Finding the Third Way

Shelter - A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore, by Lawrence Jackson

I've lived in a Baltimore suburb for 30 years, and frequently head into the city for restaurants, a book store browse, or a walk around Fells Point.  I love Baltimore.  I love its grittiness.  I love the stately row houses lining Federal Hill.  I pass pokey little alley ways and forgotten places that smell of Old City and Damp Concrete and notice the beautiful metal grills and flower pots full of bright blooms.  I love the Harbor and the stadiums and Little Italy and all the things that make Baltimore what it is. 

But I don't know Baltimore at all!  

Sure, I knew about the other Baltimore.   I see the pictures in the newspaper.  I watch mayor after mayor make promises to do better.  I see the murder rate stats and hear stories from my braver friends who live on MLK Blvd, or Druid's Hill, shaking my head, wondering why on earth they chose to live there.   But, always, I keep on driving, staying safe on the east side of Charles Street, and snug on the cobble stones of Canton and Fells Point.  The other Baltimore is not mine and I don't give it much thought.

Once when Zoë was young, we set off to the Baltimore Zoo (this is pre-GPS) using written directions to navigate what should have been a straight shot down I-83.  Baltimore Zoo is in West Baltimore but on the safe side of the street.  With warnings to not get lost, I quickly found myself in a neighborhood I did not recognize at all.  

It was a completely alien landscape from the touristy white "B'more."  I grew up in cities and it takes a lot for me to feel nervous, but I was starting to sweat.  Maybe because Zoë was strapped into the back seat.  Maybe it was the people lingering on the street corners outside the liquor stores swaggering to the thump, thump, thump of the boombox.  Maybe it was the growing realization that I didn't know how to get out of these strange streets.  And then a lanky boy sauntered over and thumped the car roof.  "Hey," he called out laughing, "You lost?  You must be lost?"  

Finally, I pulled over.  Using the latest in cell phone technology (remember the clunky bricks that we carried around in huge, heavy charging bags?), I called John, who pulled out his city map, and talked me out of the neighborhood, street by street, turn by turn.  Finally I was on North Avenue, driving to the zoo and safety.  

But as I wandered around those backstreets, I noticed things.  There were lots of Mom and Pop shops advertising beer, cigarettes, cigars and other non-edibles.  There were hair salons, and, it seemed like, a church on every block.  There were few trees or green spaces, no grocery stores, nothing nice - just row after row of little houses in various degrees of dilapidation.  And the young men in the droopy jeans and heavy gold chains, hanging on the corners, yelling at each other across the traffic.   I'd never been to this Baltimore.  And I didn't want to return.  Ever.

Shelter - A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore, by Lawrence Jackson, published in April, 2022, by Greywolf Press, is a poetic and lyrical narrative, weaving together Jackson's story with that of Baltimore's.  He is one who got away from those ghetto streets.  But he is one who came back.  His voice authentically speaks to the struggle of the upwardly mobile Black middle-class and the Baltimore they call "home."

There's a line that divides the city from the Haves and the Have-nots, the elite and the dealers that lies cheek by jowl with some of the poshest neighborhoods in the city.  But the line might as well be a moat full of alligators and the other Baltimore could just as well be on the planet Mars.  No one crosses that line for any good reason.  The fact that Jackson did makes his story and that of Baltimore's, a fascinating and heartbreaking tale of institutional racism up to the present day.  Starting with the Homeland Manor built off the backs of slaves, Jackson describes how the White City Founders set up civic life, law and order to ensure the Black community stayed in their part of town, with their own schools, jobs, churches; their own way of life. Systematically and with a sharp clarity, Jackson peals back the underbelly of this city and reveals it for what it was, and as a result, for what it is.

I think the most shocking reveal (spoiler alert), which shows my own willful ignorance, is the Johns Hopkins University story line.  I consider JHU to be an elite university. Its Homewood campus lies right in the middle of West Baltimore - with that manor house I mentioned, on its campus as a symbol of all that is White and Right.  Throughout its history, JHU has resisted admitting Black students.  Even today, its diversity pie is over 40% White, with a mere 7.6% or just over 2,000 African American or Black students.  The only pieces of the pie that are less are the 2+, the Unknowns and the Islanders.  Underneath the pie, there is this statement - The majority of students at JHU are white.  Racial/ethnic diversity at Johns Hopkins is very high. Let's put this into context.  It seems that JHU recruits from everywhere but Baltimore.   According to Jackson, little is done in the immediate community to seek scholars from the neighborhood schools.  Most students, like a whooping 88%, come from out of state.  Building is case, author's tells of the efforts made by the university to keep local bright, promising Black students out.   Ironically the author is a Black man from the local Black community, who is a tenured professor at JHU.  One of the 3,440, or 18% of professors of color.  What's so incredible is that somehow, Jackson made it through the Baltimore City schools, through Stanford University and into a career in academics at Emory University, before heading home to B'more to accept his position at JHU.  Instead of returning to the old neighborhood, he created a home in the White enclave of Roland Park, where there are rules about mowing and noise and expectations to keep your house in good repair. 

Mostly this book is about that - the full circle back to Homewood.  But it's also about the terrible hardship and indignities Jackson has undergone to hold onto his identity as a Black man navigating the White world.  He wanted more out of life and so he bought a house in that posh neighborhood he could barely afford but which symbolized his middle-class rise.  While his neighbors bring in Latino crews to tend to the lawns and Trump bumper-stickered service trucks to fix the faucets and roofs to keep up the image of affluent middle class America, Jackson does the work himself.   The impulse to do so is not just about money but is buried in his DNA.  He is doing the same work his ancestors, the Black maids and gardeners and slaves of yesteryear.  The difference is it's his plot, his tree, his leaves that he's tending.

Until 1968, he would not have been able to buy a house in Homewood.  But with the work of the Civil Rights movement, the community association had to amend its rules, if not its practices.  But you can still keep black, brown and Jews out; you just have to be sneaky about it.   Jackson figured his way in.  But once in, he spends time exploring the neighborhood, walking it's wide, tree-lined avenues as the white SVUs drive by looking for people, both past and present.  He finds its alley ways that funneled Black servants in and out of white homes unseen, dumping them out at the bus stop on the main road.   He recognizes the irony of each step he takes on the main thoroughfares.   Unlike his ancestors, he is visible to all.

In his own quiet way, Jackson is a change agent.  He is opening a door that both sheds light on the city's deep racist roots, making a life that is rightfully his, but by doing so, finding a Third Way to set a trail for others to follow.  That Third Way is the way out of racism, I believe, and of which this book has given me a glimpse, if not a sense of hope, of what the next steps for our community, for our country, could be.   I'll be thinking about this book for a long time to come, but mostly, I want to join him in his walk on the broad, leafy main roads and bring West Baltimore with us.