‘Powerful and revealing … it shows us the plight of urban America honestly and without condescending to those trapped on its mean streets. I defy you to read about them and not be moved.’
WASHINGTON POST
‘A brave, unblinkered and heartbreaking look at the residents of a few blocks of West Baltimore’s ghetto … So far above most reporting on the underclass as to demand attention.’
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
‘The Corner is an intimate, intense dispatch from the broken heart of urban America. It is impossible to read these pages and not feel stunned at the high price, in human potential, in thwarted aspirations, that simple survival on the streets of West Baltimore demands of its citizens. An important document, as devastating as it is lucid.’
RICHARD PRICE, author OF CLOCKERS
‘A triumph.’
PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
‘This harrowing work of journalism should come with a label: Do not read unless you’re ready to be shaken to your soul … Stick with it, and the reward is a deepened understanding of America’s complex, intractable drug culture, and, indeed, of human nature.’
PEOPLE
‘A complex and beautifully written narrative … A timely and important report from the front.’
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
‘A bracing read.’
ECONOMIST
‘A devastating account of the almost daily hardening of children’s hearts and hopes … This is another world.’
LOS ANGELES TIMES
‘Because the authors have been able to humanise their subjects without romanticising them or making heroes out of them, The Corner offers rare insight into not only one aspect of inner-city culture, but also into the utter failure of so much public policy at all levels.’
NEWSDAY
For my parents, Bernard & Dorothy Simon
For Anna Burns
“You can hold back from the suffering of the world. You have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”
—Kafka
MAP LEGEND
1 Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center 1a. MLK center playground
2 The Dew Drop Inn, 1625 Fayette Street (home to Fran, DeAndre, DeRodd in January 1993)
3 1717 Fayette Street (vacant house, once home to Gary, Fran, and DeAndre)
4 1806 Fayette Street (Ella Thompson’s apartment)
5 1827 Vine Street (the McCullough home)
6 1825 Vine Street (Annie’s house)
7 1846 Fayette Street (Blue’s house)
8 R.C.’s apartment building
9 St. James Methodist Church
10 St. Martin's Roman Catholic Church
11 Monroe and Fayette (Fat Curt’s corner)
12 Bentalou Recreation Center
13 2526 Boyd Street (new home for Fran, DeAndre, and DeRodd as of late September 1993)
14 Westside Shopping Center
15 United Iron & Metal Company
16 The scrap yard on McPhail Street
17 Bon Secours Hospital
18 Scoogie’s house
19 Tyreeka’s house in January 1993 (the family's later move to Riggs Avenue puts them twenty blocks north by northwest, off the map)
20 Francis M. Woods Senior High School
21 Franklin Square Park
22 Union Square Park
23 Seapride Crabhouse (one of four In the Pratt and Monroe Street area, known as “Crab Alley”)
24 Pops’ shooting gallery
25 Brown’s funeral establishment
26 Fairmount and Gilmore (DeAndre’s winter corner)
27 McHenry and Gilmore (C.M.B.’s summer corner)
28 Mt. Clare Shopping Center
CONTENTS
Winter
Spring
Summer
Fall
Authors’ Note
Afterword
ONE
Fat Curt is on the corner.
He leans hard into his aluminum hospital cane, bent to this ancient business of survival. His fattened, needle-scarred hands will never again see the deep bottom of a trouser pocket; his forearms are swollen leather; his bloated legs mass up from the concrete. But then obese limbs converge on a withered torso: At the heart of the man, Fat Curt is fat no more.
“Yo, Curt.”
Turning slightly, Curt watches Junie glide over from the other side of Fayette, heading into Blue’s for the evening’s last shot. Curt stops, a few feet from Blue’s door, and here’s Mr. Blue himself, standing on the front steps of what was once his mother’s pristine rowhome, scratching at the edges of his beard between arrivals, pocketing two bills from each, though it’s two more if you need a fresh tool. No charge, of course, for share and share alike.
From down the hill near Gilmor comes a short string of gunshots—too even, too deliberate for firecrackers. Barely tensing, Blue allows Junie to edge past him on the marble steps. A regular: no charge for Junie.
“They shootin’ already,” says Blue.
Curt grunts. “Motherfuckers can’t tell no time.”
Blue smiles softly, then turns to follow Junie inside.
Fat Curt slips slowly toward Monroe, reddened eyes tracking a white boy who pulls to the curb in a battered pickup. But there’s no play here; one of Gee Money’s younger touts has already laid hands on the sale.
Curt works his way around the corner to Vine, passing Bryan, who nods acknowledgment. No sale here, either; not with Bryan Sampson out here working his own tired hustle, selling that baking soda. Curt shakes his head: Bryan looking to get his ass shot up again behind that Arm & Hammer shit.
From down the hill, from somewhere around Hollins and Payson this time, comes more crackling syncopation—the beginning of the deluge to come, though it isn’t quite eleven yet. Curt shrugs it off and shuffles back toward Fayette. Time enough left, he knows, to make a little money.
“Wassup?”
Finally, a face he knows from down on Mount Street, a gaunt dark-skinned fiend, scurrying up the hill in the hope of catching a better product. Coming right at Curt.
“Wassup now?”
Curt growls