Margaret Walker – Dipping Into Light

po_Walker-Margaret Margaret Walker (Margaret Abigail Walker Alexander by marriage) July 7, 1915 – November 30, 1998) was an American poet and writer.

She was part of the African-American literary movement in Chicago. Her notable works include the award-winning poem For My People (1942) and the novel Jubilee (1966), set in the South during the American Civil War.

DARK BLOOD
Margaret Walker

There were bizarre beginnings in old lands for the making
of me. There were sugar sands and islands of fern and
pearl, palm jungles and stretches of a never-ending sea.

There were the wooing nights of tropical lands and the cool
    discretion of flowering plains between two stalwart
    hills. They nurtured my coming with wanderlust. I
    sucked fevers of adventure through my veins with my
    mother’s milk.

Someday I shall go to the tropical lands of my birth, to the
    coasts of continents and the tiny wharves of island
    shores. I shall roam the Balkans and the hot lanes of
    Africa and Asia. I shall stand on mountain tops and
    gaze on fertile homes below.

And when I return to Mobile I shall go by the way of
    Panama and Bocas del Toro to the littered streets and
    the one-room shacks of my old poverty, and blazing suns
    of other lands may struggle then to reconcile the pride
    and pain in me.

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FOR MY PEOPLE
Margaret Walker

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs

repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues

and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an

unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an

unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the

gone years and the now years and the maybe years,

washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching

dragging along never gaining never reaping never

knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama

backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor

and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking

and playhouse and concert and store and hair and

Miss Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn

to know the reasons why and the answers to and the

people who and the places where and the days when, in

memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we

were black and poor and small and different and nobody

cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to

be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and

play and drink their wine and religion and success, to

marry their playmates and bear children and then die

of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street

and Lenox Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New

Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy

people filling the cabarets and taverns and other

people’s pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and

land and money and something—something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and groping and floundering in

the dark of churches and schools and clubs

and societies, associations and councils and committees and

conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and

devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,

preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by

false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now

rise and take control.

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WE HAVE BEEN BELIEVERS
Margaret Walker

We have been believers believing in the black gods of an old
land, believing in the secrets of the seeress and the
magic of the charmers and the power of the devil’s evil
ones.

And in the white gods of a new land we have been believers
believing in the mercy of our masters and the beauty of
our brothers, believing in the conjure of the humble
and the faithful and the pure.

Neither the slaves’ whip nor the lynchers’ rope nor the
bayonet could kill our black belief. In our hunger we
beheld the welcome table and in our nakedness the
glory of a long white robe. We have been believers in
the new Jerusalem.

We have been believers feeding greedy grinning gods, like a
Moloch demanding our sons and our daughters, our
strength and our wills and our spirits of pain. We have
been believers, silent and stolid and stubborn and
strong.

We have been believers yielding substance for the world.
With our hands have we fed a people and out of our
strength have they wrung the necessities of a nation.
Our song has filled the twilight and our hope has
heralded the dawn.

Now we stand ready for the touch of one fiery iron, for the
cleansing breath of many molten truths, that the eyes
of the blind may see and the ears of the deaf may hear
and the tongues of the people be filled with living fire.

Where are our gods that they leave us asleep? Surely the
priests and the preachers and the powers will hear.
Surely now that our hands are empty and our hearts too
full to pray they will understand. Surely the sires of
the people will send us a sign.

We have been believers believing in our burdens and our
demigods too long. Now the needy no longer weep and
pray; the long-suffering arise, and our fists bleed
against the bars with a strange insistency.