The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  The following morning, she gets up when her daughter, Donnie, drops off four-year-old Tianna and heads to work. Ella makes her granddaughter a stack of pancakes, then pads around the apartment until late morning, watching the clock, telling herself that today’s chore is one she wants to deal with only once. Ten-thirty is too early; eleven is still before the worst of it. At half past eleven, she’s ready to head down to Echo House, knowing that by the time she finishes talking with Myrtle Summers, the Mount Street corners will be ripe. Noon—that’s when she’ll be shepherding summer campers to lunch at St. Martin’s.

  At quarter past twelve, wearing a T-shirt and denims, Ella Thompson is standing amid the comings and goings of Mount Street. They’re moving Red Tops, Pinks, and In the Hole today; she’s looking for a break in the sales clamor to make her point. She stands silently, her face blank and calm, eyeing first one tout then another, her presence alone calling for attention. Within moments, the pitch has dropped, though the movement of fiends—foot traffic, autos, the occasional truck—doesn’t abate. It’s as good an opportunity as she’s going to get.

  She steps to the curb and raises her right hand.

  “You know,” Ella begins, adjusting her voice, “camp for the little kids starts Monday morning, next Monday …”

  Buster and Stevie Boyd, Black Donnie and Eddie Bland stop their chattering and turn to listen. Their interest spreads to the others. Soon almost everyone on the corner is actively listening to the rec center lady, and those too caught up in the game to hear her out are at least unwilling to compete with her openly.

  “… I’m saying, the campers and the counselors will be walking past here starting Monday. One time in the early morning and then again about this time of the day when they go to lunch at the church, then back from lunch when they go to the pool.”

  Her voice is steady and unemotional; Ella is not naive enough to deliver anything resembling either a plea or a sermon. Instead, she dispenses simple information, believing that these men and women remain a part of her community, that they will take to heart what she has to say and then do what should be done.

  “… so when they come through, I would appreciate it if you could let them walk past together and stay as a group, and if you would keep the noise down so they can hear the counselors.”

  Some heads actually nod.

  “Starting Monday,” she reminds them with a smile. “Thank you.”

  Ella leaves the corner as casually as she arrived; for her, there is no absolute evil, save for maybe the vials themselves. Of course, the vials didn’t break into the rec and steal the television. Nor was it the vials that chased and beat the white girl, then took her bike. And all the dope and coke in the world can’t be blamed for what happened to Pooh. Those sins were peopled, though Ella clings to the opposite view. To her, the worst that can be said is that the men and women on Mount Street are wasting themselves, and in doing so, they are serving this neighborhood poorly. But Ella won’t go beyond that; on faith alone, she grants them a perspective they may or may not have. She believes that if she’s about the business of helping their children, if she’s direct and honest and willing to make her case on the most basic level, they’ll surely give her what she needs.

  And come the following Monday, her judgment seems sound enough, as the counselors lead a string of campers across Mount and Fayette on the first day of camp. At that moment, at least, there is a tentative truce in the daily conflict between corner and community.

  “Time out,” yells one of the lookouts, seeing the six-year-olds leading the way out of St. Martin’s and down the sidewalk past Echo House, on their way to the Francis Woods pool. The birdcall hawking of the touts dies away; the slingers take a step or two down Mount.

  It’s not a complete concession by any means—the corner world is too far gone to get everything right on the first day. As the children saunter hand-in-hand across Mount, Buster is still at the pay phone, arguing with one of his runners. Down the block, Alfred keeps working that ground stash, unwilling to give a white boy chance enough to walk past him and cop from someone else.

  But Ella Thompson has not been disrespected. By right or by conscience, her children are taken into account; even in its desperation, the corner manages that much. By the second Monday, with camp in full swing, she can watch as the children file out the church doors and tramp down the sidewalk, knowing that what awaits them down at the corner is nothing worse than an awkward pause in the action. Every now and then, she hears someone trying to keep it in check:

  “Chill for a minute.”

  “Man, let the little ones go past.”

  “Shorty comin’.”

  This tells Ella something, perhaps the wrong thing. She ventures down to the corner, gets what is due to her, and walks away believing that these people can be reached, that they want the same things as anyone else, and that they are on some fundamental level, in control of their lives. If these things are true—and she wants them to be true—then everything she does here has purpose. If they are not true, then she has no business on Fayette Street. She chooses to believe.

  A week or so later, before escorting her campers down from the church one hot July afternoon, she heads from St. Martin’s up the block to her apartment for a toy that Tianna has been asking for all day. Rushing up her front steps, she waves to Smitty and Gale, both of them sitting on the stoop of the vacant rowhouse just up from Ella’s apartment. The three-story derelict is home to Smitty, Gale, and Gale’s baby—a nuclear family nested on the corner—and Ella is accustomed to seeing them on the front steps, waiting for redemption or a cool breeze from the harbor, neither of which seems particularly likely. On this day, they’re looking rough: Gale has her head in her hands and the baby on her lap; Smitty is looking blandly up the street, his eyes a watery yellow. Both nod at her casually, but Ella insists on a more genuine connection.

  “Hello, Smitty.”

  “Hey, Miss Ella.”

  “Gale, how are you today? How’s the baby?”

  “Not so good today,” she tells Ella. “My brother got killed yesterday and I just got told.”

  “Your brother?”

  “Ricky. You know Ricky.”

  Ricky Cunningham. The young man who wanted to volunteer at the rec center. He had come to the Valentine’s Dance, then fallen in love with Ella, then disappeared only to write from the city jail, asking Ella Thompson to be there for his court date. Shoplifting. Vitamins. The Rite-Aid security guard. The whole sad story rushes up at once.

  “He was killed? Gale, I’m so sorry.”

  “He got shot,” she tells Ella. “Down the projects. My family tryin’ to find money to bury him.”

  “Why? Why did … ? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Mistaken identity,” explains Gale, without really explaining.

  “You don’t know about services yet?”

  “Nuh uh,” says Gale.

  “Well, please let me know. I know he was a good person.”

  Ella leaves them there on the steps, promising to ask around the neighborhood about contributions for funeral expenses. Only later does a little more detail come her way. Ricky had done his thirty days for the vitamins, then left from the detention center with the idea that he would stay away from the vials, maybe do something good with his life. He had even called Ella at the rec center once to say he’d be coming past, to thank her again for coming to court for him, and to assure her that he still wanted to volunteer at the center.

  But a few nights back, Ricky had been down by the Murphy Homes high-rises, walking through, when he was spotted and taken for his brother, who had supposedly done some stickups in the projects. There was no debate, no parley, just two to the back, plain and simple.

  But if there is a lesson here, it won’t take with Ella.

  The random dispatch of Ricky Cunningham, who walks by the wrong corner at the wrong moment, will not add up for her the way it would for anyone beyond the frontier of West Baltimore. She will not co
nnect what happened to Ricky with her own proximity to the disaster, to the presence of her family there, to the cold fact that her daily routine now requires her to walk into hell itself and rely on the cooperation of street dealers and drug addicts.

  And for what is she fighting in this place? For a future? She’s already raised one group up, watched them go from the sliding board to foursquare, from rec center dances to basketball games. She’s been at it long enough to see all of her fifteen-and sixteen-year-olds—Tae and Brooks, Dinky and DeAndre, R.C. and Brian—go down to the corner and betray everything that the rec center means to her.

  Yet even with the ending all but certain, she still loves them. She can look at them and see qualities worth celebrating. To her DeAndre and R.C. and Tae are not drug dealers; they are her children, her ball team, their lives still in the balance, their possibilities still before them. And Smitty and Gale aren’t beleaguered addicts; they’re neighbors. And Ricky Cunningham wasn’t creeping past the high-rises, where he went to cop vials night after night; he was a bystander caught up in someone else’s evil.

  A half hour after talking with Smitty and Gale, she’s back down the street, delivering the wayward toy to Tianna and leading the campers hand-in-hand across the battleground of Mount Street, taking perhaps too much satisfaction in the quiet decorum that once again greets her. It’s a small moment, but small moments are the only kind Ella Thompson can acquire. She manages to string together three or four or five such moments and call it hope.

  That afternoon she stays on the wooden bleachers at poolside in the basement of Francis Woods High School, gathering strength from the sight of her children squealing and splashing in the shallow end. She stays for the whole pool period, soaking up her share of the watery mayhem, laughing and racing down the tile floor when a few of the bold ones try to sneak up to the near edge of the pool and wet her down. And when the older boys finish their pickup game in the gym upstairs, when they come down the stairwell wasted and sweating, she turns her mercies to them.

  “Miss Ella,” asks Tae. “Can we swim today? We hot.”

  “The pool is only for the summer camp, Dontae.”

  “But we hot as I don’t know what.”

  It’s enough for Ella to sense another small moment. She goes to the pool manager and the lifeguard and uses up a favor. Two minutes later, the basketball team is racing out of the locker room—most with their gym shorts for bathing trunks, all with a look of salvation on their faces as they tumble into the deep end of the pool. She watches her boys dog-paddle about, clinging to the edge—most of them swimmers only in the most liberal sense. Tae dunks Dinky; Dinky splashes Brooks; Brooks threatens to go home and get a gun on anyone who puts his head under water.

  “How’s the pool, Dontae?” Ella asks from the bleachers.

  Dewayne pulls him off the wall before he can answer. His smile disappears beneath the waves in a look of panic. Ella laughs at the spectacle.

  “Miss Ella,” says Tae when he regains the edge of the pool. “Miss Ella, you awright.”

  DeAndre leaves the Dew Drop early this morning. The air is still cool, but the summer heat is lurking, waiting its chance. He’s halfway to Gilmor before his mother pokes her head out of the vestibule, shouting him back.

  “An-dre.”

  He mugs impatience.

  “Dre. C’mere.”

  Showing all kinds of irritation, he slogs back up the block. Fran meets him almost at the alley.

  “Gimme some sugar.”

  The street is empty, thank God. Just the Korean sweeping up outside the store on Mount.

  “C’mon, Andre. I might not be comin’ home.”

  He finally cracks his smile, folding his arm around Fran’s thin shoulders. The embrace is genuine, and when she kisses his cheek, he barely starts.

  “You embarrassed?” she asks.

  “Ma,” he laughs awkwardly, “we out in the damn street.”

  At odd moments, life on Fayette Street isn’t any different than life anywhere else; here, too, a grown-up boy doesn’t want to be seen in his mother’s arms.

  “Good luck,” he tells her.

  “You too.”

  They are on different missions today: DeAndre is heading east to the McDonald’s at Harford and North, where he has every reason to believe that a job is waiting for him; his mother is heading up to Wabash to deal with the first of three boosting charges from last year. She’s got one case in the city, another out in Catonsville and a third floating around in the Anne Arundel County computer somewhere. The last hasn’t popped up as a court date yet and Fran is beginning to believe that it won’t, that the security officers at Harundale are satisfied to simply bar her from the mall.

  Making his way east on Fayette Street, DeAndre mulls the proba bilities in his mind. His mother is scared of court—this he knows. For all her time drugging and boosting, she’s yet to be convicted of anything, so the idea of even an overnight stay at women’s detention appalls her. But it might come to that. And if Fran gets locked up at court today, he’ll be the man of the house. He’ll have to take care of DeRodd. He’ll have to get his mother’s check money come the first of the month. He’ll be out here on his own.

  The idea is unnerving and at the same time exhilarating. First thing, he’ll clean up their bedroom. Then, he’ll make DeRodd act right. And before Fran comes home, he’ll have the job at Mickey Dee’s and take a driving test and buy a car and stay up all night running the streets with his boys. He’ll bring girls up to the bedroom every damn night, smoking Phillie blunts until his eyeballs look like cherries in buttermilk. Yeah boy.

  On the other hand, he realizes, if his mother has to jail, she’ll miss her chance at detox. Her number will come up on the BRC waiting list and she’ll be over on Eager Street somewhere, or trapped inside the Dew Drop, wearing one of those monitoring rings around her ankle. This alone ruins the fantasy for DeAndre. His mother was trying, or at least thinking of trying, and despite himself DeAndre has been allowing himself to hope.

  “Ma,” he told her at one point, “you lookin’ better.”

  “What you mean?”

  “You lookin’ better is all. You doin’ better.”

  He could see it. She was slowing down a bit, making enough time in her day to call the detox center, talking about the future as if she had a plan. DeAndre loved his mother; he could never deny that. But he had grown up inside the Dew Drop, and his familiarity with the crudball move gave him a wholesale contempt for her ways. DeAndre offered his mother only as much hope as he dared, bracing himself all the while for the inevitable disappointment. Apart from a few generous moments, he kept a safe distance. He knew he had to get out of 1625 West Fayette, and lately he had been telling himself that if Fran didn’t make a move soon, he would have to find his own exit.

  It was strange, but he blamed his father less. Part of what centered his scorn on Fran was the familiarity, the day-in-day-out sight of Fran’s drugging. The other part came from knowing that it was his mother who fell first. He’d heard the neighborhood talk that said Fran had broken Gary’s will, that she had turned a good man out. DeAndre believed that his father was a victim, that he had been, and still could be, the solution.

  A week earlier, in a quiet moment after his mother had just emerged from the basement, he ventured to suggest as much, assuring Fran that if she went through detox, she could get back together with Gary and things would be as they once were. Fran looked for a minute as though she wanted to slap him.

  “Dre,” she said slowly. “You out yo’ damn mind.”

  “Ma, we’d be a family.”

  “Andre, your father as much a dope fiend as I am.”

  He stalked out of the bedroom, but not before letting go with both barrels. He couldn’t help himself; he felt the need to defend his father.

  “You always downin’ him,” he yelled at her. “He’d still be on top now if you hadn’t drug him down.”

  At that, Fran was beyond hitting him. She sat ther
e seething. If he thought Gary was the solution, she told him, then he could go live with Gary. In Miss Roberta’s basement on Vine Street. Watch Gary chase the needle. Learn just how much better his father was.

  “Everyone out here doing what they do by hisself and for hisself,” she told DeAndre, her voice low and hard. “Your father don’t need my help to get high. He doin’ all right on his own.”

  “You brought him down.”

  “Shut up, Andre.”

  And he did, for a time. But a few days later, hope again slipped into the fringes of their conversation. He saw Fran go across the street to the neighbor to make another call down to BRC; when she came back, she asked DeAndre if he could take care of DeRodd, if he would be there to help when she went into rehab.

  “Yeah, you know that,” he told her.

  “Scoogie’ll help,” she offered.

  “I got it covered.”

  He acted like it was no big thing: If she did what she had to do, then he’d surely do the same. When she mentioned that the McDonald’s job would give him more money to care for himself and his brother, DeAndre readily agreed with that as well. She’d gotten hold of his birth certificate and social security card; now, he knew, it was up to him to get hold of the job.

  That meant the long hike today, down Fayette and across downtown and up past Old Town to Harford and North, where an eastside McDonald’s franchise was still hiring summer help. DeAndre had called over the week before and talked to a lady manager. She said to come Monday, talk to her, and fill out an application.

  DeAndre didn’t mind the idea of slinging fast food. Fact is, he’d been raised on McDonald’s No. 2 Happy Meals. And he figured that McDonald’s had to be easier than Seapride; he was almost grateful when Miss Mary stopped giving him hours at the crabhouse—the smell alone was enough to shut his lungs down. No, Mickey Dee’s would be good for a couple months. It wasn’t close to the kind of money he could make on a corner, but they didn’t lock you up, stick you up, or shoot you down for slinging burgers. Not all the time anyway.

  As for the distance, he’d have to learn the bus lines, figure out where to transfer downtown. He wouldn’t be clocking enough cash behind burgers and fries to pay for hack rides every day. There were McDonald’s outlets a lot closer—Franklin Street, Washington Boulevard—but they weren’t hiring any more summer help. So it was East Baltimore or nothing.