From Steel Inside Cotton

“That which shrinksMust first expand…”

—Laozi 36

Baltimore sits at the top of the Chesapeake Bay, a quiet jewel the Confederacy desperately wanted, and tried to get with the support of a broad base of southern sympathizers in the city, so many that Ft. McHenry became a detention center during the Civil War, with Union cannons on Federal Hill, and Union encampments all over the city. The Mason-Dixon line is the northern boundary of Maryland, and the state song is an homage to plantation culture. After the War, Baltimore became a mecca for supremacists from the Old South, including faculty at Hopkins and Peabody. When I was born, Black folk had their own world inside this white world, and I looked out at the white world from the safety of Blackness. We understood white folk as other, but we never discussed them in derogatory terms in our home. I knew, without asking, why my father stretched across his bed on Saturday afternoons and listened to the Orioles on the radio, and never mentioned going to Memorial Stadium. On the way home from the junior high school, I watched from the bus as a white man tried to attack us with a garden rake, until his wife pulled him down from the fence. Segregation in Baltimore was more southern than northern, rooted in the unfulfilled promises to Blacks that were the city’s history, with the effect of overcrowded neighborhoods and schools, and police brutality.

So being different meant rising above in a culture where conformity was so adhered to that it felt oppressive. The proliferation of industrial jobs that lured people like my parents to the city with its sameness seemed to support this conformity in the way industry succeeds when machines obey, ironically, the necessities of a machinist’s tolerance, of measurements. Now I was the only Black person I knew of in Baltimore who was studying Taiji. Like a baby eagle pecking at the last pieces of the egg that had held him, I was looking to be free. Eagles, when flying, can be free, but the egg that held me would only let me think I was free, filled as my egg was with fears arising from hurt I buried so deeply I did not know it was there.

When my grandmother advised me to go out and play under the lamplight behind the house, the lamplight that would shine on a myriad of misdoings, some more criminal than mischievous as Baltimore changed over the years, she did not know I was learning how to fly. I started in junior high school, pressing the normal three years of seventh, eighth, and ninth into two years. It was in the room that was my first room of my own since I was an only child and we lived in a two-family house in West Baltimore. Now, on the East Side, we were in another house built for two families, but my parents were buyers this time. When our last tenants, a lovely young couple with no children, moved out of the house, I was waiting to move into the room that would be my first cave. It had been designed as a small kitchen, so there was a space for a small gas range and a refrigerator. There was a sink with a cabinet, and in the small space opposite the sink, my parents put in a twin size bed with the head pointing to the window looking out over the gigantic field behind us, a field of the dead waiting for life, Baltimore Cemetery, the gates to which stood at the eastern endpoint of North Avenue. In the light of a full moon I could look out and see the granite headstones glistening, or even when the moon was less than full I could still see the sparkles. Imagining Judgement Day, I thought of the ground opening and the rotted bodies taking on new flesh, and this vision was driven by my deepest fears of breaking any of the commandments, especially the Baptist explanation of adultery as sex outside of marriage, and...