Jerald Walker teaches English lit and creative writing at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, but his memoir, Street Shadows, is a south-side Chicago tale through and through—real deal, as some say below Cermak, unspun in its tracking of the author’s circular path from hope to despair and then back to hope again. Street Shadows is Walker’s homage to second chances, recounting how he took a wayward turn in youth and still found his way as an adult, discovering opportunity in Chicago.
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I was born on the west side in a housing project. My parents, both of whom were blind, struggled mightily to get us out of that environment, and they managed to do so in 1970, when I was six years old. We moved to South Shore, which was predominately white. We were one of the first black families, if not the first black family, to move into the neighborhood. It was a solid, middle-class, stable environment. That lasted for a few years, until the whites seemed to have some important place to be. We started noticing the for-sale signs sprouting up, until, maybe six, seven years after we had arrived, the neighborhood was all black. And by ten years after we’d arrived it had turned into a ghetto, not unlike the project area we’d moved from.
By age 14 I’d started experimenting with drugs and alcohol. I dropped out of high school at 16. Then, by 20, I had a strong interest in snorting all the cocaine I could find. And then a friend of mine was murdered when I was 21—he died soon after I’d bought some drugs from him. That kind of shook me up like other things had not shaken me up and made me decide it was time to redirect my life. So, at the age of 24, I enrolled in Loop College [now Harold Washington College], and there I met Professor Edward Homewood, who took an interest in me and in my writing ability. He helped me get to the Iowa Writers Workshop.
A lot of what I do early in the book is focus on my teenage years through flashback. All of these flashbacks chronicle my experiences growing up around 80th and Phillips. You can see me becoming progressively more involved in the street life, getting caught up in that transformation of the neighborhood. In the later chapters, you see me progressively more involved in the academic life that I ultimately go to. So I use the flashbacks to try to capture that sense of movement.
Uplifting. One of the things I wanted to do with the book is say that yes, there is struggle, and there are obstacles, and there are challenges in life. A lot more attention needs to be placed on the overcoming rather than on the obstacles themselves. But to focus on the achievements and the overcoming was a challenge for me. I really try to get that across in Street Shadows. Every review that I’ve gotten that talks about the book mentions that it doesn’t blame anyone for anything. I state the facts the way they are, and then I say how they are dealt with. And I’m pretty proud of that.
