When your (Black) child is late and you start to panic: Book shows snapshots of life right now

Jerald Walker’s “Magically Black And Other Essays” is so funny that, even though it’s nonfiction, as you read it you might find yourself tempted to think he’s kidding. That’s because Walker’s a smart aleck; his jokes run the full range from so subtle you might miss them to keen observational humor, delivered with the impeccable timing often reserved for professional stand-ups.

It’s also because the situations Walker creates and the situations that are visited upon him as a Black man in America are so surprising and savage you might go toward laughter to keep yourself from crying.

In the title essay, Walker, while teaching a class on the African American novel, emerges as a witty and brilliant jokester who reveals classrooms to be imaginative spaces where real, enduring lessons can show up. “Magically Black” functions in the same way.

As another example of Walker’s humor, during a moment of bonhomie, a contractor at Walker’s house reveals that he used to be racist, en route to saying, only seconds later, something super-racist. Walker goes on to share, in a humorous way, a racist exchange with a previous contractor and similar exchanges while trying to hire other contractors or get his house appraised. All of this is funny, right? Right?

Well, it is when Walker tells it. It also isn’t. Part of Walker’s point is that humor is one of many survival strategies Black people deploy to stay alive and somewhat sane in America.

There are other strategies. Some of them aren’t funny at all; some will break your heart.

One of the 17 wonderful essays in “Magically Black,” a short stunner called “Lost,” emerges as one of those pieces I wish the entire country would read on the same day. It’s about how a frantic Walker reacted after one of his sons arrived home from theater rehearsal, quite a bit later than expected. His son explained that after practice he went back into the school building to retrieve his forgotten cellphone, found it with its battery depleted, missed his ride home, decided to walk the significant distance from his school to his house and got lost on the way.

As Walker shares the survival strategies he and his wife developed to keep their two sons safe, and as readers realize how close his son came to a potentially lethal peril as he walked alone in the dark, what becomes clear is that the survival game cannot be won by strategy alone. It requires a measure of luck, and there’s nothing funny about that.

Taken as a whole, “Magically Black” blends the humorous with the horrific, Walker’s past as a juvenile delinquent with his present as a polished professional, personal things with pop culture things and the potentially mundane with the surprising and spectacular — all in a way that is brilliant and entertaining.

Walker thrives here with his keen mind, observant eyes and razor-sharp wit. No kidding.

Michael Kleber-Diggs is a St. Paul-based essayist, critic and poet, whose collection “Worldly Things” was published by Milkweed Editions.

Magically Black and Other Essays

By: Jerald Walker.

Publisher: Amistad, 162 pages, $24.99.