April Is The Cruelest Month

April 29th, 2015  |   

                                April is the cruelest month, breeding

                                Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

                               Memory and desire, stirring

                               Dull roots with spring rain.

                                   The Waste Land   T. S. Eliot

I’m Going To Baltimore

Just as soon as I punch out these notes from beneath my fig tree, I am on my way to Baltimore.

Baltimore? Did I say Baltimore? Go to Baltimore where people are rioting in the streets; where schools and businesses have been shut down; where Oriole baseball games have been postponed; where the National Guard is now deployed?

Yes, Baltimore. You see, my brother, Gary, has died suddenly—I mean suddenly—and on Saturday I will join family and friends for a celebration and remembrance of his life.

Baltimore. That’s where Gary and I were born, and where old memories of days-gone-by are like floaters that whiz across my eyes, headed straight from my head to my heart.

Baltimore: Parts That Make Me Wince

Baltimore: It’s an imperfect place. Boy, is it imperfect. And there are parts of its past that make you wince. It’s not all marble steps and waitresses calling you ‘hon,’ you know. Racial strife in the sixties, the riots during the Civil War. F. Scott Fitzgerald said it was civilized and gay, rotted and polite. The  terms are slightly anachronistic now, but I think he was essentially right.         

           Hardly Knew Her: Stories    Laura Lippman

April Is The Cruelest Month

March may come in like a proverbial lion, as it certainly did this winter, parading its paw prints all over tons of snow. But it doesn’t seem to want to follow the script and exit like a lamb. It has been prowling about, with an icy mane, roaring and breathing clouds of vapor on people buried under mounds of wool, booted and hooded and mittened.

Talk about beginnings. On April 1, April Fool’s Day, my sister-in-law called to tell me that Gary was in a Baltimore hospital. Running a fever, vomiting, with intense head and neck pain, it was only a short time before he sunk into a cocoon of silence, unable to talk or comprehend much, if anything, of what was taking place in his room.

After tests-galore, the culture grown from a series of spinal taps, the doctors put a label on the villain that had invaded his body. He had been laid low by bacterial meningitis. In other words, the protective membrane that surrounds his brain and spinal cord suddenly became infected and refused to protect him.

That’s what killed him, as April drew to a close. An infected, compromised brain and spinal chord.

Meanwhile, in downtown Baltimore, just eleven days after Gary was admitted to the hospital, someone else suffered spinal chord problems. Freddie Gray, a black man, was arrested, dragged into a police van, and died a week later from severe spinal chord injuries.

The Order Of Things Seems Out Of Order

I should be dead, not my brother. I am seven years older than Gary. In the order of things, it’s my turn to die, not his. When Judy died 20 months ago, she was also younger than me. It should have been me. Things seem to be drastically out of order.

But when it comes to order, all bets are off, all rational tabulations don’t finally add up. The Prophet Isaiah had it right when he said, “God’s thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are God’s ways your ways.”

Well, I wonder what God’s thoughts are about Freddy Gray, about the way he died at age twenty-five. I’ll bet God is pissed off. You know, that wrath thing. So am I. Okay, I’ll go tame on order, the way I think things should be. But, for God’s sake, if not for our own sake as well, let’s demand some justice.

Perhaps the most powerful utterance, a real challenge to all of us who still have life and breath, came from Pastor Jamal Bryant in the eulogy he gave for Mr. Gray. “He had to have been asking himself, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ He had to feel at age 25 like the walls were closing in on him.”

He’s My Brother    

The day after Gary was admitted to the hospital, I stood at the foot of the bed and watched the doctor, bent over him, checking his responses with a small flashlight, and a few questions.   

“What is that man’s name?” she asked. Gary looked at me, opened his mouth, and said…”J…J..J..J..J.. It was as if he were sorting alphabet cards that had been shuffled out of order in his brain. Finding a “J” I knew he was searching for an “I” and an “M”.  

“But who is he?” she said.

“He’s in the middle of things.” That made me laugh. Gary did know me.  He sure did.

“But who is he?

No delay. “He’s my brother!”

I returned to Charleston feeling that my brother would be all right. We would get him back again. But it was not to be.

“In The Middle Of Things”

Watching the rioting, burning and looting in the streets of Baltimore sent me to bed discouraged. Working hard to create a liturgy for my brother’s memorial service, something he had requested back in 2006, the television coverage of the mess in Baltimore was an added weight to my tired spirit.

It’s no easy assignment to grieve over my brother’s sudden death, while at the same time draw together a remembrance and celebration full of grief and gratitude, both sorrow and hope. The pictures of Baltimore on my television set weighed me down. Lying in bed, rolling about, trying to capture sleep, all I could get hold of were old memories. 

In the middle of the struggle, in the 1960’s, accompanying a black woman into the office of a Baltimore housing development in order for her to submit her application for housing. She was refused because she was black.

In the middle of the black neighborhood, in an abandoned Roman Catholic Church after Dr. King had been assassinated, all night, with the mayor and a black disk jockey. Like Pied Pipers, music blaring, we were attempting to keep angry, young people from burning down their neighborhood, as was being done on that very night in Baltimore.

In the middle of Baltimore, with a man who helped teach me, during my first years of ordained ministry, about poverty and racism, and the connection between the two. I saw good row houses being demolished in black neighborhoods, so that a highway could be built, one that finally was not built. Filling the space were high-rise structures that spawned poverty, drugs, and crime. They, also, were demolished later.

In the middle of things, I was discovering a different Baltimore than I had known in my white, segregated world. I met a new Jesus, not the white one whose picture hung in my Sunday school classroom, but a black one who was being nailed to the cross of racism and poverty.

The Lincoln Theater

A black woman, often referred to as “Colored Mary,” helped my mother take care of me when I was confined to bed, as a child, with rheumatic fever. Her name was Mary Brown, and I loved her. She often smelled like fried chicken. Why not? She cooked plenty of it downstairs in the kitchen. I also caught a sweet whiff from whatever it was that she put on her hair to make it straight.

After my recovery, well into my teenage years, Mary stayed on to help my mother. In high school, I would often drive her home. Like so many black women, who rode the buses and streetcars, to and from work, she would carry a bag of food from my kitchen to her kitchen.      

Mary Brown lived very near Pennsylvania Avenue, a street that ran through the black neighborhoods that surrounded it. It was crammed full of stores, bars, rooming houses and hotels. It was the epicenter of black life in Baltimore. In the heart of Pennsylvania Avenue was the Lincoln Theater. The greatest black musicians, vocalists, and entertainers appeared there. The Hippodrome Theater was nearby on Howard Street. On Saturdays, I would go there to see movies and the very best movie star, stage, and vaudeville performers. All of them, along with the audience, were white.

In bed, watching the coverage of the riots in Baltimore, Pennsylvania Avenue came into view. I felt like a child again. Mary Brown’s smell. The black neighborhood 500 feet from the school playground where I played summer baseball with my white friends. Those black women with their shopping bags, waiting at the streetcar stops. The black men who brought horse-pulled wagons full of fruit into my neighborhood, yelling phrases like, “Watermelons! Red to the rind!”

Rolling over in bed, sleep played hide-and-seek with me, I longed for Judy’s presence. She was never a mother to me, always my friend, companion, and lover. But, like a child, without my mother and brother, I felt a massive desire to be held by Judy, like a child.

The Sparrow

Finished with breakfast, I sat in my brother’s living room chair catching up on e-mails, before going to the hospital. Gary and Nancy live in a rural heavily wooded area just north of Baltimore. Gary was disposed, by his very nature, to the quiet reverence of trees, birds, flowers and bushes, and the animal wildlife he could view from the large glass window by his chair. He rendezvoused with fish in Michigan in the summertime.

Like a shot out of the blue, I heard a loud thud. A small bird had collided with the window. There he sat, just a few feet away. Biblical language came to mind. Perhaps he was looking at me “through a glass darkly,” trying to get a fix on who I was, and what had interrupted his flight.

As I watched this little, dizzy, stunned bird, I thought of Gary, just a few miles away in that hospital bed. He cannot speak, and has been intubated. Like that little bird, Gary’s brain is trying to sort itself out, get itself back in order so that it can fly once again.

Out of the chair, I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye. When I looked through the window, the bird was gone. Leaving for the hospital, I wonder if that bird is in flight, or if a hawk has snatched it from the porch, in flight and out of sight.

His Eye Is On The Sparrow

I have listened to dozens of pieces of music as I put Gary’s memorial service together. It comes as no surprise to me that the spiritual, His Eye Is On The Sparrow comes to mind.

The sharpest, most poignant memories cling to the times that I have heard it sung in black churches, at a funeral of a dear friend, and by a black woman in a North Carolina prison.

Ethel Waters comes to mind. I just know this African-American blues, jazz and gospel singer and actress was connected to Baltimore. When I do my homework on the computer, sure enough, Baltimore is there. Born from a teenaged mother who had been raped, abused in her own life, she had to grow out of poverty, by the grace of God, and despite those who took advantage of her.

Sure enough, Baltimore surfaces. Singing two songs at a nightclub in Philadelphia while working for $4.75 per week at a hotel, she was offered professional work at the Lincoln Theater in Baltimore. Paid ten dollars a week, her managers cheated her out of tips thrown on the stage. Her autobiography bears the title, “His Eye Is On The Sparrow.”

While Baltimore police and Maryland National Guard patrol Pennsylvania Avenue, those of us gathered on Saturday to remember Gary will sing His Eye Is On The Sparrow. While we sing, I shall picture a hawk carrying Gary toward heaven.

Sing Like A Wounded Bird

Why should I feel discouraged, why should the shadows come,

Why should my heart be lonely, and long for heaven and home,

When Jesus is my portion? My constant friend is He:

His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me;

His eye is on the sparrow, and I know He watches me.

I sing because I’m happy,

I sing because I’m free,

For His eye is on the sparrow,

And I know He watches me.

On Turning One’s Eyes Away From Death

A friend tells me that she can no longer watch or read the news. It is too violent. Death is always violent, so I know how she feels. Watching television as I dress, I see the news that a ship full of people fleeing Libya, has sunk off the coast of Italy. The sea has swallowed hundreds of people.

Like a second shot from an automatic rifle, there’s a picture of Christians about to be beheaded in Libya.

Like the birds in Alfred Hitchcock’s frightening film, drones swoop through my television set. More dead people, Americans and innocent Afghans.

While I eat my breakfast, the newspaper reminds me that juries will soon hand down verdicts for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the Boston Marathon bomber, and James Holmes, who left 12 people dead and 70 people injured when he went on a shooting rage in Colorado back in 2012. Will they get life imprisonment or the death penalty? That capital punishment is still an option is unacceptable to me.

Home from the hospital in the evenings, I watch two Baltimore Oriole baseball games. It’s a good way to turn my eyes away from death, from horrible news. Certainly we will all go blind if we don’t find occasions to look away from death, and frightful news. Only long enough, however, to remember that our task, as Mother Jones once said, is “To pray for the dead,” as we will do on Saturday for my brother Gary, “and fight like hell for the living.”  You know, all the people who are caught in the trap of racism and poverty. It’s all about personal and political resurrection, isn’t it?  

One final baseball pitch: Oriole Park at Camden Yards, a part of the Baltimore Inner Harbor complex, was built adjacent to where my father and brother operated the family business. I like to remember that after the wrecking ball took their property, as it did so many poor people’s property in Baltimore, my father and brother refused to leave the city. They moved up to a Mount Royal Street location, just a few blocks from where people are protesting, and fires and looting have taken place.

The message: We must not fail the communities in which we live, no matter how broken they may be. In fact, we must stay because they are broken, because we love them still.

Remember, God’s eye is on the sparrow, and I just believe with all my heart that He’s watching us.

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