“Hello, this is an important message from the Baltimore City Police Department. Last night, on May 22, 2017, at approximately 3:10 a.m. there was a homicide committed in the 5100 block of York Road. We’re asking anyone who has information or knows someone who has information to call Detective … (etc., etc.)…. Thank you for your help.”
Some neighborhood homicides generate a robocall and others don’t. I have no idea why.
And on the day after, where was I? I got up early and worked till noon. Went to the drugstore (5200 block) and had lunch with my son. We talked of our neighborhood’s various boundaries, and yes, we covered the pertinent topics—redlining, blockbusting, turf wars, and so on and so forth with the institutions of higher injustice. Of the city’s hundreds of microcommunities, ours is described as “friendly, affordable, diverse.” A block away, York Road remains one of the sharpest East/West divides (East communities get no adjectives on the real estate sites). And the blood would be where, I wondered, on which side? And the location, evidence of what?
I know myself well enough to say that the searching itself is a particular method: I look to figure out why I’m looking.
Let me triangulate my position. Coming up to the corner under review, York and Winston, there’s the community garden (Westsiders’ project). Across the street (E) is Value Village, where most recently I got my son a pair of good winter boots and a watch for myself. Everyone (E & W) shops there. If you turn back from Value Village, pass the garden (tangle of weekend weeding awaits) and head west a block, there’s our house. Backyard planted up with offerings from friends, so when I look out I see their faces in hostas, hydrangeas, and black-eyed Susans. My dog’s running around now with her new pal next door. Who else have I seen here? Owls, foxes, opossums, hawks. Go further (W) down the street and it’s even greener—a small patch of real woods, home or rest stop for the abovementioned. A little creek banking along till it hits a drainpipe and emerges again en route to the falls. Black buzzards on the college library’s roof. Buttercup Forest so named by (W) kids, the ground entirely yellow in spring. Patch of hillside let go to Peace Meadow, complete with new plaque (“Lord make me an instrument of Thy peace,” etc.) I stop by and read often. Sledding hill. Frisbee/soccer/dog run field. Closer to York, group homes of many sorts. Popeyes. McDonald’s. Medical clinic.
Such is the micro Western front.
To the East, an abundance of liquor stores, braiding salons, corner takeouts, methadone clinic.
I don’t know what the blood will say. Or if I find it, what I’ll do. Out here now, on the corner of York and Winston (W), the sounds I gather extend my looking: a nearby cardinal’s please-please-please-please birdie-birdie-birdie (I can see his throat pulsing in a McDonald’s tree). Bass-line barking the dogs lay in. Something off-loaded, dropped very hard and over and over, which could be gunshot, but isn’t. This echo’s entirely different. To describe a fleet-bodied, there-and-gone light, Emily Dickinson wrote, “Noons report away”—and so must’ve known her gun sounds, too. A word used well is many-realmed and maps in all directions at once. So, report unfurls further—as in noons tell about themselves, or show up for duty.
I did not hear last night’s shots, but on other nights they’re very clear.
Still, I think of them as out there.
Here on the corner, a bike with two LOVE emblazoned saddlebags goes by. A couple with matching T-shirts (Thing 1 and Thing 2) walks into the (W) clinic. A leafy branch the length of me in the middle of the street, run over and flattened, goes on shining with all the wet pressed out of it.
Some yellow crime scene tape still attached to the lamppost is blowing like a kite tail in wind (E)—so I’m close. It’s a busy place, York and Winston:
Corner salon selling Virgin Hair (E) and on the window above the salon, the words TAX_ O_ _ ICE stenciled in black (once I sat in my car for a good ten minutes filling in the unlettered bits).
The remodeled Westside McDonald’s (where once I Heimliched an Eastside baby choking on a piece of hamburger).
Gas station (E) with its double-take sign: Quality Is Not an Option, Expect It. The tattered rock roses in front—gas station owner’s attempt to spiff up and appease (the Westside) neighbors upset about dealing on premises, trash collection, the murder there almost exactly a year ago.
Here on the corner, as I’m trained up to do, I’m sifting the simultaneities: (E) teenagers on motorbikes screaming down York, a version of skateboarders at the pricey Westside Jesuit college—where on one of the buildings is carved a line of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” When I’m waiting for the light to change, I say it aloud and run through the refractions: charged, as with responsibility, to care for; charged, as in electrified, lit; charged, meaning run at or run through, the known world taken by surprise and pierced; charged as if for a crime committed and the world made to pay for it, some kind of guilt-feel, which I can’t make sense of, but still hovers.
I call this all my neighborhood when I’m talking to anyone not from here, unfamiliar with the precision-carved nature of things. Where I buy my clothes (E) and grow my food (W) makes it sound like a village, self-reliant, contained, with a town hall near and market stalls and everyone knows each other’s kin. And that last part’s true, but East keeps to East kin and West to West. I’m looking around on the East side of the street now, where I don’t have much reason to be, where the rules are nowhere inscribed but govern—at the moment, quietly, except for gas getting and Value Village shopping, This isn’t where you belong, they say. And here’s a more profound version of the invisibles and unspokens: The other day I stopped to talk with my neighbor a few houses down, who had a load of yard brush to get rid of. He told me it would cost sixty-eight dollars to bring to the city dump with his little trailer, and I said why not just stuff it in the college dumpster around the corner, that’s what I (white) do. As in, Oh wow, sorry officer, ran out of lawn bags, didn’t realize, won’t do it again. That’s how I’d proceed. Hmm, he said, quiet and looking off, the feel of his calculation clear: in this, his own neighborhood, that’s not how it would go for him.
This isn’t easy territory to read. The elements keep sliding around: how that auk-auk-auk bird call might also be (as day is done, and dark comes on) blood clotting up in a throat from a chest wound.
Nothing is still or unto itself. Meanings regroup and retrofit, layer up and multiply. To read the land like a poem (not make it poetic—what we say when things go ethery) is to read for the all-dimensions-at-once sensation. To listen in archeologically. To navigate constellationally. So a singular moment overrides its fixed place.
Three years ago, when the city exploded, just after Freddie Gray died, I met up with some (W) neighbors who intended to help clean up the shattered storefronts on York, a few blocks from here. We went as a group, some with peace signs, all with brooms, trash bags, and shovels—and as we crossed Woodbourne Avenue, a guy whose business was interrupted looked up and spit and said, “Yeah, fuck your peace.”
The offence of peace. Imported. Marched in. So earnest in its imposition.
Fuck your peace: like any poem, unfurling the vast energies within.
Here on the corner (W) three red lines look like the blood I’m looking for, but I translate them back: surveyors’ marks for new drainpipes. Then a few steps over in front of McDonald’s, near bus stop and trash can, fresh scrub marks on the sidewalk, dark at the edges like a sunset cloud. A gray dove of the Eurasian variety, not the white kind with olive branch, lands in the center and pecks at a roll. A small tangle of hair is blowing in circles (in Baltimorese, a tumbleweave), taking up with newspaper, half a blunt, soda can. Everything mingling, touching, reordering.
So, here they are, the bloodspots I sought—here and not East. Nothing’s encroaching. They’re not a West anomaly. If where I live is to compass more than one street, I have to say at my doorstep not-figuratively. Any last-ditch efforts at elsewhereing—it was 3 a.m. and I’m never out then or he knew the assailant or deal gone bad—aren’t working. None of it’s working. Elsewhereing unpoems a place. And illiterates me.