CARBONDALE, Ill.   —He’s big, he’s black and he plays basketball, but Javan E. Walker stubbornly refuses to stick to the stereotype.

        The 6-foot-8-inch, 33-year-old Detroit native, who has little use for “ebonics,” finished a master’s degree in English at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale last spring.

     This spring, the Midwestern Association of Graduate Schools said the thesis he wrote to earn that degree was the best one produced by students in 18 states.

     Walker acknowledges that his academic specialty marks him as different among “the brothers.”

     “It’s not terribly common yet to find black guys in the humanities—there are probably not enough of us to make a basketball team,” says Walker, whose prize-winning work explores the effect of race-based stereotypes on characters in Ralph Ellison’s novel, “Invisible Man.”

     But, he says, echoing the idea he developed in his thesis, the notion that all black folks must look the same, talk the same and make the same life choices is a stereotype—one cherished not just by whites but by many blacks as well.

     “Back in 1952 (when “Invisible Man” was published), Ralph Ellison saw something no one else did—that that magical African essence that draws all blacks together is a fraud,” Walker says.

     “Get rid of that (idea), and blacks are free to be who they are.”

     He pauses, smiles.

     “Free to be English majors,” he says with a laugh as rich and sweet as chocolate.

     Walker’s road to freedom was a long, twisting one.  He discovered, when he started school, that he was good at it; as a boy, that caused him no grief.

     “My (black) friends would tease me and call me ‘Genius,’ but I was in with them,” he recalls.

     “We’d go down to the creek, pull up girls’ skirts, get into trouble—we did everything together, and I was just the smart one.”

     But things began to change as they all got older.

     “There was a stigma attached to being intelligent,” Walker says.

     “The idea that you’d do well in school, get a good job and move out to the ’burbs meant that you were leaving them behind.  I’d say, ‘I’m not leaving you behind.  What’s stopping you from following me?’”

     By the time he reached high school, there was another force at work as well.  The son of a career Army officer, Walker had lived in four large, racially mixed cities before his father retired.  But after the family settled in East Peoria in 1976, Walker began to feel “different.”

     “I was one of only eight black kids in my high school,” he recalls.

     “People, not meaning to be mean, would say or do things that would just crush me.  The thoughtless black joke…or ‘We don’t think of you as black…’  I’d think, ‘Well, then, what am I?’

     “For a long time, the issue of race was very troublesome.  It’s probably what sent me down the road I’m on.”

     Like his father before him, he started drinking in his senior year.

     “I like to say that I integrated the high school, and they integrated me with Budweiser,” Walker says with another deep laugh.

     After he finished high school, Walker attended a nearby community college for a couple of years, playing basketball there well enough to win an athletic scholarship to a small college in North Dakota.

     “I was one of six black folks in the entire county, and five of us were on the basketball team,” he says, shaking his head.

     “It was as bleak an environment as I have ever been in in my life, flat as a pool table.  There was one stoplight in the whole county, and that wasn’t a real stoplight—it blinked.”

     Adjustment problems and alcohol made college life feel “like a death sentence.”  By October, he was out of there.

     Walker worked for a time as counter help at a Big Boy restaurant out in California.  He sold women’s shoes.  He spent three years in the infantry, “rappelling, jumping out of helicopters and having a lot of fun with bullets.”  After he got out of the Army, Walker worked as a hotel doorman and a nightclub disk jockey, and all the while, he continued to drink.

     He wound up at SIUC in the fall of 1991 completely by chance.  A friend he’d met at the hotel was planning to enroll, and Walker thought he’d come along, too.  He brought his drinking problem with him.

     “Of course, I didn’t think I had a problem—the problem was when I couldn’t get beer,” Walker says with a wry smile.

     “The first thing I did in the morning was go get beer.  I’d drink a six-pack, and then I’d go out drinking.  But it was socially acceptable, and it wasn’t hurting my schoolwork.  I had a 3.75 gradepoint average before I quit.”

     He quit May 12, 1992, for reasons that aren’t entirely clear, even to him.  Now a deeply religious man, Walker says all he can figure is that he was stopped by the hand of God.

     “I quit drinking before I got saved, but looking back, I could see that it was easier to come to God without all that alcohol fogging my mind,” he says.  “God was preparing me to be saved.”

     His life was about to change in other ways as well.  Although he had originally signed up as an education major, he took a class on the African novel taught by newly hired English prof Robert E. Fox.

     “That course opened my head up,” Walker says.

     “I realized, ‘This is what I want to do.’  Then I went like a house on fire.”

     He finished his bachelor’s degree in 1993 with a 3.6 GPA and entered the master’s program in English.  That same year he discovered Ralph Ellison’s novel.

     Written in the 1940s and published to near-instant critical acclaim, “Invisible Man” relates the misadventures of a nameless narrator from the rural South, both down home and up North.

     While much has been written about this novel, Walker’s take on it was termed “fresh” and “inviting” by the graduate school association that gave Walker his prize.

     What Ellison did, Walker thinks, was to point out that black folks don’t automatically belong to some mystical black “community” just because they have black skin.  In fact, black folks often aren’t even very much alike.

     “Look at (trumpeter) Wynton Marsalis and (murdered rapper) Biggie Smalls,” Walker says with some heat.

     “Marsalis just won a Pulitzer.  Comparing the two is like comparing apples and pistols.  Oh, sure, at some level there’s a similarity—they’re both carbon-based.”

     Embracing that reality can set folks free, Walker believes.  The black men who are lousy at basketball, the black women who couldn’t “carry a tune if you put a handle on it,” can become truck drivers or taxidermists, antique dealers or auto mechanics.

     “You can do what you want, because it’s your mind—your path,” Walker says.

     Walker himself hasn’t decided what path to take next.  He spent six months working for two lawyers after finishing his master’s last May and a couple of months this spring as project manager for evangelist Ralph Bell’s Carbondale crusade.  Since October, he’s been youth pastor at the First Baptist Church in Valier, home to some 700 souls 30 miles northeast of his Murphysboro home.

     The advice he gives to the kids he works with comes from the lessons he’s learned along his own long way.

     “Don’t let someone else’s opinion of you become your reality; don’t let someone else’s expectations preclude your path to greatness,” he urges.

     “Go after what you want wholeheartedly but with integrity, and keep in mind that you can’t run with everybody and follow your own path.  Shrug off criticism and being left out, and remember that the main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing.  You alone can live your life, and you owe yourself that life.”