HOW TO MAKE A SLAVE

I laughed out loud, nodded at Jerald Walker’s delivery of so much truth, and just shook my head at how gracefully he achieves so much so quickly in every piece in How to Make a Slave. All I can say is, ‘Wow.’ And you can’t just consume one; you’ll find yourself gobbling down every essay here and hungering for more. No one—absolutely no one—I’ve read is writing better than Jerald Walker about race, being black, and the depths and complexities of our humanity.

Walker demonstrates the keen intellect and direct style that characterized his acclaimed 2010 memoir, Street Shadows….Crafted with honesty and wry comedic flair, these essays are both engaging and enraging.

His rich compilation adds up to a rewardingly insightful self-portrait that reveals how one man relates to various aspects of his identity.

In these absorbing essays, Jerald Walker adds race to the commonplace (a little girl helping her younger brother with his homework, a job interview, a family dining out, a teenager crashing the family car) and shows us something knotty, fraught, and unforgettable, not just about race and the commonplace, ‘living while black,’ but about living while human.

Walker manages to be all of us—we are all the college English department’s pet token, we are all the potential Whole Foods crime wave, we are all the Negro middle American agonizing over a return trip to the implosive inner city from whence we came. These fresh, revelatory snippets of black life deserve a rollicking collective Amen! and an audience of both the converted and the curious.

Jerald Walker’s How to Make a Slave is notable for its persistence of vision. These essays are relentlessly humane even as they stare into America’s split, racist heart. And like America and Americans, this book is both funny and fucked up, and neither can exist without the other.