Jerald Walker
Photo by Brenda Molife
Bio
Jerald Walker is the author of The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult and Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption, recipient of the 2011 PEN New England Award for Nonfiction. He has published in magazines such as Creative Nonfiction, The Harvard Review, the Missouri Review, River Teeth, Mother Jones, the Iowa Review, andthe Oxford American, and he has been widely anthologized, including four times in The Best American Essays. Walker is a professor of creative writing at Emerson College.
There is no bad time to be named an NEA Fellow, though there are better times than others. And then there is the best time, which, for me, is now—a book in progress, short on time, short on money, short on youth, and the ever-present need for confirmation of the work. It’s a critical juncture of my career, in other words, and I’m exceedingly grateful for the NEA’s support.
Excerpt from "How to Make a Slave"
Gather scissors, construction paper, crayons, popsicle sticks, and glue. Take them to the den, where your thirteen-year-old sister sits at the table thumbing through your schoolbook on black history. Smile when she notices you and turns to the pre-marked page with a photo of Frederick Douglass. It’s one from his later years, when his Afro was white. Realize you need cotton balls. Leave and return with them a moment later to see that your sister has already cut from the construction paper a circle that will serve as Douglass’s head. Start gluing the popsicle sticks together to make his body. As you work silently, your sister tells you basic facts about slavery and abolition that you will present to your class. You’ll end the presentation by saying with passion that Frederick Douglass is your hero, which will not be true because you are only ten and the things you are learning about black history make it difficult to feel good about his life, and sometimes yours.
But feel good about the beating he gave his master. Your classmates feel good about it too. They cheer when you describe it, as they cheered seconds earlier when you recited Douglass’s famous line: You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man. “I wouldn’t have taken that stuff either,” one of your classmates says after school. Forget his name in a few years but remember his skin was so dark that you and your friends had no choice but to call him Congo. Congo explains how he would have gouged out his master’s eyes, and then other boys break their masters’ legs and amputate their arms, and when someone curls his fingers into a claw and twists off his master’s balls everyone cups his crotch in agony before laughing. Enjoy how wonderful it feels to laugh at that moment, and as you walk home, with Douglass staring somberly out of your back pocket, wish black history had some funny parts.
Find a funny part. One has been captured on an FBI wiretap of Martin Luther King, Jr., in which he’s in a hotel having sex and at the right moment yells, “I’m fucking for God!” The funniness is not immediately apparently, though, because you are twenty-five now and King is your hero and the woman with whom he is performing God’s work is not his wife. Wonder with indignation how he could do such a thing, but come to terms with the complexity of humankind and the idea of moral subjectivism while smoking the second of three bongs. Now it is clear that the important thing here is not the messenger but rather the message. It is also clear that the message bears repeating.
After you repeat it, your girlfriend looks confused. She opens her mouth as if to respond but all she does is stare up at you, not even blinking when a bead of sweat falls from your forehead onto hers. Try to explain that you are only quoting some black history but be overtaken by the giggles and conclude that this is a conversation for a different time, when you have not smoked three bongs and are not doing God’s work. And maybe it is a conversation for a different person too, because this one is white and does not like to talk about race. She does not even see race, she has said, having taught herself to judge individuals solely by their character and deeds. She is postracial, the first postracial person you have ever known, but because the term has not yet been invented you just think she’s stupid. And because you are the first person she has ever known who has taught himself to see race in everything, she thinks you are stupid too. In time, you both seek and find smarter companions.