Donald Lives in Middle East Baltimore

Donald lives in Middle East Baltimore.

Middle East Baltimore is being erased. 

My class met Donald outside of an old Catholic school.  A room on the top floor acts as the headquarters of the Save Middle East Action Committee.  The committee was created nine years ago by neighborhood residents who learned about the East Baltimore Development Initiative from the newspapers.  EBDI is a fourteen year plan to revitalize the entire East side, turning it into an internationally prestigious Hopkins research park and diverse residential neighborhood.  To do this they are evicting current residents, promising replacement housing, and bulldozing their homes.  

Donald was warm and welcoming.  "I want my home to be your home today", he said with a gracious smile, revealing plaque covered teeth.  

His deep accent sounded Nigerian, and I wondered if he was from Lagos,  but as we walked down the road we passed the house he grew up in, and I realized it was just an East Baltimore accent - ebonics or black english vernacular as some call it.  

Our group of students wandered past mountains of swelled black trash bags, torn and spilling out chicken bones and whiskey bottles.  We listened to Donald talk about the pain, uncertainty and anxiety of being displaced from his home.  He talked about the community's fight for fair housing rights when EBDI left promises unfulfilled.    

I snapped a picture of an eviction notice stapled to the wood of a boarded up door.

How could I help but recall another Baltimore?  At the turn of the 20th century, this city was the first to bring about segregation and a sentiment of racialized urban reform.

A cool breeze comes down the street, and our group passes expanses of empty lots, like a bomb went off, where row-homes once stood.  We see signs:

"Building a Better Baltimore!"

"A New East Side"

"Progress Ahead!"

with pictures of white people doing yoga, and a black and blonde girl smiling cheek to cheek.

How could I help but recall the promises of urban renewal, growth, and "serving the greater good" that surrounded slum clearance in 1911?

Hopkins Hospital stands above us on a hill, a beautiful ivory tower.  Donald says he was born there, and now they are treating him like a second class citizen.  

How can I help but recall past Hopkins doctors like William Welchm, who lectured on the "negro problem", stating that blacks were more prone to poverty, immorality, and disease, especially tuberculosis.  Whites believed they would bring their problems wherever they moved, like a contagion.  Something had to be done.  Baltimore legalized residential segregation in 1910, setting the model for the rest of the country.   

EBDI's project is a model for the rest of the world.  This is how you do urban revitalization.

As our group walks further into the neighborhood, I linger in front of yet another abandoned home.  Two black and white photos are stapled to the plywood where a window once was.  One depicts a riot in the 1960's, when the Jim Crow laws were overturned.  The other is of Martin Luther King Jr. speaking to a crowd.  

A few blocks away, layers of brick and cement peel off a building, like flesh falling off a leper.  A spray paint tag on a neighboring wall cries out "I wonder if heaven got a ghetto!"

We returned to the old catholic school where we began to talk more with Donald in the classroom on the top floor.  Sneakered feet trudged up the steps, past old sunday school signs saying "Love one another", past a picture of a black Jesus and a black Last Supper. 

A plastic statue of the Virgin Mary stands next to a dirty window, palms pressed together at her breast.  Rows and rows and rows of red brick homes stretch into the  sunlight below, but her eyes are averted, staring at heaven, or maybe nothing at all, in the middle of some some quiet, anxious plea.  

Ariel

All of a sudden, I was bound in a big, childlike hug. I strained my neck backwards to see Arielle, although I couldn’t remember her name at the time, and Im pretty sure she didn’t remember mine either. Where did I know her from? Obviously it didn’t matter; she seemed excited to catch me leaning against the rod iron fence outside. I was reading Freud while I waited for the evening shuttle home.


The girl released the hug and I saw she was wearing one of those horizontally striped tshirts you find in the little boys section of WalMart. On top of her dyed-red hair sat a cap with a purple muppet face on the front. His white circle eyes stared at me and the hat’s flat brim was his gaping mouth. Arielle’s own eyes are kind of spacey, and you can tell she’s not fully with it, but you find a lot of that at art school.
  

She excitedly showed me a square paperback book, perfect bound with smooth, guillotine-cut edges. Apparently her mom (but not really her mom, a woman her dad dated and is the closest she has to a mother figure), suggested the book to her. She said everyone was reading it in the seventies. It's about God and yoga and being in the "here and now". The middle is full of really intricate line drawings that look like something you'd see on a punk rock poster. The cream colored pages have lavender type and photos of old gurus. 
  

We were talking about theories of where to find happiness when my shuttle arrived. I told her she should come visit me in the Student Activities office some time.

I was working late the next night and sure enough, she strolled in with the same purple monster staring at me from atop her head. I'm pretty sure she was wearing the same shirt too, and definitely the same quirky smile. 
  

"Can I get your opinion on something" she asked, holding up a cardboard portfolio.

"Yeah!" I said, gliding away from the computer in my rolley chair. 

Three large pieces of paper with torn edges emerged. One drawing spanned across them all.

"It's my take on the Garden of Earthly Delights," she said as she laid them next to each other on the carpet. 
  

A highlighter pink woman floated sideways in a sky painted maroon-purple. She was covered in intricate line drawings that reminded me of the guru book. Wrinkled cigarettes, Marlborough boxes with gold centers, and clusters of pills colored with a light green watercolor wash crowded the pages. There were little cartoon -like figures, some that looked like naked people, others that looked like strange animals. Neon vibrated everywhere. 
  

"My teacher said I use too much color" Arielle noted, which made me sad because I found the chaotic hues very appropriate. 
  

Tonight she was making a second version of the drawing in the form of a wheel. We talked through the technicalities of constructing it, and I gave her a large piece of foam core to mount it on. She began measuring and I got back to my computer, listening to her talk about her weekend, saying, “I’m so tired! I gotta stop doing some of this stuff.” We both couldn’t help but laugh a little. “It’s too expensive and too much of a hassel to get anyway.” We agreed that there’s better things to focus on. 

I was on my cell phone when she took a break from her work and snuck up behind me just as she had the night before. But her surprises are only loving, and she began to smooth her hands through my hair, sending goosebumps down my legs. I love that feeling. I momentarily tuned out the voice coming from the phone at my ear to crane my head back and give her a smile of approval, not that she needed one.

Josh

Bending over,
I place the knives of mirror carefully on top of my palm.
"I probably would have been the one to smash that
ten years ago," Josh says.
Josh lives on the second floor.
We are sharing our porch stoop this morning,
me being a Sunday laundry person,
him being a cigarette person.
He looks like a young McJagger with a lisp and curled up eyelashes,
his chest swelling beneath a wife beater.
You would never guess he's thirty-three.
"So you were a rebel without a cause, huh?" I say.
"Yeah" he smiles.
"And now?"
"Just tryin to find one." he says.
He's been chasing a BFA for over ten years,
and says, with nicotine teeth,
"I've been messin around for a long time."
I look up and say his slow pace is refreshing.
"Well, only a few more poems to write", he says
"then I'll probably just be working in some coffee shop."

With all the broken mirror pieces in my hand,
I rise
and tell him how I've been trying to write a
big philosophical poem
for the past month.
Then we decide that universals
are best when boiled down
to small real life happenings.

During the mirror's funeral procession to the trash
on Charles and Eager,
I am suddenly holding the sky in my hand.

And when i toss the mirror into
the dark metal bin
with Dorito bags and coffee cups,
it turns into shards of red brick rowhomes
that cut through the sour smell.

I walked away with a bowed head,
in mourning for the mirror,
and for the city,
and then
for the sparrow
who abruptly appeared,
dead at my feet.
Her stick legs jutted out beneath her,
with talons gripping a branch that wasn't there.
Her black eyes were paused in a squint,
like she was looking into something beyond
the hard brick sidewalk
beneath her head.
Her swollen breast shone pure yellow,
as if reflecting the sun.