The Corner (49 page)

And come the end of every academic year, the deceit culminates in a process that is known, in Baltimore at least, as the social promotion. When all else has failed, when the relationship between the child and the school is in tatters, it’s time for the last, desperate act.

Social promotion—elevation based on age or behavior, rather than
academic achievement—is anathema to many teachers and even some school administrators. They regard it as a turning away from the old standards, which hold that each academic year should build on a progression of skills, that it isn’t in a child’s best interest to be moved up until those skills are firmly in place. But all that presumes a functional society, one in which the occasional child with the most earnest intentions will for some reason struggle with the work. It presumes a failure rate proportionate and manageable, housed within the larger set of well-tended, well-taught school children. But in end-of-the-century Baltimore, the swelling horde of disconnected kids has forced a whole new logic on an educational structure that has neither the time nor the resources to respond.

To the individual child, a social promotion is a devaluation, a dumbing-down of the system’s already fragile standards. Collectively, however, it seems to offer a solution to the backlog of repeaters, the hulking sixteen-year-olds clustered at the rear of every eighth-grade class. Without social promotion, the older kids are retained to terrorize the younger ones, or pass down their legacy of mayhem, or openly battle teachers for control of the class, or—at best—sit sullenly, embittered, no more willing or able to learn than they were the year before.

It’s a Hobson’s choice: The studies note that kids left behind will drop out sooner, but passing them without basic skills can hardly be considered a guarantee of success. Worse still, the social promotions send a message to the borderline students—the ones who just might, with the effort of a good teacher, be induced to continue working. For them, there seems to be no discernible difference in outcome. If they pay attention and do their work, they will see the ninth grade come September. So, too, will everyone else.

There can be no right decision here, nothing that can later be justified to anyone who actually cares why Johnny can’t read—not that there’s much hue and cry from any quarter. It’s left to you and the other teachers to sit in that staff room on a late spring day as the vice principal rolls down the list. There’s nothing in writing, nothing for the record, but everyone in the room knows what’s feasible and what isn’t. Three percent can fail, maybe 6 or 8 percent if you want to push it. But the system can’t sustain itself on a 25 or 40 or 60 percent failure rate. So you sit there with your colleagues, roll book in front of you, and you begin, alphabetically as always.

“Abbott.”

“He’s okay … pass.”

“Adams, Monique.”

“I saw some improvement at the end of the year.”

“Well, not in my class.”

“You can fail her there, but I’ve got to pass her.”

“Me too.”

“Addams, Robert.”

“Lord, one more year and I can adopt him.”

“Hey,” someone jokes, “third time’s the charm.”

“No way. I’m tired of him tossing books out the windows.”

“Well Herbert Thomas sets his on fire and we passed him.”

“Please. I can’t deal with Robert.”

“Okay, pass.”

You sit there for two and a half hours, making judgments off the top of your head, all the while sensing the absurdity of the thing. You remember a test you gave back in March on Greek mythology—a unit that they invariably enjoy. That was the test where you offered a full review the day before, giving them the answers to every question, making a game of it and letting them team up to work on the material. Eight-five percent of your students failed that exam; the highest score was an eighty-six. Hell, you were even offering a ten-point bonus just for reading the test directions.

“Please put your name and class number at the top of the sheet,” you typed on the ditto sheet. “Then number the paper in the left-hand column from one to twenty-five. After answering the questions, on the back of the paper, for ten bonus points, draw a smiley face.”

From twenty-two students, you got six grinning circles.

Now, you all sit here going through the motions, pretending that there is a difference between the kids you send to the tenth grade and those left behind. The no-shows are easy enough—if they didn’t exist in your class, they can’t exist now—but virtually everyone else is an open question.

Failing grades in the core classes? That alone could disqualify more than half of the eighth grade. Achievement, or the lack of it, is not enough of a filter. You factor in class absences, disruptive behavior, and indifference; still, the number of those actually deserving promotion is appallingly low. But next year, there will be another swarm of eighth-graders. And they can’t be taught if a third of last year’s class is hulking in the back of the room.

“Gregg.”

“His stepfather got him working.”

“Pass.”

What is left at the end of such an exercise is a school system playing with numbers in the same way that the police department must, a bureaucracy still seeking some proportional response to a problem of complete disproportion. Just as Baltimore’s police commissioner will seize the rostrum to proclaim 18,000 street-level drug arrests a victory, so does the school superintendent cull his files for anything that smells like hope or success. Reading and math scores are up a couple percentage points; never mind that Baltimore is trailing the rest of the state by 60 percent. The senior graduation rate is up in the mid-nineties; never mind that by the twelfth grade, 70 percent of the students have already been lost to attrition.

Yet these children, like children everywhere, have facile minds. You can hear it in their ease of language, in their rapid-fire mimicry of adult convention. You can see the innate intelligence on those rare occasions when a bit of information touches a nerve, provoking them with a challenge that they can understand and accept as relevant to their world. These children can, when it serves them, unravel a moral dilemma with subtle precision. They can respond to a classroom injustice with the most carefully formed arguments, or produce the solutions to the most intricate engineering and historical conundrums.

Ask Michelle whether Egypt or England are countries or continents and she has no interest and no clue. But ask how the Pharoah’s architects managed to get the crypt inside the finished tomb, or how the ancients got the rocks to stand at Stonehenge, and invariably, she’ll give you a working hypothesis. And Michelle’s effort will readily provoke a vigorous class-room discussion, as kids previously dead to the process suddenly pour themselves into heated debate. Just don’t ask for anything in writing, or expect the effort to sustain itself for longer than fifteen minutes or show itself in any review quiz a few days later. To see these students come alive, to sense the eagerness buried inside them, is to understand just how far the elemental human urge to learn has been subverted, how something natural to childhood has been brutally limited to a handful of raw lessons suitable to the corner.

Eventually, somewhere short of the sixteenth birthday, most of these children stop going through the motions. At some point in the ninth grade, the social promotions cease and some facsimile of actual
schoolwork is required. But by then they’re close enough to the age when they will no longer be a problem to the school system. The severance, when it comes, is rarely planned; it simply happens. One day, a kid starts out for Southwestern or Francis Woods but end ups down at the Carroll Park courts, or over at some girl’s house, or out on the corner where his crew is hanging. He doesn’t go back the next day. Or Friday either. A couple months drift away and he’s dropped from the rolls; the academic exercise ends without so much as a word spoken.

For the children of Fayette Street, the result is never in doubt. One after another, the boys and their girlfriends follow each other down to Mount Street, or Fairmount, or Monroe, until the entire C.M.B. contingent reaches that station in life for which they were always intended. They arrive on the corners utterly intact, hardened to the business at hand and ready to deal with failure on a grand scale. All those Head Start programs, all those grade-school lectures about civics and drugs and violence, all the alternative curricula and vocational education and Afrocentric esteem-building—in the end, none of it sticks. None of it even counts for baggage as they journey to their place on the factory floor.

DeAndre pretends to school, but his efforts seem almost valid when compared to the rest of the crew. Dorian and Brooks, for example, jumped out of the system two years ago, wandering away from Harlem Park by the seventh grade, removing themselves so early that the truancy people were actually able to catch on and lock them up before they could got close to sixteen. That meant some time in group homes, but little improvement in school attendance. Dinky, DeAndre’s cousin, felt the same but managed to wait a little longer to make his move. The truancy workers never laid a glove on Dinky.

This spring, it’s Brian who escapes the eighth grade, walking away from middle school to work his uncle’s package on Lemmon Street, then getting locked up with so many vials that schoolwork becomes the least of his problems. R.C. plays the system as best he can by missing virtually all of his ninth-grade year at Southwestern, then landing at Francis Woods and doing the same thing with a second set of teachers and administrators.

Then there is Tae, the leader of the pack and the only one of them to demonstrate any academic promise at all. Never having been held back a grade, Tae is finishing the tenth grade at Carver with a high-C
average and standing on the track team. He’s getting past algebra and talking scholarship, telling himself and anyone else who would listen that school isn’t a problem. And Tae can talk that way without it bouncing back; he’s a cofounder of C.M.B. and his corner status is such that any academic inclinations are unlikely to be criticized. In time, Tae will make it all the way to his senior year. In fact, he’ll get all the way to the second semester of the twelfth grade before simply giving up and going down to McHenry and Gilmor full-time.

By then, the slow grinding will be done. The school system will have taken its shots, tallied its misses, and closed its files, relinquishing any further claim.

The corners will have them all.

“Oh mah Gawd,” drawls DeAndre as the opposition enters the gym. “It’s the old school.”

Kiti laughs a s he holds the gym door open for Preston. Shamrock and Jamie are already inside, lacing up on the bleachers.

“Who you callin’ old?” grins Shamrock.

“Yes, Lawd,” DeAndre adds. “They think they still got a game.”

“You ain’t never had a game,” Preston assures him.

From the second row of the bleachers, Ella Thompson laughs. “Come on now, Preston,” she says, feigning offense. “I don’t want to hear you talking about my players that way.”

Preston sees Ella and mumbles his apology.

“If it’s your team, Miss Ella, then I respects that,” Preston says. “But otherwise, I have to say, they don’t look like too much.”

Ella laughs again.

Preston; Shamrock; Jamie; DeAndre’s uncle, Kwame—Ella has the older heads off the corners and in the gym for this one day in June. These are the eighteen-and nineteen-and twenty-year-olds, the Fayette Street crew just senior to C.M.B.; these boys are also the closest friends of her youngest son.

Kiti seems happy to be out of his room, joining up with his old crew to give his mother’s rec center team a run. Ella watches him walk into the gym and senses the release in the moment. The past is present; the gym is sanctuary. As with the Valentine’s Day dance, on this afternoon, Kiti gets to snatch at some freedom.

The bleachers are filled with younger kids from the rec center, neighborhood girls, even a few of the older street dealers. The game itself seems casual enough, but Ella had been trying to put it together since early spring. It took weeks for Ella and Kiti to pry Shamrock away from his daily regime of slinging and stickups and to bring Kwame,
Preston, and Jamie in from Fulton Avenue, where she could see them every day, drinking forties outside the liquor store, standing there amid the touts and runners and the 40-Dawg graffiti on the store wall. Today, all of them would relive just a bit of their childhood and give Miss Ella and her sixteen-and-under squad whatever remained of their court game.

Officially, this is the follow-up to the Martin Luther Kings’ loss to Bentalou, an upstart challenge by the new breed along Fayette Street. Their elders used to own the neighborhood ball courts but now, with the obvious exception of Kiti, they are serving the corners full-time. Yet Ella has known these young men all their lives; she sees them not as they are, but as they want to be seen. When she asks them for a game—asks them two or three times until finally, they realize that she isn’t just making conversation—they drop the package and the blunt and the forty of St. Ides and walk the five blocks down Fayette Street and strip down to their shorts.

“You all think you ready?” asks Shamrock.

“Born ready,” answers DeAndre.

Ella laughs again. A ten-year-old is designated as the bank, then loaded down with gold chains, beepers, watches, wads of cash and spare change. Ella sees all this and pays no mind; nor does she worry that Kiti seems entirely at ease with Preston and Shamrock and the rest of his old crew. How could it be otherwise? This was his crowd until Preston and the rest went down to the corner; if not for Ella, Kiti would be with them in all things. She knows this. He knows this. His friends know it, too.

Tae captains the rec team, choosing his starters—Truck, Twin, and Mike of the Hilltop crew; R.C. and himself to represent C.M.B.—and calling for a two-three zone. Shamrock offers to let the younger team have the first possession, but Tae demurs. Our court, he tells him. Your ball out.

“Ol’ heads,” shouts DeAndre from the bench, as Preston brings the ball up. “Ol’ heads gonna get tired.”

The older boys work the ball well, giving it up, looking to penetrate by getting one pass ahead. There is less ego to their game, more of the distance required to play as a team. They work Kiti to a ten-foot turnaround that goes in and out.

Truck is quick off the rebound, with an outlet to R.C., who fires the ball crosscourt to Tae for a finger roll; even Shamrock has to smile.
DeAndre and R.C. declare immediate victory, assuring the old school that their time has passed.

Preston misses from the baseline, but Shamrock gets behind the defense for a tap-in. Tie score.

“Cheap,” yells DeAndre. “Cheap bucket.”

R.C. responds with a long jumper from the corner, then Tae steals a pass and dishes out to Twin. Suddenly, it’s 6–2, and it’s all the success the rec team can stand. Shamrock slows the game down to work the ball, running the offense with deliberate calm. Twice back and forth, and it’s tied. Then it’s 10–6, favor the old school. Then 14–8, 20–10 and—as Tae begins subbing his players, bringing DeAndre, Manny Man, and Dinky onto the court—the score bottoms out at 32–14, enough of a margin to make it apparent that any changing of the guard on Fayette Street will have to be rescheduled.

R.C. stalks off the court after a twenty-minute run, sitting with his head in his hands as he tries to catch his wind. He watches things go from bad to worse, growing visibly angry, at one point kicking the wooden bleachers for emphasis when DeAndre loses the ball off his own foot.

He subs himself back in, crashing the boards wildly, trying to force the game to another conclusion. He’s going over people for rebounds, diving for loose balls, but no matter. The older crew wins by almost thirty.

Afterward R.C. is on the front steps of the school with the rest of the team, muttering to himself bitterly. Kiti comes through the doors, stepping past R.C., walking out into the sunlit afternoon.

“G’game,” says Tae, slapping his hand.

“Yeah,” says DeAndre. “You guys still got a little somethin’.”

Kiti laughs, but glides slowly past them, down to the curb where Preston and Shamrock are leaning on a parked car, Preston trying to spin a worn leather ball on his finger.

“What can I say,” Shamrock tells the rec team. “You young’uns talkin’ shit. We had to set you down.”

Laughing, Preston throws him five, then adds, “We nice. Boys tried to step up but they just not ready.”

“Please,” says DeAndre, smiling.

R.C. takes it hard. He gets up from the steps and walks back inside the school lobby in obvious disgust. The others give the old school its due.

Shamrock and Preston linger by the curb for a while, talking softly with Kiti. For Kiti, this is a rare chance to reconnect, but it doesn’t come easy. Shamrock is steady slinging, and when that doesn’t pay the bills, he’s up for robbing dealers and stash houses, taking other people’s drugs and money at the point of a gun. By next year, he’ll be over in pretrial detention, charged with shooting a man to death on South Gilmor Street. When he hasn’t been slinging and getting high on his own product, Kwame has been at Shamrock’s side for a few of those robberies. And Preston and Jamie are together as well, working a package that Jamie brings down direct from his relatives in the Bronx. That leaves Kiti in a strange sort of purgatory. He likes his boys, he wants to be tight with them; but now, hanging can’t be a casual act.

“We gonna go up the way,” says Preston, gesturing toward Fayette Street. “Run by the store.”

“Naw,” Kiti replies. “Gonna walk with my ma.”

So they clasp hands and roll out, leaving Kiti in self-enforced solitude outside the high school. He waits on Ella, who is moving slowly, surrounded as she is by a crowd of the younger rec kids. She’s at the school doors, shouting for this one to come along and for that one to stop ringing the buzzer—but it’s all good-natured chiding rather than real discipline. Kiti has to smile; he was raised by this woman and still he can’t imagine where all the patience comes from. Ella is beaming at him as she comes down the steps, delighted at how the day turned out.

“My boys say they want a rematch,” she tells her son.

Kiti laughs.

“They do. You tell Preston and them to come back down.”

“Okay.”

He falls in beside her, matching her step for step up the hill, shortening his stride to her pace. The younger children dart and shriek, racing around them like charged particles.

“Did you call Tito?” she asks.

“I’m gonna call tonight.”

“Tonight,” she says, affirming.

“Yeah.”

Ella is of two minds about her youngest son’s latest plan. Kiti’s idea is to graduate this month from Francis Woods, work the summer for spending cash, then go to California to stay with Tito, his older brother, who has been discharged and has found work with the phone company. On the one hand, Ella knows that her youngest son hates Fayette Street,
not so much out of fear anymore, but more from a sense of what it will do to him if he stays. His room and his music, his part-time job down at the tape and record store off Howard Street—Ella understands that these are not enough. For years now, ever since Pooh’s death, in fact, Kiti has been on her to leave, to move to some other neighborhood where the choices don’t seem so ugly and obvious.

She had thought about moving, even looked at the newspaper ads a few times, but there was only so much time in a day. Besides, she had raised her family out of 1806 Fayette; she felt connected with this neighborhood more than other, better places. To leave her apartment and her street and come to work at the rec center from outside the neighborhood seemed to Ella wrong.

Kiti would have his freedom soon enough. Tito was all for his brother coming out to Long Beach, where the want ads were full of jobs, where Kiti could work and maybe take some community college courses at the same time. Ella was tremendously proud of her youngest son, especially because Kiti had suffered Fayette Street at its worst. And yet, he found a way to endure.

The proof was there for Ella in late May, when she walked down to the Francis M. Woods gym for a ceremony honoring those scheduled to be graduated from the school. Kiti and forty-six others wore the black and gold class colors, each taking a turn at the rostrum to receive honor roll awards and outstanding student awards and most improved awards, followed by citations for carpentry, food service, child care, and video production—the vocational elements in the Francis M. Woods curriculum. By the end, there wasn’t a young man or woman without at least one certificate of merit to go with the diploma. For Ella, as for the others in the audience, there was a sense not only of pride, but of relief at having seen a child through to this day. To reach their senior commencement, the forty-seven in the Francis Woods gymasium that day had traveled further in their education than the majority of those attending Baltimore public schools. Yet for most of the graduates, their formal education ended that day; high school fundamentals and participation in a vocational program might or might not get them a restaurant job or an apprenticeship at a downtown hotel.

Here again, Ella managed more hope than most. Kiti had been fascinated by his video production classes at Francis Woods; if he could find some broadcasting courses and stay with them, he might be on his way to something. In fact, this was part of the current California plan:
Kiti was going out west to enjoy life, maybe to get a job for some spending money and see that part of the world. But college was there for him, too, if he wanted it.

Ella would miss him terribly. She sometimes worried that California was too far, that she wouldn’t be there for him if things went wrong. But watching him lope beside her now, she realized just how much he had grown this year. He seemed always to have towered over her, but now his face was that of a young man, his eyes showing new certainty and purpose. Even his bearing was different—the way he walked, or stood, or sat. Kiti had always been quiet; now, he was quietly in control.

“So what do you think?” she asks him.

“About what?”

“About my team.”

Kiti laughs and shakes his head.

“That bad?” Ella asks.

“They all right,” Kiti offers charitably. “They got a little something goin’ on.”

They pause at Gilmor. Ella looks down to the Baltimore Street corner and sees Linwood at the pay phone, working out with the B & G crew. She watches him take ten from a walk-up sale and point the customer down Fairmount toward the stash. The same Linwood who went to Francis Woods with Kiti, who played that first game at Bentalou with her team.

She sees Linwood and says nothing.

Kiti, too, catches sight of the sale. “You comin’ home soon?” he asks his mother.

Ella sighs. She’s got a long list of things to do at the rec. Summer camp starts next week. “I’ll be home for dinner,” she tells him. “You fix something if you get hungry before then.”

They part and she watches him walk up Fayette Street, his hands loose and his arms swaying at his side. A couple of times he raises a hand in greeting but doesn’t stop to talk. Once he crosses Bruce Street, Ella turns and walks up Gilmor toward the rec center. When she arrives, some of the younger crowd are ready and waiting.

“Miss Ella?”

“What Stevie?”

“You gonna open the rec?”

She shakes her head, sending Little Stevie, DeRodd, and a half-dozen other small fry into a state of indignation. They waited through the older
boys’ basketball game. They waited for her to make her slow stroll up from the high school. And now, for all that, they’re not going to get anything whatsoever.

“Stevie, the rec is closed.”

“The rec been closed,” pouts DeRodd.

“We’re getting ready for summer camp. You all know that. We close every year to get ready for camp.”

“When camp?”

Ella rolls her eyes. “You got the flyers, you’re signed up. You know when camp begins.”

“When camp?”

“Next Monday,” she says.

“Oh.”

Inside the rec, silence is golden. Little Stevie Boyd soon thinks of another gambit and begins rapping on the doors, but Ella ignores him long enough for the voices outside to fall away. She’s left with her preparations for the neighborhood summer camp, which this year promises to be more extensive and more complicated than ever before. The summer program involves not only the recreation center, but Echo House and St. Martin’s Church as well; activities will be scheduled at all three locations and children will be shuttled along Fayette Street from one place to another. They’ll be using the basement at St. Martin’s, which doubles as the local soup kitchen, and they’re hoping to use the church’s auditorium at other times to introduce and educational component to the camp routine. They’ll also be using the swimming pool in the basement of Francis M. Woods, which means coordinating with Rose Davis, as well as the Calhoun Street Boys’ Club, which runs a camp of its own and will be sharing time at the pool. There will be some trips, too—day adventures to local parks and picnic grounds. And there’s the training of the counselors—teenagers hired through the city summer jobs program and screened by Echo House—as well as new inventory for the daily snacks, new art supplies for the crafts classes, and a smattering of secondhand sports equipment for the blacktop outside. For Ella, summer camp is the most frantic time, with children around her the whole day long, rather than at three-hour, after-school intervals.