Dan Rodricks: Lawrence Jackson’s book is an enlightening and challenging journey from West Baltimore to Homeland | COMMENTARY
Calling Baltimore native Lawrence Jackson’s new book a memoir understates what it offers. “Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore” is a long, enlightening and challenging journey (with frequent side trips) through time and the city — from Jackson’s childhood to fatherhood, but more, from the days of slavery to segregation to the hour of Freddie Gray.
Jackson’s essays cover a lot of territory. They are as rich with Baltimore history as they are with trenchant and witty observations about city life across generations. His journey went from West Baltimore to Loyola Blakefield to a professorship in Atlanta, then back to Baltimore and a home in an upscale white neighborhood that had been inaccessible to his parents.
Jackson is an award-winning biographer and a professor of history and English at Johns Hopkins University, where he directs the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts. As I took Jackson’s vigorous walk through Baltimore, I had a few questions for him.
Was your decision, six years ago, to buy a house in Homeland partly a social experiment or do you look back on it as wholly practical, considering your personal needs?
From the time I was a child, I was more than curious about the world that everyone universally agreed was middle class. Part of what I would regard as a “baked in” feature of Black identity in the U.S., maybe even a full-wide diaspora convention of 500 years or so, is precarity. I love the idea of security. So that is what abstractly Homeland represents for me, a transparent assertion that satisfies a deep need. My choice was directly connected to trying to persuade a “good old girl” judge in Dekalb County, Georgia, to permit me custody of my two sons. I was hoping to demonstrate an unassailable symbol of my fitness to a person that had complete power over my personal life and finances and whom I considered a crude racist. And, practically, [the Homeland house] was two miles in either direction between work and my son’s school, and commuting is hazardous to my way of life.
How were you received in Homeland by neighbors, but also by friends who came to visit you there?
Everyone is quite polite, and we have strong tendencies in common about the maintenance and upkeep of our homes. I am inspired to plant grass in the fall and spring. I happen to live near some legacy homeowners, but the neighborhood experiences quite a bit of turnover as families from the outside move in, then seek more space, lower taxes and fewer building restrictions, and move out. My mother will say things to me like, “I don’t want to walk around the ponds in your neighborhood. People might think I don’t belong there,” which can sometimes sum up what it can feel like from the outside.
I have learned a lot about Baltimore from your book. I find your prose engaging, but at times veering into the stream of consciousness. That’s not a complaint, but an observation.
I think when you are sensitively alive to the contradictions, like the nature of the city and its history, and you and your family members have lived extensively in city neighborhoods, there aren’t easy choices to resolve the contradictions and obligations of life, striving to live with a moral compass. That fullness and prolixity can impact the prose, and extend the thought process. With most of us we improve at the sentence level as we go on. This September will mark my sixth book, and I will have published just a bit shy I think of a million words. My biography of [novelist] Chester Himes is usually what I think of as my favorite writing. The fall book discusses representations of Black characters in American Westerns.
I am, like you, keen on Lafayette Square in West Baltimore, thinking there’s such an opportunity for rebirth in that neighborhood. How do we make that happen?
Keep getting to know each other better. I am hoping to make “Jazz in the Square,” a free concert the Saturday after Labor Day, a symbol of rebuilding the commons in the historically Black neighborhoods of the city. Art and history can serve as our communal heritage. They offer everyone a point of access and build up our mutual sinew. We want to bring Global Baltimore, east and west, Black and white, Hopkins and Morgan, Jewish and Hispanic, and the sojourners out in the counties back to historic Black neighborhoods and businesses. My two favorite people, Rev. Al Hathaway of Union Baptist and Beloved Community and Savannah Wood of Afro Charities, are both opening up institutions for community education and archival preservation in Druid Heights and Upton, and I will be joining their work with field offices from my outfit, the Billie Holiday Center for Liberation Arts, in 2023.
What did you hope to leave the reader with in “Shelter”?
We are questioning the middle class ideal [in] conveying private property at this point in our nation’s history, partly because of the raw legacy of slavery and partly because of economic policies of both political parties that have exacerbated the distance between rich and poor. So the book is a Baltimore and Maryland story meandering around a bedrock decision that joins you to the middle class — buying a home in an historic neighborhood. This is an act of faith connected to the belief in the American middle class dream. It would be great if “Shelter” helps to build our muscle, our capacity to engage with vivid reality at a deeper and more meaningfully purposive level that advances human justice and encourages adults to inspire the youth.
