The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood

by David Simon

Another time, he walked into a matinee and caught that Schindler’s List movie that everyone was talking about. The movie shocked him, tore a hole through his heart; he left the theater unable to speak, feeling connected to the nightmare. But for weeks afterward, he talked incessantly about Schindler and Nazis and death camps. What they did to those people, he told those willing to listen. What they did to them Jews when the Jews weren’t messing with anyone. “No matter where you go,” he offered at one point, “a nigger’s always a nigger.” With new eyes, Gary looked around at the waste and carnage and stupidity of his own neighborhood and soon began thinking in parallel terms. In another time and place, the damned were shot and gassed and burned by the millions with frightening efficiency. In West Baltimore, in a nation of civil liberties, there was instead the slow-motion destruction of thousands. It was different, Gary had to admit; but it was the same, too. On Fayette Street, life had become a slow process of taking black boys and girls, black men and women, and breaking them down, turning them into less. It happened without camps and barbed wire, without cattle cars or crematoriums or dictatorial intent. But it happened nonetheless, quietly, hour by wasted hour. Gary not only saw it all as genocidal, but convinced himself that this time, there would be people ready and able to justify it. They’re going to get tired, he would say. They’re going to get tired of the violence...