Shelter A black tale of Homeland, Baltimore

Shelter is a collection of essays that trace the struggles of being Black and middle class in Baltimore through the experiences of the author and his family. In this illuminating text, Lawrence Jackson brings to bear his impressive academic record: he holds a PhD in English and American literature from Stanford University and is currently Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History at Johns Hopkins University. His extensive publications include biographies of Ralph Ellison and Chester B. Himes and his book Indignant Generation: A Narrative History of African American Writers and Critics, 1934--1960 (2011), which won the Modern Language Association's William Sanders Scarborough Prize. Notably, Shelter is not the first of Jackson's works to explore his family history or Baltimore's contentious racial legacy. He first covered these topics in the book My Father's Name: A Black Virginia Family After the Civil War (2012) and in his 2016 article in Harper's Magazine on Freddie Gray, "The City That Bleeds." The book's title cannot fully encapsulate the range of interrelated and intertwined topics covered in the six essays, which are partly personal and family remembrances and partly Black history and social geography of Baltimore, particularly the Homeland neighborhood where Jackson purchased a home upon returning to the city in 2016. Across the essays, Jackson traces his family's history and the multigenerational efforts to attain a middle-class life as people of color in the context of a racist society. While elucidating how racism specifically manifests in Maryland and Baltimore, the author provides racialized histories of several major Baltimore institutions. His interest in Baltimore's physical city and landscape offers another lens for understanding the city. Dispersed throughout are ruminations on other topics that deviate somewhat from the narrative yet are valuable in their own right. In detailing his family history, Jackson conveys meaningful insights, broadly applicable, into the problems facing African Americans in pursuit of middle-class status. His ancestors were strivers: after the Civil War, they established themselves as landowners and acquired education and professional standing. Five generations lived in Baltimore and joined the African Episcopal Church, whose members, Jackson notes, are "readers and people of reason" (p. 107). His parents graduated from college and became professionals and homeowners, but the American dream did not work out for them as it did for many white Americans. Several factors converged to pull Black residents into a pernicious undertow. Banks' predatory practice of redlining--refusing loans for purchase or improvement to individuals living in areas deemed risky--caused depreciating home values, and urban renewal (effectively Black removal) organizations declared eminent domain to claim Black-owned homes at cheap prices so developers could renew the land for profit. In 1965, redevelopment efforts forced Jackson's grandparents out of their home with little remuneration. Segregation ordinances, formally effective in Baltimore from 1911 to 1917 and informally well after, restricted where Black residents could live. Restrictive covenants, used by Homeland developers and others, prohibited Black Baltimoreans from renting or owning homes in white residential areas unless they were servants. Having grown up in an urban row house in the Black neighborhood of Park Heights, Jackson later tried to create a new start for himself and his family in Atlanta, where he taught at Emory University. However, after fifteen years of hard struggle there, he returned to Baltimore in 2016--now divorced--for a position at Johns Hopkins University with one of his two sons. His hunt for "shelter" in Baltimore led him to Homeland, an affluent, predominantly white neighborhood within Baltimore about five miles away from Park Heights. Jackson's decision to move there was not without internal conflict: the area came with heavy baggage and a history steeped in slavery. In 1832, David Perine, a wealthy white slaveowner, purchased the 238 acres for his country estate. Further, Perine's close friend was Supreme Court Justice Roger B. Taney, author of the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision, which held that Blacks had no rights that whites need honor. In the 1920s, the Roland Park Company acquired the land for its Homeland development, hiring Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr., to lay out the new neighborhood. To attract prosperous white buyers, the developers established a homeowners' association and restrictive covenants that kept out Black residents. Curvilinear streets; large, heavily treed lots; and architect-designed houses provided the amenities well-to-do buyers sought. Jackson found Homeland's design and ambience to his liking, describing it as "a well-tended stately village" (p. 16) and "like a cathedral of redemption" (p. 143). Strongly identifying as middle-class, he felt something heroic in living with his class as a Black person, and Homeland certainly fit that requirement. He also hoped to break the deadly undertow of Black urban economics by transmitting some generational wealth to his children through home ownership. He admitted to some economic anxiety, however, by confessing that upon retiring, he would have to move into a very small house, reducing the likelihood of that transmission. With a sense of irony, Jackson also found that Homeland's pastoral ideal had many machines in its garden. He effectively describes the neighborhood's street life as one of "bruising unquiet during three of the four seasons" as leaf blowers whined and HVACs drowned out the birds (p. 284). In keeping with his neighborhood, Jackson took pride in maintaining his grounds but did so through his own labor, unlike his neighbors, who hired out this work. Despite questioning his motives for choosing Homeland, the author was clearly at home there, as was his son. By combining both personal and group levels of narrative analysis, Jackson offers a different approach to understanding the difficulties facing the Black middle class. He concludes that "systemic racism is the obvious culprit" behind a long line of brutal acts and policies--from slavery to vagrancy laws, Black codes, poll taxes, grandfather clauses, rape, and lynching--and traces the complicity of several major Baltimore institutions (p. 260). During the early 1900s, Johns Hopkins medical scientists promoted eugenics, the hospital maintained segregated wards until 1973, and both the university and the medical school enrolled few Black students and hired few Black faculty. Although Baltimore public schools integrated more quickly than those in other southern cities, they also built prison-like school facilities, and school administrators presumed white teachers were the best promoters of middle-class behavior and attitudes. Jackson tried to confront these racist traditions by bringing together members of the university community and Black residents. One such effort involved organizing a "Jazz in the Square" concert in a Black neighborhood. Billed as a memorial to Billie Holiday, the great American jazz singer who grew up in Baltimore, the event drew residents from the immediate area and around the city. The site was near where, several years earlier, a large-scale street disturbance had broken out to protest Freddie Gray's killing in a police van. Examining Baltimore's physical and social layout, Jackson notes that it was "the experience of bus riding [that] made it possible for [him] to observe people and the built environment of the city" (p. 240). In doing so, he follows in the footsteps of Alfred Kazin, who, via foot, brilliantly described the physical and social worlds of his Brooklyn, NY, neighborhood in A Walker in the City (1951). Where Kazin moved more slowly and intimately through his neighborhood, Jackson is propelled more rapidly and less intimately but with a wider territorial range. The essay form Jackson adopts is both the strength and weakness of the book. These essays are thought pieces stitched together to ultimately make a book. Dispersed throughout are digressions that can distract from the main narrative but often demonstrate the richness of Black life and culture. They include brief discussions of such topics as Baltimore jazz; Black fraternities' dance patterns at a Martin Luther King parade; squeegee boys, whom the author transforms into entrepreneurs, challenging the conventional view that they are annoyances or threats; and the African ethnicities of Black Baltimore. Whereas the main narratives are more developed, these asides are unconnected snapshots. There is no comprehensive argument about Black resistance, Black survival, or an alternative culture. The essays are not definitive; they are valuable more for their perspectives, insights, and suggestions than for their evidentiary base. Shelter has received uniformly positive evaluations; Kirkus Review found it a "probing portrait" of Baltimore. Overall, these are excellent essays, though not without some challenge for readers. They provide good insight into the difficulties that Black middle-class Baltimoreans must contend with because of personal and institutional racism. To a lesser extent, they suggest the vibrancy and stamina of Black Baltimoreans' efforts to create a viable culture and to resist that racism. Jackson writes for sophisticated readers, but the essays are accessible to a broad audience. This book is an excellent read for all, especially for those interested in urban, Black, and Baltimore history. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --James Borchert, emeritus, Cleveland State University

A Black man makes a conflicted return to his roots in this bittersweet meditation on race and belonging. In 2016, Jackson (My Father's Name) moved back to his hometown of Baltimore to take a professorship in English at Johns Hopkins University, and bought a house in the upscale white neighborhood of Homeland--formerly a slave owner's estate and a far cry from the inner-city surroundings of his boyhood. He found the battle to maintain his house to the homeowners association's standards a source of satisfaction--the yard-work scenes are epic and engrossing--but also of anxiety as he worried about implied accusations by old friends of Uncle Tom--ism. On that peg he hangs an atmospheric history of Black Baltimore, sketching vivid profiles of famous locals--a tragic Billie Holiday, an ambitious Frederick Douglass who "refused to believe that the rules... applied to him"--while revisiting old haunts, surveying political wrangles over poverty and crime, and taking in a King Day parade that gets stymied by horse manure. In resonant prose, Jackson ably conveys the feuding aspirations and unease of the Black middle class: "I want my son to have the confidence of the people who owned the land, without having to hate himself for it." The result is a stirring reflection on the meaning of home. Agent: Regina Brooks, Serendipity Literary. (Apr.)

The misunderstood city of Baltimore receives a probing portrait by a returning native son. In 2016, Jackson, a noted historian and biographer, returned from a professorship in Atlanta to his hometown of Baltimore, where he had been offered a joint appointment in history and English by Johns Hopkins, and he now directs the Billie Holiday Project for Liberation Arts. It was a year after the police killing of Freddie Gray set the city aflame, and Jackson's purchase of a home in a historically White neighborhood is the point of departure for a series of essays that seamlessly blend history, journalism, and memoir. The author's command of factual detail is matched by the laser clarity of his childhood memories, whether offering a taxonomy of his elementary school teachers or recollecting the loan of a landscaping tool by a neighbor. Jackson clarifies issues like whether Johns Hopkins should have a private police force with a full complement of reporting, analysis, introspection, and lament. One of myriad evocative sentences: "When 'Prince of Peace' rang out over the congregation in 1989 at St. James, I could claim to have experienced a shared spiritual presence, a palpable thickening of emotional connection with people who were not materially engaged. This is my main experience of transcendence outside of a nightclub dancing to deep house music, and only then on those rare occasions when I had sweated through my pants." Writing about bus drivers, the author showcases the brilliant embodiment of geography that will make this book come alive for non-Baltimoreans: "They displayed inimitable sangfroid as they plowed the twenty-ton behemoths into the rapid flow of traffic on Druid Hill Avenue before making the daring left turn at Cloverdale basketball court, all the while we passengers were showcased rarities, like the rotating carousel of pork loins in the window of Leon's Pig Pen." Those are only two of countless passages of sparkling prose. An extraordinary dual portrait of the author and his hometown--angry, tender, incisive, and bracingly eloquent. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.