The Corner. David Simon
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wrapped in certainty and purpose. Kiti pockets his house key, ambles to the car, and at last they’re off, only to be snagged a block away by the traffic light at Monroe. As the engine idles roughly in the January cold, Ella watches Smitty and Gale in front of the bar; Gale, holding her baby as she touts a package, oblivious to the winter wind. Curt appears in the crosswalk, lifting his cane in acknowledgment of Ella, and from the front steps of the shooting gallery, with his satchel at his feet, Blue waves with genuine pleasure. An artist by trade, Blue still keeps his paints, markers, and a book of poems in that satchel, carrying it with him everywhere for fear of losing it in the needle palace. And Ella is working on Blue, trying to recruit him for an art class at the rec. She tries again today.
Kiti rolls down the passenger window and Ella calls to her neighbor.
“Hello, Mr. Blue. When you coming down?”
“Soon. Soon, Ella.”
“We need you, Blue.”
He flashes a self-deprecating smile, but only waves. No commitment this time; too much running and gunning. A shame, she thinks, watching the traffic up and down Blue’s steps.
The light changes and she drives on. The world of Fayette and Monroe fades, to be replaced in its turn by an endless succession of drug corners as the car rolls north through the heart of West Baltimore. Fulton and Lexington, Fulton and Edmondson, Fulton and Lanvale—all of them the same.
“It doesn’t make sense,” she says, as much to herself as to Kiti. If Ella Thompson has a practiced mantra, this is it: It doesn’t make sense. And to her, on the outside peering in, the corner world would never make sense. Strange, since she has spent so many years living at the edge of it. Stranger still, since she has seen it creep into her own life and destroy so much.
She was married a year and a half before she even had a clue. Allen was from a hardworking family, with steady work down at the General Refractors plant in Curtis Bay. It was a union job, decent money, and for a time, their life together seemed to promise a better future. Ella had been through one relationship already; her oldest child, Shulita, was by that man, and two more, Donilla and Tito, quickly followed from the marriage to Allen. At the least, a hardworking husband promised to take her away from the endless drudgery of packaging canned soups at the Gross & Blackwell Company, a merciless job for a twenty-five-year-old woman. For that alone, Allen was salvation of a kind, a knight in shining armor, and maybe that was why she was so slow to figure things out. They were always short of money as young couples with children are always short of money, so, naturally, she only noticed the backsliding when paid-for things started to disappear around the house. It was little things at first, food and small appliances, but eventually the big-ticket stuff too. Love kept her blind until the day she found his tools. With the spike out in the open, she swallowed her fear and tried confrontation, but that just made for another broken promise. What could she do? And where could she go? She was young then, with three children under the age of four, just frightened and foolish enough to try to ignore the drugging, and later, to ignore the beatings that came from guilty rage. She tried to wait him out, hoping against all logic that things would get better if she just loved him enough.
Her sister offered her refuge after one of those bad nights of abuse and tears. But even in that sanctuary, she couldn’t see her way to a solution. I’ve made my bed hard, she told her sister, then went home to suffer some more. Eventually, and through no decision of her own, she caught a break: Allen fell for three years on a state drug charge. He took that gray corrections division bus to Hagerstown; Ella and her children used the pause to fashion their escape.
Taking Fulton across North Avenue, Ella and Kiti reach the top end of Monroe Street and the New Shiloh Baptist Church, a bastion of the older order in black Baltimore, a magnet that still draws together the fragments of broken neighborhoods in a genuine display of power and glory.
On this cold, cloudy Friday, the parking lot is filling fast; cars, trucks, and minivans line up behind the hearse and limousine already waiting at the entrance. The good people—the whole of black Baltimore that stands apart from the corner—have come together in grief and tribute for one of their own.
Ella and Kiti join the throng as it moves rapidly through the lobby, filling the amphitheater of pews that fan out from the pulpit. Ella and her son move down an aisle and find seats; immediately, Ella begins looking around, scanning the faces row by row.
“Thank God,” she says finally.
Tito isn’t here.
A few minutes before the choir breaks out with the opening hymn, Gordon finds her. They embrace and he guides Ella to a coterie of polished young soldiers, introducing her to his friends. She smiles on all of them, so crisp in starched dress uniforms. Strong, fine men, she tells herself. Like Dana. Like Tito. Serious young men, they extend polite handshakes and soft words.
The service begins. Ella steps back into the aisle, grasps Gordon’s hand once again, then moves lightly to her own seat. Among the scores of churches that speckle black Baltimore from Hilton Parkway on the west side to Milton Avenue on the east—gothic piles and storefronts, old stone monoliths and rehabbed rowhouses—New Shiloh holds upper-rung status. On the west side, only Bethel A.M.E. and its legendary choir can argue greater standing in the community than New Shiloh. For Ella, who calls a more modest African Baptist church at Baltimore and Pulaski home, the vast auditorium and a full house of more than five hundred mourners gives weight and authority to Dana’s homecoming. So, too, does the Reverend Harold Carter.
“I am sad this morning,” he says, bearing down on the eulogy with a ringing tenor, “I am grieved, but I cannot, I will not be disappointed today.”
It isn’t the usual West Baltimore funeral oratory, the kind that gracefully forgives the frailty of the departed, that struggles to understand the will of God in a merciless world. Today, the Reverend Mr. Carter can offer words that are unlike so many others spoken from city pulpits. Today, he does not have to account for another young life squandered amid the drugs and the guns. Today, he is free to hail a right-living young man who transcended the corners to serve his country and, ultimately, to give his life not to a needle or handgun, but to the random chance of a loose electrical cable. In Baltimore, this is close enough to be called victory.
All of which is not lost on the reverend, who chooses this eulogy to draw the comparisons: Dana’s short life, the lives of so many others expended on the city’s streets. To the call-and-response of willing, waiting mourners, he hits every note:
“… because for once I am not here to bury a young man who lost his way in drugs and violence …”
“YES, LAWD.”
“… and for once I do not have to help a young man’s family and friends hold their heads high, for their heads are not bowed. There was no shame in the life of this fine young man.”
“TELL IT. TELL IT.”
The eulogy rolls outward in waves—cresting, ebbing, then cresting again until Harold Carter is at the crescendo, displaying for the faithful the talents that have accorded him the New Shiloh pulpit. Then, almost as a relief, the choir chimes in, followed by telegrams and messages of condolence and, finally, an accounting of an unfinished life, the obituary of Dana Lamm.
At the end of the service, Ella consults briefly with Kiti. They decide to ride with friends in the procession to the burial site at Arlington National Cemetery, south of Washington. Tito would have wanted that, and on this winter morning, his mother and brother are his loyal surrogates.
“Must be fifty cars,” says Kiti, as the procession begins to roll south on Monroe Street, or old U.S. 1 as it appears on the road maps. Monroe snakes south through block after block of rowhouses until it crosses the west side expressway.
At the intersection with Fayette, Ella sees that the packages are now out. Curt is on post in front of the liquor store with a half-dozen others, and Blue is tending to shooting gallery business from his front steps. The funeral rolls past them, then down the hill into the edges of hillbilly Pigtown and across Wilkens Avenue, where Monroe Street wraps itself around Carroll Park and then glides past the vacant Montgomery Ward