The fall the Orioles won their first World Series, I was rooming off-campus with three other Towson State College freshmen in a three-story house on Evesham Avenue. The Baltimore of the mid-1960’s was not as much ashamed of its heritage as unschooled in it, most Baltimoreans not knowing—or caring—that, under the shade of the trees...
“I have lost all confidence in the veracity and honesty of the Northern people, and if I could honorably leave the country for a foreign land, I believe our condition would be bettered.” —Letter to Frances Mudd, by Samuel Mudd, September 5, 1865 an injured John Wilkes Booth fled southward out of Washington and headed...
In my 1950’s childhood, boys and men, hair slicked down with tonic, girls and ladies in mantillas and hats primly veiled with mesh worshiped at small country churches against which lapped the green and white fields of late-summer tobacco. On Easter Sundays, prissy and full of ourselves on such a special occasion, my sister and...
After the Battle of Gettysburg, a prison camp was established in occupied Maryland on a low peninsula lapped by the waters of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. All told, 52,000 people—Confederate soldiers, Maryland and Virginia civilians, blockade runners, and spies—passed through the portals of the “Andersonville of the North.” In 1910, because erosion threatened...
As recently as the 1930’s, elderly black people in rural Maryland were still keeping headstrong children in line with the admonition that something called “pattiroll” would “get” them if they didn’t behave themselves. “Pattirolls,” or patrols, were gangs of Union Army soldiers who rode throughout the moonlit countryside enforcing curfews in occupied Maryland during the...
She is a middle-aged grocery clerk, and I have seen her working at Food Lion on Sundays and holidays and late into the evening during the week. Standing at her register, she warmly greets her customers, but she could as easily be receiving tourists at an antebellum mansion on the James River or teaching Arthurian...
There ain’t no shame in a job well done, from driving a nail to driving a truck. As a matter of fact, I’d like to set things straight, A few more people should be pulling their weight. If you want a cram course in reality, You get yourself a working man’s Ph.D. —Aaron Tippin, “Working...
When I hear all the talk about tobacco, I think of my Uncle Rollins, a green-visored straw hat on his salt-and-pepper head and a two-day stubble on his seasoned farmer face. He is standing in a field or by an unpainted barn as he crumbles a yellow-brown leaf and sticks a wad of ‘bacca in...