The Corner (82 page)

It isn’t like basketball. Out on the corner, there is no team for which a player should sacrifice himself. On the corner, you catch a bullet and it’s yours and yours alone. At most, the rest of your crew will show up at Brown’s for the viewing, performing for each other, swearing eternal revenge and then wandering back to their posts to sling and forget. Last night, they had seemed a team and R.C. had belonged. But the night before, he’d been beefing with Dinky over some short vials and arguing with Brooks about money owed. Tomorrow night, if the D.C. boys stay away, those arguments will resume.

For Richard Carter, the illusion of the basketball court has been carefully nurtured and sustained for one reason only. Between the baselines, he can—at the right moment and with the right players around him—be more than he believes himself to be. On the corner, however, there’s no pretending.

When his phone rings, he’s tempted not to answer, but he grabs the receiver after the fourth ring.

“Hullo.”

He pauses, listening, trying to think of something to say, something that might transport him to some other place and time, a life other than the one left to him. No such words exist.

“Yeah, I been up,” he tells Tae. “What time we goin’ down there?”

Before the children of the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center labored for three weeks in October to make it a community garden, the vacant lot at the northwest corner of Fayette and Mount was filled with
the wreckage created by a stolen car. And before a sixteen-year-old named Terrance, with half a dozen police cars in pursuit, ran his contraband up the sidewalk and into the brick rowhome, it was 1702 West Fayette, a recently vacated shooting gallery that Franklin Square neighborhood activists had managed to seize through condemnation proceedings. This had been Clean Gene’s shooting gallery, raided by police as a spring cleaning ritual and, until Terrance had his way, destined to become a men’s shelter, or a residential facility for recovering addicts, or more office space for the Echo House outreach center across the street. Before Gene got hold of it, it had been a three-story home for generations of black, Irish, and German families—a Federal—style rowhouse next door to the home where Henry Louis Mencken, the great iconoclast and sage of Baltimore, was born and raised.

But when Ella Thompson and her children first laid hands on the spot, it was dirt and rubble. Working in plain view of touts and runners, slingers and fiends at the Mount Street corners, the rec center contingent had transformed the lot into something more. By November, the empty spot was a carefully tended garden—a victory garden of a kind.

Urban greenery was the idea of last resort, as Terrance had done his work well and left the neighborhood group with few other options. His wild joyride took out the front facade of the structure, leaving what remained weak and vulnerable. A city building inspector gave the remnant last rites and, after a week or two, a dump truck and loader showed up to haul away the joists and plaster and bricks.

Myrtle Summers and Joyce Smith and the rest of the neighborhood leadership were undeterred by this unexpected development. They had fought long and hard for this real estate, planning the takeover and restoration of the rowhouse as a toehold in the heart of the Fayette Street strip. Gene had taken his needle palace elsewhere, of course, and half the rowhouses in the 1700 block of Fayette were just as derelict. But the journey had to begin somewhere, or so they reasoned. So when a sixteen-year-old with a gift for stripping ignitions ended one dream, they managed, like true optimists, to conjure another.

With some work, they reasoned, the vacant corner lot could still be transformed into something worthwhile. If not a structure restored to function and utility, then something of a symbolic nature—symbolism being so often the last refuge of the truly beleaguered.

A park. A garden. A small islet of beauty to stand in answer to the Mount Street crews—Family Affair, Diamond in the Raw, Death Row—
who so misused this crossroads. Myrtle Summers told Ella that the garden would be dedicated as a memorial to Melvin Powell, a longtime neighborhood resident who had been shot to death a year earlier during a robbery of the Korean grocery at Mount and Baltimore streets. An uncle to Tae Bennett, Powell had been working at the grocery as a security guard, and the gunmen paused in their pillaging of the front registers only long enough to shoot him down. Ella knew the horror story by heart; she knew all the neighborhood stories down to the saddest little detail. Get her started and she could recite them, one after the next, spanning weeks and months and years of life along Fayette Street, meandering through the oral history of this hellish strip and shaking her head in dismay, as if truly astonished that the intimate knowledge of so many nightmares could count for so little.

From the moment Myrtle spoke to her about it, the idea of a garden for Mr. Powell appealed to Ella’s sense of community. For her, all of Fayette Street was bound together. The children, the fiends, the working folk, the runners and touts—all of them were connected in an essential way, and no one could be touched, or hurt, or helped without it meaning something to everyone else.

She believed that. She had to believe it.

So Mr. Powell and his sacrifice would be remembered with flowers and shrubs, and his name, in turn, would give the community some sense of itself. Everyone passing this little garden—the taxpayers, the dealers, the addicts—would be required to acknowledge, on some level, that Franklin Square was still a neighborhood of caring human souls. It wasn’t any kind of solution to the mayhem, but hope is hope, and Ella Thompson had always been willing to invest in struggle for its own sake.

A week or so into October, she put the younger children to work clearing the double-width lot of rock and brick, readying it for the peat and topsoil and landscaping stones. Little Stevie and Daymo and DeRodd helped out—even Chubb and T.J. abandoned their gangster apprenticeships long enough to contribute. Ella let the girls decide where to plant the flowers—day lilies and pansies, daisies and black-eyed Susans that would go into the ground in a late planting, showing themselves on this corner until the first frost took their colors away. Toward more permanence, the rec children planted daffodil and tulip bulbs, perennials that would bring the garden to bloom in the spring. In the center of the flower beds were small shrubs, hardy evergreens that would assert themselves all winter long. The children arranged the planting by size
and color, saving the most vibrant things for the garden centerpiece—the wide bed of fresh topsoil ringed with stone in the shape of the African continent.

At first the labors of Ella and the rec center children received only indifference from the corner crews, who continued to do business along Mount Street. But in time, as this horticultural campaign continued, the touts and slingers tried to avoid the garden, traveling a block east to Gilmor, or moving a respectful distance down Mount to Baltimore Street. Eventually, some of the older kids—many of whom Ella had counted as all but lost to the corners—stopped their misadventures long enough to lend a hand. Manny Man came up from McHenry Street to spend the better part of three days with a rake and hoe—in small part because gardening proved pleasant and distracting, and in larger part because he owed one of the South Baltimore dealers quite a bit of money behind a messed-up package. Dion helped, too. So did Tae and R.C. for a half-day or so, until fresh happenings down at McHenry and Gilmor lured them back. When the volunteers were finished with their handiwork just before Halloween, it looked better than any Mount Street corner had a right to look.

“Too good for Fayette Street,” Manny Man told Ella, admiring the result. “They should sell the drugs somewheres else now that the garden is right there.”

For a while they did. By degrees, though, when the work was done and the flowers watered and the tools put away, there was nothing left at Mount and Fayette but the usual empty calm. Without the daily presence of the gardeners, the dealers returned to fill the void with their catcalls and shouts and warning whistles. Amid the last buds of the surviving annuals, a collection of candy wrappers, pretzel bags, breakaway syringes, and empty vials began to accumulate. In the final days of autumn, weeks after the planting and shortly before the park was to be dedicated by the neighborhood association, Ella went back up to the corner and cleaned the flower beds a second, then a third time. She talked to some of the Mount Street regulars, asking them to do their business on the other corners, to mind this fragile patch of paradise. To some extent, they obliged—and Ella took her usual pride in being able to command even backhanded respect from the corner crowd.

Now, just in time for the dedication on this early December day, a little bit of last-minute clean-up has the community garden looking pristine. Joyce and Myrtle both say a few words, after which the children
who worked on the garden are introduced and applauded. Then a white sheet is lifted from a wooden sign at the corner entrance to the garden, and Ella, who has taken on this project without so much as a clue, finds herself stunned and speechless. As she stares at the sign, she is no longer smiling and laughing.

Dedicated to the memory. And not just the memory of Melvin Powell, but to Andrea Perry as well.

Andrea. Fatty Pooh.

The name of her missing child, five years gone and never far from her mind. In an awkward silence, Ella reads the sign again and again.

For the rest of the dedication ceremony, Ella can barely speak. She nods acknowledgment, swallows hard and manages a genuine, if hasty, thank you. Then she retreats across Mount Street to the rec center and her backroom office.

Most people watching understand; the rest wait for a more visible moment of recognition and gratitude—a moment that never quite comes.

In her heart, of course, Ella is grateful. With the dedication, the neighborhood has done what she herself has been trying to do for the last five years. Her daughter’s life has now been remembered and recognized and reconnected to everyone who passes these corners day after day. At the rec, at her church, on the corners, Ella has for a long time been trying to give Pooh some kind of testament. What is this small garden, if not evidence of her spirit?

Yet when the sheet came up and the wooden sign stared out at her, Ella could feel years and months being ripped away, bringing her right back to the horror of the thing. Pooh is dead. Murdered. Raped. And all the hope in the world won’t change that; five years of good works and good thoughts and still, when Ella thinks about her daughter, she bleeds all over again. The garden is Ella’s beautiful handiwork; her recreation center across the street, a gift of her love; and the children, from Chubb and Old Man and Little Stevie up to Tae and Neacey and DeAndre, are her very ambition. But now, with the past confronting her, none of it is enough to cauterize the wound.

This is what Fayette Street took from Ella Thompson:

A twelve-year-old, all curls and smiles and laughter in November of 1988, walking her older sister to the bus stop at Baltimore and Gilmor. It was almost dark and very cold on that evening, but Pooh wanted to walk with Donnie, to see her onto the No. 20 bus and afterward walk
back up Fulton to Fayette. More than that, Pooh wanted to show off the hairdo that Donnie had spent more than an hour fashioning for her that afternoon.

“It’s not often you get your older sister to do up your hair like that,” Ella had told Andrea, watching Donnie work with brush and braids.

It had been Donnie’s plan to stay in for the night, but she’d been seeing a boy down in Cherry Hill, and later, after Ella left for a continuing education class at Carver High School, the older daughter decided to catch a bus and visit him. Despite the cold, Pooh tagged along, waved at her eighteen-year-old sister, then turned back up Fulton as the No. 20 rumbled down Baltimore Street. Sitting on the bus by a window, Donnie saw her go.

That night, when Ella returned from class, she assumed that everyone was in bed already. She fell asleep early, exhausted from the class. When she woke for no reason at five that morning, something told her to look in on Donnie and Pooh, Tito and Kiti.

Donnie was sound asleep. Pooh’s bed was empty.

Ella woke the older girl, but Donnie had no idea either. “I thought she came straight back home.”

The worst didn’t immediately occur to them. Pooh was twelve—just old enough to have started breaking some of the rules. She had girlfriends throughout the neighborhood, and for the rest of the early morning hours Ella tried to calm herself, to convince herself that Pooh had stayed at a friend’s and would be back home at first light, sheepish and apologetic. But when day broke, Ella called the police.

Still, Ella reasoned away the fear, imagining that Andrea had overslept, that she would awake at a friend’s house late and realize that she was in a mess of trouble. Ella told Donnie and Tito that she could imagine a worried Andrea in some other girl’s room, trying to think of how to make things right.

That morning, Ella had jury duty.

“You goin’?” Donnie asked her.

Ella nodded. Waiting for the police to call home would be an admission that something serious had really happened. Besides, she told her daughter, if she left it would give Pooh a chance to come home. “She’s probably waiting to see all of us leave so she can sneak back in here without us catching her and pretend she was here all the while.”

From the jury room at the downtown courthouse, Ella called home repeatedly. Donnie was nervous, but reassured her mother with the
news that she had twice picked up the phone only to hear the caller immediately disconnect.

“That’s Pooh,” Ella told her, half-relieved. “She’s calling to see if anyone’s around. Next time, let it ring.”

But there were no more calls, and nothing from the police.

When she returned home that night, Ella moved restlessly around the apartment. On the six o’clock news, one of the television stations had a breaking story about the body of an unidentified woman dis covered in an alley behind the 1800 block of West Baltimore Street. There was nothing more to it—no suggestion that the body was anything but an adult female—yet from the moment she heard the broadcast, Ella knew. Her fears, carefully suppressed all day long, overwhelmed her.