Jerald Walker

Personal essays exploring identity, work, family, and community through the prism of race and black culture.

How to Make a Slave and Other Essays

A memoir of growing up with blind, African-American parents in a segregated cult preaching the imminent end of the world When The World in Flames begins, in 1970, Jerry Walker is six years old. His consciousness revolves around being a member of a church whose beliefs he finds not only confusing but terrifying. Composed of a hodgepodge of requirements and restrictions (including a prohibition against doctors and hospitals), the underpinning tenet of Herbert W. Armstrong’s Worldwide Church of God was that its members were divinely chosen and all others would soon perish in rivers of flames. The substantial membership was ruled by fear, intimidation, and threats. Anyone who dared leave the church would endure hardship for the remainder of this life and eternal suffering in the next. The next life, according to Armstrong, would arrive in 1975, three years after the start of the Great Tribulation. Jerry would be eleven years old. Jerry’s parents were particularly vulnerable to the promise of relief from the world’s hardships. When they joined the church, in 1960, they were living in a two-room apartment in a dangerous Chicago housing project with the first four of their seven children, and, most significantly, they both were blind, having lost their sight to childhood accidents. They took comfort in the belief that they had been chosen for a special afterlife, even if it meant following a religion with a white supremacist ideology and dutifully sending tithes to Armstrong, whose church boasted more than 100,000 members and more than $80 million in annual revenues at its height. When the prophecy of the 1972 Great Tribulation does not materialize, Jerry is considerably less disappointed than relieved. When the 1975 end-time prophecy also fails, he finally begins to question his faith and imagine the possibility of choosing a destiny of his own.

A Black Boyhood in a White Supremacist Doomsday Cult

The World in Flames

"Personal essays exploring identity, family, and community through the prism of race and black culture. Confronts the medical profession's racial biases, shopping while black at Whole Foods, the legacy of Michael Jackson, raising black boys, haircuts that scare white people, racial profiling, and growing up in Southside Chicago"--

Chelsea Hodson

Dawn Davies

Jess Stoner

Catherine Carberry

Adam Ortman

Courtney Preiss

Alexandra Tanner

Jess Williard

Dawna Kemper

The Austin Review. Built by Literati. True Things. And Lies. The Austin Review is an independent, nonprofit literary journal featuring contemporary fiction and creative, flash nonfiction. This fourth issue of The Austin Review features ten works.

The Austin Review

Presents a memoir of growing up with blind, African American parents, who were members of Herbert W. Armstrong's cult, the Worldwide Church of God, which believed that their members were divinely chosen and all others would soon perish in rivers of flame. The substantial membership was ruled by fear, intimidation, and threats. Anyone who dared leave would endure hardship for the remainder of this life and eternal suffering in the next, which would arrive in 1975, three years after the start of the Great Tribulation. With more than a hundred thousand members and more than $80 million (the equivalent of $265 million in today's highest) at its height, the failure of the prophecy to materialize led the then-elementary-aged author to question his faith and imagine the possibility of choosing a destiny of his own.

Jerald Walker

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