The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood by David Simon, Edward Burns

From the Publisher

The crime-infested intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets is well-known--and cautiously avoided--by most of Baltimore. But this notorious corner's 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood. David Simon, an award-winning author and crime reporter, and Edward Burns, a 20-year veteran of the urban drug war, tell the chilling story of this desolate crossroad.

Through the eyes of one broken family--two drug-addicted adults and their smart, vulnerable 15-year-old son, DeAndre McCollough, Simon and Burns examine the sinister realities of inner cities across the country and unflinchingly assess why law enforcement policies, moral crusades, and the welfare system have accomplished so little. This extraordinary book is a crucial look at the price of the drug culture and the poignant scenes of hope, caring, and love that astonishingly rise in the midst of a place America has abandoned.

New York Times Book Review - Sara Mosle

Brave, unblinkered and heartbreaking.

Lynch

The Corner is set in West Baltimore, part of a city with the highest rate of drug-related arrests in the country. Metaphorically, though, the intersection of Fayette and Monroe Streets is replicated across America, in every urban neighborhood, and is encroaching on every Main Street.

The cast is varied, but nearly all are consumed by the economic wasteland of their environs, and by the siren, escapist call of drugs. At the heartbreaking core of the story is 15-year-old DeAndre McCullough, a prototypical adolescent in the drug-drenched world of the corner, dealing, skipping school, fronting a tough image that's about to stick. DeAndre's life bends all the classic theories of a young male forced to raise himself in the fatherless world of the ghetto. In fact, DeAndre's parents are all too present, both of them addicted to the blast, scheming and stealing from the moment they awaken until they finally crash.

Gary McCullough, DeAndre's father, once rose to success as a businessman, only to be lured back to the corner. The cravings counter his inherent decency, today's fix taking precedence over yesterday's conscience. So while Gary still sees the world's possibilities, he is even more a slave to the snake that wakens in his belly every morning, hungry for the blast and full of venom without it.

Fran McCullough, DeAndre's mother, has no illusions. She is of the corner. But her awareness of self exceeds any pity for her ex-husband, Gary, whose gentle and moral spirit allows him to be victimized again and again by all, especially Fran.

Other players infuse the narrative. Shuffling down the block, working to earn his cut, Fat Curt and his bloated limbs testify to years of substance abuse. Rita, the "nurse" at the local shooting gallery, is an expert at finding a vein in rotting arms, including her own; as payment, she shares her patients' stash.

At the other end of the spectrum is Ella, who believes that the recreation center she runs provides a haven for the neighborhood's children, all of whom are "at risk." Alas, one woman cannot save an entire community and fill the vacuum created by years of neglect. That someone ransacks the meager contents of the rec center is telling; that one or more of Ella's kids might have had a hand is debilitating. Saddest and most forgotten of all is DeRodd, seven years old and DeAndre's half brother, whose desire to watch "Barney" earns him a smack in the head.

The corner has become its own ecosystem, "as complex as any natural world, as distinct and separate from the middle-class experience as can be imagined." And what invests The Corner as a document of truth is the journalistic devotion of the authors, David Simon and Edward Burns; their revelations spring from direct observation of these lives. Their motivation is a heightened understanding, not personal ideology. And just when despair threatens to consume the reader, too, the authors shift to a macroperspective, or add a note of compassion.

"How do we bridge the chasm?" The authors ask. "How do we begin to reconnect with those now lost to the corner world? We've got to begin to think as Gary McCullough thinks when he's flat broke and sick with desire, crawling through some vacant row house in search of scrap metal. Or live, for a moment at least, as Fat Curt lives when he's staggering back and forth between corner and shooting gallery."

Lord knows, there have been examinations of inner-city violence and studies of the drug culture, gangs, and teenagers having babies. All have a "tsk-tsk" quality or a "look at where society is headed" backdrop. The Corner is much more powerful and important than those because the authors accord respect to the reality of the lives they recount. After all, movies have been made, articles have been written, and even Bill Moyers's son has fallen victim to drug addiction resulting in a detailed report on "the hijacked brain." The authors refuse to join the cynical head-shaking about the drug world.

However, in every drug documentary there comes the mention of "rock bottom," that place where every addict must find him self before he turns his life around. Well, Simon and Burns decided to visit the people who are born to and reside in rock bottom. For these people, rock bottom is death. But before they die, they live a life with purpose, meaning, and dedication -- to getting high.

Through these harrowing yet highly readable 500-odd pages, the authors have achieved more than society could ask. While neither are novices to these experiences -- Simon is the author of the award-winning book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets , which inspired the NBC-TV series, and Burns spent 20 years with the Baltimore Police Department before embarking on a career as a teacher in the city's public schools -- their lingering naivete can be felt in every revelation, every break in the action where they put things into perspective for the reader and for themselves.

And The Corner has many moments of brilliant abstract analysis, such as the phenomenon of the "paper bag." Who hasn't seen men in the parks drinking some alcoholic beverage out of a paper bag? Magically, the illegality of public drinking is transformed: "When the first wino dropped the first bottle of elderberry into the first paper bag -- and a moment of quiet genius it was -- the point was moot. The paper bag allowed the smoke hounds to keep their smoke, just as it allowed the beat cop a modicum of respect. In time, the bag was institutionalized as a symbol; to drink without it was to insult the patrolman and risk arrest, just as it was a violation of the tacit agreement for the cop to ignore the bag and humble anyone employing it."

The subtlety of the paper bag gives way to the irony of the caper, the everyday burglaries, robberies, and stick-ups that pay for the drugs: "All that effort not to get caught, and then, when they did get caught, it hardly mattered. All that cloak and dagger and a half-hour later they're walking a refrigerator down Baltimore Street, in broad daylight."

We who are African American, even if we have three degrees from Harvard, remain only two-degrees-of-separation from someone living on the corner. We know about much of what's revealed in these pages. But we will revel nonetheless that we are finally reading the truth. These two writers, despite their outsider status as whites, came to understand things that are very intricate to the ecosystem. They even manage to explain what keeps the ecosystem so complete, so fertile, something many of us know but will be glad they're telling everyone else: "On Fayette Street, the standing assumption is that any place in America without bricks and pavement and black people is, by definition, a playground for sheet-wearing, pickup-truck-wrecking, get-a-rope rednecks."

Would you leave?

While the authors are aware that the pervasiveness of drug addiction among the women of the inner city is a new phenomenon, they fail to realize the absolutely devastating impact of that fact. That great R&B group, the Intruders, told us back in the '70s that they'll always love their mama. Remember? They couldn't understand "how she made it through the week because she never got a good night's sleep." She was working all the time. And Pop was always gone; out drinking somewhere. Addicted to liquor. Well, the corners have lost mama. She's addicted. She's way too young. She's no longer strong.

Where are we in all this? Regardless of color, and from the perspective of the corner, we're the taxpayers; conspicuously missing from the corner community. Voting without truth. Well, the truth is finally on paper. And it shall set us all free. But we've got work to do.

--Marlene Connor Lynch

Publishers Weekly

In the authors' note, Simon (Homicide) and Burns, a retired patrolman and detective with the Baltimore Police Department, encapsulate their year-long (1992-1993) experience on a west Baltimore street corner interviewing drug addicts and watching children grow up too fast. They masterfully present a theater of the drug war as they follow four generations of the McCullough family, concentrating on 15-year-old DeAndre, who attempts to rise above the mistakes of his heroin- and cocaine-addicted parents but fails to escape the pressures of the street. Yet his story allows exploration of other issues, such as the history of the corner's drug activities and the attitudes of the police, the social workers and the high-school teachers who have all but lost hope for the area's children. Part family neighborhood portrait, part political-social analysis, the book conveys the feeling of helplessness of those who awake every morning thinking only of their "next blast" and the arrogance of those who condemn them for it. The loss of innocence chronicled here is summed up by a line from one of DeAndre's poems: "Hungry for knowledge, but afraid to eat."

Paula Dempsey, Loyola University, Chicago - Library Journal

This portrayal of a year in drug-crazed west Baltimore will satisfy neither readers looking for a perceptive witness to the urban crisis nor those in search of social analysis. Simon (Homicide), a crime reporter, and Burns, a Baltimore police veteran and public school teacher, mask their presence in the scene with an omniscient style that strains credibility, and the chronological framework blunts the impact of their most compelling themes. The authors salute the courageous but futile efforts of individual parents, educators, and police officers but deny the possibility of a social solution to the devastation they acknowledge is rooted in social policy. A more compelling account is Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago, based on interviews conducted by 13-year-old public housing residents LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman in 1993. For larger public libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

In an accomplished and vivid piece of reporting, Edgar Award winner Simon ("Homicide", 1991) and retired detective Burns team up to document the struggles of a cross-section of the Baltimore drug subculture.

By the mid-1990s, Baltimore had the highest rate of intravenous drug use in the country. Simon and Burns follow their West Baltimore subjects throughout the year 1993. Alternating bits of social history and commentary with intimate details of the corner inhabitants' lives, Simon and Burns focus primarily on three members of a single family, the McCulloughs: Gary, a junkie who had it all and lost it; his ex-wife, Fran, a user who nonetheless does her best to raise her boys; and DeAndre, a 15-year-old hustler for whom flash and brand name—whether Timberland, Nike, or Hilfiger—are all. The main players move forward, then backward, in fits and starts. For most of the others the reader meets, a steady downward trajectory describes their existence. The authors liken the corner heroin and crack market to a fast-food emporium, a place of "sustenance," no less elemental to the inner cities of America than the watering hole is to the natural world. Against the fact of relentless addiction and the commerce of the drug marketplace, Simon and Burns argue, the drug war stands as a "useless and unnecessary brutalization." The authors don't claim to have the answers to eradicating the corner drug culture that thrives throughout America's cities. But their portrait suggests that any solution must be grounded in compassion for, and understanding of, a group of individuals who are wrongly seen by much of America as somehow less than human.

Having gained the trust of their subjects, and with almost novelistic skill in bringing them (especially DeAndre) to life, Simon and Burns offer us a first step to achieving that understanding.

What People Are Saying

Richard Price
The Corner is an intimate, intense dispatch from the broken heart of urban America. It is impossible to read these pages and not feel stunned at the high price, in human potential, in thwarted aspirations, that simple survival on the streets of West Baltimore demands of its citizens. An important document, as devastating as it is lucid.
(Richard Price, author of Clockers)

Glenn Frankel
The Corner is a remarkable book — very tough, very demanding, very rewarding. Some of it is brutal and all of it is heartbreaking. As a reporter, I can only stand back and admire David Simon and Edward Burns for an amazing piece of reportage. To be there for an entire year, to make sense of random events and a list of characters long enough to make Charles Dickens envious, and to write coherently — it's a breathtaking achievement. And they manage to make West Baltimore as much a character as any of the flesh-and-blood people in the book.
(Glenn Frankel, author of Beyond the Promised Land)

Nicholas Lemann
If you want to understand street-corner life in the inner city, you should read The Corner, an amazingly intimate, detailed work of reporting that makes human and vivid a world that outsiders ordinarily are forced to learn about through statistics, sound bites, and stereotypes.
(Nicholas Lemann, author of The Promised Land)

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