"I have had an opportunity to be a voice for the voiceless, to make those in power to hear those voices," says Sonia Walker.
Photographs by Karen Pulfer Focht
In Sonia Walker’s living room, there’s a houseplant the width of a washer and dryer. To call it a houseplant is an injustice; it’s a Schefflera arboricola on steroids, gone wild on sunlight from the south-facing window. Its branches are propped on wire frames and redirected around the trunk in crazy, serpentine loops. It’s difficult to say which came first, the East Memphis ranch house or the plant.
The inviting room with the super-plant also exhibits African art with feminine themes that attest to a lifetime of collecting, and a set of antique calipers mimics birds in flight on the wall above the sofa. It’s a place where friends and family come to process loss, celebration, divorce, and transition with Sonia, the 81-year-old associate pastor of First Congregational Church on Cooper.
It’s not such a stretch to span careers in television, counseling, education, and ministry, she says. To others, it may appear that she’s a wizard at re-invention, but according to her, it’s just what life required of her at different stages.
Um, hold it right there: For most of us, it takes a lifetime to master even one career. Earlier this year, the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis recognized Walker with the Catalyst Award for her “selfless dedication to creating positive change … and her lifelong commitment to help end hunger in the community.” Walker was instrumental in the expansion of the Mid-South Food Bank’s ministry. In 2010, Women of Achievement singled her out for their prestigious “Initiative” award, citing her ability to “use her talents and create her own future.”
When her late husband, Dr. Walker Walter, accepted the presidency of LeMoyne-Owen College in 1974, the couple moved to Memphis from Chicago with their three sons. Once the boys were in school, Walker took a job as director of community relations at WHBQ-TV. Even without formal training in broadcasting, her prior experience as an educator and social worker equipped her for public affairs reporting. She also brought a dimension of advocacy to the job and used her platform to address social issues such as hunger, race, school reform, and literacy. For the last decade, she has served the city in ordained ministry.
The Rev. Walker conducts services in the main sanctuary of First Congregational Church.
After the Walkers were established in Memphis, she would encourage friends to relocate to the New South. “When I first got here I used to tell people in Chicago and New York that they ought to come here. I’d say, ‘You should come to Memphis. You’re living in those cities with all your talents and you’re living like a bedding plant.’ Because I knew some pretty outstanding African-American people that would have rocked the city and helped us move more expeditiously towards our best good. Bedding plants are all crowded up together; when you plant them in their own space they have room to grow. And there was room for growth here.”
While she made no converts from Chicago, she raised three sons to adulthood here. Her voice — which she now uses to pray and comfort — was just the right timbre for television. Memphis shaped her development as much as she shaped Memphis.
“All the seeds were planted when I came here,” she says. “The television job gave me access to many voices and many opportunities for which the seeds had been planted.”
She used her access to get things done. “Not everybody has access to the captains of industry here and the people who made major decisions simply because they had wealth,” she says. “They shape our cultural community, our economic community, our communities of faith, the quality of life.
“And I’ve been able to converse with these people over the years in many capacities; as a colleague; as somebody who had something to offer them when I was in broadcasting; and as a recipient of their beneficence. So I have had an opportunity to be a voice for the voiceless, to make those in power to hear those voices. Access has been a major element of my life in Memphis.”
Associate Pastor Sonia Walker greets parishioners at First Congregational Church.
As her sons married and left the city to pursue their own careers, her empty nest filled again with aging loved ones. At one time she was looking after her husband, her mother, mother-in-law, and an aunt. Again she dug deep for creative solutions to meet their many colliding needs.
An example: When she was establishing the counseling center at Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church, there was no budget for staff or even a dedicated telephone line. So, she deployed her retired husband and her mother — both disabled by that time — as the ersatz appointment and reception staff. It gave everyone a purpose, and they stayed in the jobs after she moved on to another gig.
"I don’t think we outgrow Christmas, but you have to figure out a way that makes it meaningful. The spirit can be the same, but the implementation doesn’t have to be."
Creative problem-solving is a Walker trademark. One year, Christmas came along when resources were spread thin. She wrote limericks in red ink for every member of the family, and sent each on a treasure hunt for their presents hidden deep in the attic and locked storage closets. When all the adult children and grandchildren came to Memphis last December, guess what tradition they wanted recreated?
Christmas Eve is a work night for this pastor, but she is well acquainted with the pressures on women to create an unrealistic fantasy Christmas for a family who may or may not be present. The secret to keeping the holiday fresh, she says, is to do it authentically and not be apologetic.
Walker says people "should not be afraid of the darkness in their lives, and the uncertainties."
“I don’t think we outgrow Christmas, but you have to figure out a way that makes it meaningful. The spirit can be the same, but the implementation doesn’t have to be. Let it be something different every year if need be. Especially if you start losing key people, you have to make it different. Maybe go to a different place.”
Grandparenting, too, requires a modern approach in 2019. With families on two coasts, maintaining intimate relationships with grandchildren requires emotional presence if not physical proximity.
“Being a grandparent, you have to be intentional,” she says. “I had such wonderful grandmothers who lived in the city I lived in [Columbus, Ohio],” and frequent visits taught her the meaning of extended family. “The kinds of things I shared with my grandmothers, they come in little, compressed packages of time now.”
If you want to be in the lives of grandchildren, you must keep up, she says. FaceTime, Skype, and travel keep her in touch, and one of them is applying to colleges now. “I’ve given her some advice about following up with these places because relationships are everything,” Walker says. “Young people are operating in a new reality. What we can do is encourage them to create their own access routes.”
Living into our calling is everyone’s own responsibility. For Walker, the calling to Memphis Theological Seminary grew organically out of her life experience.
"They always encouraged me to use my voice, even if it got me in trouble a lot of times," says Sonia Walker.
“I’ve always asked the hard questions,” she says. And people in crisis have naturally come to her. A friend recommended that she put some credentials behind the armchair counseling, so, already possessing a master’s in social work, she earned her Master of Divinity degree from Memphis Theological Seminary in 2008. “I wanted to be in that environment. When I ran the counseling center, I said I will never do therapy again without the guidance of the Holy Spirit. If people want to talk about their fake lives, I can’t serve them in the same way.”
We all contain the raw materials of greatness, and it is our responsibility to cultivate them, regardless of the culture, Walker says. She tells a story about her father, the first African American to be the manager of a Kroger store in Columbus. Despite his outward success, he was a frustrated inventor and artist. In the late 1950s or early ’60s, he had an idea about manufacturing dolls in multiple skin colors, especially all shades of brown, “all the colors little children come in,” she recalls.
The day the rejection letter came, the sense of letdown in the house was palpable. “Now when I see all those dolls in the department store, I think, ‘Dad, you were so ahead of your time.’”
She credits a large, diverse family who fostered independence as her foundation. “I never thought I wasn’t wise,” she says. “Even as a child I had always been validated as a person of substance. My name means ‘wisdom.’ They always encouraged me to use my voice, even if it got me in trouble a lot of times.”
With a career that spans the days of the public service announcement on television to the era of the 12-minute TEDx Talk, Walker says one skill she mastered along the way was getting her message across in 30 seconds. And at 81, it is this:
“This forum gives me one more opportunity to encourage people to live into their own truths. To live creatively. To not be afraid of the darkness in their lives and the uncertainties. And not to feel compelled to fill their lives with busyness that has no purpose and no pleasure in it.To step into the calling that God put in you. I don’t believe that because I’m clergy; I’m clergy because I believe that.”
