The Best American Essays 2017

by Leslie Jamison

  It’s hard not to want our white fellow citizens to share at least this one dimension of our lives more fully. One Baltimore case I think about took place at a new café on Cathedral Street, in Mount Vernon. I was getting breakfast and I could tell that the people running the place were a family from Highlandtown or maybe Hampden, close-knit white enclaves set off by a peculiar accent, the one from the John Waters movies that people use to make believe they know Baltimore. The order was wrong and I sent the food back to the manager in an understated manner, but he was gruff with me in a way that went outside the rules for interracial peace in the city. He then proceeded to outdo his rudeness to me by being curt with the two muscular busboys, who looked to all the world like recent parolees. (We’d say they “just came home.”) We weren’t in the county, and I was amazed.

  One thing that the writer Chester Himes observed during the ’60s and that I have noticed to be true for most of my life is that very many black people are willing to die before they will adopt the submissive attitude that they, rightly or wrongly, associate with what was necessary to endure under slavery. (Plenty of people refused to endure it then.) I had simply never heard a white man use an insulting tone that freely with black men who had just come home. On the news a few weeks later I heard that the manager’s body was found. Shortly after that the busboys confessed to executing him; their pictures were at the ATM. Dignity is another kind of national sovereignty we live in and protect.

  The black neighborhoods of Baltimore—like Sandtown, which kind of runs between Druid Hill Avenue and Payson Street—are like that, too, like countries, defended lands. Sandtown has a historic coherence partly because it runs between Monroe and Pennsylvania, the famous boulevard for black life during a significant portion of the twentieth century, home to the Royal Theater, to musical genius Eubie Blake, to the bandleaders Cab Calloway and Chick Webb, and to Baltimore’s siren, Billie Holiday. It has also been for a long time a vibrant crossroads for adult city life, music, culture, religion, food markets, and narcotics. My favorite landmark is Everyone’s Place on North Avenue, a thirty-year-old bookstore run by Baba Nati that easily outdistances its early competitors like Liberation Books in Harlem or Pyramid Books in D.C. It is like a black-nationalist-bent mini–Strand Bookstore in a row house at Penn North. Everyone’s Place put an intellectual hub in the center of an all-black neighborhood. That is a revolutionary act when you live in neighborhoods where houses are the same price as Detroit’s automobiles.

  On the other side of Gwynns Falls Parkway from Mondawmin is Frederick Douglass High School, among the first black secondary schools south of the Mason-Dixon Line and the alma mater of the black Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshall and the sociologist E. Franklin Frazier. Neither Marshall nor Frazier attended this “new” Douglass, relocated in the 1950s as a kind of last gasp of the segregation era, but the school has catered to the needs of the western side of the city and enrolled students from many different neighborhoods, especially those in easy walking distance from Sandtown and Reisterstown Road. Traditionally, Douglass meant to us Westsiders what Paul Laurence Dunbar High School, the home of so many basketball legends, has meant to black Eastsiders. The east–west divide of the black city was weaponized in the 1980s by a guy who came from out of town to popularize a radio show, but it took hold with the same intensity and imagined community conveyed by the names of the Los Angeles street gangs, which warped and fragmented young people in the 1990s. Today there is a deadly gang problem, with roots about as deep as a tweet.

  But one of the real boundaries is concrete and steel. At the southernmost edge of Sandtown stands the Highway to Nowhere, a metaphor of the deliberate failure and bad faith of 1960s urban renewal. It is a mile and a half of sunken highway, pitched initially as a part of slum clearance, that stops and crescendos into nothing, a powerful symbol of political inertia because it is meaningless except as a mark of “vertical sovereignty,” a bulky three-dimensional underpass reminding the observant of the state’s ability not simply to remove and change the past but to control and categorize space, a monument to the imminent splintering that is such a dominant factor in black life.

  Of course what is not really possible to understand about Sandtown is that it is, from street to street, an unending series of open-air drug markets and shooting galleries, of catcalls for “boy” or “girl.” That means that when the police cruisers move out of sight, highly organized and commercially profitable narcotics exchanges take place. Disputes here are settled violently and fatally. It’s embarrassing to admit it, and easier to ignore the confluence of forces that creates something that is more or less unthinkable—that a quadrant of a major city operates precisely like Ciudad Juárez, and has consumed generation after generation, banging a gun for coke or dope, decade after decade. The narco trafficking has outlasted any known employment industry, empowering the ambitious entrepreneurs and chemically numbing the idealists. Prison, death, and impairment are the fate of both groups, as the young dealers become the users.

  What was unbelievable about the April Uprising, what made it a genuine uprising, is that eighteen-year-old corner hustlers, dope boys, hoppers, curb servers, parolees, people who’ve never held a job and don’t anticipate holding one, typically don’t have enough invested in the state to riot against it—but for some reason now they do. When I visited a high school on McCulloh Street, at the edge of Sandtown, a school that embraced the students dismissed from everywhere else, and asked the teenagers whether they were ready to return to throwing bricks at police cars if there were an acquittal in the trial, two students swiftly piped up: “We is!”

  The Porter trial reflected the same extreme views that now fully dominate American life and have failed to halt the cycle of entropy, malaise, and outright disaster. One brother I talked to at the trial was convinced that Officer Porter would receive a guilty verdict for police misconduct, since he repeatedly stated that he had violated circulated guidelines by not buckling Freddie Gray into a seat. Even on television, the police are known to punish people who run away, so on the street everybody believes that Freddie Gray wound up dying from a retaliatory “rough ride” in a police van. But after a day’s deliberation, the jury told the judge they were deadlocked. When another two days brought no movement, the judge declared a mistrial. One juror believed that Porter had committed no crimes whatsoever; conversely, another held fast to the idea that Porter was a killer, guilty of manslaughter. The state voiced its determination to retry Porter, and in the meantime went to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals, delaying the trials against the other officers.

  The six suspended officers might have been useful on the street during 2015, when 344 people were killed in Baltimore City—a per capita record—66 of them in the Western District where Porter had once been on patrol, the deadliest place in the city. Only one in three of those murders has been cleared from police books.

  There seems, really, no way out for Freddie and William and Marvin and Larry, if the economy grows or contracts, if we move beyond the inner city or not. Walking west from the Cold Spring subway stop after the trial, I talked with a Gray family friend, a guy who was now a politico with ties to evangelical ministries but had once run with the late Little Melvin, the drug lord reputed to have called the end to rioting in 1968. As he talked to me about other horrifying cases of wrongful police force, we passed the car wash, and boys raced fat-tired ATVs by us as night came on. We were not far from where crosses had been burned in the late ’60s to keep potential black homebuyers away, the teachers, postal workers, and steelworkers. Now I wondered about my mother’s block, with its aging homeowners born before World War II, with a house that is already boarded up. Who belongs to the generation prepared to revitalize the modest city neighborhoods that desegregation left behind?

  So, in protest against the unjust killing of not just one Freddie Gray but generations of black women and men, and understanding that the remedy here is in the hinterland if it ever appears, a riot makes a lot of fuc
king sense.

  RACHEL KUSHNER

  “We Are Orphans Here”

  FROM The New York Times Magazine

  Standing at an intersection in Shuafat Refugee Camp, in East Jerusalem, I watched as a boy, sunk down behind the steering wheel of a beat-up sedan, zoomed through an intersection with his arm out the driver’s-side window, signaling like a nascar driver pulling in for a pit stop. I was amazed. He looked about twelve.

  “No one cares here,” my host, Baha Nababta, said, laughing at my astonishment. “Anyone can do anything they want.”

  As Baha and I walked around Shuafat this spring, teenagers fell in behind us, forming a kind of retinue. Among them were cool kids who looked like cool kids the world over, tuned in to that teenage frequency, a dog whistle with global reach. I noticed that white was a popular color. White slouchy, pegged jeans, white polo shirts, white high-tops. Maybe white has extra status in a place where many roads are unpaved and turn to mud, where garbage is everywhere, literally, and where water shortages make it exceedingly difficult to keep people and clothing clean.

  So few nonresidents enter Shuafat that my appearance there seemed to be a highly unusual event, met with warm greetings verging on hysteria, crowds of kids following along. “Hello, America!” they called excitedly. I was a novelty, but also, I was with Baha Nababta, a twenty-nine-year-old Palestinian community organizer beloved by the kids of Shuafat. Those who followed us wanted not just my attention but his. Baha had a rare kind of charisma. Camp-counselor charisma, you might call it. He was a natural leader of boys. Every kid we passed knew him and either waved or stopped to speak to him. Baha founded a community center so that older children would have a place to hang out, because there is no open space in Shuafat Refugee Camp, no park, not a single playground, nowhere for kids to go, not even a street, really, where they can play, because there are no sidewalks, most of the narrow roads barely fitting the cars that ramble down them. Younger kids tapped me on the arms and wanted to show me the mural they painted with Baha. The road they helped to pave with Baha, who supervised its completion. The plants they planted with Baha along a narrow strip. Baha, Baha, Baha.

  It was like that with the adults too. They all wanted his attention. His phone was blowing up in his pocket as we walked. He finally answered. There was a dispute between a man whose baby died at a clinic and the doctor who treated the baby. The man whose baby died tried to burn the doctor alive, and now the doctor was in critical condition, in a hospital in Jerusalem. Throughout the two days I spent with Baha, I heard more stories like this that he was asked to help resolve. People relied on him. He had a vision for the Shuafat camp, where he was born and raised, that went beyond what could be imagined from within the very limited confines of the place.

  In an area of high-rise apartment buildings clustered around a mosque with spindly, futuristic minarets, a pudgy boy of ten or eleven called over to us. “My dad is trying to reach you,” he said to Baha. Baha told me that the buildings in that part of the camp had no water and that everyone was contacting him about it. He had not been answering his phone, he confessed, because he didn’t have any good news yet for the residents. I got the impression Baha was something like an informal mayor, on whom people depended to resolve disputes, build roads, put together volunteer committees, and try to make Shuafat safe for children.

  The building next to us was twelve stories. Next to it was another twelve-story building. High-rise apartments in the camp are built so close together that if a fire should happen, the results would be devastating. There would be no way to put it out. The buildings were all built of stone blocks that featured, between blocks, wooden wedges that stuck out intermittently, as if the builders had never returned to fill the gaps with mortar. I gazed up at a towering facade, with its strange wooden wedges, which made the building look like a model of a structure, except that it was occupied. The pudgy boy turned to me as I craned my neck. “This building is stupidly built,” he said. “It’s junk.”

  “Do you live here?” I asked him, and he said yes.

  Shuafat Refugee Camp is inside Jerusalem proper, according to the municipal boundaries that Israel declared after the Six Day War in 1967. (Though the entire walled area is frequently referred to as the Shuafat Refugee Camp, the actual camp, run by the United Nation’s relief agency for Palestinian refugees, is only a small portion. Adjacent to the camp are three neighborhoods that are the responsibility of the city of Jerusalem.) The Palestinian Authority has no jurisdiction there: the camp is, according to Israeli law, inside Israel, and the people who live there are Jerusalem residents, but they are refugees in their own city. Residents pay taxes to Israel, but the camp is barely serviced. There is very little legally supplied water, a scarcely functioning sewage system, essentially no garbage pickup, no road building, no mail service (the streets don’t even have names, much less addresses), virtually no infrastructure of any kind. There is no adequate school system. Israeli emergency fire and medical services do not enter the camp. The Israeli police enter only to make arrests; they provide no security for camp residents. There is chaotic land registration. While no one knows how many people really live in the Shuafat camp and its three surrounding neighborhoods, which is roughly one square kilometer, it’s estimated that the population is around eighty thousand. They live surrounded by a twenty-five-foot concrete wall, a wall interspersed by guard towers and trapdoors that swing open when Israeli forces raid the camp, with reinforcements in the hundreds, or even, as in December 2015, over a thousand troops.

  Effectively, there are no laws in the Shuafat Refugee Camp, despite its geographical location inside Jerusalem. The Shuafat camp’s original citizens were moved from the Old City, where they sought asylum in 1948 during the Arab-Israeli War, to the camp’s boundaries starting in 1965, when the camp was under the control of the Jordanian government, with more arriving, in need of asylum, during and after the war in 1967. Now, fifty years after Israel’s 1967 boundaries were drawn, even Israeli security experts don’t quite know why the Shuafat Refugee Camp was placed inside the Jerusalem municipal boundaries. The population was much smaller then and surrounded by beautiful green, open forestland, which stretched to the land on which the Jewish settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev was later built. (The forestland is still there, visible beyond the separation wall, but inaccessible to camp residents, on account of the wall.) Perhaps the Israelis were hoping the camp’s residents could be relocated, because they numbered only a few thousand. Instead, the population of the camp exploded in the following decades into the tens of thousands. In 1980 Israel passed a law declaring Jerusalem the “complete and united” capital of Israel. In 2004 Israel began erecting the concrete wall around the camp, cutting inside Israel’s own declared boundaries, as if to stanch and cauterize the camp from “united” Jerusalem.

  If high-rise buildings are not typically conjured by the term “refugee camp,” neither is an indoor shopping mall, but there is one in the Shuafat camp: two floors and a third that was under construction, an escalator up and down, and a store called Fendi, which sells inexpensive women’s clothes. The mall owner greeted us with exuberance and pulled Baha aside to ask for advice of some kind. A teenager who worked at a mall ice-cream parlor, a hipster in a hoodie and eyeglass frames without lenses, did a world-class beatbox for me and Moriel Rothman-Zecher, a writer and organizer who had walked me into the camp in order to make introductions between me and Baha and to serve as my Arabic interpreter. Moriel and the teenager from the ice-cream shop took turns. Moriel’s own beatbox was good but not quite up to the Shuafat Refugee Camp beatbox standard. We met an accountant named Fahed, who had just opened his shop in the mall to prepare taxes for residents. He was stunned to hear English being spoken and eager to use his own. The tax forms are in Hebrew, he explained, so most people in the camp must hire a bilingual accountant to complete them.

  Before the separation wall was constructed, the mall was bulldozed twice by the Israeli authorities, but the owner rebuilt both
times. Since the wall has gone up, the Israelis have not tried to demolish any large buildings in Shuafat, though they have destroyed individual homes. Armed Palestinian gangsters could take away someone’s land or apartment at any moment. A fire or earthquake would be catastrophic. There are multiple risks to buying property in the Shuafat camp, but the cost of an apartment there can be less than a tenth of what an apartment would cost on the other side of the separation wall, in East Jerusalem. And living in Shuafat is a way to try to hold on to Jerusalem residency status. Jerusalem residents have a coveted blue ID card, meaning they can enter Israel in order to work and support their families, unlike Palestinians with green, or West Bank, ID cards, who need many supporting documents in order to enter Israel—to work or for any other reason, and who also must pass through military checkpoints like Qalandiya, which can require waiting in hours-long lines. Jerusalem residency is, quite simply, a lifeline to employment, a matter of survival.