasm for Walker's lyrics had not waned. In 1975, I met her for the first time at the annual meeting of the College Language Association in New Orleans. Nearly a decade later, she expressed humorous surprise in Philadelphia that I was not getting any thinner. During the interim, I had published a critical article about her poetry in Tennessee Studies in 1981 and would revise the article for Black American Poets Between Worlds in 1986. Jerry W. Ward, Jr., included the essay in Black Southern Voices (1992), as a signature replacement for my article on Alex Haley's Roots, selected previously by the late John O. Killens. After the completion of a brief monograph on African American Southern Literature, for an authored issue of the Xavier Review in 1991, I began the long trek to celebrate Walker's resilience as a poet/thinker. In her ambivalent admiration for Richard Wright, she had placed him in the pantheon of world thought over the last two centuries - along with Freud, Marx, and Faulkner - as heir to the great intellectual traditions. Her four were Southern Gothic, American Realism and Naturalism of the Midwestern variety, Existentialism, and African American Humanism.

As an artist/philosopher, Walker ranks with the best of them. Her introspection in Phylon 11 (1950) bolsters the intellectual depth of humanistic theory. She tills the ground on which we of a more erudite and lesser sort compose new tomes to honor her tradition.

She lived out her last years on Margaret Walker Boulevard in Jackson, Mississippi. If the ultimate test of an artistic talent means little diminution of literary quality over time, she confirmed her resilient lyricism at Carolina on what possibly became her final bow to national acclaim at Chapel Hill on April 3, 1998. During the inaugural meeting of the George Moses Horton Society, her new moment came fifty-six years after the reception of the Yale University Prize for Younger Poets to honor the publication of For My People in 1942. The early book differs significantly in tone and timbre from a subsequent volume, Prophets For a New Day (1970), which is another signature work. The first came before the end of World War II and the second near the end of the Black Arts Movement twenty-eight years later. Since then many of her precise lyrics in October Journey (1973), For Farish Street Green (1986), and This Is My Century: New and Collected Poems (1988) have been impeccably crafted.

Margaret Walker is the senior-ranking writer of the African American South and probably its greatest poet. Variously, she has played the part of novelist, essayist, teacher, and poet. As a most accomplished American author during nearly two-thirds of the century, she exemplified a range of poetic forms, such as the Petrarchan and Shakespearean sonnet. Many of her finest verses have elegiac turns. Especially in the early ballads, she transcribes the legendary trickery and deceit narrated in the folklore of the early nineteenth century and portrays an enchantment with the superstition and magic of her own time. In the later work, she elevates the resonance of the folk sermon to apostolic heights of righteous indignation. Beyond all else, she is one of America's foremost poets of ideas. Of the few talented voices to bridge the chasm between the generation of the Harlem Renaissance of the twenties and the Black Arts, she has likely retained the most creative finish in her lyrical power:

a kiss to give across a wide abyss and knowing magic of reconciliation and hope To a place blessed with smiling Shining beyond the brightness of noonday and I lift my voice above a rising wind. ("The Labyrinth of Life")

From North Carolina Central at the close of the sixties, to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in April 1998, Margaret Walker kept her eye on the sparrow. As much as any poet, she continues to lead me to become a literary critic of the African American South. A shaper of African American monuments in poetry, she keeps the faith as a guardian of cultured memory. She is the living obelisk in and of her own poetry. Our lives are enriched by her voice.

R. Baxter Miller is Director of the Institute of African American Studies and Professor of African American Studies and English at the University of Georgia and serves on the editorial board of AAR.