‘I Ain’t Never Left Baltimore’: Meditations on Love and Charm City
by Isaiah M. Wooden | special to NewBlackMan (in Exile)
Shamrock: We done gone so far from Baltimore, we're losing the station. Yo', try a Philly station or some shit like that
Bodie: The radio in Philly is different?
Shamrock: Nigga, please. You gotta be fucking with me, right? You ain't never heard a station outside of Baltimore?
Bodie: Yo' man, I ain't never left Baltimore except that Boys Village shit one day, and I wasn't tryin' to hear no radio up in that bitch.—“Ebb Tide,” Season 2, Episode 1 of The Wire
I.
A funny thing happens on the way to Philadelphia in the season two opener of David Simon and Ed Burns’s generally lauded television drama series, The Wire: static. While traveling up I-95 in a white utility vehicle to pick up a package of drugs, Bodie Broadus (J.D. Williams) and Sean “Shamrock” McGinty (Richard Burton), two drug dealers in the fictional “Barksdale organization,” encounter an unexpected challenge: the interruption of their favorite Baltimore radio station by the scratches and clicks that often accompany a weak FM signal. The noise prompts Bodie to conclude that there is something wrong with the radio—that it is not properly working. Shamrock, however, knows better. He explains to Bodie that the problem is not with the radio, but with the signal: “We’re losing it…We’re losing the station, man…We done gone so far from Baltimore, we're losing the station.” Boadie is confounded by this explanation because, as he reveals in the subsequent exchange, he had no knowledge that people in other cities listened to different radio stations. Save for a one-day stint in Boys Village, a juvenile detention center located in Prince George’s County, MD, he, in fact, has never left Baltimore. Thus, his radio stations have never failed him. In fact, his inability to find a suitable station for the ride northward leaves him questioning why anyone would ever leave Baltimore.
The scene renders Boadie—who, across four seasons of The Wire, serves as a proxy for the many youth conscripted into the subterranean economies fueled by the drug trade—as provincial. His naïveté is meant to prompt laughter; his genuine surprise is meant to induce ridicule. And yet, in revisiting the scene nearly nine years after its original airing, Bodie’s incredulousness about the source of the radio static stirs something else, something more profound, in me. I find myself deeply moved by his expression of love for a city, a space, a particular geography that has provided him with years of uninterrupted radio. I am moved because, despite now living nearly 3000 miles away, I realize that, like Boadie, I ain’t never left Baltimore or, rather, Baltimore has never left me.
II.
I passed much of my youth as a kind of flâneur, wandering the blocks between 25th Street and North Avenue on Baltimore’s eastside. Barclay Street and Greenmount Avenue also bounded my youthful strolls in the city. The three-story red brick row house where I was raised with two other rambunctious little boys—my brothers—was the launching ground for many adventures. Often, while my brothers bounced and pounced, I traipsed. Our house, with its narrow staircase and its cement backyard, held a lot of family history within its colorful walls. My mother had also been raised there. Its off-white linoleum floors carried the traces of her childhood too. But, for her, it was not always the most hospitable or even bearable place. In fact, when at fifteen she became pregnant with my oldest brother, it refused to accommodate her at all. This perhaps accounted for her tireless efforts to make that house, taller than it was wide, comfortable—a home—for my siblings and me. My father, in his best moments, proved an ideal co-conspirator. He too had a long history with what we affectionately called “445.”
Raised with five of his siblings in a three-bedroom, two-story house located on the opposite side of the street, my father, much to the chagrin of my maternal grandmother, would knock on 445’s front door every morning to ensure that my mother was ready for school. His parents had determined that all of their children would graduate from high school. My father had determined that my mother needed to do the same. He knocked. My grandmother cursed. My mother graduated. Thereafter, the two of them attempted to create a life together in the Barclay neighborhood that raised them: the same Barclay neighborhood that would later become my playground—the scene of my youth; the backdrop for my meanderings. Their creative process was not without its struggles, however. Indeed, they endured many challenges. Family squabbles, financial difficulties, heroin addiction, cocaine abuse, domestic violence, depression, death, all, threatened to swallow them up at various moments. And yet, their commitment to each other, to their neighborhood, and to the wellbeing of their children never wavered. Together, they endeavored to fill my childhood with bright greens and purples and oranges, not cloudy grays or weary blues. I was allowed to wander and to wonder. I was encouraged to imagine.
Some of my most vivid childhood memories are of my father sweating profusely while sweeping our block from top to bottom. He would place the trash he collected in the very large brown paper bags he lifted from his job as a sanitation worker. Often, with a beer in his left hand and with his work done, he would say to me that if he could spend his days picking up trash in other people’s communities, then he could certainly do the same in his own. As my father sweated and swept, I usually raced up and down the street with my neighborhood friends. There were a lot of children living on my block and, provided that we were not in the midst of some puerile conflict, we functioned like a family. We played block ball, spades, and hide-n-go-seek. We danced to club music in basements. We did back flips on the mattresses dumped in the back of Greenmount Recreation Center. We ate fried chicken wings and French fries and gravy from the Chinese carry-out. We dodged bullets that threatened to cancel our lives too soon. Mostly, though, we laughed. I remember smashing my little body into a car traveling up East 23rd Street once. I was in a hurry to rejoin my friends after being summoned to the house by my mother. In my haste, I failed to look for oncoming traffic and so I hit the moving vehicle. It hurt. I survived. We laughed.
***
I bid farewell to Baltimore in 1996, the year I moved to the suburbs of Washington, D.C. to attend a tony boarding school replete with a nine-hole golf course. My body rejected the scene change. Most days, I was plagued by anxiety so intense I feared I would permanently lose my breath. I longed to return to the community that had become so well practiced in cradling me. I seemed to only make it back there for major holidays. And then, during my sophomore year, an announcement: my mother decided she wanted to move to a different house in a different neighborhood. Much like Lena Younger in Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, she had always dreamed of owning a home filled with a lot of sunlight. The grim pall cast by daily gun violence in our community was making it nearly impossible for her to even imagine the sun. So, she moved. My father resisted. She dragged him along anyway. My visits home became less and less frequent after that. This was, in part, due to the demands of college and early adulthood. My intense love affair with the nation’s capital did not help, however. I relished the independence D.C. offered. I liked its radio stations too. After years of artfully negotiating D.C.’s convolutedly mapped streets, Baltimore had come to represent static to me.
I lived in the D.C. Metropolitan area for eight blissful years before moving to the suburbs of Northern California to attend graduate school. The suburbs, I now know, do not suit me. My family remained in Baltimore. They continue to make their lives there. Despite a rather peripatetic existence, I, too, still consider that city home. Wondering and worrying often mark my returns, however. I often wonder if I have gone so far that, like Bodie and Shamrock, I have lost the station. I often worry if I will be able to find 92Q, Baltimore’s home for hip-hop and R&B music, again or, really, if it will be able to find me. I often wonder and worry if I’ll be able to feel my father’s presence. In the summer of 2008—the summer before I ventured west to take up residence on what was formerly farmland—my father, the man who passed many days sweating and sweeping, succumbed to the melancholia that often whelmed him. His broken heart, though shocked several times by a host of doctors, refused mending. My heart broke too. I have been wondering and worrying about feeling ever since.
Compelled by a need to feel, I went looking for the three-story red brick row house that gave life to my imagination on a recent visit home. Despite searching high and low, I could not find it anywhere. It was not in the place that I thought I had left it. Where were its palimpsestic walls? They had been turned into dust to make way for urban renewal—something new. I wept. I wept because the block that raised me, a block that was at one time so vital, was now oddly empty and quiet. It felt haunted. Cities do often traffic in ghosts. I felt haunted. And, then, I felt my father. I saw him: sweating and sweeping. I wept. He reminded me that, despite my distance from it, I had never really left Baltimore and, indeed, Baltimore had never really left me. I should stop worrying, he said: he had never left me either. He then proceeded to paint the empty space where the three-story red brick row house once stood with the bright greens and purples and oranges that were so omnipresent during my youth. And with each stroke, he renewed my love for Charm City.
III.
Often when I tell people that I was raised in Baltimore, they begin to wax poetically about their deep appreciation for The Wire. The show’s searing depiction of urban life, decline, inequality and inequities is unmatched in television history, they say. Indeed, they are impressed that any televisual representation could so facilely capture the complexities of the drug trade, the shipping and manufacturing industries, urban school systems, the print media enterprise, and government bureaucracy all while interrogating the ways issues of race, class, gender, sexuality, age and ability inform and inflect modern life. Usually, there’s some talk of Avon’s guile, Stringer’s savvy, Omar’s fearlessness, Marlo’s ruthlessness, and Bubbles’s heart. Brother Mouzone, the bespectacled and sharply dressed hit man from New York with a gift for elegantly turning a phrase, frequently warrants a mention too. They go on and on…and so on. Inevitably, an elision between the real and the representational happens. The conversation turns to Baltimore’s “danger.” Various scenes from The Wirerecounted as evidence of this. I try to offer a different perspective, my narrative about my time growing up in Charm City, but it’s often to no avail. What people really want is for me to confirm their belief in The Wire’s veracity—its realism—and Baltimore’s infirmities. When I remark that I think the show fails as ethnography—or that I don’t think ethnography was a desired goal for its creators—they still demand that I do an accounting of the ways its fictional depictions document lived experiences. I stammer. I want to relay the stories of my youth with the nuance that they merit. I stutter. I certainly knew boys like Bodie growing up. We ate popcorn together and trash-talked after school at the Franciscan Youth Center. Their lives, however, didn’t unfold against the seemingly endless shades of gray that frame much of the action in The Wire. They unfolded in Technicolor. Indeed, like mine, they were more precise. I struggle. I want to narrate them with that precision.
Baltimore has proven a compelling site for gritty, urban dramas—from Homicide: Life on the Streets to The Corner to The Wire—time and time again. And while television shows like One on One and its spin-off Cuts have tried to recuperate the city as a site for boundless laughter, it circulates in the popular imaginary as a place devoid of life, of light and, crucially, of love. But there is a lot of love in the city. I love in the city. I love the city. It was not until recently, however, that I found the language to express the fullness of that love. It was a stroll through some of my favorite spots in Baltimore via the delightfully whimsical music video for Gregory Porter’s “Be Good” that allowed me to uncouple the shackles of silence and to be birthed into a new idiom. From the opening image of a little girl’s hands accessorized with cracked fingernail polish, a metallic purple bangle and a few charms to the subway-tiled walls of Penn Station framing large, olive green windows and long, horizontal, honey-colored benches—from the row of houses in Charles Village trimmed in every hue of the rainbow to the postmodern dance down stone sidewalks staged against a backdrop of modern sculpture—Porter’s “Be Good” video, which Pierre Bennu directed and for which Dirk Joseph provided playful and witty props, inspired me to make eloquent my deep and spiritual connection to Baltimore. I watched the video over and over again, enchanted by its vibrant greens and purples and oranges: the colors of my youth. As Porter’s agile baritone voice filled the air and etched the words “be good, be good, be good,” in my mind, I remembered.
I remembered: I ain’t never left Baltimore.
I remembered: I love that city.
***
Isaiah M. Wooden is a writer, performance-maker, and doctoral candidate in Theater and Performance Studies at Stanford University. He was born and raised in the great city of Baltimore, MD.
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