SHELTER

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.