GREG MADE HIS WAY FROM his home on Kirk Avenue along Montpelier Street, looking for recruits to accompany him on his pilgrimage. “Anybody trying to go downtown?” he would ask. Each time the answer was no.
Greg didn’t understand why no one shared his sense of urgency. The city was rising up at last. This is what they’d all sat around and talked about—the day when everything could change. Just like Baltimore to sit by when it was time to stand up, Greg thought wearily.
Finally he ran into a neighbor, White Boy Chris, who said he was heading in the direction of the Penn North neighborhood. Chris understood the gravity of what was unfolding in the city and was on his way to his storage unit to prepare. Even though he was seen as a harmless junkie in the hood, Chris seemed to realize that today he was about as vulnerable as he’d ever be as a white man. Today, unlike most days in Baltimore, black lives were the ones that mattered. So Chris was headed to retrieve his arsenal, just in case he had to fight for his own.
Greg hopped in the car with Chris and his girlfriend and rode with them to the storage unit. There he told them he was going to walk the rest of the way and get as close as he could to the source of the smoke. Before Greg got out of the car, White Boy Chris told him to be safe, to make sure that he was covered and protected. Greg had a pocketknife, which he’d always carried and never used, and a ski mask, which he’d picked up at Chris’s unit. But Chris thought that wasn’t proper gear for a warrior. He dug around in his gear, lifted something up, and said to Greg, “This is what you need.”
He handed Greg a gas mask.