The Corner (17 page)

Realtors seized the day, busting block after block. In the neighborhoods just north of Franklin Square, frightened whites fled at the first sign of a black home owner; in the late fifties, stable communities such as Edmondson Village could go from white to black within a year.

Along Fayette Street, too, the whites ran—many heading west toward suburban Irvington and Catonsville, others south across Baltimore Street, which would remain a hard-and-fast racial boundary for another two decades. By the early 1960s, W. M. could count only a handful of white strays, older residents mostly. The Jewish families were still working the corner stores, but none lived above the shops anymore. They drove down from Park Heights in the morning, worked the counter, then drove back with the day’s receipts.

Almost overnight, the sense of shared community that W.M. had discovered and prized in Franklin Square was dead and buried forever beneath a blizzard of real estate signs. He had been among the neighborhood’s first black home buyers, the crest of the immigrant wave. What broke behind him was not only a deluge of black working-class families trying to buy their own homes, but the working poor, the sad fodder for carved-up rental units, many of which were rowhouses already battered by the earlier Appalachian migrants.

On the west side of Monroe Street, some of the white homeowners held for a time, selling off to individual black buyers at prices that accorded their tree-lined blocks the pride and stability that home ownership always brings. But from Monroe Street down the hill to Franklin Square itself, there was very little that the landlords and speculators didn’t eventually claim. It only got worse when city planners rammed I-170 through West Baltimore, knocking down blocks of rowhomes just north of Franklin Square, forcing ever more poor refugees into the worst of the rental properties.

By the mid-1960s, the poor had come to Fayette Street and the problems of the poor became the problems of the neighborhood. Worst of all, the industrial and manufacturing economy that had originally propelled the migration began to disappear. Among the later migrants, particularly, unemployment was chronic as factories closed and the demand for unskilled labor collapsed. Nor were the schools what they had been; white refugees took the tax dollars with them, though until the end of the decade, an adequate public education could still be had at high schools like Frederick Douglass, Carver, and Mergenthaler.

In the McCullough family, the older children seemed for the most
part immune. The neighborhood was changing, but they had all grown up on the values of their parents, on streets that were still generally benign. The corners weren’t corners yet; the drug trade had not yet grown bold and vast. But the scent of the game was in the air and a few were learning where to go and who to find.

By 1966, Ricardo had been born, and Rodney, too. Kathy, now the oldest of nine, was already out of the house, attending college. Gary almost nine, was already showing the kind of utter earnestness that his father could recognize as a McCullough trait. That year, Gary got his first job as a stock boy at Nathan and Abe Lemler’s pharmacy, grocery, and liquor store on Lexington Street, and the Lemlers imparted everything they knew about work and business to the child. Gary worked hard, stayed honest, and was, in turn, trusted by the family. He made twenty dollars a week.

To Gary, the Lemlers seemed to be good people—they extended credit and would fill prescriptions without charge if someone was sick and unable to pay—yet they were regarded as outsiders by the locals, who saw them as purely mercantile. Gary felt his loyalty stretched to the limit when some of the older heads would roll through the store—snatching liquor bottles and carrying them off—and the Lemlers would ask Gary to chase after them. Once, he had followed Fat Curt’s brother, Dennis, who had lifted a bottle of rye whisky.

“Nigger,” Dennis asked, when Gary caught up to him, “who the fuck you think you is?”

It was a question he never had to answer; the riots after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. decided the matter. From Fremont Avenue to Edmondson Village on the west side, the Lemlers and nearly every other Jewish shop owner were burned out, eventually to be replaced by Korean merchants who would neither extend credit nor hire children from the neighborhood.

The riots accelerated the decline along Fayette Street. At night, a quiet but persistent heroin trade opened up at Fulton and Lexington, the corner where the Lemler store used to be.

At 1827 Vine Street, William Junior—known to all as June Bey—was first to stumble, losing himself by the early 1970s in a heroin addiction that would consume the rest of his adult life. His mother and father tried to wait him out, tried to revive their hopes each of the two dozen times June Bey took himself off the street for drug treatment. He’d been to Kentucky for the detox program there; he’d been down to Carolina
to stay with family. But nothing took, and when the appliances around the house began to disappear, W.M. finally put him out.

It was the first heartbreak. Miss Roberta took solace in religion and her other children, praying all the while that June Bey might still see himself in a new light. W.M. did what he had always done; he swallowed hard and went back to work.

In the mid-1970s, American Standard closed their Baltimore plant, and the company provided W.M. with a twenty-year pension that amounted to exactly thirty-seven dollars a month—an absurd sum that he often thought of questioning, though his inability to read discouraged him from seeking a detailed explanation. For a time, W.M. drove a truck interstate for Sky King, then worked for a limo service, and then, in 1980, he got a license from the public service commission and began driving for Royal Cab. Most weeks, he worked six days of double shift, rising early to catch the morning rush, then coming in for lunch and a nap, then back out until ten or eleven at night. He drove everywhere, worked every neighborhood, relying on his instincts to keep him alive in a line of work as lethal as any in Baltimore. After being robbed a half-dozen times, he started carrying a pistol under the driver’s seat.

W.M. was never much on conversation; it was always Miss Roberta who provided the day-to-day childrearing, who would take hold of the minor problems and major disasters in their lives. But W.M. served as the moral example, as a standard for will and endurance against which his children took their measurement. Gary, more than most, stood in absolute awe, and his own double-and triple-shift life was a tribute to his father. He’d learned a lot about business from the Lemlers, and what he didn’t know he set about learning in half a dozen jobs that took him through high school. He cooked crabs down at Seapride on Monroe Street, clerked at some of the shops on Baltimore Street, sold a bit of weed now and then, and still found time to run all kinds of errands for his mother and father.

He graduated with honors from Mergenthaler Vocational—“Mervo, where they teach you how to earn a living, but not how to live,” Gary liked to say—then spent the half year at Ohio State before getting that telegram from a pregnant Fran Boyd. He came home—not only because it was the right thing to do, but because he was tired of school. College was all talk and theory; Gary wanted to be out there, working and earning and scheming.

His sister Joanne told him about an affirmative action program at
Bethlehem Steel. For years, the company had steadfastly refused to hire blacks for skilled positions and was now playing catch-up. Gary took the test and scored well, getting an apprentice job and becoming one of the first black craftsmen at Sparrows Point, eventually rising to supervisor. He took a night job as a guard out at the Social Security building in suburban Woodlawn. Then he started buying cheap, vacant rowhouse properties in the neighborhood, rehabbing some as rental units and setting up Lightlaw, which he registered at City Hall as a minority contractor. He worked every day of the year—Christmas, Easter, New Year’s, his own birthday—sometimes for sixteen hours a day. When the money began rolling in, when there was more under the mattress than he could spend, he began soaking up the financial publications, trying, on his own, to decode the Babel of stock and fund listings. He got a brokerage account with Charles Schwab, began trading, feeling his way through some ventures. At one point, his income from investments alone reached more than two thousand dollars a month.

Gary McCullough was a whirlwind, a man of dreams and plans. Before long, he was the talk of the neighborhood. For W.M., his son seemed proof positive that whatever problems there were on Fayette Street, they weren’t going to hold his family down. June Bey had fallen, but he could still be counted as the exception. Nothing out there made you take drugs, or hang on the corner, or laze around the house all day waiting on a welfare check. W.M. and Miss Roberta had proved the other way of living, the right way; now their children were proving it, too.

The oldest children—Kathy, Jay, and Joanne—were not so sanguine. Repeatedly, they urged their parents to move off Vine Street, to buy a house or take an apartment in the county. Since the 1970s, suburban flight had ceased to be a white prerogative in Baltimore; the black middleclass had been pushing westward since the late 1960s, a step or two ahead of the working poor that would follow them down Frederick Road to Irvington and Yale Heights, or out Edmondson and Liberty Heights Avenues to Edmondson Village and Forest Park. Now, western Baltimore County—Woodmoor, Woodlawn, parts of Randallstown and Arbutus—was home to the black taxpayer. Left behind were too many of the broken families, too many who had grown up without hope; too many migrants and sons of migrants who had come too late to the city, who had never caught hold of the union-scale wages that allowed one generation to climb out of poverty and carry the next on its back to the suburbs.

The irony was ripe: Segregation had leavened the ghettos by keeping
black professionals and middle-class families active in the life of city neighborhoods; now they, too, were missing at the community meetings, at PTA conferences, at recreation centers, at block parties. By the late 1970s, many of black Baltimore’s institutional treasures—Provident Hospital, Douglass High School, even the grand boulevard of Pennsylvania Avenue—were, to one degree or another, failing.

W.M. and Miss Roberta sensed this, of course, just as everyone else in the city sensed it. They had seen their older children move to suburban homes; now those same children were pleading for them to follow. But the mortgage was paid on Vine Street and they wouldn’t get much if they sold out. There weren’t any savings to talk about, though the children offered to help pay for the move. Still, that wouldn’t do; neither W.M. nor his wife could stand for that kind of charity. Besides, it felt like home. Miss Roberta had fed a family out of that small kitchen; W.M. had stepped down the same stone steps for every working morning going back twenty-five years. There were all of the usual ties to the neighborhood; Roberta McCullough never missed a church function at St. James on Monroe Street. And there were still others like them, too—good people who would stick it out with them if they stayed. Ella Thompson. And Bertha Montgomery, across the alley. And Paul Booth around the corner on Lexington.

They stayed, just as Gary stayed on Fayette Street when Fran convinced him not to buy that house out in Catonsville. But there was an inertia to their decision, an inability to see just how bad Franklin Square had become, or how much worse it would get. Slowly, in ways that were perceptible only over years, the Fayette Street corners grew more and more treacherous. The New York Boys came. Then the cocaine vials, and, finally, the pipers and the ready rock.

Among the younger McCullough children, Darren, Sean, and Chris were all as hardworking and serious as their predecessors. But the corner caught up with Judy’s husband about 1984, driving him out of a happy marriage and up onto the Monroe Street corners. It caught up to Ricardo, too, when his friends lured him out of the house to run with the pack, trying their hands as sneak thieves and stickup boys. It caught up to Kwame, the youngest son, so angry at everyone and everything that W.M. actually tried to talk to him, going out of character to make his boy see that a man had to make peace with himself and the world. But Kwame couldn’t see it, couldn’t feel it the way W.M. had. For a time, Darren got him a job at the shoe store on Baltimore Street, where Darren had made
manager, but Kwame spent the rest of his time in the streets, working packages or sticking up younger dealers with Shamrock. The corner also caught up to Kenyetta, the youngest, who got involved with a boy who gave her a child and then took to shooting people before a state charge finally stuck and he rode the prison bus to Hagerstown. The baby, Shakima, toddled around Miss Roberta’s kitchen every day while Kenyetta tried to finish school at Southwestern.

But the shocker was Gary. The third son, who had taken life by storm; the wide-eyed dreamer who had learned his father’s lessons and taken them to a new level. When Gary began the fall into drugs in 1986, his parents were shaken to the core. Gary had made it in a way that W.M. understood; others among his children were equally successful, but their way had been paved by educational opportunities and career plans. All of them made W.M. proud, but Gary’s victories resonated with his father because he had won them as W.M. had—by getting up early to chase a few dollars more.

There was no sense in it, nothing to W.M.’ s eye to explain how his son could fall so far. Gary split with Fran for good in 1985 and four years after that, all of it—the craftsman’s job at Beth Steel, the second job, the properties, the Mercedes-Benz, the bank accounts, the brokerage account—was gone. Gary had been hurt; W.M. knew that. He’d been hurt by Fran, by the women who followed Fran. Quite a few people in the neighborhood had taken advantage, too, stealing from Gary; his son was always a little too trusting that way. But nothing to W.M.’ s way of thinking could take hold of someone with Gary’s dreams and Gary’s mind and transform that person into a drug addict.

In the end, it was Gary who let them know just how much worse it could get, who taught them to fear their neighborhood the way it ought to be feared, so that standing at the front door on a summer day, watching the dealers work a ground stash, Miss Roberta could turn to her husband and say, very gently, that maybe the children were right. Maybe they should have left.