Poetry

FOR MY PEOPLE--Margaret Walker-- Yale ($2).

There is perhaps more quiet medicament for negrophobes in Margaret Walker's For My People than in any other book of Negro verse yet published. Poetess Walker, a 27-year-old, Alabama-born English teacher, avoids the callow literary posturing that is the curse of most Negro versifiers. In this, her first book, she writes with civilized simplicity and dignity about the humanity of her people. The effect, whether in her psalmlike lyrics, her stark ballads or her biting sonnets, is often solemn and beautiful, like a black frost in the deep South:

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 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 . . . leeches, preyed on by facile force of state and fad . . . by false prophet and holy believer. . . .

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way 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. . . .

The moral guilelessness which may well rate as the most valuable gift of the Negro to American civilization is exemplified in almost every stanza of this slim 26-poem book. But Poetess Walker does not overrate the virtues of her people any more than she underrates the trouble they see:

Our birth and death are easy hours, like sleep

and food and drink. The struggle staggers us

for bread, for pride, for simple dignity.

And this is more than fighting to exist;

more than revolt and war and human odds.

There is a journey from the me to you.

There is a journey from the you to me.

A union of the two strange worlds must be.

For My People provides no answers to the Negro problem. But it puts that problem where everybody, not only lawmakers and reformers, can look at it. The Negro problem, the book seems to say, is not Negroes but people; and the solution of the problem, if it is ever achieved, will be achieved by people caring for people. Margaret Walker's book helps make her people easy to care for.

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