Magically Black and Other Essays (Amistad Press, 2024) by Jerald Walker, a Guggenheim Fellow and National Book Award finalist, is a brilliant and necessary addition to the canon on race in America, though for somewhat difficult and contradictory reasons. Having grown up in a white supremacist cult, Walker has written several memoirs and essay collections that deserve to be better known, most notably The World In Flames and How to Make a Slave and Other Essays. Walker is a stubborn individualist who writes about Blackness without laying claim to its familiar forms, who chronicles racism and white privilege but complicates his findings with complexity and doubt. His essays, while highly personal, are so light-handed that a few humorous pages recounting a dinner party or a trip to the doctor fearlessly expose a hot topic, make challenging observations, and critique both the topic and himself. Idiosyncratic and smart, Magically Black moves the dialogue forward.
Walker teaches at Emerson College in Boston. I was bussed through that urban campus for most of my childhood, as a white child attending an elite private girls’ school next door. This was in the era when “good” white people like those at my school were “race blind,” priding ourselves on treating everyone “the same,” meaning we behaved with white normativity. The Winsor School was surprisingly queer in the late ’80s when I attended—girls openly dated other girls—and was a funny combination of starchy and progressive, though I don’t remember any challenging information when it came to race. We piously read To Kill a Mockingbird and Native Son and felt good about ourselves. Racism was what bad people did. Not us. The topic seemed simple; the moral lines clear.
Jerald Walker’s writings on race are a gift in this moment because he allows a wide-ranging discussion. Additionally, there has been a backlash in the wider culture by writers of color claiming the popularity of racial justice among white people has created a publishing boom that is actually a demand for a specific and limiting narrative—of race-related suffering, followed by the heroic overcoming of obstacles. This can be its own form of silencing. See Percival Everett’s Erasure, adapted to become the movie American Fiction, or Andrew Boryaga’s Victim. Walker doesn’t reference this problem specifically, but he’s so original and stubbornly himself that he resists all stereotyping—even the well-intentioned kind—likely due to his unusual personal history.
Walker started out life as one of seven siblings on Chicago’s South Side, born to parents who were rare Black members of the Worldwide Church of God, a racist cult that, at its peak in the 1970s, had a quarter million members. He wrote about this mind-bending experience in his second memoir, The World in Flames: A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult. The memoir addresses the complicating factor that both of Walker’s parents were blind, and that as a child he was never quite sure if the discrimination his family experienced was racist or ableist. When Walker left the cult, he followed in a sibling’s footsteps into a life of drugs and crime, which he wrote about in his first memoir, Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion and Redemption. But again atypical, Walker eventually exited that lifestyle, went to college, and became a professor.
Magically Black and Other Essays is a follow-up to Walker’s How to Make a Slave and Other Essays, which was a finalist for the National Book Award. The title essay refers to an African American novel class Walker taught to predominately white, working-class students in his early years as a professor. Those students were a different population than most students today in the sense that they seemed to be thinking about race for the first time. Walker’s launch with this essay in 2024 suggests a kind of contrarianism: The more things change, the more the same kind of basic education in empathy is needed. On the first day of each semester of this class, he claimed that he was adding “one drop” of black blood to everyone, turning them, as one girl wrote in her notebook “magically black.” By the simple premise of imagining themselves Black, Walker thought, his mostly white students would come to see the absurdity of negative racial stereotyping.
The students read The Bondswoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, Black Thunder about Gabriel Prosser, and Toni Morrison’s Sula in order to learn about Black strategies to survive oppression—discovering strengths like faith, hope, loyalty, improvisation, courage, and unity. They were free to make cringey comments (Will we be wearing blackface? Do we learn to rap?), which Walker handled diplomatically, and they were also free to make mistakes. They read Richard Wright’s Native Son, feeling sympathy for the character Bigger Thomas. Walker says that he once did too: “It continued to ring true to me in some vague way that Black folks, as [Bigger] insisted, were ‘whipped before they are born,’” he says, “although I read these words as a flourishing college student.” But he wrong-foots the white students who agree, offering up Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man . . . and his own story.
Walker’s background was similar to Bigger’s, and yet here he is, a college professor. Bigger, he says, is an exception rather than a rule. And Invisible Man is both a better example of Black ingenuity and an inspiring example of human possibility. He quotes the following passage from Ellison’s book: “I feel, feel suddenly that I have become more human. For the first time, lying there in the dark, I could glimpse the possibility of being more than a member of a race. Why waste your time creating a conscience for something that doesn’t exist? For you see, blood and skin do not think! Our task is that of making ourselves individuals. . . .” Obviously, Walker thinks race exists: he’s teaching a class about it, but he also prizes individuality for Black people and allows those complexities to exist side by side.
The essays in Magically Black are short and, largely, deceptively humorous chronicles of Walker’s later life as a successful Black college professor, married to a Black woman, father of two Black children, living in a wealthy and mostly white town in Massachusetts. He leans into the idea of representative Blackness, with discussions of mowing his lawn, having white people to dinner, and discovering that the local doctor is a Black man. Nonetheless, the essays have teeth. In “On Getting Along,” he writes about a dinner party of deliberately bougie proportions—his wife makes “coffee marinaded mutton chops with balsamic reduction”—where his white guests bristle at him for watching football during the era of Colin Kaepernick’s protesting police brutality during the national anthem. Walker says, “If I stand my ground, it will be at the risk of ruining the evening’s good cheer and possibly, should things get out of hand, some friendships.” He assures them that he wears a Kaepernick jersey while he watches, then tells a sob story about watching sports with his blind father and how much the activity meant to them. Mentally, he flashes back to himself as a teenager, watching police beat a friend of his, which he doesn’t mention. The guests are chastened, friendships are saved. But when they leave Walker’s wife calls bullshit on him; nothing he said was true. Here, Walker insists on his individuality and right to self-determination regardless of what the race narrative might suggest. He also ends the piece with another complication: an acknowledgement that there are good cops, too.
Some of the essays have experimental, dualistic structures to help develop Walker’s multi-layered thinking. “The Blessing” is the story of his visit to a prison to do a reading sponsored by the National Book Foundation and Freedom Reads, a program founded by poet Reginald Dwayne Betts. The main body of the story is from a recording Walker made shortly after the experience, noting his impressions, and concluding that “this was probably the best experience I’ve had as a writer, and even as a person.” Copious footnotes provide counterpoint, mostly details from his own youthful experiences being arrested and behind bars. They reveal he was more nervous than the recording lets on, and that when tested by the inmates Walker was found somewhat wanting in prison-smarts. In the last footnote, he says that months later, he has erased the positive aspects of the experience, and somehow remembers it as one of failure, linked to his failures as a teen to “do the kinds of things that would have earned the respect of my delinquent peers.” He is struck with gratitude listening to the recording and remembering his euphoria at the time. Both stories, we understand, are true.
In a similar way, the volume’s penultimate essay, “The Master of the Lawn” is structured as the ultimate expression of multiple truths, a choose-your-own-adventure. “You,” the hero “are a middle-aged Black man living in a wealthy, predominately white town, about to mow your lawn.” As a Black man, Walker writes “merely feeling good in a public space . . . is all the story you ever need.” But that’s not what happens. In addition to the funny bits about the lawn’s irregularities, Walker stews over his neighbor’s MAGA sign, recalls potential instances of white privilege he has encountered, and reveals actual ones. A man yells a slur at him as he drives by (at least, that’s one interpretation). A woman stops to ask him how much he charges for mowing the lawn, assuming he’s the hired help because he’s Black. The essay’s structure cleverly foregrounds the importance not just of the slights, but of how the hero interprets them. And it offers the possibility that many of the scenarios are genuinely open to interpretation, even the MAGA sign, whose owner is friendly to his Black neighbor. (Walker doesn’t really buy that the man is not a racist, but he mentions it’s possible.) The essay offers both a real reckoning on racism, and a wealth of uncertainties and matters for debate.
In the essay “Minstrel II,” Walker discusses the n-word, an essay on Dave Chappelle veering through a discussion of Black comedian, Richard Pryor, before lambasting the unfunny Chappelle. Walker’s wife, he says, is “deeply offended by the word in all instances.” He, by contrast, does “not mind its casual use, having come of age in a community that allowed for this exception.” He goes on to discuss how Pryor renounced the n-word, but also presents the difference between laughing with someone and laughing at them, suggesting context is everything especially with the most taboo material. Walker doesn’t tell us what he and his wife have instructed their own sons to do, or what the sons do when mom is out of earshot. So, while providing no conclusion, really, he makes an honest and subtle presentation of the issues.
The passage I find most moving is not in that essay, though, but rather in “The Master of the Lawn.” Here Walker asks if “you,” the magically Black protagonist of the choose-your-own-adventure, believe things are getting better for Black people in America, or if you would merely like to believe that’s the case. If the latter, he directs “You” back to passage seventeen, which recounts “a lone white child, no more than seven or eight,” standing in the rain on the town’s Main Street, “holding a large piece of cardboard high over his head” which turns out to be a Black Lives Matter sign. Walker has given do-gooding whites some gentle criticism above, but here “You,” the Black protagonist, beeps and gives the kid a thumbs-up, at which point, he writes, “The boy spun around and, seeing you, leaped for joy. This memory warms your heart. Your faith in humanity is renewed.” This is the choice that seems closest Walker’s heart, both as an educator and as a man choosing his own adventure.
