Margaret Walker’s lost book surfaces
For nearly 90 years, a groundbreaking, unpublished novel by the legendary Black Renaissance author lay quietly in the archives.
Margaret Walker is perhaps best known for the only novel she ever published. Anniversary. But buried in the archives of the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University lies a little-known novel that Walker left unfinished and unknown to the world.
For the past seven years, Seretha Williams, a Margaret Walker scholar and professor at Augusta University in Georgia, has been quietly combing through the archives to Goose Island into the public consciousness nearly 90 years after Walker wrote it. The novel, the first book of its genre when Walker wrote it in the 1930s, is getting a second chance with a tentative publication date of January 2025 from the University Press of Mississippi.
Walker, born in Birmingham and raised in New Orleans, was a poet and author. On July 7 of this year she would have turned 109 years old. Under the guidance of WEB Dubois and Langston Hughes and herself a mentor to writers such as James Baldwin and Alice Walker, Margaret Walker made a name for herself as part of the Chicago literary movement of the Black Renaissance. In 1937 she wrote a poem entitled “For My People” for her master’s thesis at the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and was the first black woman to receive the Younger Poets Award from Yale University.
Walker moved to Jackson in 1949, where she taught at JSU for 30 years and founded the Institute for the Study of Black History, Life and Culture, now known as the Margaret Walker Center. During her tenure at JSU, she wrote anniversary. Scholars credit the book with inventing the genre of the neo-slave narrative, which also includes works such as Toni Morrison’s beloved.
It is no coincidence that Williams has been interested in Walker since her early college days.
“You might think this is fate,” Williams said.
Not only does Williams study Walker, she is also related to her by marriage. Walker’s youngest daughter married William’s uncle. When Williams was 10 years old, her uncle introduced her to Walker.
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Although she didn’t think much of her first encounter with the writer at the time, Williams came across Walker’s poem “For My People” in college at Northwestern University and immediately recognized the face on the back of the book. Williams was instantly intrigued.
“I see my own professional history in hers,” she said. “Our paths have crossed in many ways that I could never have foreseen.”
During his research on Walker, Williams came across several mentions of Goose Island and decided to visit JSU to look at the manuscript. When she proposed the idea of editing and publishing the novel, the Margaret Walker Center gave her permission to work on it.
“From the beginning, we were excited to work with her to bring the project out and publish it,” said Robert Luckett, director of the Margaret Walker Center.
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That was no easy task. The manuscript, Williams said, is in rough shape, with multiple versions, missing chapters, changed character names and unfinished sections. According to Alina Boyte, a prospective law professor at the University of Hawai’i’s William S. Richardson School of Law, Williams can make any changes she feels are necessary to make the text more understandable.
“Legally, there is nothing to stop the publisher from having free rein in the use of the book – unless he/she adapts the work and creates a ‘derivative’ work,” Boyte said in a statement.
Williams, however, plans to be very conservative in his editing, opting for footnotes so as not to detract from Walker’s words and annotations to clarify the context of the various sections and provide commentary on historical significance.
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But the complications do not end with the text itself.
“I’m trying to figure out what responsibility I have to her and her legacy and what responsibility I have to her family,” Williams said.
Walker said she never wanted Goose Island Her youngest daughter and Williams’ aunt have echoed this point in conversations with Williams about the novel and explained why.
While working at the Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago and volunteering with at-risk women, Walker wrote Goose Island, which describes the life of a young black woman living on Chicago’s Northside during the Great Depression. During this time she met writer Richard Wright and helped him write his literary classic Native son.
“She allowed him to read them Goose Island manuscript, and he read it, and it seems like the next thing she knew, he published Only Begotten Son”, said Angela Stewart, archivist of the Margaret Walker Center. “For her, she saw much of what she had recorded in Goose Island in Only begotten son.”
Worried that people might think she had plagiarized Wright, Walker put the manuscript aside, never to be touched again.
“I try to be very respectful in this project and understand that she did not want this text to be released to the world,” Williams said.
But the literary and historical significance of the text seems to cry out for publication.
“It’s important that it’s accessible to scholars because it really helps you understand Margaret Walker as a writer and the breadth of her work,” said Margaret Walker scholar Kathi King.Goose Island is a literary premiere. It is the first novel in the genre of proletarian realism with a black protagonist.”
So far, the first novel of this genre would be Anne Petry’s The street, published in 1947, about 10 years after Goose Island.
Maryemma Graham, author of the Margaret Walker biography The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker and professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, said Goose Island invented the short story cycle.
“She was ahead of her time,” Graham said. “The historical significance and the literary value are both more important than the value of the work at the time she would have published it.”
Goose Island is a crucial part of Walker’s backstory, Graham added, and part of the argument for her rediscovery and importance in the American literary tradition.
“If we don’t connect her with the early part of her career, she will continue to be an unknown,” Graham said. “Give Walker the responsibility for establishing this tradition. What we couldn’t do in her lifetime, we can do in hindsight.”
It is difficult to say what would have happened if Walker had published the novel, but King and Williams both said it would be published along with Wright’s Native son.
“I think these novels might have been the beginning of a black version of proletarian realism, or perhaps you could call it black naturalism,” King added.
For Walker himself, King said, the publication could have been life-changing. If Goose Island Had she completed her studies successfully, Walker could have made a living from writing instead of focusing on a career as a teacher.
Margaret Walker’s granddaughter Gwendolyn Williams says she is delighted with the publication of Goose Island and that her grandmother receives greater recognition.
“We really want the world to know more about her involvement in black history and American literature,” she added.
When Goose Island When Mars hits the world next year, scientists hope Margaret Walker will be there.
“Margaret Walker is a really important literary figure. She is under-researched and not as well understood as some other literary figures,” said Seretha Williams. “Scholars like me are trying to bring Margaret Walker out of the fringes.”
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