Street Shadows: A Memoir of Race, Rebellion, and Redemption - Hardcover

Walker, Jerald

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553807552 ISBN 13: 9780553807554

Publisher: Bantam Books, 2010

Synopsis

Masterfully told, marked by irony and humor as well as outrage and a barely contained sadness, Jerald Walker’s Street Shadows is the story of a young man’s descent into the “thug life” and the wake-up call that led to his finding himself again.

Walker was born in a Chicago housing project and raised, along with his six brothers and sisters, by blind parents of modest means but middle-class aspirations. A boy of great promise whose parents and teachers saw success in his future, he seemed destined to fulfill their hopes. But by age fourteen, like so many of his friends, he found himself drawn to the streets. By age seventeen he was a school dropout, a drug addict, and a gangbanger, his life spiraling toward the violent and premature end all too familiar to African American males.

And then came the blast of gunfire that changed everything: His coke-dealing friend Greg was shot to death—less than an hour after Walker scored a gram from him. “Twenty-five years later, tossing the drug out the window is still the second most difficult thing I’ve ever done. The most difficult thing is still that I didn’t follow it.”

So begins the story, told in alternating time frames, of the journey that Walker took to become the man he is today—a husband, father, teacher, and writer. But his struggle to escape the long shadows of the streets was not easy. There were racial stereotypes to overcome—his own as well as those of the very white world he found himself in—and a hard grappling with the meaning of race that came to an unexpected climax on a trip to Africa.

An eloquent account of how the past shadows but need not determine the present, Street Shadows is the opposite of a victim narrative. Walker casts no blame (except upon himself), sheds no tears (except for those who have not shared his good fortune), and refuses the temptations of self-pity and self-exoneration. In the end, what Jerald Walker has written is a stirring portrait of two Americas—one hopeless, the other inspirational—embodied within one man.   
 

About this title

Review

Jerald Walker on Street Shadows

Privacy in the Public Square

I am a private person. One might even describe me as borderline reclusive, as I find that my best days are often the ones in which my contact with the world’s seven billion humans is restricted to the three with whom I live. It might seem odd, then, that I have written a memoir; as odd, perhaps, as if I had disrobed in the public square. Odder still is that my disrobing--for, in a manner of speaking, that is what I do in Street Shadows--reveals moral imperfections that cause me not only embarrassment but also shame. Delinquency, as it turns out, is not good for the soul.

Nor, at least in my particular case, is the confessional. Chronicling my wrongs and misdeeds did not unburden me of anything. In fact, it burdened me more. This was especially true when I called my 73-year-old mother to read her each completed chapter. Often she responded with pride and admiration at how I turned my life around, but sometimes, when I gave detailed accounts of the darker aspects of my journey, she responded with a mournful, "Oh, Jerry..." or "I can’t believe you did that," or, worst of all, with silence. I was devastated. Because you see, while my mother was aware that my formative years were troubled, she did not know to what extent. Three decades later, I was disappointing her all over again. And yet I continued to call her to read chapters, wholly aware that each person--family and friends, as well as strangers--who read my story might very well echo her dismay.

But I was also aware that my story, in its most basic form, is everyone’s. Once you move past the specifics of my experience--the drug and alcohol abuse, the petty crimes, the racial conflicts, the religious angst, etc.--what you are left with is a person who is on a universal quest to discover who he is and what his place is in the world. I understood that in revealing myself to readers, I might also be revealing readers to themselves. My mother included. As I offered her more and more of my tale, I suspected, and hoped, that her sighs were as much for herself as they were for me. Her joy in my triumphs was also her joy in her own. And so I am inclined to believe that, on some level, I wrote my memoir not to single myself out for attention, not to boast of any uniqueness, but as a way of proclaiming my sameness, and, in so doing, blending into the crowd of humanity. Disrobing in the public square, then, odd though it may seem, could very well be the ultimate expression of privacy. --Jerald Walker

(Photo © Corry De Neef)

About the Author

Jerald Walker is an associate professor of English at Bridgewater State College. Married and the father of two young sons, he lives in Bridgewater, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in The Best American Essays (2007 and 2009), Best African American Essays (2009 and 2010), the anthology Brothers: 26 Stories of Love and Rivalry, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Missouri Review, The Iowa Review, and Mother Jones, for which he profiled Chicago’s South Side.

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam Books
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0553807552
• ISBN 13: 9780553807554
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256