Margaret Walker Alexander lecture on Richard Wright at the University of Iowa, July 30, 1971

Speaker 1: The following is a lecture by Margaret Walker Alexander, recorded at the Third Annual Institute for Afro- American Culture on July 30th, 1971. Mrs. Alexander speaks on Richard Wright. Margaret Walker...: I'm delighted to be in Iowa City again, if only for one day and to spend two nights in that house where I was able to finish Jubilee. I'm very happy to see so many Iowa friends again before I begin this long sojourn across the water. But I'm also very happy to be a member of the very distinguished company of scholars and lecturers who have been here talking to you in these last two weeks about Richard Wright. My subject tonight is Richard Wright. Margaret Walker: I'm sorry. I first saw Richard Wright on Sunday afternoon, February 16, 1936 in Chicago at the old armory building where he was presiding over the writers section of the first National Negro Congress. I lost for him on the evening of June 9th, 1939 in New York City where I had gone to attend the League of American Writers convention, see the New York World's Fair and hopefully, sell my novel Goose Island. During those three years I think we were rather good friends. Looking back upon that relationship, it seems a rare and once in a lifetime association which I'm sure was not merely of mutual benefit, but rather uncommon in its completely literary nature. Margaret Walker: By literary, I do not mean arty or pretentious or any form of dilettantism which he despised. I believe now that we shared a genuine interest in writing in books and literature. Moreover, we were mutually engaged in those three years in a number of associations and undertakings that given the perspective of 35 years since their inception, seem uncanny in their significant. We were writers together on the Federal Writers Project of the WPA in Chicago. We were members of the South Side Writers Group. We were interested in the liberal magazine new challenge. We had mutual friends and associates who were also writers. During those three years we were struggling to publish for the first time in national magazines and books as professional writers. Margaret Walker: We had varying and unequal degrees of success but both our talents found shape during those years. I know I owe much to his influence and interest in my writing and publishing poetry at that time. I am not so sure how much he owed to me. One thing I do know, however, is that during this three-year period, Richard Wright wrote Almost a Man, Lawd Today, The Ethics of Living Jim Crow, Blueprint for Negro Writing, all the five stories in Uncle Tom's Children and Native Son. Margaret Walker: Prior to our friendship, although he had published poetry in left-wing magazines, he had not published one significant piece of imaginative probes. I had the privilege of watching the birth of each of these works and seeing them through various stages of conception organization and realization. His first scissors and paste job was the first I had ever witnessed and I rejoiced with him as each of these works found publication. Langston Hughes introduced us and when Wright died in Paris, Langston wrote me from London the news of their last visit. Wright in turn introduced me to Arna Bontemps and Sterling Brown, who were also on the WPA. In our South Side Writers Group where Theodore Ward, the playwright and Frank Marshall Davis, the poet who was working for the Associated Negro press and on the project was such writers as Nelson Algren, whose sole work at that time was Somebody in Boots. Margaret Walker: [Jack Shayer], who became director of the School of Journalism at Northwestern University, [Jimmy Fellon], who became a regular contributor to the Saturday Evening Post, Sam Ross, who went to the Hollywood to write scripts and Abe Aaron whose whereabouts I still do not know. John T. Frederick, the editor of The Old Midland and one time director of the project, Katherine Dunham, the dancer, Willard Motley and Frank Yerby, novelist and Fenton Johnson, poet and playwright. Wright and I went to some of the same studio parties, read the same books, spent long evenings talking together and often walked from the North side of the project when it was located on Erie Street, downtown to the public library, we often walked there. I know Miss Hovey is listening for these terrible sentences. Our road, the arrow to the South side, where we lived. Margaret Walker: He gave me books for presents and autograph manuscript of Almost a Man, a carbon copy of Lawd Today, which I typed gratis, a copy of Flaubert's Madame Bovary, E.E. Cummings' Enormous Room, and an autographed copy of Uncle Tom's Children. For two years after he went to New York we corresponded and for the most part, I kept his letters. Much to the chagrin of Mr. Margolis and Mr. Bob, I still refuse to give them up. My gifts were variably food and wine and cigarettes, and perhaps what he valued most an exchange of ideas, moral support and a steadfast encouragement because I had no doubt from the beginning that he would win fame and fortune. Margaret Walker: When I met him, his apprentice years were over and in that last year of his 10 Chicago years, it was easy to see where he was headed. I have decided to divide my remarks here into four parts. First, a running account of the literary activities of those three years when we were friends with emphasis on the writing of Native Son. Second, a brief biographical sketch showing the background for his writing and dividing his life into four periods. Those four periods are one, or A, I should say, because I've already said one, two, three, four. A, his first 19 years in the violent South. B, those 10 Chicago years during which I met him. C, his 10 New York years about which I can speak intelligently only for the first two years. D, the 14 Paris years of which I know least. Margaret Walker: Third and concurrently, a brief listing of the serious reading on books we discussed. Most of this occurred during that first year from summer 1936 to summer 1937. For I believe the serious reading offers a real key to the understanding of Wright as a writer. Fourth and finally, his philosophy of life and an assessment of his influence on American literature and the black writer. Margaret Walker: Now for the first part. Going back in my memory to that Sunday afternoon in February 1936 when I saw Wright for the first time, I am remembering that I went to the meeting because I heard it announced that Langston Hughes would be there. I met Langston first in New Orleans on his tour of the South. I met him in February 1932 when he appeared in a lecture recital, reading his poetry after college, New Orleans University, where my parents taught. He encouraged me then to continue writing poetry and he also urged my parents to get me out of the deep south. Margaret Walker: Four years later to the very month, I wanted him to read what I had written in those four years. Six months earlier, I had graduated from college at Northwestern and I still had no job. I was anxious to stay in Chicago, where I hoped to meet other writers, learn something more about writing and perhaps published some of my poetry. I tried to press my manuscripts on Langston, but when I admitted I had no copies, he would not take them. Instead, he turned to Wright who was standing nearby listening to the conversation and smiling at my desperation. Langston said, "If you people really get a group together, don't forget to include this girl." Wright promised that he would remember. A month passed and I heard nothing. I presumed he had either forgotten or they didn't get a group together. Margaret Walker: Meanwhile, on Friday, March 13th, 1936, I received my notice in the mail to report to the WPA Writers Project directed by Lewis-Ryles and located downtown in the loop on Wells Street. I guess Wells is outside of it. Six weeks later, I received a penny postcard inviting me to the first meeting of the South Side Writer's Group. Twice, I left the house and turn back the first time out of great self-consciousness because I felt I looked abominable. I had nothing to wear to make a nice appearance and I was going to the far south side where I felt those people would make fun of me. But my great desire to meet writers and in my long isolation conquered this superficial fear. I made myself go. Margaret Walker: At the address given on the card I discovered I was very late. I thought the meeting was over and I heard people laughing as I bloated out, "Is this the right place or I am I too late?" I heard a man expounding on the sad state of Negro writing at that point in the 30s and he was punctuating his remarks with pungent epithets. I drew back in Sunday school horror, totally shocked by his strong speech, but I steeled myself to hear him out. The man was Richard Wright. Subsequently, as each person present was asked to bring something to read next time, most people refused. When I was asked, I said, rather defiantly, that I would. I left the meeting alone. Margaret Walker: Next time when we met at Lincoln Center on Oakwood Boulevard, I read a group of my poems. I was surprised to see they did not cut me down, Ted Ward and Dick Wright were kind in their praise. I remember that Russell Marshall and Edward Bland were also there. Bland was killed in the battle of the Bulge. I was completely amazed to hear, Wright read a piece of prose he was working on. Even after I went home, I kept thinking, my God, how that man can write. After the meeting, Wright said he was going my way. He asked me if I want the Writer's Project and I said, yes. Then he said, "I think I'm going to get on that project." I looked at him in complete disbelief belief. I knew it took weeks and months to qualify for WPA, plus additional red tape to get on one of the professional art projects. Margaret Walker: What I did not know was that he had already been on WPA for some time. He was merely transferring from the theater project to the writers project. The next week when I went to the project office for my semi-weekly assignment Wright was the first person I saw when I got off the elevator. He quickly came over and led me to his desk. He was a supervisor and I was a junior writer. My salary was $85 per month while his was $125. He hastened to explain that he was responsible for his mother, his aunt and his younger brother and he was therefore the head of a family though single, he emphasized. While I had only my sister as my responsibility. A year later, I advanced to $94, but then he was getting ready to leave Chicago. Margaret Walker: Gradually a pattern established itself and our relationship on the project. I went downtown twice weekly with my assignments on the Illinois guide book, and afterward I spent most of the day in conversation with Richard Wright. Sometimes I was there at the end of the day, but I never worked daily as he did in the office. I worked at home and went looking for news stories or covered art exhibits and made reports. That is how I came to have a creative assignment after I had been on the project about nine months. Wright, on the contrary, worked with the editorial group and sandwiched his writing in between when there was a lull in office work. Margaret Walker: He had taught himself to type, rather hunt and peck method. I was astounded to watch him type of way with two or three fingers while his eyes concentrated on the keyboard. The first writer's conference I attended was a Midwest writers' conference early in the spring of 1936, shortly after I met Wright. He was speaking and asked me to attend. Afterwards, in our South Side Writer's Group meeting, I was recalling the incident and Frank Marshall Davis asked me if, "Isn't that a communist group?" I was confused and said, "I don't know." Then I looked at right on the grin gleefully and said, "Don't look at me." The whole thing sunk in gradually that he was a communist. Margaret Walker: I honestly didn't know what communism or Marxism meant. I had no courses in sociology, economics nor political science. While I was a student in college I majored in English with the emphasis on the European Renaissance. Except for a few basic and general courses in mathematics, science, psychology, and religion, I concentrated on literature, history and languages. Didn't learn them either. My sister knew more about Hitler and Stalin than I did. I was even more puzzled when [Jack Shayer] tried to give me some advice one afternoon, leading the project. He said, "Margaret, I hope you will get to know all these people on the project without getting involved and getting to be a part of them and all they represent. You are young and you have talent. You can go far. Observe them, learn all you can from them, but don't join." Margaret Walker: Only years later did I begin to understand him. I thought he was seriously talking about the Labor Movement, which was quite exciting at that time. CIO was just being organized and I heard John L. Lewis speak several times. [inaudible] had never wanted Negros in their trade unions. Wright seemed intensely interested in the labor struggle as well as all the problems of race. What he explained to me was a class struggle. One of the first books he handed me to read was John Reed's, Ten Days That Shook the World. I was fascinated. That same summer, Maxim Gorky died and I had never heard his name. I read quickly his Lower Depths and The Mother, then I read the so called Red Archbishop of Canterbury's book, The Soviet Power. Margaret Walker: Having very little money to spend on books, I bought them as I bought my clothes; on layaway. Under the influence and partial to the legend Wright, I put five modern library giant books in layaway; Karl Marx's Das Kapital, Strachey's The Coming Struggle for Power, The complete philosophy of Nietzsche, Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and a novel by Romain Rolland. A whole year later and long after Wright was in New York, the books were mine. One afternoon, Wright quoted from T.S. Eliot's poem, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock; "Let us go there, you and I. When the evening is spread out against the sky, like a patient etherized upon a table." He explained what an image, something exploded in my head and I went home to find my copy of Untermeyer's Anthology of Modern American Poetry and re-read Eliot. Margaret Walker: I remembered how dull he had seen that Northwestern when the teacher was reading a loud and even when I heard Eliot himself reading on a bad recording, "We are the hollow man." William Butler Yeats and James Joyce and Gertrude Stein followed in rapid succession. I re-read and found myself reading for the first time such books as André Gide's Strait is the Gate and The Counterfeiters. I was not going to be caught ignorant about French, Russian, Scandinavian, Spanish, German, America, nor modern English literature. I sat up late reading into the night and reading fast, fast, fast. [inaudible]. I had always loved Guy de Maupassant, Balzac and Anatole France and I read Columba in French in high school. But I struggled to catch up with such works, André Malraux's Man's Fate, Silone's Bread and Wine, Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil, Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter and the works of Selma Lagerlöf. Margaret Walker: I began James Joyce with A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and then I read Ulysses. Wright used James Joyce as an example when he was writing Lawd Today. Being struck by a book that kept all the action limited to one day. But he considered Lawd Today, which I retyped for him as one of his worst books or worst works. I think it was actually his first completed novel. I don't believe he would ever have published it, I do believe it came out after he was dead. I remember that he regarded Melanctha in Gertrude Stein's Three Lives, originally called [Demonstrandum], as the first serious study of a Negro girl by a white American writer. Stephen Crane's Red Badge of Courage I knew, but not Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, which was Wright's favorite. Margaret Walker: I think from the beginning, we differed about Hemingway and Faulkner. Although I had read some of Hemingway, I have not read much of Faulkner and despite Wright's ecstatic feeling about sanctuary, I found it revolting possibly because I was still strongly influenced by moralistic and puritanical background. Both Faulkner and T.S Eliot were interpreted quite differently then from the way they are interpreted. No one applied the critical beliefs of the new critics or the myth of Christian redemption to them at that time. The socialist and communist regarded Eliot and Faulkner as their special property and no respectable established critic was raving about either one. Margaret Walker: Granville Hicks reviewed Faulkner for new masses before 1939 and a long time before then and you need to remember that it is 1939 when the respectable critics began considering Faulkner. Faulkner's symbolism was considered quite boldly, a form of socialist realism and so was Eliot. As the communists and socialists thought these two were in revolt against the mechanistic society of capitalism and boring middle-class life. I never worshiped at the alters of either Hemingway or Faulkner, but I deeply admired both. I read James Farrell's Studs Lonigan at Wright's request, but I could not work up a passion for Clifford Odets' Waiting For Lefty. Margaret Walker: The WPA theater project produced it while Wright was working on with the other project. During the same period, they produced Caldwell's Kneel to the Rising Sun, which Wright liked very much. Caldwell's Tobacco Road was another one of his favorites. A nationally famous play and a [Pulitzer Prize winner like that of Paul Green's In Abraham's Bosom. I liked in Abraham's Bosom better than the others. John Dos Passos, The Big Money and Sandburg's The People, Yes were current favorites that we both loved. Reading Proust was an experience that I associate completely with Richard Wright. I become confused over the exact time of my renewed interest in Thomas Mann. I read Magic Mountain and Buddenbrooks but not Death in Venice at that time. Margaret Walker: I realized when I did read Death in Venice and Joyce's The Dead, that Wright had probably read them both before that time in the late 30s. Wright's favorite D.H. Lawrence was Sons and Lovers rather than Lady Chatterley's Lover. Although I read The Women and Rainbow, I don't remember particularly our discussing the facts. I confess now that my understanding of Sons and Lovers was much better when I was much older best of all after I became the mother of sons. But I am sure all of this must've led to some of the discussions we had them on Freud, Jung and Adler, especially a discussion of Freud's Sleep and Dreams and his theory of psychoanalysis. Margaret Walker: Also, it is very important to remember when we read the later Richard Wright in a book like The Outsider, after his association with Sartre and his interest in existentialism that way back there in the 30s, he was intensely interested in Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and above all, the novelist Dostoevsky. Wright and I different keenly on our tastes and interest in the Russian writers. He believed that Dostoevsky was the greatest novelist who ever lived and The Brothers Karamazov was his greatest novel. I like Dostoevsky, yes, but I never felt quite that extravagantly about him even though I plunged into the book at that period for the first time. I had always adored told story and I still do. Margaret Walker: I feel just as extravagantly about war and peace and Anna Karenina. We did share a great interest in the theater and we read Maxwell Anderson, Eugene O'Neill and Robert Sherwood with equal enthusiasm and joy. Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, and Uncle Vanya struck me more than the short stories, which I did not read seriously until later realizing again, that Wright must have been familiar with Chekhov's short stories. Turgenev and Conrad were two of us on whom we differed. I had read some of both, but now I found a renewed interest. It was amazing how many people I re-read, but I had never felt as sympathetic toward Conrad as Wright. I liked the element of adventure in his sea tales, I recognized his greatness as a writer, but I have never liked Heart of Darkness nor An Outpost of Progress. I realize now that I have deeply resented what I feel is their socks and Conrad's treatment of Africa and the Negro. Margaret Walker: The two works Wright and I discussed most were Lord Jim and The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', which I must confess deeply impressed me. Arrow of Gold I must admit, ignorantly, I have never read. Possibly his best book they tell me. Wright also liked very much Melville's Moby Dick and I am sure his favorite book in the Bible was Job from which he has quoted so often. He explained that he read the Bible for no religious interests whatsoever, but from a humanist and literary standpoint. Although we discussed at great length the books of philosophy by Nietzsche, such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Man and Superman, Of Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, I was never able to understand what was a natural for Wright dialectical materialism. Margaret Walker: My complete background was permeated by I'm influenced from my father and a great deal of reading and teaching of the idealistic philosophy, both free Christian and modern in structured time and theory. We read at that time José Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses. If that were to literary books that were Wrights Bible, they were Henry James, collected prefaces on the Art of the Novel and Joseph Warren Beaches, 20th Century Novel. It must've been James who first interested him in the long short story or the short novel, which he correctly called by its Italian name, The Novella. When they consider, however, that Wright was also familiar with a sharp fiction of Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Melville, D.H Lawrence, Joyce, and Mann, as well as James, one cannot be too certain who first led him in this direction. I know however, that he had been interested in the short story form for a very long time. Margaret Walker: I vaguely remember and realize now how much he loved Edgar Allen Poe's stories that he read when he was very young. [Conan] Doyle and Jack London. I heard the other day somebody said something about Horatio Alger, I never heard that one before. That he talked of having read pulps, detective stories and murder mysteries long before his serious reading began with Minkin while he lived in Memphis. He was tremendously impressed with Minkin and I never read the essay on puritanism in American literature without thinking of Wright. Every time I teach it, it all comes back again. Margaret Walker: Suspended it in time, somewhere between the Writers Project and the South Side Writers Group, possibly in the parlor of the house where I lived, three forms of writing took place in our consciousness, conversation and actions. We sat together and worked on the forms of my poetry, the free verse things, and came up with my long line or strophic form punctuated by a sharp line. I remember particularly the poem, People of Unrest in which Wright and I revise the poem together, at which time we revise the poem together, emphasizing the verbs. This is a lesson from Hemingway; "Stare from your pillow into the sun. See the disk of light in the shadows, watch day growing tall, cry with a loud voice after the sun. Take his yellow arms and wrap them around your life. Be glad to be washed in the sun, be glad to see people of unrest and sorrow. Stare from your pillow into the sun." Margaret Walker: Likewise, we sat together and worked on revisions of almost a man and Lawd Today. I will not discuss his inadequacies at that time. We discussed the difficulties of Negro dialect and Wright decided he would leave off for all apostrophes and corruptions of the usual type. We discussed book materials, and both of us discussed the coincidence of our interest in Negro spirituals and work songs and what Wright called the dozens. Remember how Big Boy Leaves Home begins? I remember both of us were working on a piece using the words of the spiritual down by the riverside. Silt was a forerunner of a long short story down by the riverside. That's also the story of the man who saw the flood. I felt hopeless about my novel manuscript, which became Jubilee and which I had 300 pages written at that time. We both decided I should put it away until another time. Margaret Walker: I was moving away from the kind of poetry I had written at Northwestern and John Laffite, The Baratarian and I was writing more social protest poetry. Meanwhile, Wright was experimenting for the first time with a long short story and was writing Big Boy Leaves Home. I remember how excited I was when I read it for the first time, but not nearly as excited as when it was published in The American Caravan and Wright opened the book on the project for the first time. I did some short character sketches and pros that were full of books, stuff and dialect which ended up two years later as ballads completely rewritten as poetry. But I wanted to work in the novel form, which was always my ambition. Wright travelled a careful road from poetry, to short stories, to novella, to the novel form. Margaret Walker: While I had no real knowledge of the form and theory of prose fiction, as it differs from poetry. My poetry was shaping up, but my fiction was not. Fully a year before I began working on the project, however, I had been engaged in something that I wanted very much to record in fiction. While I was still a senior at Northwestern, I became interested to the point of becoming a volunteer worker in a recreation project in the slum neighborhood where I lived and which was sponsored by the Institute for Juvenile Research directed by Clifford Shaw, author of The Jack-Roller and supervised by young Haydon, the son of a professor Eustace Haydon at the University of Chicago and by Joseph Lohman, who became the sheriff of Los Angeles County, all of which was located on the near North side of Chicago. Margaret Walker: As a volunteer worker I counseled a group of teenage girls not much younger than myself but who were not only potential delinquents but already moving into the life of shoplifting and prostitution. A known pimp in the neighborhood was a straw boss on the recreation project and his brother was nicknamed smugs because he was a smuggler of narcotics. Another young woman in the neighborhood who was having trouble in her marriage and moving slowly into division street prostitution, despite a wonderful talent in music and a good formal education was my main character. Margaret Walker: These were all characters in the novel I called Goose Island and which I was trying to write. When I was asked to submit chapters to my supervisor on the project sometime during the late fall and early winter of 1936, I was pleasantly surprised to learn early in January of 1937, that I would be granted a creative assignment and my novel chapters could now be turned in as my work assignments. The day I was told Richard Wright was absent from the project and I learned he was home ill with a bad cold. When I went home that afternoon, my sister and I decided to buy some oranges and take them to him then I could tell him my good news. Margaret Walker: We found him in the house on Indiana Avenue in bed, in a room that I could not understand because it had one door and no windows. Imagine my shock when I later realized it was a closet. He was very happy to hear about my good luck however, and both of us were embarrassed about the oranges. Despite in this research at the University of Chicago and hall house and in libraries meeting one of the Abbott's sisters and learning how they caught the big rats under the ells in the spring, my work on the novel continued rather poorly until 1939. It was this novel I was trying to write when Wright was working on the long, short stories on novella, which he finished before leaving for New York. Margaret Walker: One cold windy day in Chicago, walking downtown from Erie Street we crossed Wacker Drive, turning our backs to the wind and went into the public library at Washington and Michigan Avenue. I was returning a pile of books and Wright said he felt tempted to teach me how to steal those books but he would resist such corruption. I assured him that I felt no compulsion to steal books. I had a library card when I was seven and I had never been able to read all my father's books at home, but I thought I had read the major English and American classics, the Bible, Greek and Roman mythology, and a lot of saccharin fiction when I discovered after meeting him that I had never read anything at all. Margaret Walker: My sister and I had spent summers reading, Thomas Hardy and Dickens, as well as The Girl of the Limberlost, The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come and Grace Livingston Hill. At school, I had read Dreiser's American Tragedy, but not Jennie Gerhardt and Sister Carrie and those were Wright's favorites. I had read all of Sinclair Lewis available but not all of Sherwood Anderson, such as Windy McPherson and Poor White. Wight left Chicago for New York on May 28th, 1937. It was Friday afternoon and payday on the project. We generally went to the same check cashing place nearby and when we were standing in line for checks, Wright was behind me so he asked me to wait for him. About that time, one of the silly young gushing girls on the project came up to me. As Nelson used to say, "Dames who don't know the day of the week." She said, "Margaret, tell Dick, he's got to kiss us all goodbye. All us girls, goodbye." Margaret Walker: I laughed at her and told her, "Tell him yourself." I wouldn't dare. When I got my check, I looked around and sure enough, all the young white chicks were mobbing him with loving farewells so I left. Outside on the street, I had walked a block when I heard him yelling and hailing me. I turned and waited. I thought I told you to wait for me and he grinned impishly. I said, "Well, you were very busy kissing all the girls goodbye. I am in a hurry and the place to cash out checks will soon close." Margaret Walker: We cashed the checks and got on the aisle. Fortunately, the car was not crowded and we got seats on one of the long benches. He said, "When I go tonight, I will have $40 in my pocket." "You are leaving tonight?" "Yes, I've got a ride. Lucky for me, it's a good thing because I surely can't afford the railroad fare." Well, you'll make it. I hope I can get on the writer's project there I've got to find work right away and I hope I'm not making a mistake going this way." "How can you say such a thing? Aren't you on your way to fame and fortune? You can't be making a mistake." "I knew you would say that. I guess you won't think again about coming to New York too, and soon." "No, I've got to help my sister. I can't leave now." "I think together we could make it big." Margaret Walker: He was not being sentimental and I did not misunderstand him. I said, "I know you will make it big, but I can't leave now. Later, perhaps I will." "You know Margaret, I got a notice to come for permanent work at the post office and I sat in my room and toyed up. Bad as I need money, it was the hardest decision I ever made in my life." "Well, would you like to be a postman all your life?" He looked at me and laughed. He didn't need to answer for he had said more than once, "I want my life to count for something. I don't want to waste it or throw it away; it's got to be worthwhile." His stop came first and suddenly he grabbed both my hands and said, "Goodbye." That was Friday afternoon and Tuesday I received his first letter, very brief, saying he had arrived Saturday and at first felt strange in the big city but in a little while he was riding the subways like an old New Yorker. He thought he had a lead on a job. In any case, he would try Monday. Margaret Walker: Meanwhile, I must write him all the news from Chicago and tell him everything that was going on on the project. Like every letter that followed, it was signed as, "Ever Dick." I was surprised to get that letter. I never really expected that he would write, but I am set. My letters were generally longer and I felt sometimes silly and full of gossip, but he continued to write often, if sometimes quite briefly. Assessing his influence on me in that one short year, I knew that I had gained a new social perspective and analysis of the race problem and a serious dedication to writing as an art. Margaret Walker: In the fall of 1937, he wrote that he was entering the WPA short story contest, sponsored by story magazine and Harper's publishing house. I was supposed to enter Goose Island but I didn't get it ready in time. Wright had written all four novella before going to New York. When he left, he was working on Bright and Morning Star, which was first published in New Masses but it was not ready when he submitted the manuscript for the contest. Big Boy Leaves Home was the only story that had already been published. He had also published the The Ethics of Living Jim Crow in American stuff. Earlier, he had published poetry in international literature and it was in that Russian magazine that both of us first read Sholokhov's And Quiet Flows the Don. Margaret Walker: I don't think Wright ever wanted to write socialist realism. He chased under the dictates of the communist party that members should write fiction that was socialist realism. He was completely interested in naturalistic fiction. If he had any aspirations beyond that, as he indicated to me after Native Son, it was toward his own unique form of symbolism. I don't think it came as a surprise when Wright won the short story contest. Though he wrote once, it seemed a long time since he had submitted that manuscript and he hadn't heard anything. His friends in Chicago and New York were pleased and excited, but not surprised. They took it as a matter of course that his work was the best from all those sent in from WPA projects around the country. Margaret Walker: In November, I published for the first time in Poetry Magazine. Wright wrote it once that he had seen the poem, For My People, which was written in the summer after he left and he liked it very much. Meanwhile, we were getting things together for the New Challenge magazine. He wrote that I should send my manuscript for poem somewhere else besides Gail. There are lots of other places he said and I should give up trying them for after all, they weren't likely to publish me or any other black person. In the spring of 1938, Uncle Tom's Children was published and Wright won the $500 prize. The book got interesting reviews, but all of them did not make us happy. Margaret Walker: He had moved to Lefferts Place and was staying with Jane and Herbert Newton. Then on the wings of success, came the news that he was getting married. I hastened to congratulate him and he denied the whole thing. I learned later that the young black and very bourgeoisie girl he was dating thought Wright was even more successful in a financial way than he was. He had arranged extra space from the Newtons and move his bride in with them but her family wanted her to have the best, and if he couldn't provide that, an apartment and everything that went with it, no soap. Well, it was no soap. Margaret Walker: Regardless of financial status and one year after his arrival in New York, he had achieved national prominence. He remarked in a letter at the end of that year that he had set a goal for five years and one of those years was over. He wanted to write another book right away, a novel, before the first one could be forgotten. Then he wanted to go to Mexico and he wanted to go to Paris. During the first week in June 1938, I received in rapid succession, two air mails special delivery letters. I answered one at once but before he could receive my answer, he wrote again in great excitement. He said, "I have just learned of a case in Chicago that has broken bare and it is exactly like the story I am starting to write. See if you can get the newspaper clippings and send them to me." Margaret Walker: The case was that of a young black boy named Nixon who had been accused of rape and when the police captured him, they forced the confession of five major crimes from him, of which rape was only one if not the...