The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  For DeAndre, there is no common ground with anything resembling authority, and his juvenile sheet chronicles a constant struggle to stand true to himself regardless of the damage done. DeAndre McCullough doesn’t bend and he doesn’t forgive and he never forgets. In the classroom, he flies the flag of piracy and insolence. He is about struggle.

  In nursery school, he had words with a little girl and ended up crowning her with a chair. That was the first suspension. In the second and fourth grades, he fought with his teachers, taking charges for assault and more suspensions. In the fifth grade, he was asked to leave three separate schools. In the seventh grade, he failed to embrace an antidrug presentation at the school and joined the select few who can claim a charge of punching an armed Baltimore City police officer during classroom hours.

  It’s not as if school officials weren’t aware of the challenge. They caught on to DeAndre early and sent him, at age ten, to a big brother program, hoping a role model would have a positive influence. It didn’t take, but still they moved him along. He’s too smart to be held back, they would tell Fran, who learned to anticipate that on the second day of any given semester, she could expect an invitation to meet with some vice principal at some school somewhere in the city.

  But things seemed to change last September, when DeAndre came to Francis Woods and the enlightened administration of Miss Rose Davis. Fresh from his wild summer on Fairmount, DeAndre arrived at school in high spirits, and come the second day of classes, he stayed put. He was there the third day, as well. And the fourth. His mother began to believe that her son had turned a corner.

  What she didn’t know about this sudden commitment to academics was its origin, which had to do with a hot weekend night that summer, when the boys of C.M.B. got deep and decided to take a walk into South Baltimore, down to Ramsay Street in search of a rumored house party. They found it, but they weren’t exactly welcomed—at least not by the Stricker and Ramsay crew, who sensed a territorial violation. Eyes glaring, the two groups managed for a time to keep their distance, but when you’re traveling with the likes of Boo and Dorian, trouble is assured. Words got tossed, then fists, until a full-blown brawl tumbled outside. C.M.B. held its own; DeAndre and R.C. were doing most of the damage until one of the Stricker and Ramsay boys—Sherman Smith, by name—tilted the table and came out with his iron. A couple of misspent shots and C.M.B. was on the run.

  It wasn’t anything special. They’d had their share of shooting and being shot at and were usually content to laugh it off in the safety of Tae’s basement or the rec center playground, R.C. often taking the lead in editing the encounter: “Yo, we was fucking them up. Yo, did you see DeAndre hit that motherfucker? Yo, he dropped him.”

  That they got run off, that they were fighting tame when the other side had their guns out didn’t matter. In R.C.’ s version, victory would always be assured.

  But on that occasion, R.C.’ s revisionism wasn’t enough for DeAndre, who crept back home to get his .380 semi, a weary thing that could have used a little more care. Creeping back down in the bottom that same night, DeAndre spotted Sherman near McHenry Street and let one fly, but missed. Sherman returned fire and a rolling gun battle ensued, at least until DeAndre’s gun fell apart, the clip hitting the ground, the bullets spilling onto the pavement.

  Aw shit. He tried frantically to stuff the bullets into the clip, but Sherman, sensing weakness, pressed the attack and sent DeAndre scurrying back up top. Safe on the other side of Baltimore Street, his body soaked in sweat, DeAndre vowed revenge. And true to that purpose, he spent the rest of the summer hunting Sherman from Westside to Mt. Claire, but the boy was nowhere to be found.

  Until September, when on that first day of class, during the home room roll call, DeAndre caught the sound of two magic words: “Sherman Smith.”

  Yeah boy. Brightening, he scanned the room.

  “… Sherman Smith …”

  No response. Marked absent.

  DeAndre left school that day inspired. Of all the schools and of all the classes, fate chose to put Sherman in the same blessed room. All he had to do was wait him out, and for that, DeAndre was in school the next day and the day after that and for as long as it took, all the time praying that Sherman wasn’t locked up, or doing so well on some corner that he wouldn’t ever come to class. As the September days ran one to the next, his resolve never wavered. Every morning he was up and out, attending each of his first three classes, then maybe cutting out only when he was convinced Sherman was a no-show.

  He even asked his mother to help him get up in the mornings. Fran responded initially with suspicion, but after a week or so, DeAndre could see she was impressed at his effort.

  Two weeks into the semester, DeAndre was in a third-floor hallway when he focused on the vision that was Sherman, bending over to open a metal locker.

  “Yeah boy!”

  DeAndre dropped his binder and charged. Sherman had a second to straighten up before DeAndre crashed into him, sending both boys sprawling across the floor. DeAndre was on top quickly, raining fists as Sherman balled up like a possum.

  Later in her office, Rose Davis let loose on both DeAndre and Sherman, ordering them to come back the next day with a parent. DeAndre left first and quickly found R.C., who was hanging on Fulton Avenue with Dorian.

  “Look at these,” he declared, raising his swollen hands with pride. “Fucked that boy up.”

  “DeAndre, you a crazy nigger, yo,” R.C. assured him.

  Then it was off to tell Fran, who listened to the whole story and gave back only a cold look of disappointment. Watching her, DeAndre actually felt bad for the first time and found himself promising to continue with school if Fran would go and talk with Miss Davis.

  “Andre, you got to be joking,” she told him.

  But the next day, Fran went with her son to see Rose Davis, who greeted Fran warmly and ushered her into her office. As long as DeAndre could remember, Fran had always attended these meetings and, regardless of her own problems, had always managed to wear her concern into the room.

  “You can come in, too,” added Rose, her eyebrows raised. DeAndre had settled in on the couch in the outer office. “There are no secrets here.”

  True to form, Rose had spent part of the previous day tapping into her considerable sources, pinning down the details of the McCullough-Smith feud. With the three of them seated in her office, she let a long silence undermine DeAndre’s confidence, staring at him until he dropped his head and began to fidget. She related to Fran her son’s history with Sherman.

  Damn, thought DeAndre. Who snitching?

  “Well, DeAndre,” Rose said, turning her attention to him, “your attendance has certainly improved from last year.”

  He was out of his depth and he knew it, hiding behind a mumbled, “Yes’m.”

  “So now that you’ve settled your little score, I guess we won’t be seeing very much of you around here anymore.”

  “No, I’m going to go,” he insisted. “I’m going to go.”

  “Well, let’s just write that down.”

  She handed him her little account book, the repository for so many handwritten promises, all duly signed. Some were kept, most were forgotten, but all were used to try to bind her students to her, to put it on a personal level.

  DeAndre had signed that promise, but as the fall days grew shorter, he felt the ache of his poverty, the desolation of the rear bedroom on Fayette Street and the lure of the nightly action. Slowly, inexorably, he slipped off to Fairmount Avenue.

  Now he’s back. And of course, Rose Davis will take him on the rolls, give him another chance, promise even to promote him if he can pull himself together. She sees no other choice. Like so many of her students, DeAndre is keeping a foot in both camps, straddling for a brief moment the two disparate worlds. If she can keep him coming to school four days out of five—three days a week, even—she might have a shot. If he stops entirely, then she has lost another one—a gifted one, in fact—to the corner.<
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  The door to Rose Davis’s office opens. She acknowledges DeAndre with a rueful nod.

  “Hey,” he says, breaking the ice.

  “You can come in,” she tells him.

  DeAndre rises, glancing again at Rose as he steps past her in the office doorway. To his surprise, she is smiling.

  Ella Thompson prepares herself slowly in the back bedroom of her apartment. Black dress, black hat, dress heels, gold earrings—she’s getting better at this drill than any person ought to be. Last month, the service was at March’s; today, the homecoming is at New Shiloh, and next week, it will be at Brown’s on Baltimore Street for a neighbor’s son. And Ella is always in the middle of it, measuring out a little more of herself for each eulogy, for each gospel hymn, as if sitting demurely in these pews and bearing witness to tragedy is some kind of career.

  She pauses at the mirror with her makeup, listening for signs of life in the room across the hall. Nothing. Her youngest, Kiti, is pretending to be up and running when she knows he’s still face down in his pillow.

  “Kiti?”

  Silence.

  “Keee-Teee! Are you up?”

  She begins moving toward his bedroom door, but the click-clack of her heels gives warning. Before she can knock, her son greets her, bleary-eyed, at the bedroom door.

  “Ma, I’m up.”

  She smiles. “I’m serious now. You’ve got to get yourself dressed or we’ll be late.”

  The seventeen-year-old nods, then pads to the bathroom. Ella goes back to the mirror, peering into the glass at a face that has somehow managed to keep a look far younger than forty-six years. Ella is very dark, with the deepest of brown eyes and perfectly straight, jet-black bangs that give her face a girlish quality. Even after five children, she has kept her figure, so that among the children of Fayette Street, the general consensus is that Miss Ella might be more than thirty, maybe even thirty-five if you count carefully.

  On the other hand, such agelessness is wasted on Ella Thompson, who seems to concede nothing to her own vanity. She doesn’t work at looking younger, at changing her appearance or at obscuring her status as a middle-aged grandmother. Instead, she works at nearly everything else, and somehow, in a rush of well-spent days and months and years, she has forgotten to age.

  But on this morning, quite naturally, the mirror gives Ella back a hint of fear. Today is for Dana Lamm, but her son, Tito, is the young man most on her mind.

  The two had been inseparable since childhood. It had been a threesome, really—Tito and Dana, and then Gordon—three fine boys who were always rambling in and out of her rowhouse apartment, sharing with her their earliest triumphs, seeking her comfort when they stumbled. Ella had nurtured her son and his friends alike, encouraged them as she did everyone, watched with a cautious joy as each turned away from the corner. She had seen all the possibilities in those three boys and she had fought for those possibilities, inoculating each with her own unlikely optimism, her unwavering Christian purposefulness. School, work, respect, love, responsibility—from most any other soul on Fayette Street, such things were easily marked down as platitude. But from Ella Thompson, these things were life itself. With God’s own grace those three boys raised themselves up and got out. Her son to the navy, Gordon with him, and Dana to the marines.

  Victories, she thinks, hunting down her black purse.

  But then what is today? A victory emptied of itself, with Dana lost despite it all, dead from an electrocution at Camp LeJeune. A training accident. To survive a childhood in West Baltimore and then fall by random chance as a peacetime warrior—where in such an ending do you put your faith? Ella shakes her head. It makes no sense.

  Worse still, Tito has disappeared. When Gordon called her with the news of Dana’s death, her thoughts jumped to her oldest son. She phoned Tito in California that night and listened as he poured out his grief, the hurt turned bitter because the navy had denied him permission to fly home for the funeral. His pain was fierce, and she let him rant and cry, absorbing as much of his suffering as she could. She consoled and counseled, finally eliciting from him a promise not to go absent without leave. But since then, it has been four days of silence.

  Last night again, she had stayed up late trying to reach him, fretting away the three-hour time difference. Tito’s roommate was solicitous, but had no answer: “Haven’t seen him. Sorry, ma’am. I don’t know where he is.”

  She knows her son. He is strong-willed. He would jeopardize everything to be with Dana today, and there is a part of her that wouldn’t be surprised to see Tito at the church an hour from now.

  She pulls back from the mirror, brushing a few specks of lint from the dark fabric. Inspection complete.

  “Kiti?” she calls, sending her voice down the narrow hallway to his room.

  “In a minute,” he answers.

  She waits for him in the living room, a cluttered but clean space at the front of the first-floor apartment. The walls are filled with pictures of family and friends, and she pauses at the door to seek out Tito’s portrait, the one of him in uniform. She vivdly remembers the day the picture was taken. Dana was supposed to be in the portrait, too, but he couldn’t find his dress pants, so he begged off while Tito and Gordon, decked in their military finery, went to the downtown studio. And next to that picture, the shot of Tito at his high school prom, and below that, a photo of her children—all of them—clustered together on a sofa. For a moment, Ella lets her eyes gaze on the face of her youngest, Andrea, who is about ten in the photograph. Then Ella quickly looks away, fighting down the wave of emotion that inevitably rolls over her when she thinks of Fatty Pooh.

  Finally, Kiti joins her. She looks to him fondly as she adjusts his tie. She is a tall woman, but Kiti, a high school senior, towers over her as he submits to mothering.

  “You look nice,” she says.

  He smiles awkwardly. They go out the apartment door and onto the steps, where Ella surveys the Fayette Street strip as she pulls the front door closed. No one is hanging here in front of 1806, though just down the hill, Bruce Street is bustling. A look out slouches along Fulton Avenue.

  Two regulars glide past, heading down the hill from Monroe. “Morning,” says the one closest.

  “Good morning,” she replies. Her tone is open, a careful effort to avoid judgment; it’s Ella’s way to exclude no one. “How are you today?”

  Both men offer affirmative grunts. Neither breaks stride as they sail on toward Bruce Street, 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 mak
e 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.