 Good evening everybody. Welcome to the San Francisco Public Library. We're so pleased to be hosting a program with Dr. Mary Emma Graham today and discussing her new book, The House Where My Soul Lives. We're at the main library and African-American Center. Welcome to everybody who's joining us virtually. We're on the third floor of the main library and I before we get started I just wanted to say and acknowledge that we are on the unceded ancestral homeland homeland of the Ramaytushaloni peoples of the San Francisco Peninsula. As the original peoples of this land the Ramaytushaloni have never ceded, lost, nor forgotten their responsibilities as the caretakers of this place. We recognize that we benefit from living, working, learning on their traditional homeland. As uninvited guests, we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders, and relatives of the Ramaytushaloni community. I'm Shauna Sherman, manager of the African-American Center and we're very honored today to be hosting this program in partnership with Dr. Tiffany Caesar from the Africana Studies Department at San Francisco State University and the Margaret Walker Center in Mississippi. This program is special to me and I think because it shows the legacy of Margaret Walker as I recently wrote a short piece on a black librarian from Mississippi by the name of Virgia Brock Shed and she was a friend of Margaret Walker's and I remember I contacted the Margaret Walker Center to get more information on her and they actually sent me a poem that Margaret Walker had written at her funeral she had passed away early. So to me this is like coming around full circle because I know Dr. Caesar has worked at the Margaret Walker Center as well and Dr. Mary Emma Graham has had a long relationship with her as well. So before we get started just want to thank everybody for being here. Thank the Media Services Department at San Francisco Public Library who you can't see but who always do such great job recording our programs for us. Also Anisa in the back recording the program for the Zoom audience and thank you again to the Africana Studies Department at San Francisco State University and the Margaret Walker Center and I'm gonna pass on the mic to Dr. Caesar but before I do I'm gonna give you a short introduction to her bio. So Dr. Caesar calls herself a black woman's archivist due to her ongoing research on the preservation of transitional black women leaders and engagement with public history. Queen Mothermore Margaret Walker and Phyllis Nantala. Dr. Caesar was a Mellon scholar at the Margaret Walker Center and a faculty fellow for the Institute for Social Justice and Race Relation at Jackson State University. She has participated in cultural heritage preservation initiatives in the United States and South Africa both key scene on gender issues cross cultural youth dialogue and social justice issues. Dr. Caesar is a cultural heritage ambassador for the Nelson Mandela Museum in South Africa and she is also a member of the National Association of Black Studies National Conference of Black Political Scientists, Iberia African-American Historical Society and the National Association of Black Storytellers. I want to bring her up now and thank you all again for being here for our conversation with Dr. Mary I'm a Graham and in conversation with SF poet laureate Tonga Eisen Martin who I forgot to mention earlier sorry about that okay. Thank you so much thank you so much. I am super super excited to be here I was telling someone it is like you know the South meets the West you know but as we hear this wonderful conversation that we have with our two iconic authors we will see that there is a lot of overlap and things where you know things merge together and so again I would like to thank the African-American Center here at the San Francisco Public Library for engaging us I would like to thank the Africana Studies Department at San Francisco State University as well as the Margaret Walker Center at Jackson State University and so I'm just going to take a few moments just to introduce our two esteemed authors. I would like to first start with Dr. Mary I'm a Graham. Dr. Mary I'm a Graham actually met Margaret Walker in college and since they met she has been researching and writing and preserving her work. I would also consider Dr. Mary I'm a Graham a black woman archivist through the way that she has preserved the legacy of Margaret Walker. Also I had the opportunity to work with Mary I'm a Graham Dr. Mary I'm a Graham at the Margaret Walker Center and she was very supportive of my events as it concerns the preservation of the Phyllis Wheatley Poetry Festival and just my ongoing research on Margaret Walker. I am very much so excited that she agreed to participate in this wonderful event as a distinguished professor at the University of Kansas. I would like to also introduce Tongo Eisen Martin who is the San Francisco poet Lauret. He also was an activist in Jackson, Mississippi and was a guest speaker for the Institute for Social Justice and Race Relation. I was very excited when I realized that he was in San Francisco because he had just gave a wonderful conversation and engaged in dialogue with some of the professors at Jackson State University. So that is another connection, right? Jackson State University. He has done many works concerning activism and his work, his poetry is internationally known. So without further ado, I would like to introduce our two wonderful guests, Dr. Mary I'm a Graham and Tongo Eisen Martin. Can we give them a round of applause? I would also like to say that at the end, we have a book from each one of them that we will give to a lucky audience member. So please stay tuned for that. Thank you. Hi, everybody. Thank you for coming for sharing some of your time with us and so great to meet you. It's so great to meet you. I don't know what we're doing tonight. Do you know what we're doing tonight? I don't know. Well, I think we're all going to be in for an interesting evening, I think. But I am really excited to be here. So I want to thank everybody for coming. My colleagues who came over and we did side saddle in the car. So we get here together, a bunch of us in one car. My best critic, my daughter, Malika, and discovering that I know Shana from an earlier iteration of our work together. So it's been a great evening. And Tiffany, thank you so much. And it's good to see you on this end. And this is truly that Southwest Southwest connection. I mean, I'm sure we're going to discover a whole lot more connections. But thank you anyway. And I'm going to do hundreds here, whatever that is. I'm more than nervous because this is like having to do right by two great minds, you know. But but I wanted to start just asking you, you know, how in in in total in aggregate, but also specifically as biographer, how was your journey with with Margaret Walker? That's a good question. I'd say there were multiple journeys. The book had its own journey. Some of you know the story. The book took 20 years. And Walker herself was fond of saying, you know, that all of her books took a long time. And so I guess I was repeating some of her history in this book taking a long time. But that journey at some point became not just a labor of love, but a necessity to tell as much of the story as truthfully and as completely as possible. Because there was so much unsaid. There was so much so many interpretations that needed to be corrected that I felt I did make to take the time to do it. And that if I didn't do it, I would have somebody haunting me. And we all know who I'm talking about. So but that that was a 20 year journey. It was a journey. I promised Walker I would do it. She couldn't do her autobiography. She tried. And there were three versions of it. So it meant that I had to finish the job. But you can't finish a job until you start a job. And so the starting was another journey. That is Tiffany said that I met her years and years ago. She was in part responsible for my coming to Mississippi. My family and I and two children at the time and two more in Mississippi, because you got big families in Mississippi, you know, so you got to keep up with the rest of the folks in Mississippi. And I am so so I got to spend a lot of time with her. So that journey was with her, not just with the book, but learning about a woman who was incredible, complicated, committed to the work that she was doing, defiant and not at all willing to give in to anything she did not believe in. So spending time with her was a journey of learning who this person was and watching her operate and saying, oh my God, I don't think I could do that because she would put her mind to doing something and she would do it. I mean, she would do stuff that we just can't. We don't know how she did it. The Phillies Wheatley Festival, how she could do that in 1973 and, you know, hold a big conference in Mississippi of all places where people were people were afraid to come to Mississippi in the 80s and 90s. She was talking about the 70s and bringing people come on down y'all and people came because she called them. So that was that journey. And I think the third journey was mine in terms of what does it mean for me to take charge of somebody else's life and scary. Do, am I going to get stuff wrong? Yeah. I'll do the best I can. So I think some of that 20 years was about fear of I can't let it go yet because it's not quite right. I can't let it go because I still don't understand some things that I want to talk about. So those were the three journeys. They're probably more journeys, but I'd say those were the three main journeys, a sense of responsibility that you got to finish it in knowing this person well up close and personal. And then the book itself just actually writing a book. I mean, you're a writer, so you know what that's like, you know, the words might be in your head. They may not come out the way you want them to. And you have to be your own critic, but you have to also accept what it is you think you're doing and commit to doing it. So long answer to a question that we will make even longer because it's such a kind of a singular guardianship. What did you, I guess, what did you find most easy or seamless? What was difficult? And did those things change over time? Did you get used to certain kind of almost aspects of psychic connection or how did these things play out? Oh, okay, you're gonna be hard on me here. Okay, the easiest thing, as Tiffany knows, is that Walker told her own story. She was an inveterate writer. She kept journals from the time she was 12 years old. She wrote everything, every thought. I mean, this is a woman who wrote drafts of letters in her journals before the letter was written formally or typed and mailed. So she remembered everything. She wrote recipes down. She wrote every, you know, she blessed people out in her journals before she blessed them out in person and she did a lot of that. So she wrote everything down. So it was like, this is the perfect situation anybody could have. People left their own tomes of thoughts and ideas and writing unpublished work. She just left. She left a huge collection, of course, which forms the Margaret Walker Center's primary collection at Jackson State University. And by the way, it is the largest collection of a black writer that we have. It is the largest collection. And she took great care to preserve it. She was concerned that we lose too much history. And so, and I don't think this was vanity. I think it was giving us a model. We can do this. All of our stuff does not have to be at Yale or the Bionic. It doesn't, I mean, we can keep our own history and it will start. I will show you how. So, so in that sense, it was easy because I had everything before me. And my youngest son is down here, but he can tell you stories of going to Mississippi in the heat of the summer when I was reading in the archives, and he had to play in the hot sun. You know, Mississippi, while I was reading all day, he does not like sun that much. But I took him with me while I was spending those summers going through. And I had to physically, this is way before COVID. I had to go into that library. It was not digitized and go through every single journal and take notes and photocopy where I could. So that original approach was used. They ultimately began to digitize some things, but only selected things. So I could not be selected. So that was the easy part, in a sense. Um, the hardest part, could I believe everything she said? I mean, a journal is your best friend. Nobody's looking over it. I mean, I think she understood. No, let me say this differently. I think she expected somebody to come behind her and read every single word like I did and make comments about it. I think she thought, though, that she had spoken her truth and that all I needed to do was manage it, organize it and give it to the public. Somewhere along the way, I saw ups and downs and changes and I had to become suspicious and a healthy suspicion and cautious about trusting somebody's words because what I did learn about her was that she was extremely intentional. So she's writing everything down, expecting somebody to come after her and take them seriously. Then I can also imagine that she wrote a certain way in order to have control over that narrative. So I was in a battle with her and with myself over how much of the narrative I want to trust and how much of a narrative I have to be more suspicious of. So the few people, my dear friends who would put up with 700 pages of reading have said to me that it's really thick because I tell the story as I understood it to be, then I comment on the story that I'm telling. So I saw that problem by basically having two voices. Does it work? I don't know. You'll have to tell me. A sneak preview. It does. It works. Yeah, I don't know because I had to be suspicious. I had to say these are some facts. But what's the real deal here? So that was harder. So yeah, so what's easy sometimes can be hard. And everybody would say, oh, you are so lucky because you have all those letters and journals. Yeah, and no. Because it was a lot and a lot and a lot letters. But you can't trust it all. That's super trippy. It's almost like you were a universe's only physicist getting to the bottom of it. What did what what helped you kind of make out shapes for yourself in, you know, in all of this kind of thought that you were sitting in the middle of. So I think ultimately, what happened, I had done an outline early on, you know, chronological fact. Oh, sorry. Thank you. Thank you. That people love you. Love you. I get carried away. I'm so sorry. You were like dancing on the stars up there. I got it. I didn't see it. So I ultimately, I think the outline was there. And it was the easiest one of the easiest things, the chronology of her life. And I decided I wasn't going to read. She made three attempts to do an autobiography. And I said, I'm not going to do that. Not going to read those because it will bias me too much. But I ultimately decided to read them very closely match them against the outline that I had. And what that proved to me is that she had created a different narrative of her life. And therefore I was right to distrust everything that was there. So the outline that I had, and she had outlined to so it was like I'm on a desk. There's her outline, my outline. And then, you know, my notebook, because I went through the journals and took my own notes. So I have two big that notebooks of notes from the journals. And there were about 138 notebooks. 138, maybe 148 maybe notebooks. And I mean spiral bound. You remember the notebooks y'all used to use for school? Front and back side, what 200 or 300 pages, she had 130 or 40 of those. And that was just the baseline. There was a lot of other stuff too. But that was the baseline. So I read all of those because they were three different versions. And I can begin to see some contradictions. So I focused on trying to figure out what those contradictions were. And that I think got me started in earnest understanding a woman whose life was filled with contradictions. And but who made sense of her life in her own way. And therefore I could tell a story about how one lives through the ups and downs, the changes of of experiences, tries to figure out how to make it through the most difficult times, how to come back, regroup and not care about what other people say. But the contradictions became were staring me in the face, basically, when I could look at those through. And of course, there were all the stories about her that people had. I can add this to what was maybe I'll say the most exciting thing that was so many people still living when I started that I could interview family members. People who were, I would say, I'll cut the tape off now. If you don't want me to hear this. And at the time, I was doing those very early tapes. Walker was still living. And when she died, I go, I'll go back to those people and they'd say, Yeah, that was something that I didn't tell you. Yeah. So it's like when she was living, you get one version. When she died, you get other versions and they would and I always interviewed people not one on one, but two or three people at a time. So they could argue with each other. No, she didn't say that. Yes, she did. You remember when so and so happened. So I got those conversational tapes and these were much older people, all of whom are dead now who could talk about experiences. And this is North Carolina, but she spent the early years of her married life. It was friends in Mississippi. There were people in a professional life. Again, many of whom have died. But I was able to talk to those people in concert with other people. And I could hear even more contradictions, because people were interpreting her differently in those like what she really meant was and I'm just listening. But they would try to tell me what they thought she meant. And then I could try to extract from that what I thought the conversation was about. So but it was really discovering the contradictions, letting her show me those contradictions so that I felt comfortable saying, Yeah, there's a story here with many layers, multi plotted story. And I got to do my best to unravel it so that people see a whole person not an easy person to get along with not a person who is evenly yoked, a person who has highs and lows, possibly some mental health issues underlying a long life. Some diagnosed some not but an woman who ultimately liked to be in control and who could say if she said she was going to do something, she did it. It didn't matter who it hurt. Who it influenced. It didn't matter what other people encouraged her not to do. If she set out to do it, she did it come hell or high water. And in many cases, we are so glad she did. In other cases, it led to her. What's that word? Ruination. Ruination. That's a good old Southern word. Ruination. I mean, it did do her in some of the things she did did her in because she wouldn't listen to what anybody said. I'm going to do this because I believe it's right. And I'm Margaret Walker. And Margaret Walker does what Margaret Walker says. Always did. But there were some beautiful moments in that sort of evolution. And I will say speaking as a black woman, one of the things that I really liked watching is the evolution of her marriage from a very difficult, really difficult situation to a loving, caring, nurturing relationship that she had for 50 years. And the support that she got, the mutual support she got from her husband and then finishing a book while the time was not on her side and he is not letting himself go until she finished the book. He was dying of cancer. He I'm giving away on the plot here. Dying of cancer, sat beside him, kept writing and he did not die until she had penned the last word on the book. So that was something just really beautiful and magical about that because I knew the troubled marriage that it had been. But it came through the hills and the valleys. And that was, so those were, those moments were beautiful moments that kept me like, this is a damn good story. You know, it's a biography, but it's a learning experience, a teaching experience. It's for all of us to look to take it hard. But anyway, so my answers are too long. Long but necessary. You know, one of the, there's one of the things that kind of really you kind of see this thread running through a lot of the greats is this dance with their spiritual life. And it with Margaret Walker plays out in, you know, most of the thread that could be a book in itself. Can you speak to how you, you know, how you think her spirit, spiritual life both cooperated with her gift, contradicted her gift and everything in between. That's a really good question. And I'm not sure that I, I got it fully, you know, clarified because she was deeply spiritual. She was deeply religious, Christian, Sunday school teacher, the whole nine yards. She taught the Bible as literature at Jackson State. And it was a state university. She insisted on teaching the class other people were another of those cases where she refused to listen to what she was told. She said, everybody needs to know the Bible, but I'll teach you this literature and that way you don't have to report it to the state that I'm teaching religion in the schools. So this combination of the spirituality and the Christianity and the politics, she studied Marxism. She wasn't a vowed Marxist. She had deep and it wasn't that it was just a popular fad doing a certain part of her life because she regrouped with Marxist analysis all the time. She was giving an analysis that everything and how those things fit together, never quite, you know, melt. It's like, how can you be all those things? We're all complex people, right? How can you be all those things? But the spirituality was profound because it wasn't a crutch. Many people think that religion can be a crutch. It was her need, I think, to explore. What was deeply human in all of us. And I think she found that through her expression of spirituality and her search for different spiritual modalities. She did the prayer clause and the prayer clause calls where people would call for advice. She would do things like that. She was, she believes in the stars, serious astrological leanings. She had lots of friends and she would go all the way to Texas to visit friends and read the charts. Some weird kind of stuff, you know, you think, why is this woman doing that? But her spiritual life was just broad. But then there was this deep Christian faith. The daughter of a minister. And she would chastise herself. She did something that was un-Christian. But she could also justify stuff she did as it was the right thing to do. Even if other people say, no, you don't want to do that. You don't want to do that. Nope. She had talked to God about it. The values were there. She needed to do it. So I think that that probably the combination of the traditional, traditional Christian religion, which is not unusual for that generation and the daughter of a minister and the daughter of a music teacher. Religious music, classical music, black classical music. But all these other ways in which she entered that spiritual world seemed to be necessary to keep her together as one whole person. I mean, I don't think she could do it without either of them. And there was always something to do. I mean, she read world religions. She studied world religions. She could write about them eloquently. Going back way back in time. The first religion of whatever people existed on the world, indigenous faith. So she was very interested. Part of that I think was intellectual curiosity. So the faith is one thing, the knowledge of religion is something else that she wanted to know about those things because she wanted to understand people better. But I do think it was a foundation for everything she did. And how do you, like, do you think it also played out as far, like, do you think she saw writing as part of her spiritual task or even subconsciously was that part of the kind of, like, the power of her creativity or a power within her creativity? I think I'd say it evolved. It started, writing started because she couldn't keep her mouth shut. And that part of the story is true. She was one of those children who would not believe in children should be seen and not heard. That part of the book resonated with me. I was like, man, that was me. I just flashed back to every time I talked back to random adults. Talking back was her forte. And that is something that all of her sister siblings agreed upon. I didn't get a chance to meet with her siblings. And they always said she just wouldn't shut up. Dad and mom were trying to, she would not shut up. She's going to talk back until it, if it killed her. And so her father's, a very gentle man, said to her, you need to write it down. Just don't say it out loud. Write it down. And that was the beginning of her, what you used to call it, daybook. Anybody who knows about back in the day, the daybooks, you write it down. 19th century people had daybooks. But if you know something about history, this was also to keep women quiet. Girls teach them discipline. You don't want to interrupt in conversation where you don't belong. So she was given a daybook when she was early and said, just write it. And she filled up every page. So I think, so writing at that point was supposed to be sort of forced on her. Keep your mouth shut. Here, just write it out. Talk it out. I think ultimately she enjoyed that activity so much. And she was a, you know, started reading at three or four, went to school early, loved that. I think she enjoyed the ability to be able to communicate through language. And she started reading poetry, always British poetry, because that's what they were teaching at the time. She was imitating and trying to write poetry like the romantics. It was horrible poetry. So I think those stages, and then somehow the idea of being a poet, you know, we're all, you know, we grew up thinking, I want to be this. And somehow the idea of a poet struck her as being really nice, really fanciful. The family was, it was a teled family. Sister was musically gifted. So was her brother, but he liked jazz and it was not allowed in the household. And so he didn't start doing it until the parents died. And he was profound. I mean, he's New Orleans musician, and New Orleans has its famous musicians as we know. So the sister was a musician. Walker couldn't play very well. She took piano lessons violin. She wasn't very good, but so hers, I would be a poet. I'm going to be a writer because somebody else can do this, but I can do this. So she imposed that on herself. And her parents, she had progressive parents who didn't say what you had to do. They were going to help you develop to become that person, whatever it was. But a father did say, don't, poets don't make no money. They don't make no money. I mean, do poets not make money today? No, no we don't. Poets don't make money. If you're going to be a poet, you got to have another job. This is a very old quote. So it was, okay, I got to have a day job because I can't make a living as a poet. But she was defiant. I'm going to do this or die. I'm not having a day job yet. I had a day job, but I'm going to write because that's what I want to do. That's what I love. That makes me whole. But I think setting this idea of becoming a poet, and she of course met Langston Hughes, who gave her the example of yes, now he didn't make a lot of money either, but she liked the idea that he was a poet and everybody loved him. And she liked the idea that she could do that too. So the different stages I think in what writing meant for her, but ultimately it was the choice of a career. It wasn't her profession. She was an educator, a teacher by profession. But I think in terms of what she saw as her career, her objective, fulfilling what it is that she was gifted with, it was the writer part of her. But she had to make it work. She had to make it work because of the times in which she lived. And she had to make it work because of the times in which she lived. And the inability to again be a black woman poet in this country. Young too. I mean you can take it away with that, right? Oh yeah. It'd be a sad song. Yeah. But she's such a... I don't know, I was really kind of just like start to finish just blown away by her, by a lot of her triumph. You know, speaking, kind of like speaking of Langston Hughes and kind of her being tapped so young or identified so young. And I think in terms of what she saw as her career, she had to make it work for her. And I think that's what I think she identified so young. She's one of us type of thing. You know, it's almost like the human journey has its adventures in these renaissance, right? And in which she is an adventurer, right? So kind of like really surfing on top of this tidal wave is really interesting. There's so much great history in the book, so much, you know, just beautiful context. I would love to hear your take on the, you know, what are the ingredients of a renaissance or, you know, a pocket of renaissance, you know, especially as, you know, like the kind of the Chicago gangsters took the, you know, took the reins in the in the 30s. What is responsible for a kind of a leap forward or a new kind of a new synthesis of craft and political project, right? That's a good question. I mean, I think there do have to be elements, I think, for what we call a movement or a renaissance. I mean, we've been using that word a lot now, you know, the Harlem renaissance, the Chicago renaissance, the Black women's renaissance. We've been using it a lot. And what I've come to understand is that every story we tell is pretty incomplete. For instance, in thinking about our talk tonight, I was trying to remember what I had read and other people had read and I had edited it on the West Coast poetry movement coming from the 60s and 70s. I mean, we know a whole lot about the Black Arts movement on the East Coast. But what about the West Coast? And we know the Watts Riders Workshop, but that's L.A. What about, you know, the Bay Area? And there are all these different ways in which people explain those movements. One of the versions that I think is probably incorrect, even though it appears in a book that I published, that is the people from the East Coast who split from the people in the East Coast and came out to the West Coast and started their own movement and which means that the people in the West Coast and everything going on in the first place. That's obviously not true. And you could probably tell me more about that. What was happening that created a movement or a renaissance? You got to have a common set of ideas. And I do think it has to have some kind of, I guess if I say ideas, some kind of ideology, you can call it political, but I think it has to be public facing. I mean, many of the movements we know about are internal and they get, you know, built up. I think a lot of movements within African American life and the life of people in this country who have not had much control over their lives, I think those movements always have a public component. They do it with an intent to have an impact that's outward. So I'd say so. You've got the people, you've got these ideas and you've got a lot of people. But you've got to have something that is, that's the glue. I mean, I was, you know, struck by one other thing. I'm going to have to, I don't want to embarrass you. I got this line. I got nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. Y'all know this, right? This is a blurb on someone's dead already. This is a description of his writing, his book. Too tall, okay. Eyes and ears are just innocent bystanders as his semi-automatic ink does a drive-by on the unconscious. This is somebody talking about his poetry. I saw this line, boy, I just jumped up. I mean, it's like reading, I'm looking at this straight up in the bed like, damn, this is real, because I'm reading your stuff and this is it. It's like semi-automatic ink does a drive-by on the unconscious. That's saying, poetry is not just my private art possession. It is what I'm taking and giving back to help us understand where we are at this moment. So for me, I call that the public-facing component, the public space that we put, we make art serve and it doesn't diminish it in any way. We've been told art cannot be political, you know, all that kind of stuff. But we're saying it is more to it than just that. So I think those movements that we have had seen that have most power have always had something about them that took it away from the words come from you. The language is what you create, but it's in touch with that other reality that everybody can understand because you're reading the words that other people may not be able to create, but you're giving voice to what other people are thinking and experiencing. And that, for me, is how movements emerge because many people are thinking that way as well. So movement is not one person. We make a mistake of thinking one person or Martin Luther King started this. We make a mistake and I'm not talking about Dr. King, y'all. I'm just saying that people come together to organize around a set of ideas and when you put words to some art form or some any expressive form, dance, photography, art, music, when you put any expression out there, it's gonna take from lived experience, human experience, because you have the capacity to understand it in ways that other people may not. And if you don't do that, if you don't use that gift, I think that's a kind of betrayal. I'm sorry, I didn't want to put you on the spot. Every time I look at this line, I thought, wow, this is why he is a San Francisco poet, Laurier. That's why he is a San Francisco. People know you can't deny his ability to take language to places where you know how to make it go. Like Martin Luther King. Yes, ma'am. You know, how almost either you can see left up here on this one. I'm supposed to be your co-pilot, but I also want to be security up here and run up on various people on this floor without digress. I have almost either answered these two questions. One, do you have further kind of advice for those who would, you know, make their craft part of the historical, this historical task or contribution to liberation or if you could almost speak to almost a plot twist in these times and that the kind of like almost say where so much individualism is public and is this kind of, is this a grasp at public you know, pronouncement, you know. How should this generation play it? Yeah, I think, yeah, we have, individualism has taken over and it takes so many different forms. I mean, we use social media because we all have access to it and it makes it look like it's collective. But it really is somebody's take and other people agreeing with that particular take and people falling in line around a particular view or something. So how to explain how to shift? I mean, we keep saying we're having movements. People call them, but movies last a hot second. It seems like they're over and done with quickly, you know, before they have an and they can have an impact but the quality of the movement doesn't seem to allow it to sustain itself. So another one has to come right behind it and replace it. I still think, and this may be real old fashioned for me, that if younger writers want to make change, want to see something, I think there does have to be a healthy publishing activity. I think you have to give voice to those ideas in forms of expression. I mean, I think that that doesn't change. I think the books we write, the films we make, the music we create, the art we produce, I think the products, I think the products speak to our intent, our mission, our understanding of the world in which we live. I still think that that is required of any generation, any new, and you can't do that alone is easily. I still think that that requires community, some sense of community, because you can think a whole lot of stuff about what you do and think you can do some really good stuff. You know, this is the best thing to ever know. You got folks that can say to you, they will hold you up. We want people to raise you up. We want that. But I do think there has to be some mutual system of values and ideas and giving it and validation, validating what you do. You can't self-validate. It's important to self-validate. But other people have to validate you too. And you know when people are serious about that. You know when people are just talking to talk and don't really mean anything. Making you feel good is not really true. You know that. So I do think that that's an important part of it. I mean, maybe because I'm, you know, basically an academic and, you know, publishing is something I know we do. Maybe I'm too much in that direction. But I think, and when I say publish I mean it's not just the writing. It's any kind of product or expression of something that has, that's, you know, has existence beyond the self. Yeah, this is my book. But that book is out there. Once it's out there it ain't mine no more. You know, once your music is out there it's not yours anymore. I mean legally, yeah, we know about all of that. But it's out there for the world to take in. So I think we need that for the movement to have, to be able to sustain itself. And for young people to recognize there's value in organizing, coming together, a set of ideas that you believe in and one of those ideas to have impact in the world on some person. You know? What do you think about that? No, I agree. I think that you nailed it right there. You've been writing. You've been doing it. Yeah. No, I think it's important, you know, even for you know, even for ideas to evolve, they have to, you know, they have to land on this table and be seen, observed, and played with. You know, it's just kind of like free for all of thought it is not going to cut it. We need these totems and landmarks that happen with the, you know, with the printed word. I have to I have to have to get your take on Mississippi, man. Because I, you know, you know, on fluke or not, you know, coincidence or not. I did live in Jackson for two years and you know, you only you only have to be like a little psychic to feel that like Mississippi is on fire. You know what I mean? At all, at all times, right? And so it's such an interesting, well, I mean, interesting and all kind of as it is type of place in that you have in a sense, you just have this kind of most like this convergence of like almost dual potentials and just paradox where on the one hand you have the sight of some of the most brutal kind of expressions of our oppression and really slow genocide here. On the other side though you have this, you know, you have a great potential city that's, you know, even right now we're probably 85% black, you know, that, right, so you have like, you know, just this, and therefore, you know, I mean, if you, you know, if you politicize, you know, a city that's 85% black, you have a bloodless revolution right there, right? So it's these, these, these interesting in a way past and future just plays out there, this kind of, you know, like almost abnormally high concentration of old souls, you know, it's just a, you know, it's one hell of a protagonist to be happy with. How do you, how does, you know, how does, how does Mississippi kind of, almost is, you know, co-conspirator in all this, how does it feel for you with some of your, you know, what's your analysis of the place and the, and the effect it had, or how things played out with, with Walker's journey? Well, I will say that I learned from Margaret Walker why she loved Mississippi and she did love Mississippi. I mean, this is a woman who you, you'd be mad with her because like, how could you love Mississippi? Be killing people. I mean, I could tell you if I could step on it a little bit, like, there was a time I really didn't think I was going to leave. Right. Because it is such a kind of, like, it's a, it's a, it's a world of brutality, but a kind of, like, very comfortable and, you know, almost, not inviting, but natural. It's, it's really ours in a whole different kind of interesting way or more piece of it is, you know, in a way that you're not going to find in, and I'll get up really. No, no, I hear you. I hear you. You know, I just, I'll put it like this. So you kind of, California really, you know, you got a domestic colony here. It's, you know, we're on the wrong side of the freeway, you know, this type of thing. But in, in, in Mississippi though, there's still, there's still these, this feeling of confinement. There's also almost a, a feeling of liberated territory already in existence if we would just play it better, you know. And so, you know, there was a point where I was really dedicated to movement down there. And, and still, you know, still believing that potential, but, so yeah, she's, she's not lying. It got a gravity all to itself, you know what I mean? But yeah, I'm sorry, you were saying. No, I said, Walker felt that way about Mississippi. She came there and her poetry that she continued to write confirms that she would never leave Mississippi. She referred to it, is her harbor. That is, I put down my roots here. This is my place. These are my people. Now she's, you know, southern Birmingham, New Orleans, went north like the other people do, get education, came back. Never to leave again. I am going to die in this place. And I went to Mississippi with two children, went to work at Ole Miss. And she knew I was coming. She was one of the reasons that made, that a decision was made to go because I knew that this is somebody who made a life there. I could do no less. But I, and so I learned to love it. And I think ultimately I understood why it was a place that had so much of the blood and a lot of that was shed. The tears, the possibility and the genius. All in one place. I mean, some of that stuff has been highly commercialized like the Blues Trail, you know. There were, we know about the musicians who left Mississippi. All those musicians who did not leave Mississippi and were producing music all the time with instruments that they made, the creativity of the people in Mississippi. You could see everything associated with human potential. And I think Walker was such a humanist and I'd say that she gave the real meaning of humanism. She saw potential in everything and she saw it in Mississippi. Now the opportunities weren't always there. The violence repressed it, but she saw that if it can I mean, or worse, if a revolution, if change, if anything that can happen anywhere, it can happen in Mississippi. Seriously. And I believed her. I believed that she felt she was part of that. And if she left Mississippi, she would it would be a failing on her part. She had a lot to give. She knew it and she wanted to give it to Mississippi. Right. Right. And that tradition continues, you know, like the great person we have and common professor Sealy McGinnis, you know, really taught me that, you know, I really open my eyes to that like here, you know, I mean, we have this, I mean, I get out to the migration and everybody and all the kind of like all the moves we made forward, but I think an under emphasized part of our total history are those who stick around and stick around fearlessly and intentionally and continue to contribute to that that project or human journey right there to not go anywhere and and lay just a kind of like a beautifully communal approach to genius. I was really honored to really kind of be tutored there. Because when I got down there, I was just, you know, this is for the revolution, and all this type of thing. And Professor McGinnis would come pick me up. Like, come on, we're going to go right real quick. You know what I mean? Like, we can pass our leaflets later. And he's a good teacher. He's a good teacher. He's my life teacher. Yeah, man, so right on, just everyone should know that. But are there any questions from the good folks joining us? And how do we get there? First of all, thank both of you for this just amazing conversation. First of all, it's just a comment. And thank you for the evocation of Du Bois. Dr. Graham, I don't think anyone could have explained Dr. Du Bois' notion of black art as political propaganda any better than the way that you stated in that response. And that black art is not for lach por lach. It's not for the sake of art. There's a responsibility, social responsibility behind it. So thank you. I'll have to use that whenever I'm teaching again. And remember that. The second, my question now seems to be a little bit rhetorical. I was going to ask how you came to this amazing title. And after hearing the last iterations about Margaret Walker and about her love for Mississippi, and I'm thinking now with Mississippi is the house where her soul lives. And thinking about that, when I first saw the title before, the heart begins to be, there's a little titillation of the heart when you read that title. And the heart being the habitat where the soul actually dwells. So could you talk a little bit about, again, how you came to this amazing title? OK, yeah, a title. OK, it's interesting. And I'll use this moment as an ad. We do have the flyer for the book. And we also have 40% discount wherever those things are somewhere. And people can order it. QR code is on it. You can just get a discount. Every title of the chapter and a lot of the quotes, but especially that quote for the title, are words from Margaret Walker. So I didn't come up with it. She imposed it upon me. I knew the answer. I wasn't going to give it a. She imposed it upon us and it's in the quotes. And I was trying. I mean, I'm not a poet. And I should have been more direct with this. I learned a lot about poetry writing this book. So I wear it every poet I know they will tell you to look like in the morning. Like, well, what does this mean? Because I'm not a poet. But I wanted to get as close to it as I could. But what I did recognize is the gift of language, of the ability to coin a phrase and walk ahead there. So once I figured out how I could take some of her words and give them back to people in these chapters. But the house thing was her, again, the inner spirit that she had and her ability to surround herself with herself. My soul, that's the spirituality we talked about earlier. It's the house is the soul. I mean, she goes on to say more. It's just one little clip I took. But it was clear to me that I had to use her voice as much as I could because she couldn't live along enough to tell that story. And as somebody said to me recently, they don't think she could have told the story, even if she had written four more versions of her autobiography. They wouldn't have been satisfying to her. But it is her title. I hope she likes it. But it came from one of the dreams that she had. And she would interpret those dreams in her journals. She'd have dreams, lots of dreams, and they'd interpret them. And one of those interpretations was, in my house is many, or in my, what is the whole phrase? Well, the paraphrase, there are many mansions. There are many mansions. But in the deep, deep, most important is the house where my soul lives. All these places around me, I'm going many places. I do many things. But the one thing that is permanent, that will sustain me, is what protects my soul. My soul is the most important thing, protecting my soul. And my body is a house. My work is a house. Everything is a house where my soul lives. So it's a metaphor. But it is her, so I can't take credit for it. Wish I could, but I can't. Oh, you are my community. So as you know, as writers, we're always in the community, intellectual communities, creative communities, community of souls. Who were her communities in triumph? And who were the people in her community during the tragedies of her life? Interesting. She had multiple communities. When you live from 1915 to 1998, in the 20th century, and an inveterate talker that she was, gossip, oh my god, was she a gossip, knew everybody, talked about everybody, got into trouble with everybody. She had many different communities. There was this religious community that she was part of, teaching Sunday school with the Methodist Church in Jackson, Mississippi, downtown, where she was funeralized and all of that. So she had many different kinds of communities. She had different artist communities from the different generations, the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, the 70s. And we know, of course, that she convened that 1973 conference, the Phyllis Weaver Festival, which Tiffany is going to be bringing back, reprising, giving us the 50th anniversary of that this year, in November, which is where it was held, in November of 1973. So that community of artists that she was responsible for bringing together Black women poets, this is our time. Y'all come to Mississippi of all places, speak of the Mississippi. Who would go to Mississippi in the 70s? With its legacy, its history. And everybody came. Everybody, except two people came that we know. Tony Morrison and Gwen Brooks, that's a whole other story. But Morrison wasn't really well known at that time. She'd only read one book. So she was a poet, either. So she brought those people together into Mississippi and said, basically, I am laying on, this is what's got to be. You all are the future. You women poets are going to give us a new world. Her poem was, let a new world be born, let a new earth rise. She's saying, you poets are going to give us a new world. I'm going to bring you to Mississippi so y'all can talk together, convene. So she had milk multiple communities. Some of those communities, including the poets, tried to warn her against doing some of the things she did in the dark times. You can't do this kind of thing and not suffer the consequences. Not that they, well, no, I have to say that. Very few people came to her defense from those communities when she made decisions that affected her negatively. They said the things to her in private. And I was able to get some of those private conversations, like the one with Mari Evans, who tried to dissuade her from doing certain kinds of things. And she said, no, I'm going to do it. But what is interesting is that the women that she had convened and brought together, very few of them came to her rescue or to her support in the tough times. She understood that people could not do that. And she was deeply religious. So she had faith on her side. She had truth on her side. And she believed that. But to your point, Sheila, I think she never really recovered from that loss of a supportive community. Now, support is one thing. Public support is another. So there was not a lot of public support. And we know she was also right at the end of the day, the positions that she took. She was proven right. But she didn't take any joy or pleasure in being proven right either. Because she didn't do it just to be right. She did it because she knew that somebody had to stand up and say no. And it might as well be me. It's what she was saying. Nobody else is going to do it. It's wrong. Somebody has to say something about this because the integrity of what we do is at stake. So she had many friends, many communities. But she did not have always the support. And so by the end of her life, she was an unknown or that famous quote that Nikki Giovanni gave me, the most famous person that nobody knows. That was Nikki Giovanni. I can't take credit for that one either. And that's what she said when I asked her, can I write this biography? Because Nikki and Margaret had worked together. They had long conversations together that Paula Giddings had recorded and published in the book. And she said, you have to write the book because Margaret Walker is the most famous person nobody knows. The good stuff made her famous. The bad stuff made her famous. And so she did not have. I think people thought to support her would not be to their advantage because she was on everybody's shit list at that point for a series of things she did back to back, which affected the publications in later in life, very little attention, or critics banned her books, paying her books, even though she felt like she could have a story to tell. So I do think she suffered from that lack of support. But it didn't really matter to her, I think, because when Alex Haley was proven to be a hoax, she could have gloated. She could have said, see y'all, I was writing. She didn't do that. She didn't say. See, y'all, I told y'all, she didn't do it. And why didn't she do it? You don't speak ill of the dead. He was dead. What good could it do to say I was right and the man is dead? But I have a feeling she felt good that she knew in her heart of hearts she was right. And I think I said this to someone that journalists came knocking at her door. What do you have to say, Margaret Walker, about blah, blah, blah, blah, blah? She wouldn't speak to any one close friend that she held. She held close. She wouldn't speak because she knew they would take it out of context. Wise woman. So this is a woman who did lose from her actions, but she took full responsibility for every act that she did and never regretted a thing. Even though people said to her, you shouldn't have done it, you shouldn't have done it, never regret it. Too proud to say she was wrong. And I don't know, I can't judge her. I just explained what happened as a result of what she did. But it definitely did not give her a good turn toward the end of her life. I have so many questions, but I will only ask one. OK, talk about the others later. Yes, yes. You all talked about this possession of spirit as writers, singular guardianship, carrier of stories. And Toni Morrison also talks about that as well when she writes how she feels something takes over her. And so I want to know, how do you manage your spirits and choose which voice to write? That's a lot of your question. That's your question. I'm kind of a path of least resistance, the type of writer I guess, whoever, or you can look at a kind of a voice is synthesized from a certain train of thought and an energy that animates that train of thought. And the little kind of almost patterns of personality that get coughed up or shapes of a psyche that get coughed up. If you stay close to the thread of thought and honest with the energy, it actually doesn't matter. You can handle any kind of horror story because it's produced from this just very honest combination of investigation and energy. That in mind, though, I can't really control. So when I sit down, it's just whoever wants to come out to play is where we're going. And then understanding too that almost by the time you pick up the pen, it's too late. So whatever I'm kind of in tune with as a result of everything from kind of like a life practice to almost like the most kind of almost passive aspects of practice to whatever you might be immediately preoccupied with, it's going to make its way onto the page regardless. And so the best kind of meditation is just to really just keep my mind on doing as right as I can by this thought. And then let thesis take care of itself almost on the back end, having a kind of like just a faith that what I can bring to the page or what I can, not in a grandiose way, but what I can kind of bring to the conversation, I'm not going to have to muscle it out because it's the almost like that's the justice to art. Like the homework I've done to be a better person is what's going to get me through the poem, right? And so that's almost what looks depth-defying or what looks heavy is really natural. And it's almost in a way almost like kind of the birthright of your mind to be able to handle any, especially in this society, any scene of genocide and still come out on the other side a kind of representative of truth, right? And not just lost in the, you know, to not be lost in this very vicious sauce, you know? So it's, you know, yeah, it really, or in conclusion, a groovy little anecdote, man. No, I'm sure somebody is watching right now. It's like he's about to say the Coltrane thing. I am going to say the, where's the camera? Which camera am I? Coltrane again. So a horn player asks Coltrane, how do I become a better horn player? Coltrane said become a better person, right? And he's not being comedic, right? It really is just kind of how you cultivate yourself, expands what you can do on an instrument, and it's the same rules apply in this poetry thing. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the answer from a gifted writer. I am very clear that I am a professionally trained, not gifted writer. We need both of these folks in the world, but I love to hear and talk to and read talent such as this. I think some people have both. You become a better person, you go workshops, you do, but there is something called talent and gift that he has and that people have. I think that you asked me in the beginning why it took me 20 years because the professional training that I had teaches me to write and rewrite and edit, get other people to read and revise, then I revise their revision. So that's my professional training. And to teach me the patience to do that. If you don't have the patience to do it, you'll never be either kind of writer. But you're waiting for that voice to come. It's there. You can amend it in ways you want to, but there is something inside that's ready to come out. And when it's ready, it will come out. I can sit there and tear up 50 pages and nothing comes out. So two weeks, I can't do anything. So I have to find other. But I do know that professional training does help. And I'd see myself on that side, and I've done it long enough so that it does become intuitive at a certain point. So that's as close as I come to being gifted. It's intuitive because I've done it as long as I could. And I know how to self-correct and redirect. Well, thank you. Let's give a big round of applause to our speakers, to Dr. Mary. I'm just going to talk to Dr. Mary Emma Graham and our SF poet, Lori, at Tonga Isen Martin for this wonderful conversation. And thank you again for writing this book so that we could all learn more about the most famous writer that maybe nobody knows about. So thank you again to our online audience and everybody in the audience. Let's give a big round of applause to our first conversation.