The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  Finishing with the cartons, Ella walks back into her office and checks the clock, measuring out a couple of hours in her head. If she hurries, there will be time left to run back up to Fayette Street and hand out some of the flyers promoting the community conference later this month. She’d promised Joyce she would get those out, but so far she’s covered only her own side of the 1800 block.

  Distracted, Ella doesn’t hear the knocking until someone is fairly hurling himself against the metal doors.

  “Coming,” she yells.

  She cracks the door and looks down at DeAndre. The boy is buried beneath his black hoody, hands in his pocket, a cold look drawn over his face.

  “I have a lot to do,” she tells him. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  He shrugs and she braces for the usual excuse. Half-day. Or quarter-day even. Or Tuesdays and Thursdays off. The children of Fayette Street have manufactured flextime school schedules in their minds, as if it’s reasonable that the ninth grade actually meets for four hours every other week.

  “Why didn’t you go to school?” she asks again.

  He looks up at her, a picture of adolescent righteousness, then shakes his head softly. “Couldn’t go.”

  “Why not?”

  “My clothes were still wet.”

  A ridiculous argument for any other kid in any other neighborhood, but Ella figures that for DeAndre McCullough, it’s probably true. He’s been wearing the same denims and flannel shirt for weeks now; if he starts the laundry too late at night, he spends the next morning watching television in his underwear waiting for his school clothes to dry.

  “Can I come in?”

  Ella steps aside and the boy follows her into the dry air of the rec. He lumbers over to the weight bench as she begins setting up the game tables for the little children. Minutes later, she’s interrupted by more knocking on the metal door.

  “MISS ELLA …”

  Ella starts at the shout and looks through the wire-mesh window. R.C. is twisting his head this way and that, trying to scan every corner of the center. DeAndre gets up from the weight bench, walks within R.C.’ s sight and smiles smugly.

  “MISS ELLA.”

  Ella Thompson goes past DeAndre and cracks the door. “R.C.,” she tells him, “you know the rec isn’t open yet.”

  “HE IN THERE, MISS ELLA,” R.C. shouts. “DEANDRE IN THERE.”

  “Quiet, R.C.,” Ella says, “Why didn’t you go to school?”

  “I did,” R.C. insists. “I got out early cause it’s a half-day.”

  DeAndre breaks out laughing. “Yeah, R.C. That’ll work.”

  Even Ella smiles. Reluctantly, she agrees to let him inside; to favor DeAndre on even the smallest point would leave R.C. with a mortal wound. “But you have to settle down,” she tells him. “I’m serious, I have things to do today.”

  “I’m always good,” says R.C.

  Ella gives him a quick look and R.C. immediately begins backing up on himself: “Well, I try anyway. I try and there’s some people don’t never even do that.”

  “Who you talkin’ ’bout?” asks DeAndre.

  “You, nigger.”

  “Fuck you, bitch.”

  Ella shuts them down quickly, berating both for their profanity, eliciting mumbled apologies. She leaves them to a game of Connect Four and heads to the girls’ bathroom with the bucket and mop. She’s at it for almost an hour, cleaning floors and fixtures, listening out of one ear as DeAndre takes three games out of four and R.C. loudly declares him a cheater. The two grow bored and begin moving around the rec, dribbling and passing the rec center basketball and talking up Ella’s new team.

  “Miss Ella, we gonna get new uniforms for a summer league?”

  “We’ll see,” says Ella.

  “They should be black.”

  “Like your ass,” says DeAndre.

  “Like your face, bitch.”

  “You a whore, R.C.”

  “Nigga please.”

  The bickering continues, until both boys are restless enough to make a food run. When they leave, Ella can only marvel at the quiet, save for the droning television. It’s past three. She hasn’t time to deal with the community meeting flyers. Instead, she uses her last minutes alone to call Myrtle Summers at Echo House, the community outreach center. Myrtle wears two hats in the neighborhood hierarchy, working as an Echo House administrator and serving on the Franklin Square board. Ella asks about the possibility of renovating the rec’s playground; there’s a rumor that there’s city money available to repave the blacktop and replace equipment. Myrtle’s heard the same rumor and manages to feed Ella’s optimism.

  “Should I call Joyce or Frank?” Ella asks.

  No, she’s told, just wait. Someone from rec and parks will be coming by to assess the playground.

  “Good. That’s great.”

  As Ella gets off the phone, the children begin arriving. Soon enough, twelve names are etched into the attendance book. They’re mostly first, second, and third graders, but a few are much younger, trailing along behind their older school-age siblings, all obedient to the rec center procedures—shedding jackets at the front desk, struggling to put them on hangers, happy and without complaint. A second wave, middle-schoolers, piles up around the desk. They follow the same script, but more aggressively. For two months now, they’ve seen the older boys basking in the glory of the fledgling basketball squad, and they’ve heard talk that Ella is considering the team for a summer league. So they have a case of their own.

  “We gonna have a team, too, Miss Ella?” asks Little Stevie.

  “I don’t know yet. We’ll see how the older boys work out.”

  “Then we ain’t gonna play,” says Daymo, shaking his head and walking toward a table.

  “We don’t get shit,” says Stevie, bitter.

  Ella ignores him, leading the younger children through a cut-and-paste adventure in African mask-making. In just a few minutes, she has to put Old Man out for pasting up a smaller boy’s face. A few minutes more and she threatens Stevie and Michael with the same for tussling in the boys’ bathroom.

  The daily routine requires Ella to be all things to all manner of children, from wide-eyed first-graders to the almost-growns of C.M.B. For each age-group, the rec is a different kind of refuge, and the challenge is to somehow offer enough attention to each group in three-hour installments inside a single room.

  A child of any age has to go to great lengths to be barred permanently from the rec center. Proof of this can be found on the metal lockers across from Ella’s office, where a carefully painted portrait of a smiling teddy bear, garbed in a police uniform, still hangs unmolested more than a year after its creation. The art, proudly signed, is by Dink-Dink. And never mind that thirteen-year-old Dink-Dink is out there now at Baltimore and Gilmor running wild. Never mind that a week ago, Tyreeka Freamon was sitting on her front stoop on Stricker Street when crazy Dink-Dink came down the block carrying his nine, order ing everyone inside. Never mind that with the street free and clear, Dink-Dink shot a grown man in the leg over a drug debt, then walked away calmly, leaving the victim for the ambo. If Dink-Dink showed himself today at the rec doors, Ella would extend a welcome, show the boy to the arts-and-crafts corner and clear another place in the metal-locker gallery.

  For Ella, no defeat can be fully acknowledged. Every day, her rec center is filled not only with children still oblivious to the corner, but with those who are already in the game. This makes for a considerable amount of mayhem.

  Daymo, T.J., Chubb, Michael, and DeAndre’s brother and cousin, DeRodd and Little Stevie—this is the Fayette Street of the future, and they’ve already been tutored by their elders. “Crimping ’em up” is a local expression for the process by which older kids toughen the younger ones, steeling them for the reality of Fayette Street with a thousand petty insults and savageries.

  Childhood in West Baltimore comes replete with the usual cruelties and aggressions. But along Fayette Street, these small moments gro
w large, never tempered by that generosity of spirit that follows from a secure sense of self. Brothers and sisters trade insults ruthlessly; best friends bicker constantly over nothing; lovers betray each other with casual disregard, then bury all guilt and complicity in the coarse vocabulary of rage and abuse.

  Inside the rec, Ella bears witness to the petty warfare of everyday life, the cold glint in the eyes of young children who have been properly crimped by those older and bigger. They’ve been taught that kindness is weakness, that compassion is a thing to be suppressed. It’s vocational training of a kind: These are lessons of and about the corner.

  Around here, those who suffer through childhood with dirty clothes or unchanged underwear are nothing more than a source of comedy, just as those who struggle with enormous gaps in comprehension—“The building with the plus sign on top,” says Arnold, pointing to St. Martin’s, “that’s where we eat”—are a target for unremitting scorn. Around here, those too dark-skinned and those too light, those fat, or ugly, or awkward are never allowed to forget the liability. Just ask the chubby, moon-faced kid who came to last year’s overnight party at the rec, only to wake at four in the morning to the smell of his own burning flesh and the howls of Dink-Dink and Eric, laughing with delight at just how much fun a burning book of matches can be. Around here, the tyranny of the grade-school pecking order has been institutionalized as sport. Just shout “Snatchpops” to any kid over the age of six who happens to be sucking down food or drink between Stricker and Monroe and watch him flinch. Snatchpops is a game that has endured for a couple generations on Fayette Street, a game in which the sole rule is this: At the sound of the word “snatchpops,” any kid can justifiably take the potato chips, Sno-Kone, or Big Mac from another’s hand and eat it with impunity. It’s might makes right, legitimized.

  Today it’s Chubb, throwing an empty liquor bottle over the heads of two girls on the rec playground. Tomorrow it will be Little Stevie shouting snatchpops and grabbing at Daymo’s fruit drink, spilling it all over the rec floor. Yesterday it was open warfare between Umeka and T.J. as Marzell Myers tried bravely to lead a dozen children through the environmental apocalypse that is finger painting.

  “T.J. put paint on my face,” complained Umeka.

  “You lyin’,” said T.J.

  “You got green on your hands and there’s green on my face.”

  “So?”

  Marzell stared them both into silence, then walked to the bathroom sink just in time to miss T.J. planting a green thumbprint on Umeka’s forehead.

  “Bitch,” cried Umeka spontaneously. She raised a hand to wipe at the paint, but T.J. was already on his feet, the open palm of his hand slapping her hard in the face, leaving Umeka with wet eyes and a trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth. The two stood facing each other: Umeka, showing her best scowl, her hands balled in rage, unwilling to cry aloud or back away, but unwilling to risk a move against the stronger boy; T. J. standing opposite with a slight smile, waiting for her move, then tiring of the game and stalking away.

  “What happened?” asked Marzell, returning.

  And Umeka, properly crimped, said nothing.

  That such things happen in better places is true enough. Children are, at odd moments, brutish and violent; the phenomenon isn’t particular to Fayette Street. But here, there is so little in the way of countervailing argument—so little adult supervision, so little parental attention being paid, so little reward in the streets for charity and humility and compassion—that by grade school, the children of Franklin Square are too crimped, too broken to do much more than run with the pack that raised them. By then, an enormous amount of human potential has already disappeared.

  And Ella has them three hours a day. Between three and six on weekdays, she can reward the good and punish the bad and try to make some kind of argument against the constant, grinding process that turns children into victims and victimizers. Against all the immediate evidence, she believes in those three hours.

  Today, apart from Old Man and his paste and that ugly bit with Chubb and the liquor bottle, it’s a good session that ends with the Lorna Doones and pork rings issued one-to-a-customer, and Ella slumping, exhausted, at her desk. Still unsorted, the mail in front of her is mostly junk, much of it shopping circulars that catch Ella’s attention only when the Caldor or Woolworth ads feature children’s toys and games. She will now and then clip out an item or two, stuffing them into the top drawer of her desk in preparation for that come-and-get-it day when the Franklin Square budget is fat enough to replenish the rec’s toy chest.

  Today’s catch of circulars is halfway to the plastic waste can when she spots a gray-white envelope jutting from beneath a newsprint shopper:

  Miss Ella Thompson

  Martin Luther King Recreation Center

  100 Vincent Street

  Baltimore, Maryland

  Not an exact address, but close enough. The ink is smudged and Ella can’t really make out the letter’s return address, but from experience she knows this envelope’s point of origin. Jail mail, definitely, but the legible part of the return address is only a few digits of an inmate number and a portion of the Eager Street address. She doesn’t know anyone down there, though her mind goes immediately to George Epps. But Blue is home now; Ella saw him on Monroe Street just this Saturday last and told him she wanted him back for art class. No, not Blue.

  She looks again at her name on the envelope, and with some hesitation, finally opens it, half-convinced that the letter is intended for someone else. A name—Ricky Cunningham—is neatly printed on top. Ricky. She had wondered what happened to him after he ducked out of the Valentine’s dance, particularly since his promise to help out at the rec had seemed so direct and sincere.

  The handwriting is tidy and compressed, the letter itself beginning with an apology.

  “Ella, I know how much you counted on me to help with the basketball team …”

  Halfway down the page, the letter turns a corner.

  “It means so much to me to come around the center and be with you. You make me feel wanted again. You don’t know how much it hurts not seeing you …”

  Ella is puzzled. Ricky had been to the center only a couple of times. How could that be so important to him? And why is he writing to her?

  “… every day, I think about you …”

  Ella reads on, and to her surprise, the letter becomes florid and romantic. She’s been remote from this kind of love for a while now, cautious around suitors and unwilling to risk whatever normalcy she’s managed to establish in her life. With her history, that much could be expected: Along Fayette Street, the stronger women, the survivors, inevitably come to realize that most of the men in their world aren’t very good at making life easier. Still, she’s floored by the idea of Ricky Cunningham cultivating a schoolboy crush from some jail tier.

  The letter wanders to-and-fro, waxing on in its love and admiration for Ella and all she stands for, and then, on its final page, culminating in a plea for her to be there in court at sentencing. The crime itself is a small absurdity: Ricky was caught in a Rite-Aid, stealing a jar of vitamins. The store security guard was a girl he went to school with, and he figured that would count for something. Now, for about eight dollars worth of iron, calcium, and vitamin C, he’s been over at Eager Street for almost a month.

  “I know it was wrong,” he writes. “Wrong and stupid.”

  Ella folds the letter and walks back to her desk, trying to figure how this, too, has been added to her collective burden. She meets a young man in the neighborhood, hoping that he might be of some help to the rec center, and a couple of months after that, he’s hoping, instead, for some help from her. The wearied portion of Ella’s soul tells her to put the letter back into its envelope and bury it somewhere. But the rest of that soul is too earnest, too Christian for such a careless gesture.

  Three weeks later, she is perched on one of the back benches in a chamber of the Wabash Avenue district courthouse. She seems to b
e the lone taxpayer in that courtroom, the last true citizen amid the regular human barnacles on the benches. Bail reviews. A plea. Another plea. This case postponed, that one dismissed, the next one sent up to the circuit court for a jury trial. Bailiffs and lawyers, police and defendants—all of them moving through a brutish ballet, all of them stepping with the cold certainty of veterans.

  She sits there, listening with half an ear to the play-by-play between the judge and the lawyers, watching with a vague but genuine regret as the docket is sorted and shifted. Petty things: drugs, thefts, violations of probation, more drugs. And then, finally, Ricky comes into the room from the side door, handcuffed, with an aging jail guard behind him. For a moment, the defendant’s attention is drawn to the judge and the lawyers, to the case numbers being read and the manila folders being passed. Then, as if sensing her, he turns around to scan the benches. Ella gives a little wave.

  He sees it and breaks into a wide beam, then waves at her with manacled hands. The case—the schoolmate, the vitamins, the statement of charges, ridiculous in its simplicity—is read into the record by a young prosecutor. Then, the public defender begins to take up the outlines of an already agreed-upon plea.

  But Ricky is hardly attending to this. He’s turning constantly to meet Ella’s eyes, his contortions distracting the proceedings.

  “Thank you,” he says in a stage whisper.

  Ella nods, feeling awkward.

  She is on that bench because of someone in need, nothing more than that. But of course there’s no way to say any of this to Ricky, who can only mouth a few more thank-yous before being escorted through the side door. Ella goes back to her car and drives home; Ricky goes back to the jail van and heads downtown to finish a thirty-day bit.

  Still, she is glad she went. Ricky is trying, and he’ll keep trying when he comes home; that, she tells herself, is what that letter was all about. Her small part in the matter leaves her hopeful, filled once again with the conviction that what everyone does in this world will ultimately matter.