The day I was hired by Miss Betty to work in her Northeast Baltimore food market I walked the necessary 2 hours out of town to get back to my mother’s apartment. Miss Betty had offered to give me bus fare but I had declined out of pride. I only intended to stay in Baltimore long enough to get the money I would need to walk the Pan-American Highway through Central and South America. I had no plans beyond that.
I was still bemused to be alive at 18 and could not imagine making it to 21. My immediate plans involved finding a room for rent in the city and doing all the reading I could at the library concerning Spanish and the geography and politics of my many fanciful destinations.
The next morning I stood at the bus stop at Chapel Manor in Perry Hall with the $1.35 one way bus fare scraped from the bottom of my duffle bag. I would get a payout from Miss Betty at the end of the day. I was soon thrilled to see that the #15 bus that pulled up was labeled ‘Express’. This would surely get me to work early, a thing I dearly wanted to do, as I could tell by the looks from Mister Len and the cigar smoking grocery manager that they did not appreciate Miss Betty hiring someone for the traditional men’s grocery department.
I had left violence behind, had bottled it like a message from some insane past, and decided on working my way to Machu Picchu.
20 minutes into the drive down U.S. Route 1 into the city I recall enjoying the skyline, imagining hopping a bus all the way downtown to see what the inner harbor had become in my five year absence from the city of my birth. I did know that I would not be able to afford a room in the area I grew up in, but would be renting down in the city, in the zone where my older cousins had once battled the blacks in the streets and alleys of North and Northeast Baltimore.
As the bus pulled off from Overlea Station above Northern Parkway I became excited about the prospect of work after kicking around all summer back in Pennsylvania waiting for the hearing to discover if I would go on trial for ‘attempted murder’ and ‘assault with a deadly weapon’. When the bus came over the next hill above Glenmore I rose to get off up front. After I rang the bell the bus driver just looked at me like I was stupid and shook his head.
He rolled by the Miss Betty’s store.
He rolled past White Avenue, then Hamilton, then Frankford, then Moravia. No one was getting on or off at these primary cross streets. Something was wrong. When the bus pulled up at the light at Erdman Avenue I said to the bus driver, a middle-aged black man of good size, “Excuse me sir I wanted that stop back there.”
He looked at me like I was stupid, “And?”
“Why didn’t you let me off?”
He shook his head in disgust and rolled his right eye back and nodded over his shoulder indicating the bus packed full of middleclass suburban whites, mostly ladies headed to work. “You can’t seriously think that I’d drop any of them off in your neighborhood, or let any of these hardheads down here on to the bus? This is an express bus. It don’t stop between the city line and the Inner Harbor. You can get off on Liberty.”
I stayed on the bus for another 20 minutes, finally getting off beneath the high rises bordering the Inner Harbor, with a 3 hour walk ahead of me. I walked the bus route back, and after an hour thought that there would be no job awaiting me. To be 3 hours late on one’s first day was irredeemable. I began to look for work on the way back.
I inquired at a law firm and was looked at like I had three heads.
A deli was not hiring.
The buildings became residential, then vacant, then rubble…
Along East North Avenue I was walking by a row of boarded up row houses. Then, through the arch of a doorless doorway I heard the scrape of a shovel on concrete. I stopped and looked in the doorway, and saw a large dark-skinned black man shoveling muck in the half basement of a house.
He stopped shoveling and looked at me. It occurred to me that he could have been heavyweight contender Ron Lyle’s brother as he leaned both hands on the handle of his shovel and looked at my small thin self framed in the doorway of the house he was renovating.
I spoke up, “Excuse me sir, but would you be hiring?”
A scowl knitted his brow and his jaw slackened momentarily in disbelief, “Is you stupid white-boy? I don’t know how you got here but whicheva way you walk you ain’t seein’ white fo miles. You bes’ get yo ass up da way—go on. Don stop walkin’ ‘till afer you see da golf course.”
I nodded respectfully, and said, “Thanks” and walked double-pace ‘up da way’ as if an army of ghouls were about to emerge from their tombs to descend upon me with tooth and nail.
Earlier this year I had occasion to consider this man, and his advice, when a well-dressed and well-spoken black youth came up to me on a bus stop at nearly midnight and asked me for directions. He had gotten held up after work and was at a county transfer point debating whether to head into Northeast Baltimore on the #24 to stay the night with his brother, or head out to Middle River on the #4 to stay with his mother. As the man with the shovel had, I did a quick assessment of his survivability, found him wanting, and advised him in a like manner, “A guy like you never takes the twenty-four into the city at night. Head out to Middle River. Your brother will understand.”
“Thank you sir,” he said with a note of nervousness, as I walked off into the night.
