In This Place Where I Was Born

Abstract

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.