The other Margaret Walker novel: Unfinished book surfaces at long last for publication

Margaret Walker is perhaps most known for the only novel she ever published, Jubilee . But buried in the archives of Jackson State University’s Margaret Walker Center is a little-known novel Walker left unfinished and unknown to the world.

For the past seven years, Seretha Williams, a Margaret Walker scholar and professor at Georgia's Augusta University, has been quietly scouring the archives to bring Goose Island into the public eye nearly 90 years after Walker wrote it. The novel, the first book written in its genre when Walker first penned it in the 1930s, is getting a second chance at life with a tentative publication date in January 2025 through University Press of Mississippi.

Walker, born in Birmingham and raised in New Orleans, was a poet and author. She would have turned 109 on July 7 this year. Mentored by W.E.B. Dubois and Langston Hughes and a mentor herself to writers such as James Baldwin and Alice Walker, Margaret Walker made a name for herself as part of the Chicago Black Renaissance literary movement. In 1937, she wrote a poem called "For My People" for her master's thesis at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and became the first Black woman to receive the Yale University Younger Poets Award.

Walker moved to Jackson in 1949, where she taught at JSU for 30 years and founded their Institute for the Study of the History, Life, and Culture of Black People, now called The Margaret Walker Center. In 1966, during her tenure at JSU, she authored Jubilee . Scholars credit the book with inventing the neo-slave narrative genre, which includes works like Toni Morrison's Beloved.

Williams’ scholarship on Walker, which she has pursued since her early days in college, is not a coincidence.

“You may think that this is destiny,” Williams said.

Williams doesn’t just study Walker; she’s related to her by marriage. Walker’s youngest daughter married Williams’ uncle. When Williams was 10 years old, her uncle introduced her to Walker.

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Though she didn’t think much of her early meeting with the writer at the time, Williams encountered Walker’s poem “For My People” in college at Northwestern and instantly recognized the face on the back of the book. Williams found herself hooked.

“I see my own professional story in hers,” she said. “We have crossed paths in many ways that I never could have anticipated.”

In researching Walker, Williams ran across multiple mentions of Goose Island and decided to visit JSU to look at the manuscript. When she pitched the idea of editing and publishing the novel, The Margaret Walker Center granted her permission to work on it.

“From the beginning, we were excited to work with her to try to get this out and published,” Margaret Walker Center Director Robert Luckett said.

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It has been no easy feat. The manuscript, Williams said, is in rough shape with multiple versions, missing chapters, character name changes and unfinished sections. According to Alina Boyte, an incoming law professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law at the University of Hawai’i, Williams can make whatever changes she deems necessary to make the text understandable.

“Legally, nothing can stop the editor from having free rein with the book - unless he/she adapts the work and creates a 'derivative' work,” Boyte said in a statement.

Williams, however, plans to have a very light hand in editing, opting for footnotes to avoid interfering with Walker’s words and annotations to provide context for the different sections and commentary on historical significance.

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But the complications don’t end with the text itself.

“I’m trying to navigate what my responsibility is to her and her legacy and also what my responsibility is to her family,” Williams said.

Walker said she never wanted Goose Island published. Her youngest daughter and Williams’ aunt relayed this point in conversations with Williams about the novel and explained why.

While working with The Federal Writers’ Project in Chicago and volunteering with at-risk women, Walker authored Goose Island, which details the life of a young Black woman living in the Northside of Chicago during The Great Depression. During this time, she met writer Richard Wright and helped him with his literary classic Native Son.

“She allowed him to read her Goose Island manuscript, and he read it, and it seems like the next thing she knew, he was publishing Native Son ,” Margaret Walker Center archivist Angela Stewart said. “To her, she saw a lot of what she had included in Goose Island in Native Son.”

Concerned people would think she had plagiarized Wright, Walker set the manuscript aside, never to return to it again.

“I'm trying to be very respectful in this project, understanding that this was not a text she wanted to be open for the world,” Williams said.

But the text’s literary and historical significance seems to beg for publication.

“It's important for it to be accessible for scholars because it really helps you understand Margaret Walker as a writer and the breadth of her work,” Margaret Walker scholar Kathi King said. “ Goose Island is a literary first. It's the first novel in the genre of proletarian realism with a Black woman protagonist.”

Until now, the first novel in that genre was Anne Petry’s The Street, published in 1947, about 10 years after Goose Island.

Maryemma Graham, author of the Margaret Walker biography The House Where My Soul Lives: The Life of Margaret Walker and professor emeritus at The University of Kansas, said Goose Island invented the short story cycle.

“She was ahead of her time,” Graham said. “The historical significance and literary value are both more important than what that work would have been at the time she would have published it.”

Goose Island is a critical part of Walker’s backstory, Graham added, and part of the case for her rediscovery and importance in American literary tradition.

“If we don’t connect her to the early part of her career to this, then she’ll continue to be an unknown,” Graham said. “Give Walker the ownership of starting that tradition. What we could not do in her lifetime, we can do after the fact.”

It’s hard to say what would have happened had Walker published the novel, but King and Williams both said it would be read alongside Wright’s Native Son.

“I think these novels would have been the beginning, maybe, of a Black version of proletarian realism, or maybe Black naturalism you could call it,” King added.

For Walker herself, King said, the publication could have been life altering. If Goose Island were successful, Walker could have made a living from her writing instead of pivoting to a teaching career.

Margaret Walker’s granddaughter, Gwendolyn Williams, says she is excited about the publication of Goose Island and for her grandmother to gain wider recognition .

“We definitely want the world to know more of her involvement in Black history and American writing,” she added.

When Goose Island meets the world next year, scholars hope it will bring Margaret Walker along with it.

“Margaret Walker is a really important literary figure. She's understudied and also not understood as well as some of the other literary figures,” Seretha Williams said. “Scholars like myself are attempting to recenter Margaret Walker from the margins.”

This article originally appeared on Mississippi Clarion Ledger: The other Margaret Walker novel: Unfinished book surfaces at long last for publication