Alexander was interviewed by Jerry W. Ward, Jr., Lawrence Durgin Professor of Literature at Tougaloo College, in 1986.
WARD: Dr. Alexander, I would like to take the road less travelled by, as Frost put it, to talk a little about your life, literature and culture in the Eighties, and the future as you see it. Can we begin with place, the sense of place, the South? You've lived and worked in Mississippi since 1949, and you wrote in the poem "Jackson, Mississippi":
I give you my heart, Southern City
For you are my blood and dust of my flesh,
You are the harbor of my ship of hope, The dead-end street of my life ....
How important is Mississippi as a place in what you choose to write?
ALEXANDER: I think I told a writer quite recently that Mississippi is the epicenter of my life. I was born 250 miles away from here in Birmingham, and after I was ten years old, I lived for the rest of my childhood and early adolescence in New Orleans, 200 miles from here. And I have spent over half my lifetime now in Jackson, Mississippi. Mississippi spells for me all my roots gathered in one place. My great-uncle Jim came to Mississippi at the time of the Compromises and started a school in Greenville in the oldest black Baptist church there. My grandfather and grandmother, the Minna of Jubilee, brought their first child, born in Alabama, to Mississippi; they came to help him in that school. My grandfather taught with his brother-in-law there. But my grandmother didn't like Mississippi, so they soon left and went to Pensacola, Florida, where they spent a large portion of their married life and my grandfather was pastor of two or three Baptist churches there...among the oldest. But Uncle Jim stayed in Greenville until he died, and he's buried there. In the Twenties, my father and mother came to Mississippi to teach in Meridian, and I went to school for the first time in Meridian. Then in the Forties, my sister Mercedes taught at Prentiss. I think she taught there for about two years. That was her first teaching position. And in 1949 I came to Jackson. So, you see, when I say in the poem "You are my blood and dust of my flesh," that is literally true.
WARD: Because of the ancestral history...
ALEXANDER: In Mississippi. But the next two lines are rather pessimist I'm sure. "You are the harbor of my ship of hope"—this is where I put in from the sea. I put down roots here; I came to stay here; I looked at Jackson, Mississippi, like a harbor. After going from place to place and literally tossing on the sea of life, I put in at this harbor. And it has sometimes seemed like a dead-end street, that I'm going no farther. This is my place.
WARD: But it hasn't been a dead-end street, in spite of vicissitudes, for your creativity
ALEXANDER: I have done more in Mississippi than any place else. I came here the author of one book, and I have written six more.
WARD: That's a good record, considering that you worked as a full-time teacher at Jackson State College.
ALEXANDER: And raised a family. When I came to Jackson, my third child was nine weeks old. And my youngest child was born in New York five years after I came to Mississippi...when I was on a fellowship. They tease me and say my first child should be called Rosenwald and my last child should be called Ford. But Mississippi is the birthplace of three of my grandchildren. My two daughters-in-law were both born in Mississippi, honor graduates of Tougaloo College, and their children have been born here.
WARD: Much of what occurs in this state is grist for writing, but it seems rather tragic.
ALEXANDER: It depends upon the imagination of the writer. I received at Christmas time a calendar book of Alice Walker's. Alice has two things to say about Mississippi. When she first came, she said she'd stay awhile because the stories were knee-deep. And she wrote a great deal in Mississippi. And then she decided that she couldn't write any more in Mississippi, and she had to leave. She went to Arizona one summer, and she wrote there, and she came back with the full determination to leave Mississippi permanently. She didn't know how she could write any longer here. So she went to Brooklyn, and she stayed there awhile. But I think it's very interesting that she says before she could write The Color Purple, she had to leave Brooklyn. She went out to San Francisco. She says as soon as she got there, all these voices of these characters came up.
She knew she could write The Color Purple there. I think that's interesting about a sense of place. On the other hand, Alice has a Gothic imagination. She's truly Southern Gothic. There's been nobody more Gothic than Alice. Faulkner had that kind of imagination. Eudora Welty has it. Carson McCullers and Flannery O'Connor had it. And Richard Wright had that Gothic imagination.
WARD: And Erskine Caldwell...
ALEXANDER: Erskine Caldwell, yes. Don't leave out Alice Walker. You can't understand her at all if you don't understand that Southern Gothicism. But I don't have that kind of imagination. I belong to what we call in the South the Sentimental tradition. I sometimes think I could write better if I had the Gothic imagination, but I don't have it.
WARD: It's good for sales; it might not be good for you.
ALEXANDER: It would not be my way of expressing myself at all. But I feel the Sentimental tradition is as much a part of the South as Southern Gothicism. I feel, too, that I can express a different point of view, a different sensibility, and a different imagination. For me, it is a positive, religious, maybe sentimental...but more optimistic, not necessarily Pollyanna, but it is rooted in that other feature of the South, what we call a religious tradition or this business of being in the Bible Belt. Nothing has influenced my life more than the Bible, and religion has a lot of different meanings in the South as it has all over this country. I'm a believer, and for me, faith, family and community are keystones of my life. I don't have that Gothic imagination.
WARD: No. Yours is much more generous, much more open to a full range of human possibilities...
ALEXANDER: I don't think that I have even a great sense of the comic any more than I have of the tragic. Nothing to me is hopeless. Everything has possibilities. I believe in the goodness of the future. No matter how hard things may seem at the moment. . . the political clouds may gather, the racial problems, poverty, even sickness and death. I'm almost a Pollyanna in my belief in life, in love, in the goodness of my fellow man. No matter how horrible he may seem or what terrible crimes he may commit, every person has within him the possibilities of good. God is in everybody. There is a sacred inner self in every man. Whether it's developed, or whether it has its chance or not, it's there. And I believe that so strongly. It crosses color lines, it crosses racial lines, it crosses class lines. It's part of my heritage of the Judeo-Christian belief.
WARD: And though your work the legacy that you give to us?
ALEXANDER: That is part of it. I feel that that expresses the kind of imagination I have, because the key word in my life, I discovered, is vision. I believe in vision, and I'm a visionary. Every part of my life that I've expressed finds some connection with vision. I think that's true in more than the religious sense or the poetic sense. It's also true in terms of history, in terms of what I hope and believe and feel for my family, what I hope and believe and feel for my people as a race. It's vision. My creative world, my inner life, is guided a great deal by that sense of vision.
WARD: So that is what you called, in another context, the "figuration and configurations of concepts, thoughts, and ideas [that] are the keys to the inner thinking of the creative artist."
ALEXANDER: Yes, and I think, too, when I talk about figuration and configurations I begin with that concept, that picture in the mind that is the beginning of an idea. A number of pictures come together, a number of concepts come together to give you a complete thought. And a number of complete thoughts come together to develop an idea. You see the relationship between the word and the sentence and the paragraph. And in poetry, it's the same way, only you are dealing with phrases and words in a different pattern from that of prose.
WARD: When you talk about vision and describe the inner working of the mind, it is a way of addressing the visual imagination which seems to inform the writer's imagination. I know, for example, a number of artists are your friends. I wonder how important has visual art been for you?
ALEXANDER: You know, it's a strange thing. I think always that music has been uppermost in my mind, and in all of my thinking and writing all my life. But I didn't have early instruction in art. It was not until I went to Chicago that I had a chance to see many art exhibitions. I remember being so awe-struck and excited at the Art Institute of Chicago. I saw great paintings and great masterworks of art for the first time. I heard a symphony for the first time when I was seventeen in Chicago, and I heard José Iturbi playing with the Chicago Symphony. The Art Institute and Orchestra Hall were the experiences of my Chicago years. Although I had heard a lot of music in my home, I had never heard a great symphony live. Those pictures at the Art Institute, and the recitals and music at Orchestra Hall, seemed to bring together a lot of the yearnings of my childhood. I felt these things very deeply but had never had the great experiences of art as I had in Chicago. So, I don't know that my images have ever come out of created art. I really think that my visual perceptions began and were shaped by the Southern landscape. I think from a child I have had the feel of the South in my blood. I say it in my poetry—"Warm skies and gulf blue streams are in my blood." The climate of the South seems to me a home for my very heart. In almost everything I have written, I have chosen my images out of the Southern landscape, from nature in the South. I remember the steep hills of red clay where the train plowed through, going from Birmingham to Meridian, or from Meridian back to Birmingham. I have never forgotten how you looked out and saw almost a mountain of red clay. I don't remember seeing that red clay looking exactly that color anywhere else. The red hills of Georgia, yes, a different color red.
WARD: But Alabama red is very special.
ALEXANDER: Alabama red from Birmingham to Meridian, down through those mountains. You come right down through the mountains from Birmingham to Meridian.
WARD: So, that's the earliest image?
ALEXANDER: Yes, I must have been five or six when I saw that. I don't remember too much about the train ride that I took when I was four to Pensacola, Florida. I remember my grandmother's house and her latticed-in back porch and the jardiniere and the hat-rack in the front hall, but I don't remember the landscape. I didn't remember Florida as it is until I went back as an adult.
WARD: When you were doing research for Jubilee?
ALEXANDER: Well, I saw Florida for the first time as an adult. . . yes, in the years before I finished Jubilee.
WARD: This interview reminds me of how rich and revealing con versations can be to people who really want to understand the artist and the artist in relation to other people. Now, A Poetic Equation, your conversations with Nikki Giovanni, is a widely read book. And I know you are interested in doing a dialogue with James Baldwin should fate so grant that...
ALEXANDER: Do you think that's going to happen?
WARD: I don't know, but I was wondering if you had ever considered doing similar conversations with Sonia Sanchez or Amiri Baraka?
ALEXANDER: Well, I've done one with Sonia, and I've had the pleasure of talking a number of times with Baraka. He came down here in 1977 ...I think that was the first time while I was at the Institute for the Study of the Life, History, and Culture of Black People. And then I've been up to New York in his class and at his school. I think the closest I've come was not in a conversation with him but with Michael Simanga for The Black Nation. Baraka obviously sent Simanga to see me.
WARD: But would you like to do a dialogue with Baraka?
ALEXANDER: I think that would be most exciting. Every time I see Baraka, I'm chiding him about something he has not done. So I don't know how he would feel about it.
WARD: He's had many favorable things to say about you in his writings...
ALEXANDER: Oh, he thinks I'm a great writer. He thinks I'm a great poet.
WARD: And it's a genuine sentiment coming from him.
ALEXANDER: I feel that Baraka is himself the embodiment of what we talk about all the time as black genius. We have had a lot of great writers, a lot of profound writers, a lot of. . . shall we say scintillating, brilliant writers. But I really believe Baraka is unique as a black genius in that he has been the leader of what I call Revolutionary Black Drama. He began with that play he got the Obie. For...Dutchman. I think that he is an example of the kinds of changes that have gone on in black literature, especially in poetry. He starts out with the Beatnik generation, with Kerouac and Kauf man and Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. He belongs in that group very definitely in his early poetry. Then he moved away from that to a far more serious note. I think that his great contribution to the black consciousness movement was in drama. And then...have you read his autobiography?
WARD: Yes, I have.
ALEXANDER: The contribution there is in a special vernacular, which is his own speech pattern out of his childhood and adolescence. That's Alice Walker's best contribution to The Color Purple, the language that is her childhood and adolescent language and that we have a feeling constantly is an unconsciousness expressed. This is something coming out of her inner life, and she hears herself talking.
WARD: She either hears herself or she's hearing relatives.
ALEXANDER: Yes, all of them. You can hear them speaking in The Color Purple. You hear Alice, you hear her family, you hear her generation, you hear her mother's, her grandmother's, and her great-grand mother's generation. That's language. I think, despite the fact that some people feel that some of the characters and the idea of family emerge in a very positive fashion ...I don't feel that way about the characters of the family idea, but I feel very strongly about the language.
WARD: And that is what comes in a different genre for Baraka, the autobiography?
ALEXANDER: Yes, in his autobiography...
WARD: And perhaps in that slightly autobiographical novel The System of Dante's Hell.
ALEXANDER: Yes. When I think about Baraka, I see those three very different genres in which he has excelled and given us some splendid things. The early Beatnik poetry, the Revolutionary Black Drama, and the language of that autobiography.
WARD: Indeed, we must have a conversation between you and Baraka. Now, you have a great deal of unfinished work. Your autobiography, which I think is going to be a magnificent contribution to Afro American- literature...
ALEXANDER: I hope so. I wonder if I can live to finish it. I keep feeling it should be the best thing I've ever done. It should be a very good work. I wonder sometimes if the beauty I feel I have experienced in my life can be beautifully expressed there. Somebody criticized me once about Jubilee and said my style was awful, that I didn't sound like a poet. I worried about that for a while, and then I learned afterwards that this was just malicious criticism. It didn't matter too much, because other critics said I was singing a folksong in Jubilee. They heard the rhythms in the work. This book about my life will not be confessional. It won't be purely social and intellectual history. But I do want it to be a song of my life.
WARD: A kind of Whitmanesque song...a celebration?
ALEXANDER: That's exactly what it should be. It should be more than just a celebration of life, but that is big enough if I succeed. I think it should be a song that all men and women can hear singing in their own hearts.
WARD: That will be a great song. There are many other songs to be sung, the short stories for the collection to be called Goose Island and...
ALEXANDER: I always planned to break up that flawed and half-written, not very good novel into a number of short stories, because I had such remarkable characters there. You know, of course, it was a slum story. I say over and over again, though people don't believe me, and it sounds conceited, that Richard Wright got the idea for Native Son from Goose Island. I was writing about social conditions in Chicago and what they could do to a very talented personality. My character was a woman. She was a very talented musician. She married, and her life went down the drain into prostitution. She was a very interesting character, but then there was the pimp who was another very interesting character. And there was the man who was a narcotics dealer and a smuggler. That was another character. There were the shoplifting young girls. This was a life of crime on Division Street. I always wanted to take five or six people and develop them as a part of Goose Island.
WARD: The stories in Goose Island will be very different. When you first created the characters that was Chicago, Depression, 1930s. If you write about those characters now, they come up to the 1980s and will be very different characters.
ALEXANDER: Yes, but they will be more familiar to everybody than they were to me then. That was a very limited world. But it is now a world that we see in all our communities all over the country. That to me is very sad.
WARD: But it has to be dealt with. There are two novels left, Minna and Jim and Mother Broyer?
ALEXANDER: There are four novels left. The sequel to Jubilee is one and Mother Broyer is another. There is a novel of the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. There's a novel that deals with the period of the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, the drug scene and the youth subculture. It really deals with the experiences of one of my children. It follows the autobiography and Minna and Jim, but it's still family story and Southern-based. And then I've been thinking— I'm not going to rush to do this next one—but, of course, out of the awful experience and fiasco of the litigation surrounding Jubilee and Roots, there's another novel about this person who wants to get up and over on top without either the integrity or the talent, and what that's like. There's a mighty interesting story there. How you write a blockbuster if you don't have a blockbuster mind.
WARD: You'll give us an answer, just as John A. Williams gave us another answer about the world of publishing in Click Song. You have finished the poems for This Is My Century. I hope that collection is nearing publication.
ALEXANDER: Yes, you know, I wrote a poem in August, "For Farish Street." I think it's one of the best poems I've ever written. I sent it on to the publishers for the collection. I had three or four additional poems...I'm not sure I sent all of them. I had a tribute for Robert Hayden, a poem for Owen Dodson, and poems for Sarah Webster Fabio and Margaret Danner, two of my dear friends who are now deceased. Those four poems will be added to the collection I've already done. The piece on Farish Street (it may be done in a little brochure soon) I sent to Charles Rowell for the special poetry issue of Callaloo, and I sent one out to Iowa for an edition by poets who've been in the workshop out there. "For Farish Street" is written without the intricate symbolism but in the form T. S. Eliot used in The Waste Land. It has seven parts. The first part is called "The African Village." The second part is "A Patchwork Quilt." The third part is "A Small Black World"; the fourth, "The Crystal Palace"; the fifth, "The House of Prayer"; the sixth, "Black Magic," and the seventh part is "The Labyrinth of Life."
WARD: The number seven is fascinating, numerology...
ALEXANDER: I believe in seven. My autobiography will talk about seven in my life. I was born on the seventh day of the seventh month of the year. My mother was her mother's seventh child, and my father was his mother's seventh child. I am the child of the parents of seven, and my grandmother said, "You are born lucky." Seven is my lucky number.
WARD: Perhaps that explains something about 1937—"For My People"—and what I hope will be a celebration "Fifty Years: For My People" in 1987 in Jackson. But you have such a great amount of work left to do. Have you set any timetable for completing it?
ALEXANDER: I pray a lot. I told my doctor several years ago that I would like to live to finish my work. Some days my health seems very good. Other days I wonder if I can live out the year. You never know. Life is a gift every day. Every morning is a gift. A long time ago I decided to do something that Benjamin Franklin did. He was remarkable in that he was so well organized. He planned every day of his life. I work with one day at a time. I'm grateful when I wake up in the morning and know that I'm here for another day and hope I will live to see that day to the end. I try to do as much as I possibly can every day. I try to do some writing, with the understanding that when the time comes to leave this life I probably will have something unfinished on my desk. But I will have done the best I can and the most I can with what I have. That is my constant belief. I think I'm fairly well-organized, because most of the things I want to do I've organized on paper already. I haven't done too much with that novel about the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. And I have not done anything to organize the Roots fiasco. I did take the poem that I had about it out of This Is My Century. The poem serves as a kind of outline for the novel. It brings up the images and talks about the kind of people who will be in the novel.
WARD: What is the title of that poem?
ALEXANDER: "Ripoff Roots Style."
WARD: Are you planning to collect your essays and speeches?
ALEXANDER: My editor and I put together about twenty-five speeches, essays and articles covering a period of about fifty years, from 1932 to about 1983 or 1984. The best speeches I've given, the best articles, seem not to be in the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties but in the Sixties, Seventies, and Eighties. So, we have five decades of speeches and articles, and we have a publisher, but we haven't finished editing the book. Now, the interviews. . . we're off to a good start. The book I'm most excited about is Myriam Dîaz Diocaretz's Fields Watered with Blood, a collection of critical essays on my work. That is most exciting. At first, I though there weren't many critical pieces, but Myriam gathered maybe a dozen, and then is adding unpublished work. I was so proud of the piece Ron Baxter Miller has done on Biblical typology in my work and Southern history. Paula Giddings had long since done that article entitled "A Shoulder Hunched Against a Sharp Concern." I like that very much. And the two pieces in Mari Evans's Black Women Writers by Eleanor Traylor and Eugenia Collier. Those are two very fine pieces. Then Phyllis Klotman has an article. There's Dilla Buckner's work on folklore and James Spears's article on folk elements in Jubilee from the Mississippi Folklore Register. I think Myriam has asked Sonia Sanchez to write something, and Maryemma Graham, Stephen Henderson, you, the West Indian writer Michelle Cliff, and perhaps Adrienne Rich. It's going to be a very fine book. And I asked Myriam to ask Paul Brennan to write a piece. The book may be published in 1987.
WARD: You mentioned Ron Baxter miller's article on your poetry and the typological unity there. Now, is it an ideational unity you are seeking in This Is My Century, a unity based on a synthesis of Du Bois, Freud, Einstein, Marx and Kierkegaard?
ALEXANDER: To a certain extent, yes. But there is something else. I have dealt with a number of these figures, and I add five black men to that: Du Bois, Garvey, King, Malcolm X, and Frederick Douglass. I am thinking seriously about a half dozen figures from the Civil Rights Movement that I did not write about in Prophets for a New Day. I think I have John A. Lewis there, and I had Benjamin Mays, Bayard Rustin, and two or three poems on King. I wanted to do the firebrand of Samson setting the tails of the foxes afire, for Stokely Carmichael. I never did it. And I have been over and over thinking of a good text and a good poem for the mass leader that Jesse Jackson has become. I want to make him a Biblical figure, but he doesn't seem to fit the eighth-century prophets at all. He seems to fit. . . not one of the Gospels, not one of the saints, but...I'm not sure whether he belongs in the orthodox canon or the unorthodox, such as the Apocrypha or the Pseudepigrapha. Sometimes he's like Saul and Paul. I know he's the preacher. He's not Koheleth; he's not the average one. I think sometimes he belongs with the Maccabees. He's an Apocryphal figure. I keep working with it, because I want to do a piece on Jesse. Sonia Sanchez did a piece on Jesse in 1984, and I have watched him with great interest. I think Jesse is a very great man. He seems so much of the ordinary that people forget how extraordinary he is. There's a duality there: Saul/Paul. He's so much like Paul and he's so much like Saul.
WARD: And what do you see for the future?
ALEXANDER: When you talk about the future, there is that brave new world.
WARD: Yes, you mentioned that in your speech "Religion, Poetry, and History," but it's not the Shakespearean brave new world...
ALEXANDER: I say, "In the 21st century our progeny will raise their eyes to more than a vision of a brave new world." In my autobiography, I say that we move toward a beatific vision that is beyond our wildest imagination.
WARD: One final question. Is political action beyond writing a special price that black writers in America pay if they are not content with art as Art? Is that, as Baldwin has it, the price of the ticket?
ALEXANDER: I don't know that I understand Baldwin there. I'm not familiar with that quote. I do know that ever since Chicago days have been committed to a life of the artist for the people. I think that's the one thing I got out of my association with Wright. It may have been unformed before then, but it came out of the South. I think I've always had Black Nationalist feelings and yearnings. grew up at a time when we talked about race pride, and in my family, in my house, we were always reading Crisis magazine and Opportunity. My father's friends were Garveyites. My mother believed in Booker T. Washington, but my father believed in W. E. B. D Bois. And King was the kind of man that my father was in an intellectual way. When I look at Malcolm X, I think about my brother, my uncles, the men in my family who went through—some of them— some difficult experiences, but at the same time had real philosophy of hope for black people. I remember Nikki saying to me when I mentioned the Communists didn't like me. They rebuffed me. I couldn't have even had a full flirtation with the Communist Party, because they simply rejected me. They thought of me…now I realize I was considered petite bourgeois, Black Nationalist deviationist. I was never going to follow a set party line. And, of course, they accused Wright, and rightfully so, of not being a Stalinist, of being a Trotskyist. He was! And he had a reason. I learned then that the ivory tower was no place for a black writer. And black writers who kept saying, "Well, I don't want to be called a Negro writer or a Negro poet or a black poet"— what else were they? They were poets mainly, but they were Negroes first. They were black men before they began to write. They came here male, and the next word was black. I have no desire to separate myself from what I am...from my race, from my gender, from my nationality, and from my consciousness. I'm black, woman, writer; I'm very Black Nationalist.
WARD: That is, I think, a very fitting end. Thank you for giving me the pleasure of this interview.
ALEXANDER: Well, I enjoyed it.
WARD, JERRY W., and Margaret Walker Alexander. 1988. “A Writer for Her People: An Interview with Dr. Margaret Walker Alexander.” The Mississippi Quarterly 41(4), pp. 515-27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/26475112. Accessed 16 July 2025.