There’s No Surviving Without Hope

Nicole Graev Lipson interviews Jerald Walker about his new essay collection, “Magically Black.”

By Nicole Graev LipsonSeptember 16, 2024

• Memoir & Essay

• Cultural Studies

IN THE ESSAY “LOST,” Jerald Walker recalls a harrowing evening spent waiting for his older son Adrian to get home from a play rehearsal. As the minutes stretch into hours, Walker is beset with anxiety. He knows all too well the harm that can befall a Black male walking down a street at night—especially in the type of predominantly white suburb his family calls home.

When 14-year-old Adrian finally appears at the door—it turns out he’d simply gotten lost—Walker is relieved. Still, it’s a temporary reprieve. He knows that the racism threatening his sons’ safety hasn’t gone anywhere. Later, unable to sleep, Walker imagines himself taking a nighttime walk entirely unafraid, as if he were “just a human being out for a stroll,” enjoying the evening. “What does is feel like,” he wonders, “for a Black man to experience such a thing? Freedom? Bliss? Nothing at all?”

For Walker, this is no fleeting musing. Questions like these drive every one of the 16 riveting essays that make up his new collection Magically Black and Other Essays. A brilliant follow-up to How to Make a Slave and Other Essays (a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award), the book imbues the phrase “the personal is political” with urgent new life, illuminating the ways racial biases infiltrate even the most seemingly basic and daily interactions: mowing the lawn, for instance, or standing in a ticket line. Hiring a contractor. Though Walker takes pride in the many heroic “survival strategies” that have enabled Black Americans to prevail through a history riddled by hardship, he also longs to be free of the freight of identity—or, as he so poignantly puts it, “I wish simply to be me.” It’s a tension captured with honesty, wisdom, and a wry awareness of life’s absurdities.

I’ve known Jerald Walker since I had the life-changing luck of landing in his nonfiction workshop as part of the creative writing MFA at Emerson College. He’s as perceptive and nimble a teacher as he is a writer, and, before calling him in August to talk about Magically Black, I’d imagined us digging at length into nonfiction craft. Given Walker’s style in the classroom and on the page, I should have known our conversation would go in directions I hadn’t predicted.

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NICOLE GRAEV LIPSON: You begin Magically Black with a prologue that lays out your surprising personal history—being raised in the 1970s in Chicago by parents who, despite being Black, were enthusiastic members of a white supremacist religious cult.

JERALD WALKER: I wanted to give an overview of who I am and how I’ve come to the notion of race as something that has to be learned. I wasn’t raised practicing any of what is commonly referred to as “Black culture.” I had black skin, but I didn’t participate in the things that people associate with Black culture in the inner city, such as certain foods, and music, and entertainment. All of that was absent in my life entirely until I left the church when I was about 15 years old and had to try to figure out what Blackness meant—and how to embody this race that, to me, had not had much meaning other than what the cult leader provided for us, which was all wrong.

This book is about racial identity: how it’s formed and created, how you can learn to be a race, and how you can unlearn what race means through the course of a lifetime. This is one of my life’s enduring questions that I can’t seem to get a complete handle on.

The title Magically Black comes from words a student scribbled in her notebook when you announced to her all-white African American literature class that they would be spending the semester approaching all material as if they were Black. Why did that phrase stick with you?

I’m making the point that everything is smoke and mirrors related to race. Race doesn’t mean anything except for what we assign to it. It is all a big magic trick that has been played on the people in this country, and we have no choice now … I had to learn to play it in my teens—to teach myself to be Black, to be a part of this magic act. And the students in my class have to themselves learn to be Black.

When I told my white students that they were going to have to spend the semester being Black, they were horrified. They recoiled. If you tell someone, “Hey, you’re going to be Black for four months” and see them scrambling to get out of the room, that tells you all you need to know.

Oh my god. Is it possible they were joking?

No, no—I had a couple of students threaten to drop the course unless I changed that requirement! It just goes to show that when you mention Blackness to someone, the first, instinctive response is negative. My goal in that course was to shift that first response to something positive: courage, resiliency, bravery, the ability to improvise. One thing I told my students often was that for African Americans to go through the brutalization of slavery and come out of it, then necessarily, by definition, they are more than the sum of their brutalization. You don’t make it through that unless there are some very positive qualities about your spirit, and your culture, and your practices.

This seems to be a “teaching strategy” you use in the book as well, especially in the essays narrated from a second-person point of view. I’m thinking of “Master of the Lawn,” where the narrative is structured as a choose-your-own-adventure. I, as a white woman, found myself pondering situations I would never personally find myself in. Was this one of your goals?

Definitely. I want to show that the Black experience is teachable. Everybody can learn to be Black, and one way to do this is to put yourself in the shoes of someone who is Black. Black is nothing if not a series of choose-your-own-adventures. If I go out for a drive and someone cuts me off and blows the horn at me, I have to decide: Is this person doing that because of my race? If I get stopped by a police officer, was it because I’m Black? Do I get angry about it, or do I be as polite as I possibly can?

The last thing I want is for people to read these essays and feel pity though. I want them to see that, yes, we’re confronted with things, but we can find a way to deal with them. One of my favorite writers, Albert Murray, uses the phrase “antagonistic cooperation”—in order to be a hero, you need a villain, and all of these racial incidents Blacks go through are opportunities for heroic deliverance. He makes the analogy of a matador, a bullfighter. A matador is nothing without the bull. I see Blacks as matadors, and I see white races as the bull. We may not be as strong or as powerful or even as evil in some instances, but we have developed the necessary moves to stay safe, and to prevail, and to make sense of the chaos of being in that arena. We’ve perfected a way to survive, and I think that ought to be celebrated.

While this book explores weighty questions, I feel it’s important to point out how very funny it is. Clifford Thompson, one of its blurbers, said, “Like Richard Pryor, Jerald Walker can make us laugh our heads off even as we realize that nothing he’s talking about is funny.” Is humor just naturally part of your voice?

Well, if you read some of my early stuff, you would think I was a mortician by trade. I was so serious, and so depressing. In real life, I like to laugh, to joke, to find humor everywhere I can, but I didn’t see that as an aspect of my writing. One reason for this was because when I was learning to be Black, one of the very first things I learned about Blackness is that Blacks were angry and bitter, and that to be truly Black, I should be upset about things. When I started writing, that was the stance I took as a writer—and then I would finish writing and go about my day, and have fun, and laugh, and joke.

Eventually, I decided that I don’t want to be angry in my writing if that’s not actually how I live my life. And so I had to learn a new way of being Black, which, like Richard Pryor, blended comedy and tragedy. Anger is often the prelude to a joke. You get upset about something until you can figure out what its punch line is, and then it’s the punch line that helps you deal with the anger. I’m not going for straight comedy in my work. I’m trying to make observations about the world that have a bit of a bite—but I still want to find the punch line.

Your first two books were memoirs, and the most recent two have been essay collections. Do you think of yourself more as a memoirist or an essayist?

I think of myself as a short story writer, to be honest. The short story has always been my favorite genre, and my MFA is in fiction. I wrote short stories for many years—I just wasn’t very successful publishing them. When I was about 10 years out of my graduate program and still unpublished, my wife said, “Why don’t you try writing essays?” And I said, “You are out of your mind. Only losers write essays. I’m a fiction writer. I’m a rock star.” But she kept nagging me about it, so I wrote an essay just to get her off my back. I wrote it in about a week and sent it out, and it was accepted for publication, and then later selected for The Best American Essays. I thought, Well, that was a fluke. I’ll just try one more and then I’m right back to fiction. I wrote another essay, and it was accepted for publication. I wrote another and the same thing.

The problem with my fiction is that I have an overactive imagination. I’d write stories that would start off well, and then the plots would get out of hand. I had no way to police myself to the boundaries of my fictional world. But once I started writing nonfiction, those boundaries were set.

It occurs to me that Magically Black is very much about the imagination and the stories that we tell ourselves in the absence of knowledge. You manage to sneak fiction in by showing us that “overactive imagination”—the paths it goes down when, say, your teenage son is hours late getting home from a rehearsal, or a doctor leaves you waiting in an exam room for an hour.

One of the things that’s true of memoirs and personal essays is that you can begin running out of material. I do find myself using more and more imagined scenes, imagining that something happened that didn’t actually happen, but that fits thematically. By the letter of the law, it’s still nonfiction because it’s a stated “imagined scene.”

As a kid, you dropped out of high school and dabbled in drugs and petty crime, and today you’re a college professor, an esteemed author, and a National Book Award finalist. Some of my favorite essays in the book explore a collision between this past and present. In “The Blessing,” for instance, you write about visiting Norfolk prison as a guest author, reading your work to inmates whose paths so easily could have been yours.

My past and present are a constant source of friction. I cannot leave the past as thoroughly as I would like, and so everything that I experience and encounter I see through two lenses: the past, South Side of Chicago life and the current Boston life. And then I have to weigh how I respond to something after having filtered it through both of those experiences.

“The Blessing” is a good example of this. I’m at that prison as a distinguished college professor, and yet I’m seeing myself in the audience in many respects, and I’m seeing men who look familiar to me, even though they can’t possibly be. The irony is that I gave being a delinquent my best shot, but I just wasn’t cut out for it. I never felt that lifestyle was right for me, and so I was miserable.

Do you ever look at your life today and think, How did I get here?

If anything, I feel a certain amount of bitterness toward the detour that was the South Side of Chicago. I feel that I probably could have achieved so much more had I not had those 10 years of being a street kid. So, no, I don’t find myself thinking, How did I get here? I think, What was I doing there? That’s the thing that always strikes me as the peculiar part of my life—not where I am, but where I was.

In your book, you write that “the flames of violence and hardship often consume lives, yes, but more often than not […] those flames forge lives into steel.” Maybe those teenage years were the fire in your forging process?

I think so, but I could have done without the fire. I don’t regret that time, necessarily—without all of that, there would be no me and all that accompanies me right now, including my wife and kids. And I do appreciate that those experiences made me value the survival strategies that many Blacks have had to accumulate and master. But I don’t want anybody to have to go through hardship so that, on the other side of it, they can say, “Well, that made me the person I am.” I think you can become a person you’re happy with without certain hardships.

I suppose there’s comfort for a lot of people in thinking of adversity as something that was part of the whole plan from the beginning?

Yeah, but part of me deeply rejects that. To prepare for an interview, I recently took a look at my memoir The World in Flames (2016). I was reading the section where I was in seventh grade, and the principal called me to his office and said he wanted to send me to this magnet school on the other side of town because I had the grades to get there. He said, “You’ll be the first person in our school to ever be accepted to there, and this is a wonderful thing.” But I didn’t go, because I was in that stupid cult and afraid this was the devil’s plan to do something bad to me.

My wife came into the room and said, “What are you reading?” So I read her three or four pages and started sobbing like a baby. I was crying so hard that I could barely get through it. And she put her arm around me and said, “But just think, if your life hadn't gone the way it did, you wouldn’t have the boys, you wouldn’t have me.” And I said, “Fuck y’all.”

I was joking. See, that was me again trying to find the punch line on the other side of the tragedy. We both laughed, and she knew I was kidding, but part of me wasn’t kidding. Did I really have to go through all that?

There’s a hopeful quality to Magically Black. There are even positive connotations in the word “magically”—magical things are often beautiful or stunning in some way. How do you keep faith in humanity when you’re shown its worst again and again?

Who says I have faith in humanity?

It’s in the book! Give me a second to look.

Yes, please let me know what page it’s on. I’ll see if it’s not too late to make an edit.

Here we go—the very last page. You imagine a scene in which an enslaved man has the opportunity to behold the generations of family after him—all the way down to his great-great-great-grandson—and how they’ve been able to live free because of their ancestors’ “boundless hope” and resilience.

Well, I think there might be a distinction between faith in humanity and the survival strategy of hope. I’m hopeful, but not necessarily convinced, that humanity can and will be saved. But you have to have hope. There’s no surviving without hope.

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Featured image: Photo of Jerald Walker by Brenda Molife.