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This chapter narrates how Margaret Walker’s growing radicalism motivated an intense work ethic that allowed her to divide her time efficiently between the Writers’ Project and her own writing. She was learning to focus her creative energies and work on the “northside novel.” Knowing poetry to be her strongest artistic form, the most likely to bring recognition, she was committed to improving her skills in fiction writing as much as she could. Walker was then introduced to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Reading Hurston undoubtedly precipitated an interest in the works of Black women writers. Given the pressure Walker was under, one might expect slow progress on her own projects, but she remained highly productive. However, the transformation that her folk sketches needed did not occur until she went to Iowa in 1939: they became folk ballads that form the second part of For My People.

This chapter starts with the birth of Margaret Walker on July 7, 1915, in the west end area of Birmingham, Jefferson County, Alabama. Her father, Sigismund Constantine Walker Sr., was a well-educated minister who pastored churches before pursuing a better-paying job as a college teacher. Her mother, Marion Dozier Walker, was a well-bred young woman headed toward a successful career in music when she fell in love with the persuasive young minister just out of seminary. Walker came to know the world through her father, toward whom she felt the stronger connection. Indeed, it was Sigismund Walker who fed his daughter's belief about the perfect family. However, a contributing factor to Walker's identity as a woman was the woman-centered household in which she grew up, one where Marion’s dominating presence went unmediated. The experience would figure prominently in her developing ideas about womanhood that would mature in the novel Jubilee and become the subject of later essays. While her future social status as a Black woman was being cultivated at home and at school, she became aware of tensions having to do with class and gender distinctions uniquely tied to place and the particular dynamics within her own family.

This chapter recounts how, even though most of her time was spent going to meetings, working, reading, writing, and studying with Richard Wright, Margaret Walker had begun to respond to the advances of a young minister James Russell Brown sometime during 1936. She struggled with her feelings from the beginning: a strong sexual attraction demanding fulfillment and the need for restraint required by custom. She had to weigh these impulses against everything else that was occupying her time. The Works Progress Administration (WPA) job was going well, and she was writing constantly, experiencing success and support. But she saw herself falling hopelessly in love with Brown. She confided the private, inner story of the relationship with Brown in a thirty-two-page journal entry, in which she speaks honestly about her own sexual urges and the corresponding impact of sexual repression. The chapter then looks at Walker’s refusal of Brown’s marriage proposal because of her growing awareness of the limitations and expectations for women of her generation. The knowledge that marriage would go hand in hand with suppression of her creativity trumped all other knowledge and all feeling.