For My People

 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 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.

 

Margaret Walker, For My People (Yale University Press, 1942)