How to Make a Slave and Other Essays

"This piercing and restless collection slices through this country's agitated racial landscape with the tenacity of a thunderbolt. 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."
--Patricia Smith, author of Incendiary Art
"I've been waiting for this, the first collection of essays by one of our best essayists, for years. 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."
--Ander Monson, author of I Will Take the Answer
"These aren't essays. This is hypnosis, a spell of enchantment cast over the reader by a masterful writer whose crystal-clear vision is not only original but revelatory. 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."
--Charles Johnson, author of Middle Passage, winner of the National Book Award

"The essays in this collection are restless, brilliant and short....The brevity suits not just Walker's style but his worldview, too....Keeping things quick gives him the freedom to move; he can alight on a truth without pinning it into place." --Jennifer Szalai, the New York Times
"[These] powerful essays offer an incisive glimpse into life as a Black man in America. 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." --Kirkus (starred review)

​"Walker ... delivers a stylish and thought-provoking collection of reflections on his personal and professional life....[His] rich compilation adds up to a rewardingly insightful self-portrait that reveals how one man relates to various aspects of his identity."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"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 is furious and funny. He is talking to himself about his life and allows us to listen in."--Judges' citation, 2020 National Book Awards

"How to Make a Slave and Other Essays by South Side native Jerald Walker was one of the year's smartest sleepers, an often hilarious roundup of stories about the obliviousness of white liberals, race and restaurant seating, and the writer's own mentor."--Chicago Tribune