For My People

Margaret Walker

1915 –1998

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 in Chicago 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 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.