He goes on: “They’re thinking, ‘I can get a pack [of coke], get rid of that in five days, and then I can get me some clothes.’ The only thing is, you might not be alive when that pack is done. Seven grams of cocaine, maybe you make $500 or $600, but before you finish it, you might have a bail of $50,000. I wake them up.”
Barksdale says many of the friends he grew up with are dead or in prison. Both facts haunt him, as that cycle continues. “I don’t like it when I see the same things happening,» he says. “I didn›t like it even when I was a part of it. But this is still my neighborhood, and that›s my motivation. I want to make my mother proud today, allow her to hold her head up. Maybe I can help save someone.»
His first night canvassing, Barksdale spotted about 16 young men standing in the middle of a street, blocking a Lincoln Town Car. In what was a potentially violent standoff, two guys had stepped outside the car and one remained inside. Barksdale recognized a few of the participants.
“I’m thinking, ‘This doesn’t look right,’” he recalls. “But I keep walking up. I keep walking and I’m smiling—I am not afraid of nothing—I mean, I grew up on these same streets. And I’m handing out Safe Streets literature, telling everyone I’m from Safe Streets and asking, ‘What’s going on here?’”
One of the two guys standing by the car told him it’s about, “What this girl said.”
“What this girl said? ” Barksdale asked. Then, he laughed at the
absurdity of it all and laid out a likely scenario.
“Murder in cold blood, that’s what is going to happen,” Barksdale told the teenagers. “People are going to get arrested. Two or three are going to snitch. One person is going to be a gun shot victim. One person is not going to survive. And someone is going to go to jail and not have anyone send him any money in there.
“And you’re telling me this is over some girl who isn’t even here, not even to look her in the eye and find out if she is telling the truth? Somebody is going to get shot over this? Oh, no. No, no, no.”
(Postscript: As of January 2019, the Safe Streets initiative, Barksdale included, remains active in McElderry Park and has expanded to three other neighborhoods, Cherry Hill, Park Heights, and Mondawmin.)
Catonsville
South Rolling Road
June 1, 2009
3. Breaking the Habit
Gloria Carpeneto was born as she puts it, “to a ritually-correct and card-carrying Roman Catholic” lower middle-class European immigrant family. Baptized four days later, Sept. 14, 1947, at St. Anthony of Padua in northeast Baltimore, she attended the parish grade school with four brothers and sisters and graduated from the all-girls Seton High School on Charles Street at a time when students were “still wearing nurses uniforms,” she recalls with a laugh.
When she accepted a vocation with the Sisters of the Good Shepherd in Peekskill, NY, it surprised her family. Not because she was becoming a nun, but because she was leaving Baltimore and moving to New York.
“As you much as you can, at 17 years old, hear a call from God, I did,” Carpeneto says. “The Sisters of the Good Shepherd worked primarily with women, victims of domestic abuse, and ‘delinquent’ girls. They were out in the world, and that was very attractive to me. Even as a teenager, I really liked social service work.”
But after two years, Carpeneto, then sister Gloria Ray, questioned if the ordered life was a good fit. “It was the way convents were organized at the time, the structure. I wasn’t happy with the system. It really pushed me back home.” By no means did she ever question her faith.
Her first job upon return was in the Chancery office of the Archdiocese of Baltimore and Lawrence Cardinal Shehan. In the evenings, she finished the undergraduate work she’d begun at New York’s Fordham University at another Jesuit institution, Loyola College.
“I didn’t question Church doctrine then, not the role of women in the church or anything,” she says. “Not like today when we talk about the ‘stained glass ceiling.’”
Indeed, she could not have imagined, 40 years after departing the convent, she’d hear a new religious calling, leading to ordination as a priest—as well as ex-communication by the Vatican.
Last summer, the petite, gray-haired, 61-year-old grandmother took part in a ceremony in Boston with two other women and claimed holy Orders as a Catholic priest. Several hundred supporters attended the July ordination, which the Archdiocese of Boston immediately denounced.
Despite facing ex-communication, Roman Catholic Womenspriests have ordained 35 female priests, seven deacons and one bishop in the U.S. since 2002. In Canada and Europe, where the movement began, they have ordained another 20 bishops, priests, and deacons, all in accordance with historic apostolic tradition, they maintain.
Together with Annapolis resident Andrea Johnson, who claimed Catholic priesthood in 2007 in a similar ceremony, Carpeneto leads Mass—outside the auspices of Archdiocese of Baltimore—on the third Sunday of every month at a Protestant church in Catonsville. Typically, 30 to 40 people, including men, women and families, attend services, and Carpeneto estimated 100 supporters receive their e-mail updates.
Some people have asked her why she and the other women didn’t just leave the official Roman Catholic Church and, for example, join the Episcopalian Church or another mainline Protestant denomination that ordains women to fulfill her calling.
“The simple answer of why I didn’t choose to leave the Catholic Church is that I’ve been a Roman Catholic since I was four days old. It’s not just my religion, it’s my culture, like Judaism is for Jewish people,” Carpeneto says. “All of us [in the women’s ordination movement] love the Roman Catholic Church and our choice is to reform from within rather than walk away.
“We’ve all said this is our family.”
Baltimore Harbor
Canton Pier
January 16, 2010
4. To Haiti
In a battered, industrial corner of the Baltimore harbor, at the end of a gravel road filled with pallets, cast iron pipes, steel cables, electrical cords and cargo boxes, four-dozen people huddle in the cold, still dark, early morning hours to wish the U.S. Naval hospital ship Comfort well as it prepares to set steam for Haiti.
Meanwhile, Steve White sits at dock’s edge with a walkie-talkie, directing his tugboat crew as they lower two 35-ton diesel generators on deck. The sun has come up and the Comfort is almost ready. Fifteen welders and electricians are the last off ship. They’ve worked 36 hours without sleep.
The 894-foot ship with red crosses on its sides will carry 560 medical personnel, four x-ray machines, a CAT scan, and as much as 5,000 units of blood to the earthquake-ravaged country, where they will treat hundreds of the most severely injured.
Trying to stay warm in a gray, hooded U.S. Navy sweatshirt, Lauren Wishart of Severna Park, looks out as another tug pushes the Comfort to open water. Her son, Lt. Aaron Wishart, is aboard.
“He’s stationed in Norfolk and I saw him yesterday,” she says. “He told me he’d be down there a minimum of two months. I’m doing what a mother has to do, seeing him off.”
A crane lifts away the gang blank. Lineholders pull thick, 120-foot ropes off the bow and stern bollards. “If you’ve got a pair of gloves—feel free to lend a hand,” Jim Tighe, from Dundalk, jokes with an onlooker.
Rosalie Smith, 65, and Audrey Smith, 68, best friends from North Baltimore, attended an NAACP meeting last night where a hat was passed to collect donations for victims of the earthquake.
“You feel so helpless,” says Audrey Smith. “But we wanted to come down. It tugs at your heartstrings. I wish we could go with them and cook and serve meals to the troops.”