At 10:24 I headed down to the ghetto mart for avocados. Few vehicles were using Harford Road and none were active on the side streets. This is Sunday with a hangover. The two elderly, handicapped regulars—two black folks who worked into their seventies and are now retired in their eighties—await the #19 to downtown under the shade of the old tree sprouting from the sidewalk before the Maryland State Health Department building. As I stepped on the bricks being heaved up slowly by the determined tree, he smiled and waved and I nodded.
The intersection of Evergreen and Harford looms ahead—the center of Hamilton proper, although Hamilton Avenue is two blocks away—as I walk next to and past the concrete Hamilton Bank and come out next to the ATM, where I have been threatened and challenged by Dindus five times in the past three years. With no pedestrians out, I decide to take in the sights.
The Pakistani gas station, where drugs are openly dealt and men use the lot by the air pump as a private open air garage to detail their cars, is across Harford to my left. On that side of Harford Evergreen is one lane, spilling into the main drag between the air pump and the optimistically painted Hamilton School for the Performing Arts, where numerous crews of thugs have used the sidewalk and parking spot for a staging area from which to launch attacks on those palefaces using this ATM machine, behind me, next to a flight of stairs where patrolling cops have long permitted groups of young thugs to congregate close enough to count a customer’s money.
The entire area is clean, free of trash, as the leader of the Hamilton Business Association pays a janitor to clean the four block expanse. Towering overhead, across this two-lane stretch of Evergreen [a side street comprised of numerous dead ends that winds and wanders like a broken stick across Northeast Baltimore] is the Hamilton Presbyterian Church, whose pastor is handy with the thematic holiday saying placed on the low, five-line marquee before the old stone steps.
I walk over to read this admonishment and am intrigued:
“This nation shall remain the land of the free only so long as it is the home of the brave.”
I like it, feeling almost American as the anachronistic truism soaks into my soul.
Excuse me, my roommate's woman is throwing stuff and screaming. I let her put Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in her glass china cabinet, so must go downstairs and make sure the old sage’s bound words are not being weaponized…
As I mused over this local religious leader’s choice of words, from up the rising elevation of Evergreen, down out of the crackhouse-infested west, shuffled what looked like Fat Albert in a militant black power hooded sweat shirt. He was mumbling his raps loud enough to himself to be nearly audible to me from 60 yards in the absence of traffic.
I turned and regarded the young person as I began to walk down the flanking church stairs into the grassy churchyard, between this dignified looking edifice, the rectory and the hall, where services are actually held. As soon as I directed my steps down the stairs the voice of the giant toddler—perhaps 6 feet three inches and 360 pounds, and looking in the face to be about 15—amplified his volume to a shrieking scream, one hand holding something in his sweat shirt pocket and the other flashing gang signs.
The sweatshirt was a legitimate garment for this cool, overcast day, threatening storm. But, as I walked down the seven stairs, the only storm within earshot was:
“Yo muthafuca, where da bitch be yo steppin’! Dis is da real nigga, hea, da real nigga, yo hea, da muvafucin cracka-crushin’ nigga—ya hea! I will fuck you up Old School; da nine be muvafucin mine, bitch!...”
More words came at less volume as I turned the stone corner of the building that had once echoed better songs and smiled, because my “Saint Patrick Shrub” I call it was occupied. This is a large, box-cut, evergreen shrub against the back church wall, where I have sighted numerous juvenile rabbits over the years and where sparrows congregate and raise their young. They chirp from within, making it like a giant muffled music box. I looked for “my buddy” but did not find him. For the past three weeks a juvenile sparrow which seems disinclined to fly, perched at the fist-sized opening boldly, regarding me as I walked back and forth in the morning, even turning its head to follow my progress as I passed. Hopefully he’s flying today.
From there the only sounds I heard were my sneakers on the sandy concrete, the blubbery toad of a rapper lost behind me.
