The Corner (50 page)

All the planning and preparation takes time and gives Ella little pleasure; she would much prefer to be with the children. Still, she tells herself, she needs to get through this stuff—and the logistics of the daily passage of campers along Fayette Street requires particular care. With
the doors to the St. Martin’s auditorium above Bruce Street, Echo House near the Mount Street intersection, and the rec center below that, the transfer of the children will involve a walking tour of the entire Fayette and Mount drug market. Every day promises to be a new adventure in civil liability, and Ella knows that some groundwork for dealing with the corner needs to be laid. She resolves to deal with it tomorrow.

She turns her attention to the camp sign-up sheet, double-checking the $5-a-camper donations to see who still owes what. But before she can get halfway down the first page, there comes a hammering on the rec doors too loud to be the likes of Little Stevie. Ella walks to the front to see a familiar face on the other side of the wire-mesh window.

“Miss Ella. Miss El-la.”

R.C. has his face hard against the window, his hands cupped to his temples as a shield to the glare.

“Miss Ella.”

“R.C., you know I’m closed up,” she says, with the door half open. It’s not just R.C., but a whole committee on her doorstep. Tae, Manny Man, Dinky—the basketball squad, come to bargain.

“Miss Ella,” says R.C. “Can we get in a summer league?”

“I’m talking to Miss Summers about that. I’m talking to her about getting you all signed up for Cloverdale.”

Tae fairly leaps off the steps, arms in the air, bouncing around until he can slap five with Dinky and Manny Man. Cloverdale is one of the best summer basketball leagues in the city, a six-week competition in July and August that brings teams from all over to an outdoor court near Druid Hill Park.

“We gonna kick ass,” shouts Tae. “Yeah boy.”

Ella tries to slow the celebration, explaining that she’s been talking to Myrtle for a while about the possibility, that there is a $50 filing fee for each Cloverdale team and that a whole bunch of raffle tickets will have to be sold to pay for the league jerseys.

“I’m not making promises,” she insists.

But R.C. is already across the blacktop, taking an imaginary turnaround below the imaginary rim of the rusting outdoor backboard. Seeing the boys react, Ella goes back to her office with one more item to add to her list. Sometime after she deals with the people at Fayette and Mount tomorrow, she needs to stop by Echo House and get a $50 commitment from Myrtle.

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 connect 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.