Shelter
A Black Tale of Homeland, Baltimore
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
*A Kirkus Best Book of 2022*
A stirring consideration of homeownership, fatherhood, race, faith, and the history of an American city.
In 2016, Lawrence Jackson accepted a new job in Baltimore, searched for schools for his sons, and bought a house. It would all be unremarkable but for the fact that he had grown up in West Baltimore and now found himself teaching at Johns Hopkins, whose vexed relationship to its neighborhood, to the city and its history, provides fodder for this captivating memoir in essays.
With sardonic wit, Jackson describes his struggle to make a home in the city that had just been convulsed by the uprising that followed the murder of Freddie Gray. His new neighborhood, Homeland—largely White, built on racial covenants—is not where he is “supposed” to live. But his purchase, and his desire to pass some inheritance on to his children, provides a foundation for him to explore his personal and spiritual history, as well as Baltimore’s untold stories. Each chapter is a new exploration: a trip to the Maryland shore is an occasion to dilate on Frederick Douglass’s complicated legacy; an encounter at a Hopkins shuttle-bus stop becomes a meditation on public transportation and policing; and Jackson’s beleaguered commitment to his church opens a pathway to reimagine an urban community through jazz.
Shelter is an extraordinary biography of a city and a celebration of our capacity for domestic thriving. Jackson’s story leans on the essay to contain the raging absurdity of Black American life, establishing him as a maverick, essential writer.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
