Making Peace
Four decades of war protests

By Brian W. Simpson

The white-haired, 67-year-old woman sits in court again, yellow notepad and beach novel in hand. The charge: ignoring a police officer’s order to move as she prayed on the White House sidewalk.

Elizabeth McAlister. War protester. Former nun. Ex-con. Grandmother. Cofounder of Baltimore’s faith-based, nonviolent resistance community, Jonah House. Widow of Philip Berrigan, the ex-priest and “Catonsville 9” leader who famously torched draft records in May 1968.

On Friday, June 22, 2007, McAlister chats with friends in Room 100 of the Superior Court of the District of Columbia. Fluorescent lights throw a sickly blue hue on the wood-paneled courtroom and its burgundy-and-gray-flecked carpet. McAlister waits for the trial to begin.

The case against McAlister and fourteen others stems from the bitter cold night of March 16, 2007. After a National Cathedral service, three thousand people in the Christian Peace Witness for Iraq protest trudged through rain and sleet to the White House to pray. More than two hundred people were arrested that night for crossing police lines and ignoring orders to move off the White House sidewalk. Many chose to avoid judicial hassles by “posting and forfeiting,” which is like paying a traffic ticket. McAlister and friends wanted their day in court.

“I’ve had a few experiences in court,” she says. “I don’t know how many. I’ve been resisting this country’s wars and weapons since the mid-1960s. They add up after a while.” Her longest prison stint lasted just over two years in the 1980s, punishment for hammering holes into a B-52’s bomb-bay doors. At the time, the youngest of her three children was 2 and her oldest was 9.

As the trial begins at 10:50 a.m., McAlister seems prepared for the butt-numbing judicial proceedings. She dresses comfortably in faded jeans, brown leather hiking shoes, and a short-sleeve blue oxford. During pauses in proceedings, she dips into her book (Shenandoah Summer by John Jaffe) or slips outside to bum a couple of Marlboros from friends.

Except for a few young people, her fellow defendants and supporters are gray-haired and a bit wizened. They come from California, Minnesota, and Texas, as well as Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. They proclaim their message on buttons (“Declare Peace”) and T-shirts (a blood-spouting oil derrick borders the words “Bring Our Troops Home Now”). With an attorney-adviser’s help, they represent themselves. Before the trial, one defendant advised another, “We don’t use the term ‘your honor’ because we’re all equal in God’s eyes.”

McAlister’s face is deeply lined, her resonate voice nicotine-roughened. She is supremely confident in her opposition to war. “The Jesus we know would die rather than take a life,” she says. But trials still make her nervous. “It’s never routine. We could get some jail time,” she says. “Especially those of us who have a long record.”

At 11:45, the tousle-haired young prosecutor, Jeffrey Shapiro, stands and tells Judge Joan Zeldon that all but one of six police-officer witnesses are currently at the White House, where eight hundred protestors are attempting to scale the fence. “It’s a state of emergency,” he says. Judge Zeldon is skeptical, but orders the trial to reconvene in the afternoon. After lunch, the courtroom learns the crowds were protesting the Vietnamese president’s visit, striking an eerily familiar chord for many. The early report of hundreds of fence-jumpers was not borne out.

At 3 p.m., Shapiro calls two U.S. Park Police officers, who speak in the awkward syntax of their police reports. McAlister rises to the podium to cross-examine each. She grills them on the night’s events but fails to dent the government case. When she asks a beefy, mustachioed SWAT team commander if he realizes that a vast majority of Americans have “deep grief and/or anger” over the Iraq war, she draws an immediate prosecutorial objection sustained by the judge. Another question prompts Judge Zeldon to tell her, “This seems to be a tangent that doesn’t get you anywhere.” 

The communal defense is spirited and ardently argued. The defendants invoke higher moral values, the Geneva Conventions, and Rosa Parks. The judge shrugs them off and denies motions for acquittal.

By 4:30, after the closing statements, Judge Zeldon sternly addresses the group. “I find you guilty,” she says, imposing $100 in fines each for most defendants.

McAlister is unperturbed: “It’s what we expected.” She mulls whether or not she will pay the fine, and says coyly, “I’m taking that under advisement, as they say.”

For her, the trial is just another battle in a long struggle. “I don’t know if there’s anything we do that we ever really complete,” she says. “We’ve got gardens and we weed them. And we weed them. And we weed them. What do we do that is ever done? If you’re raising children, you change a diaper. And you change another one. And another one. You keep at it. How do you live faithfully without keeping at it?”

As the clerks write up the sentencing paperwork, Elizabeth McAlister heads outside for a quick smoke before returning to the fight.



Playground Politics
Young environmentalists work to save an endangered bird

By Susan McCallum-Smith
   
This guy right here,” says Austin, nudging Mike, “can identify any bird just by looking up into the sky.”

Mike Hudson, the lanky 11-year-old founder of the Friends of the Red Knot Club, has shoulder-blade-length brown hair and a sensitive expression, and he wears a T-shirt with a crayon drawing of the plump, rosy red knot bird on the front, his name handwritten underneath. Austin Roth-Eagle, 10, Harry Huntley, 9, and Harry’s little brother, Russell, 7, wear similar T-shirts —only I’m convinced that Austin and Harry have swapped theirs to confuse me; Austin has the tousled, cherubic looks of a boy wizard, while pale-eyed, tanned Harry vibes surfer-dude. Russell’s arms are stained indigo from palms to elbows.

“Were you painting today?” I ask. Russell stretches his arms out and swivels his wrists as if he’s tightening valves on a submarine.

“Yeah,” he sighs, with a tinge of regret. “We got ink for stamps. I just rolled in it.”


I meet the members of the Red Knot Club on the afternoon that the GreenMount School closes for summer vacation; it is the hottest day in June. The pupils stagger from the Remington neighborhood school, blinking, into the rippling heat. They clutch science models made from wire and ping-pong balls and art projects shedding glitter and tissue. White labels pinned to their chests declare, “We’re going to miss you!”

I trail the boys, sweltering damply, to a large tree whose knurled roots fan out in the center of a small park next to the school. We slip, relieved, into the shade.

“The original club actually first met on this spot,” says Mike, touching the bark of the tree, recalling the founding moment of his eight-month-old campaign to save the red knot. He hatched the idea after going on one of the monthly bird-watching walks in Patterson Park organized by the local Audubon Society. The walk’s organizer, David Curson, had explained that the red knot was likely to be extinct by 2010, unless it was placed on the endangered species list. Mike formed the club to save the bird and raise awareness of environmental damage in the Delaware and Chesapeake bays. Since January 2007, the Red Knot Club members have collected signatures for a petition and helped write or generate more than nine hundred letters to Dirk Kempthorne, secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior. (To date, no reply has been received.) The club’s website has received almost one thousand hits, and their campaign has been profiled by the Defenders of Wildlife.

Tenacious and nomadic, the red knot migrates an astonishing ten thousand miles every year from the tip of Tierra del Fuego in Chile and Argentina to the Arctic regions of Canada, pausing in Delaware Bay to refuel on horseshoe crab eggs. But, as Austin explains, “People are over-fishing horseshoe crabs to use as bait for commercial fishing.”

“So,” Mike ticks off points on his fingers, “one, the birds are not getting enough to eat to continue their migration; two, when they get to the Arctic they get there too early or too late so the food isn’t as abundant. What they eat in Delaware Bay has to last them the rest of the journey.”

Russell folds his blue arms and follows the volley of conversation like a spectator at a tennis match.


“The red knot is about the size of a robin,” says Mike. “Or maybe a tiny bit smaller. They have long wings and short tails, though, so they can lift themselves better. And there’s only the slightest difference in the red color. The girls are a bit more cinnamon, the boys are a bit more toward a scarlet shade. The boys are not like bright red like this,” he points at the drawing on his chest, “but more toward an orangey shade, and the girls are a bit more gold-y. Would you say that sounds about right?”

Russell nods vigorously.

“And the reason they eat the horseshoe crab eggs,” says Harry, “is that they are very high in protein—”

“Protein and fat,” clarifies Mike. “So they can last a very long journey. And there was this one I saw, about one hundred and seventy something … grams, I think. It wasn’t even ready to fly yet.”

“It takes one or two months to get from Tierra del Fuego to the Delaware Bay and another month to get to the Arctic,” says Harry. “About three months altogether.”

“Two or three,” agrees Mike.

“They have about three brown speckled eggs,” adds Austin. “And they wait until they get to the Arctic.”
  
“Sounds cold,” I say.

“The lower part; it’s not so cold, just chilly.”

I write this quote in my notebook, attributing it to Harry, then score out his name and replace it with Austin.

“Who made the T-shirts?

“Mikey.”

“Good idea.”

Like a canary in a coal mine, the red knot’s decline signifies more than its own demise, a fact of which the kids have a precocious, instinctive understanding.

 “We are saving more than the red knot by saving this entire ecosystem—” stresses Mike.

“We’re saving the horseshoe crab,” interrupts Russell.

“—and every shore bird that migrates the route through Delaware Bay. I’m not saying all but almost every bird does—so we’re helping marbled godwits, whimbrel curlews, sanderlings, dulins, and ruddy turnstones, etc.”

He pauses after this impressive recitation. “These are not issues that we have statistics for, but what we’re giving you, it’s close enough.”

I ask what their teachers think of them and their club. All the kids make talking motions with their hand indicating that they probably yak too much in class. Still, they have given presentations about the red knot at school, and Harry is convinced his teacher appreciates their activism. “One of the things she likes about me is that I am a great environmentalist.” We laugh. He grins, but insists, “Austin and I are both big environmentalists.”

“Me, too,” says Russell.

Mike mentions a friend who had written to President Bush about saving the polar bear. “She got nothing back. Just some letter about being a good student in school or something.”

“We had a chess tournament to raise awareness about pollution in the Chesapeake Bay,” Austin says.

“Can you all play chess?”

The kids nod.

“But my sister’s better than I am,” says Mike about Emily, peeping around her mother’s skirt.

I frown, nonplussed, at the 7-year-old, blonde child.    


Our conversation ebbs. Despite the mugginess, they squirm, antsy, eager for flight. I admire their tenacity. Some of their friends think bird watching is weird and boring but they do it anyway. This new generation is determined to fix the damage caused by my own. Sweat puddles round my feet. I feel myself wilting, I feel myself age. In a branch over our heads, a bird chirps the same three notes relentlessly.

“We actually started right here on this spot …” Harry says, breaking the lull.

“I told her that already,” says Mike.

I’m losing their attention. I don’t want them to leave. I ask them their plans for the summer.

“Get more letters sent for the red knot campaign,” says Mike. “There’s nothing interesting going to happen unless my mom lets me go to the Arctic.”

The kids look wistfully across the park, kicking the grass at their feet. I release them. They scatter from the base of the tree, whooping and swooping their way toward the swings and a long, hot, childhood summer. I pass Mike as I wade back to my car. He pauses, spins around, and looks up at the sky.

To learn more about the Friends of the Red Knot Club’s efforts to save the bird from extinction, go to www.friendsoftheredknot.org.

Click Here to watch a video on The Friends of the Red Knot


Journalism by Ordeal         
A Baltimore Sun veteran’s forty-year career

By Susan Muaddi Darraj

At a celebration commemorating the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Baltimore Science Fiction Society, David Ettlin—one of the group’s founders—offered the audience these words: “I have proof that time travel exists. There are just two drawbacks—the first is that it goes in only one direction, and the other is that it happens too fast.”

For Ettlin, forty is a magic number—on June 1, he accepted a buyout from The Baltimore Sun, retiring from his position as the night metro editor after—yes—forty years. “To the day,” he emphasized when I met with him. He leaned forward in his seat, hand on his chin. “That was a career,” he added with a smile, his blue eyes shining. “Does anybody want to work longer than forty years in the same place?”

Ettlin’s career at The Sun assumed many forms and manifestations: He worked “rewrite” for many years, assembling and editing reporter’s notes, as well as writing scut—“filler stuff”—for different sections. He’s worked the Sunday courts (hearings held on Sundays for people who’d committed crimes during the weekend) and penned weather stories that tried his patience and creativity, as well as edited the real estate section for four months—an assignment he calls “journalism by ordeal.”

Many stories have inspired him: There was Inky the Whale, a female pygmy sperm whale that had been found beached on a New Jersey shore and brought to the National Aquarium to be rehabilitated and studied. Scientists at the Aquarium saved her by locating and removing plastic debris from her stomach that had been endangering her life. Ettlin followed the story from its beginning to its conclusion, when a healthy Inky was released back into the waters off the coast of Florida five months after her initial rescue.

Many more stories have broken his heart. Early in his career, he covered a fire that broke out in a large, old frame house on Braddish Avenue in Baltimore. As fire crews fought the blaze, it became apparent that four children who had been sleeping in the attic were missing. Ettlin knocked on a neighbor’s door to speak to their mother, who was waiting there to hear news of their fate. He found her in the kitchen, sitting quietly. “She was trying to sip coffee; her hands were shaking.” He said, “I think in her heart she knew that the children were dead.”

She calmly gave him their names and ages. “I thanked her and I was backing away when someone came in the front door and shouted out that they’d found the children. She jumped from the table and went rushing out the door, just in time to see firefighters carrying out rubber sheets that had smoking bodies in them.

“And I heard her scream,” he added simply, “and I was overwhelmed.”

Despite the shock of the event—he went home that night with a 102-degree fever—he said, “I survived that night as a reporter. And I thought, ‘Maybe it can’t ever get worse than that,’ but it enabled me to understand what people go through in tragedies, to understand that there is a role-playing thing that goes on. You are the reporter, and you have to ask the questions.”  He learned the job of the reporter: to document history. “If nobody writes the names and ages of the children who died in the fire, what testimony is there in the world that they even existed?”

The story that still haunts him is that of Rita Fisher, who was found starved to death by her mother and others in her household in 1997. The gruesome tale of the 9-year-old girl who weighed only 47 pounds made Ettlin, a toughened reporter by then, break down and cry. “It was one of the most hideous cases of child abuse of all time,” he said. “The mother’s boyfriend had said that the girl had misbehaved, that she’d steal things and they had to punish her. We sent a young reporter to interview the elementary school principal; she came back with a quote that stunned me, that just tore me up. She told the principal what the family had said about Rita, about how she would steal things. And the principal said the only thing she ever stole was food.” Ettlin had to walk away from his desk to compose himself. “That destroyed me. It still does.”

It was a rare instance. “I’m in a lot of ways a pessimist, because the world is not a pretty place,” he said. “Look at what happens on a local level. We are so inured to people killing each other that it’s part of our landscape.”

Armed with forty years’ worth of gripping stories and a lot of free time to travel, explore, and pursue other kinds of writing, Ettlin thinks he may try his hand at fiction. Having written about tragedy and human suffering from a reporter’s point of view, he will rely on that as he explores fiction as well. “I may have to draw on the ghost of Rita Fisher to remember the things that haunt people.”

Click Here to watch a video interview with David Ettlin


The Sentinel
Standing guard with a helping hand

By Lionel Foster

Shortly before last Christmas, a 14-year-old boy walked into the Baltimore City Health Department’s North Avenue facility to be tested for HIV. Although approximately 17,000 city residents live with the disease and the STD clinic is just one of the four community health programs housed within the two-story building, the boy’s youth and uncertainty set him apart.

He walked through the high, concrete archway, stopped, unsure of how to proceed, then asked the security guard, who doubles as a receptionist, what to do. The boy feared the worst. After having unprotected sex, his health was failing. Four hours later he knew the cause.

“When you hear that you have AIDS,” says the security guard, Steave Williams, “death flashes in front of your eyes. I gave him a hug, said a prayer, and wrote down my phone number in case he needed help with anything.”

Six months later he hadn’t heard from the boy, but incidents like this don’t stop Williams from helping the facility’s tens of thousands of annual visitors however he can. For two years he’s been the first face the Health Department’s West Baltimore clients see en route to one of four facilities: a dental office, a men’s health center, a family planning program, and an STD prevention and training center. The last area, known to many simply as “the second floor,” is by far the most popular destination. “I see 125, sometimes 150 people per day,” Williams says. “Of that number, a hundred are headed upstairs, and sixty-five will be familiar faces.”

But he’s not complaining. “If they’re here, it means they’re getting treatment. I just wish more would come.” He welcomes each client with the same heartfelt greeting—“How are you, my brother? How are you, my sister?”—because he never knows what frame of mind the next client might be in. “I just show everyone good hospitality. It wins.”

And there’s a lot to combat.

“One man went wild upstairs. He said, ‘I am going to kill myself’ when he found out he had AIDS. I had to talk him down until the police arrived.” Eight months later, “a woman tried to run over her boyfriend with her car as soon as he stepped out of the clinic. She’d just found out that she’d contracted AIDS from him.”

Deborah Ruffin, echoing the sentiments of many coworkers, calls Williams “an angel” and insists he’s “sent straight from God.” Within minutes of meeting him, total strangers divulge their most painful secrets, and his skills have led at least one high-ranking police officer (an officer is always posted upstairs) to request that he join the force. Williams is greatly admired, but after two years, the vast majority of people he meets through his day job have no idea exactly how highly qualified he is. He spent ten years as a psychologist’s assistant at Catholic Charities.

His time at Catholic Charities coincided with a decade-long reign as the International Kickboxing League World Middleweight Champion and a 1997 induction into the World Martial Arts Hall of Fame.

Williams grew up the eighth of eleven children in one of the few houses that could accommodate such a large family in West Baltimore’s George B. Murphy Homes. For years before its federally subsidized demise, the densely populated high-rises represented the worst in American urban planning. Williams says he personally witnessed at least thirty murders during his time there. A friend of his, in trouble with area drug dealers, was shot four times in the back during a game of dodgeball.

Williams might have taken a similar route if it hadn’t gone against his natural instincts. “I was out with a few of my friends during a stick-up and tried to talk them out of it,” he recalls. “After that, they didn’t want me involved. The deal was, I’d stay in school, and they’d make sure nothing happened to me.”

Several years later he graduated from Baltimore Polytechnic Institute, then the Ohio Institute of Photography & Technology. When he returned to the city, he took up kickboxing at the Murphy Homes Recreation Center under Leroy “Superfeet” Taylor, himself a world champion.

Williams held five different regional, national, and international titles simultaneously for ten years, while defeating opponents in England, Poland, France, and the United States. He lost the world championship belt in 2002 to a 25-year-old from Massachusetts. Williams was 41 years old.

He ended up with the Health Department by happenstance when the security firm he signed on with to supplement the income from his kickboxing studio won the contract. Today, both jobs are going well. He’s getting more calls to offer classes in local schools, and his battle-tested calm is an asset behind the desk. He’s happy to be what some would consider overqualified: “I go beyond what the job requires,” he says. “I have to help, reach out, and be of service to my community. If you don’t, they’ll never go right.”



Free Style
The front porch as marketplace

By Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson

In Charles Village, you could pick up a bowl of Mardi Gras beads, a palm-sized plastic wind-up robot, or a copy of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina while out for a Saturday walk around the block. Such items are not for sale in one of the new trendy shops along St. Paul Street. These things, gently used, grace the front of some Victorian rowhouses, dotting the borderline between porch and sidewalk. They bear no signs or price tags, these mysterious closet-clearing castoffs, but are a trash-to-treasure community story.

“People come here and say, ‘Can I really take this?’” says Lisa Simeone, describing the surprised reaction she gets when she assures curious pedestrians the stuff is free. “The ones who get the most excited are young people who are into vintage clothes or are rhapsodic about LPs. You put it out there and they will come.”

A Baltimore resident for twenty-five years and a Charles Villager for twenty-two, Simeone is best known for her mellifluous voice as the former host of National Public Radio’s Weekend All Things Considered and current host of NPR’s World of Opera and the syndicated documentary radio series Soundprint. On this particular June evening, she sits gazing out an open window, barefoot, a glass of wine in her hand. She is stunning, as usual, wearing dangly gold earrings, a lime sleeveless tank, and a linen print skirt. She pets one of her three cats, Pupetto, and reflects on the souls of things.

“Some things are too good to throw away, but not nice enough to sell,” she says. “There are lots of tinkerers in the world. And if someone can use something, God bless them.”

Simeone’s Giveaway is a sporadic, year-round event, a spin on the urban porch sale in which rowhouse residents sell used things for fifty cents or five dollars. “I’m too lazy to have a porch sale and organize stuff and put prices on everything,” she says. When she gets the lighten-the-load whim, items just appear on the stoop: elegant ankle-strap heels, pots and pans, Depression-era glass, flatware, toaster ovens, tools, Madonna posters, Mozart T-shirts, and old LPs. Increasingly, friends and neighbors are joining her in this curious form of recycling.

And there are treasures to be found.

After all, Simeone’s personal flair is well-known: Her closets bulge with vintage 1950s Suzy Perette dresses; her umbrella stand contains a parasol trimmed with black rabbit fur; she owns a skirt draped with seven hundred peacock feathers (plumage was bought on eBay; the skirt, custom-made by a seamstress in Hawaii). In 1988, she painted her home a tricolor palette of pink, blue, and cream—a first in the Charles Village tradition of polychromatic Victorian rowhouse facades celebrated in the neighborhood’s occasional Painted Ladies contests.

Charles Village, which also includes the neighborhoods of Abell, Harwood, and Old Goucher, was developed in the early 1900s as a “streetcar suburb” in northern Baltimore and boasts a population of more than fourteen thousand today. The area, about one hundred square blocks, houses a demographic blend of races, economic classes, and ages. “There are professionals, college students, and retired people,” Simeone says. Students, in this case from nearby Johns Hopkins University, are always on the prowl for cool, free stuff.

“I put lots of books out there,” she says. “It seems a sin to throw away a book.”

When clearing out her cellar one day, she found textbooks left behind by a foreign exchange student. “They were in Chinese,” she explains. And they were obscure. These were twenty-year-old textbooks with riveting descriptions of the principles of business management. And they disappeared. Quickly. “That’s this neighborhood. If you put out Chinese books in Roland Park, I don’t think they would go.”

Is there anything Charles Villagers won’t take? If belongings are a reflection of their owners—their tastes or values—putting oneself out there isn’t always easy. In the end, Simeone does, indeed, wear her heart on her sleeve. And it can be broken.

“There was a jacket,” she says. “A vintage tuxedo jacket, royal blue with black lapels, painted with floral designs in fabric paint. I bought it many years ago—it’s not my style now.”

She pauses, remembering the jacket no one wanted. “I don’t know if they just hated it. Most of my stuff will go in ten minutes, twenty minutes, or, at most, I’ll leave it out a couple of days.” But the jacket just sat there, forlorn; she couldn’t bear to see it languish. “I brought it back in.”

Simeone’s generosity of spirit is not a license to steal. Some porch furniture, chained down, remains clearly demarcated personal property. The items to be “shared” have their own space: Offerings are usually within arm’s reach of the sidewalk, yet not on the porch proper. “The lip of the porch is just outside,” Simeone says, mapping out the parameters. “You don’t have to walk up onto someone’s porch. It’s a different realm.” These are the unspoken rules of urban etiquette. City dwellers instinctively get it, this line along the porches that is so essential to maintaining private space in a public sphere.



Behind Bars
Female corrections officers share an inside glimpse

By Karen Houppert

I have had some rough days, some good days, some bad days—and some situations where it was harrowing. But basically, I got through it because I’m a survivor,” says Frederica Grant, a tall, elegant, fiftysomething woman who spent a good chunk of her life as the rare woman among a slew of men inclined to hate her; she was a corrections officer for male prison inmates for fourteen years. Today, she continues to work with this same population as a case manager in a Department of Corrections work-release program in Baltimore.

“The worst thing that ever happened to me, let me tell you, was one time when an inmate and I had a difference of opinion about his recreation time. He felt as though I should give him his rec when he wanted it. I said he had to take his turn.” Frederica shakes her head. The memory, more than a decade old, still burns her. “This inmate hid behind the door. And when I came into his cell, he took a shampoo squirt bottle and shot me with the concoction right in the chest!”

I raise an eyebrow, waiting for the punch line.

But she has stopped.

That was the punch line. And she is waiting for my expression of horror.

We are sitting over a few beers in the Charles Village Donna’s along with Michele Holcombe, a colleague of mine from Urbanite and an ex-corrections officer herself who used to work with Frederica. Michele nudges Frederica conspiratorially, then leans forward, dropping her voice. “Do you know what’s in the concoction?”

I confess ignorance.

“Piss, shit, and milk.”

This time, my genuine expression of horror strikes them as adequate—and they laugh.

Frederica says she went downstairs immediately to try to clean herself off. “Don’t let them see you cry,” a fellow corrections officer said. “Cry on the way home.” She cried the long drive from Jessup to her house.

“I went back to work the next day,” she says. “I had a clean uniform on. I was spic-and-span clean.” Her supervisor offered to move her to a different hall where she could start fresh. She declined. “I worked that same tier that same night.” She sent a message; she would not be easily cowed. “The inmates said, ‘Oh, she’s that kind of person.’”


Frederica, who still works for the Department of Corrections (though no longer in the prison itself), and Michele, who would rather eat shards of glass than step into her old uniform, gently bicker about the merits of corrections work. It’s a debate that I sense they have had two hundred times before, and the only concession that Frederica can wring from Michele is that the overtime opportunities are good, and back in 1991, when Frederica first started working there as a single mother of two, the $21,000 plus health insurance looked pretty good.

“This is a good job for someone who has no other options.” This is all Michele will concede. “And it made me hate men.”

“It made me look at men differently,” Frederica says.

“Oh, come on!” Michele says.

“Well, sometimes if I’m out in a bar or something and see a guy who looks familiar, I’m like, Where do I know you from?”

When it turns out that their paths have crossed at “work,” the encounter shifts.

“They’re everywhere,” Frederica concedes about the ex-cons she runs into on the streets.

“It also made me realize that a criminal has no particular face,” Michele says, explaining that they look perfectly ordinary and that is a deeply disconcerting realization to live with. “So everybody you meet on the street is suspect.”

“I have a different perspective,” Frederica says. Frederica, her glass half-full, is a fervent champion of education. Education equals salvation. She tells story after story of hardship after hardship in her life, and the protagonist is always education. She married too early, divorced too early, was a single mother too early. She worked at the Stroh Brewery, worked retail, worked the prisons. After ten years of being passed up for promotions, she enrolled at Morgan State and got her degree in 2004; this got her out of the prison and into a nice 9-to-5 job.

Frederica’s faith in education—and the power of books—started early.

“I used to stutter badly when I was a kid,” she explains. One time, Frederica’s Baltimore City teacher waved dismissively at her as a librarian approached her. “She said, ‘Oh, she’s retarded, don’t pay any mind to her,’” Frederica recalls. “But the librarian told me that lots of famous people stuttered—Moses, Winston Churchill, Carly Simon—and I should pay no mind to that teacher.” She handed Frederica some books. “‘Here, read these,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to say a word.’”

Today, Frederica is enrolled in a graduate program for writing at Towson and it has given her a lens through which to filter her experiences, a way of tidying her life into stories. She tells me one true tale.

“Years back, I was at work one night and they brought in a busload of new inmates to be processed,” she says. “And I saw this guy that was an old classmate of mine.

“He was the class clown at school—always getting into trouble.” Frederica describes a cruel fourth-grade teacher who would hound her because of her stutter. “She was one of those teachers who was always saying to me, ‘Hurry up! Hurry up! Are you going to say it or not? We haven’t got all day.’

“She called on me this one particular day,” she continues. “I was smart. I knew the answers. But I couldn’t speak. She was zoning in on me, yelling. And this guy, he jumped up right on his desk and said, ‘I have to pee!’—very dramatically to get her attention. Her wrath left me and went to him. She was furious. And he did it on purpose, to help me. He was my savior.

“I saw him that night across this crowd of inmates and thought about that. He recognized me, too.”

Frederica pauses, a million miles away, and I interrupt her train of thought.

“What was he in for?”

She shrugs dismissively, as though my question were so naive it barely merited a response. “Drugs. Armed robbery. You know.” She takes a sip of her beer then sets her glass back down. “The usual.”

Click Here to watch a video interview with Two former prison guards for the Baltimore Correctional System





Cornel Rubino is a painter, lecturer, educator, and curator based in Baltimore. His work has appeared more than sixty times in The New Yorker magazine. He can be reached at ladolcevita@mindspring.com.


Brian W. Simpson is a Baltimore-based freelance writer and editor of Johns Hopkins Public Health magazine. Prior to joining Hopkins, Brian worked as a newspaper reporter in Florida, an editor and writer in Texas, and a technical writer in Moldova.


Susan Muaddi Darraj is associate professor of English at Harford Community College in Bel Air. Her short fiction collection, The Inheritance of Exile, was published this past April by University of Notre Dame Press.


Joanne Cavanaugh Simpson is a freelance writer, a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of Literature on Deadline (Pacific Isle Publishing, 2007).


Susan McCallum-Smith is Urbanite’s literary editor. A graduate of the Johns Hopkins writing program, McCallum-Smith also reads for the Baltimore Review and is currently working toward a master of fine arts degree in creative writing at Bennington College.



Lionel Foster, Urbanite’s editorial assistant, is a graduate of the Johns Hopkins University Writing Seminars. He earned master’s degrees in social policy and planning, and regional and urban planning, from the London School of Economics.



Karen Houppert is Urbanite’s senior editor and the author of several books. Her most recent nonfiction book, Home Fires
Burning: Married to the Military—For Better or Worse, about military wives whose husbands have been deployed to Iraq, was published by Ballantine in 2005.






Leave a Comment Here



EMAIL TO EDITOR // SEND TO A FRIEND // PRINT