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

A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore

Lawrence Jackson

Graywolf Press

Copyright 2022 by Lawrence Jackson

Epiphany: Sunday Boys appeared in different form under the title Letter from Baltimore in the Paris Review .

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This publication is made possible, in part, by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund. Significant support has also been provided by the McKnight Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the Amazon Literary Partnership, and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. To these organizations and individuals we offer our heartfelt thanks.

Published by Graywolf Press

212 Third Avenue North, Suite 485

Minneapolis, Minnesota 55401

All rights reserved.

www.graywolfpress.org

Published in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-64445-083-3

Ebook ISBN 978-1-64445-173-1

2 4 6 8 9 7 5 3 1

First Graywolf Printing, 2022

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021940585

Cover design: Kimberly Glyder Design

Cover photo: Courtesy of the author

To

Mitchell

Katani

and

Nathaniel

We learned early that to own the roof which gave us shelter was one of our first duties and to become a contributor to the expenses of our community by being a tax payer was an obligation which every citizen owes to the government which protects him and provides conveniences to his comfort and well-being.

Harry S. Cummings, Baltimore City Council (19101913)

John of Rampayne, an excellent juggler and minstrel, undertook to effect the escape of one Audulf de Bracy, by presenting himself in disguise and succeeded in imposing himself on the king, as an Ethiopian minstrel. He effected, by stratagem, the escape of the prisoner. Negroes, therefore, must have been known in England in the dark ages.

Walter Scott, Ivanhoe (1819)

Just think of a man surrounded by color storms rising almost to a hurricane.

J. V. L. McMahon to D. M. Perine, January 16, 1865

I plotted my return the day after the heaviest snowfall in a decade, a bright January afternoon. I was in Baltimore with my sons, who were sitting for entrance examinations at a local boys country day school. While they speed-penciled the bubbles, I would look at neighborhoods for our new home. I had grown up with two people who held real estate licenses in Maryland, but I didnt quite think of them. I would be looking in another part of town.

Although, relative to rank and compensation, the offer I had been made outlined an executive job, I wasnt billeted in a waterfront hotel downtown. The boys and I had taken a cab from the airport to my mothers rowhouse in the Northwest, the part of the city where I had been raised. The night we arrived, three feet of snow blanketed the land. I awoke in a panic at 5:00 a.m. and headed outdoors to shovel my mothers car out of the drift. I thought it was ungenerous to pitch the snow into the street or build an impassable igloo on the sidewalk, so I baled the heavy frozen cotton onto the neighbors yard. I shoveled steadily for two hours. When I looked in the mirror later that day I thought I was coming down with pink eye: my wintertime labor had burst a blood vessel.

The administrator of the college I would be joining had recommended a realtor. Earlier in our negotiations she had asked my preference for neighborhood, and I answered with an instinctive gaffe. Homewood, maybe Homeland? I responded genially. Ive forgotten the difference. I had not been on the inside of a home in either neighborhood, whose names sounded enough alike to me to be indistinguishable. I was also translating an instinctive response in one tongue to another language altogether. But my imprecision was promptly addressed. Oh, theyre not the same at all, the administrator, a city native whose family had migrated to the suburbs, replied with cheery obduracy. To Baltimoreans of another sort, people who were accustomed to understand or benefit from the exactness of the law, precisely accounting these neighborhoods meant something else entirely. Homewood and Homeland are somewhat contiguous through other signature tracts, Guilford and Roland Park, but one signifies the Johns Hopkins campus, and the other a residential world beyond it. I had grown up in Baltimore without ever once imagining the antebellum histories of either neighborhood, and the way that those pasts would necessarily collide with my own.

I took the clarification easily. Working to appear mild-mannered and hiding petulance are my gifts to the world.

I dropped the lads and my mother off at the preparatory school to endure what is only a preliminary regimen of assessment that will continue over the next few months in Atlanta. Although both children have been exceptional students their entire lives, they have attended public schools in Georgia and need to be measured against the nations nine- and eleven-year-olds from the independent schools. The colors of the school signal the ancient unification, the blue and the gray. Neither child will be offered admission.

A mile away I found the realtor, a trim, energetic, dark-haired Tab drinker. She drove an upgraded model SUV, freshly detailed despite the snow and salt, and when I climbed in she handed off a folder with a dozen listings. The realtor had not grown up in the city, and her words twanged with eastern waters edge. Her son had recently graduated from my old Jesuit high school and she was easily familiar with me in a way that emphasized her presumption that with only slightly different decisions she could be the executive recruit and I the local factor working on commission. I was reluctant to concede this, not simply because it was so readily true, but because the more clear-eyed fact was that she was my better. As soon as I told her where my mother lived she would know the sort of visa I required to visit her part of the world. How long would it take or in what manner would the company have to be mixed before my own country idiom began to show?

The gulf between us was temporary. I had no way of imagining in such short time exactly how much I would rely on the agents efficient professionalism. I lived in Georgia and she would be the person selecting the home inspector and attending the home inspection. Her mouth would chip down the price when the inspectors report came back. Her hands would deliver the tidy sums and promises of more. I would have to trust her, although she had fundamentally divided loyalties since her profit came from my paying more, not less, for the house. The commission from the sale would be in the range of $15,000 and the agent would be entitled to half of that. All I could do was pay.