Words of Fire

by Beverly Guy-Sheftall

  Margaret Walker Alexander (1915–)

  Margaret Walker Alexander, poet, novelist, and teacher, is professor emerita, Jackson State University, where she taught for nearly forty years. She also directed their Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People, beginning in 1986, and hosted the first national conference on black women writers. The daughter of educators, Walker grew up on a college campus surrounded by books—the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Her publications include her first collection of poetry, the award-winning For My People (1942); Jubilee (1966), a historical novel inspired by the story of her enslaved great-grandmother, Vyry; Prophets for a New Day (1970); Richard Wright: Daemonic Genius; and How I Wrote Jubilee (1972), which includes an autobiographical essay on the sexism that black women, including family members, experience within the academy. This painful account of her own struggles as an academic underscores the importance of gender analyses of higher education, which have been sorely lacking in the literature on historically black colleges. In an essay, “On Being Female, Black and Free,” included in The Writer and Her Work, edited by Janet Steinburg, Walker reveals that she didn’t notice sexism growing up in the South because of the blatant nature of racism, but after she returned to graduate school for the doctorate, she began to notice discrimination against women. She concludes: “As a woman, I have come through the fires of hell because I am a black woman, because I am poor, because I live in America, and because I am determined to be both a creative artist and maintain my inner integrity and my instinctive need to be free.”

  BLACK WOMEN IN ACADEMIA

  The first woman in my family to experience discrimination in academia was my mother. She was the first woman in her family to get a college degree and to teach school. Her father and uncle taught school, but her mother did not get an education. My mother was the youngest of seven children, and her older sisters, like her mother, had done washing and ironing and cooking for white folks. They wanted my mother, a talented musician, to have an opportunity to get an education to be a lady. So they sent her from Pensacola, Florida, to Washington, D.C., to boarding school. Although she received a scholarship to Howard University for her college training, she did not accept it. She was homesick for Florida. After three years scrubbing floors to help pay for her schooling, she wanted nothing so much as to go home.

  Completing high school, she returned to Pensacola, where she met my father and became engaged to be married. That next school term she taught country school in Greenville, Alabama, making only a few dollars a month. The first year she lived with her grandmother, and the next September she married my father and went to Birmingham, Alabama, to live.

  Six weeks after I was born she was asked to teach music in the small Methodist church school, Central Alabama Institute, which was located close to the church my father pastored in Mason City. After a brief year at Central, my father was moved to a church in Marion, Alabama. In the middle of the year, my mother received a letter asking her to return to Central Alabama Institute. She wrote she would very much like that, but she had to stay with her husband, and added that she could only accept the work if they offered my father a job as well. They hired my father and thus began twenty years of teaching in church schools for my mother and father. In all that time my mother’s salary never was as much as a hundred dollars a month.

  My mother finished college in New Orleans by going to school at night for four years while working in the day. Obviously this would not have been possible had not my grandmother lived with us and done all the cooking, washing, ironing, and housecleaning. When my father received his master’s degree at Northwestern, after going six summers, my mother was offered a scholarship to complete her graduate work in music, but could not accept because of her children and family. I was a teenager, and she said it was the wrong time for her to leave me as well as my sisters and brother. Her teaching job grew so impossible that she suddenly quit while I was in the middle of college. The day I graduated from college, my father also ended his teaching career and went back to the ministry as a pastor. My mother said she worked around the clock teaching private pupils, music classes, conducting the singing, playing the organ, conducting the orchestra, arranging music, and traveling with the singing male group, all for a pittance plus harassment. She had no rank or tenure, and she was reduced to receiving a few dollars (about thirty-five) in a small bank envelope. This was during the Depression. Soon afterward she began working on the WPA, where she made more than she had teaching.

  I also graduated to the WPA, but unlike my mother, I had gone uninterrupted through Northwestern, getting my degree in English when I was nineteen. After three years I went to graduate school in order to get a master’s degree and teach. Getting my master’s in one school year nearly killed me. I was on NYA (National Youth Association, a governmentsupported agency) and had so little money I ate lunch only once a week when a friend bought it. When I went home in August, my father lifted me from the train and I was in a state of collapse. For eighteen months I was unable to work.

  Meanwhile, one of my sisters had graduated from music college and had taken a job teaching music at a small school in Mississippi. Her salary was forty dollars a month, and like my mother, she worked seven days a week. This included playing for vespers and church on Sunday and leading the choir practices. She said the only time she had for herself was at night from close to midnight until dawn. After teaching two years in Mississippi, she went to Knoxville, Tennessee, for a larger salary but the same backbreaking schedule. Then she taught at Tuskegee; after two years she went back to Chicago to get her master’s degree, then moved to Paducah, Kentucky. Throughout these eight years her salary remained less than two hundred dollars per month.

  In disgust she left the South, saying she would never teach in a black college again, that she could not take the humiliations heaped upon her by the college administration while nearly killing herself with work and making so little money. She went to New York City and plunged herself into the concert field, only to discover that the hardest thing in the world for a black woman to do is make a living playing on the classical concert stage. After several grueling years of playing with a symphony orchestra, town hall recitals, on radio and television, and touring the South and Midwest, she gave up and went into the public schools of New York City, where at least the pay was good, although the work was neither stimulating nor rewarding.

  My second younger sister, meanwhile, had graduated from college and was substituting in the public schools of New Orleans. For many years, no woman teacher was allowed to marry, and many women kept their marriage a secret. Until she retired, she taught in the same school where she began teaching during World War II. She, too, went summers to graduate school, taking her master’s degree in child psychology from the University of Chicago. For fifteen years she served on every curriculum committee for primary instruction established by the Board of Education, New Orleans Parish. In the late fifties she took a sabbatical and went to Columbia to study for a year, taking primary supervision and curriculum building. She has suffered a triple discrimination. In addition to being black and female, she was an early victim of polio, and for a long time there was a question about whether she could be appointed to teach. It so happened at that time that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, and we argued if the President of the United States could be president in a wheelchair, surely she could teach. She uses neither a crutch nor a cane and never has been in a wheelchair. Just the same she has endured much with constant reminders that she is handicapped. Some years ago she went back to school and received another master’s degree from Loyola University, with special emphasis on teaching mathematics and science to elementary schoolchildren. She drives her car and is rated as an excellent teacher. And, although she has no wish to be a principal, she has thrice been denied the job of primary supervisor.

  As for myself, my teaching career has been fraught with conflict, insults, humiliations, and disappointm
ents. In every case where I have attempted to make a creative contribution and succeeded, I have immediately been replaced by a man. I began teaching thirty years ago at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina, for the handsome sum of one hundred and thirty dollars a month. I was very happy to get it. I had a master’s degree but no teaching experience. I arrived in Salisbury at two-thirty one cold February morning, and although I was expected, there was no one at the station to meet me. I finally found a taxi to take me to the campus, and banged on the door of the girls’ dormitory for fully a half an hour before anyone opened it. Less than three hours after I went to bed, the matron ordered me out for breakfast at six o‘clock and told me I had an eight o’clock class. My life was arranged for me hour after hour and controlled by a half-dozen people. I was resented in the town and by some faculty and staff people because I was replacing one of their favorite people. (And I didn’t know this person from Adam’s cat.) I had absolutely no social life and spent most of my afternoons and evenings in my room, writing. That summer I had to move out of the dormitory into a private home and then back again to the dormitory in the fall. I won the Yale Award for Younger Poets that summer and began getting job offers from everywhere. I felt strong pressure to stay at Livingstone, but when I went home, my parents had accepted a job for me at West Virginia State College. It paid the grand sum of two hundred dollars a month, and my dear mother felt it was her duty to grab it before somebody else did. Meanwhile at Livingstone, I went to my first College Language Association1 (CLA) meeting at Hampton Institute. As I observed then, men were completely in control of the CLA, and only recently did the organization get a woman president.

  At West Virginia State College I never had a stable living situation. The night I arrived I had no place to go. The dean had leaned out of his bedroom window to tell the driver to take me to so-and-so’s house for the time being. The next day they moved me to another place where I was clearly unwanted. I slept there but had to get up cold mornings and walk through the snow to the dining hall. After Christmas I moved into an apartment I expected to share with another young woman, and found myself in a threesome. That didn’t work, and again my dear mother solved it by arriving and putting all my stuff outdoors. Next I moved in with a crazy woman. Finally the administration let me go where I had been told all year I could not stay, to a dormitory. Five places in one school year. I had had it! Had I been a man, no one would have dared move me around like that.

  When the National Concert and Artists Corporation offered me a contract to lecture and read poetry for the next five years, guaranteeing me three times as much as my nine months salary at West Virginia, I took it. I had suffered constant embarrassments from my immediate supervisor, who declared that it looked as if I were the head of the department instead of an instructor. “All you can hear is Margaret Walker!” she said disapprovingly. I would arrive in my classroom to be told by my students that the head of the department had begged them to leave because I was late. They replied they would wait because they learned more from me in fifteen minutes than they learned from some people in an hour. That did not help my situation. I was hissed at when I arrived at the chairman’s office and was told he was too busy to see me. When I insisted, I was told, “I thought you were a student,” as if that was the way to talk to a dog much less a student. But the real harrowing experience of my life came at Jackson State College. In September 1949, when I began teaching in Jackson, Mississippi, I was married and the mother of three children. My youngest was nine weeks old the day I began. For nine months everything went well and members of the administration kept saying they were honored to have me, until I moved my family and furniture. They saw that my husband was sick and disabled from the war, that I had three children under six years of age, that I was poor and had to work; I was no longer their honored poet, but a defenseless black woman to be harassed.

  That summer the president openly attacked me in a faculty meeting by accusing me of talking about the low standards of education in Mississippi. He told me in so many words that if I didn’t like what went on in Mississippi I could find myself another job. He ranted and raved so, I was close to tears, and a neighbor nudged me and said, “Let’s go home, Mrs. Alexander.” Had I been single, I would have quit that day, but I had three children and a husband, and I had just moved. So I bowed my head and decided to stay on. Perhaps I should have taken another job. That faculty meeting put me on ice for a year. Almost nobody darkened my door except my housekeeper and my family. A year later, I was ordered to produce a literary festival for the seventy-fifth anniversary of the college and was told to write some occasional poetry and write and produce a pageant for the occasion. I said then that if I succeeded I would have to leave here, and if I failed, I would also have to leave. I succeeded through much stress and strain and public embarrassment, and then by the hardest effort, I secured a Ford Fellowship and left. I stayed away for fifteen months, and when I returned to a substantial raise, I also had another child.

  From 1954 until 1960, at Jackson State in Mississippi, my salary remained well under $6,000 each year. Meanwhile I had devised a humanities program to suit the needs of black students in Mississippi. We not only raised the cultural level seventy-five percent, but among other things, we also provided a unit on race in the modern world and the great contributions of black people to the modern world. Trouble over the humanities program nearly drove me out of my mind. I was replaced by a man who openly said he was hired to get rid of me. Words cannot express the hell that man put me through with consent of the administration. Finally the administration decided it had enough evidence against me to fire me from the college, at a time when my husband was recuperating in the hospital from his third operation and could not work any longer at the job he had been doing for seven years. I was called into the president’s office, and in the presence of the dean, I was vilified and castigated and told that if I would just resign, everybody would be happy. Knowing it had already been announced that I was going to be fired, I replied, “Why should I resign a job that I have done well every day for thirteen years and that I like? You fire me!” The president changed the subject. I knew I was entitled not only to tenure but also to an appeal and that my contract said I could not be fired except for moral turpitude and insubordination. I stood up and insisted that he tell me one thing: “Gentlemen, do I understand that I am fired?”

  “Now Mrs. Alexander, you know we have not said anything about firing you.”

  “I just wanted to know.”

  The dean said, “I knew it would end like this. I knew this would be it.”

  I said, “Well, you know, we live till we die, don’t we? Regardless, we live till we die.”

  Then began the death struggle for me to return to graduate school. I contended that I was no longer willing to be classified as the equivalent of the Ph.D. because I was a poet. My salary was not equivalent, and so I was determined to go back and get that degree that everybody worshipped so much and that brought more salary to the holder. My children were growing up and getting ready for college. My husband was disabled, and I absolutely needed the money. I was tired of living on borrowed money from one month to the next.

  I had difficulty getting another appointment with the president. Finally he consented to see me. I told him I felt insecure, and I was worried about my future. I needed more money, and I felt the best way to ensure a raise was to go back to graduate school. He informed me that I wasn’t going to get any more money. I was doing well enough. I had a house and a car, and he was sure I was doing better than I ever had done in my life. Besides, he said, you are too old to go back to school, and you have been so sick you are not even a good risk for a loan. I got into my car and went out to the edge of the town. I got out where nobody could see or hear me, and I screamed at the top of my voice. Then I went back to plan my strategy.

  I borrowed five hundred dollars from the credit union and got another three hundred from the college as salary, plus additional money from my hus
band. I took my two younger children, ages six and eleven, and I went back to the University of Iowa to summer school. There I inquired about my chances of returning for the doctorate degree, of using my Civil War novel for my dissertation, and of getting financial assistance.

  I went back to Jackson State College for another hellish year, but in September 1962, I managed to get away. I put pressure on the administration, and I managed to get half of my salary for two years, while I taught freshman English at Iowa for the other half. I signed a note to borrow my salary for the third year. My mother kept my children. Had she not been living, I could not have gone back to graduate school. (I had two children in college during those three years. One graduated a week before I did.)

  When I returned to Jackson with my degree, I asked not to be involved with humanities. Instead, I tried to formulate a new freshman English program modeled on the Iowa Rhetoric Program for writing themes with a relevant reading list. After a year the college administration did not so much as give me the courtesy of saying they would not require my services in that capacity the next year. They simply replaced me with a man: not a man with superior training, rank, or ability, just a man.

  I turned again to my interest in creative writing, which I had first started at the college, and taught courses in literary criticism, the Bible as literature, and black literature. After another so-so year, I devised a black studies program that was funded under Title III. My years with that program were the happiest of my teaching career at Jackson State College. As I told the late dean, I had worked for over twenty years at Jackson State, and, although it may have been profitable enough to meet my bills for the barest necessities, it had not been pleasant for a single day.