Miss Carole Fisher, a HoCo political activist, mother-to-five, friend-to-many-especially-me, and I were headed to a gun violence prevention training in Baltimore from her home in Ellicott City, Maryland. She suggested we nix the curt, oddly-toned instructions my phone’s GPS was barking at us and offered to guide me down Route 40 all the way there.
“Look at this little guy I found,” she said, holding her hand out gently, palm-side down, in front of her, her richly blue eyes trained on it. There was a small, bright-green inchworm on her forefinger. She noted that it looked like some parasite had laid its eggs on it and that eventually they’d hatch and eat it from the inside out.
Related: a poem about a HoCo politico based on one by Sir Walter Scott.
As we descended into the city from Howard County, she offered a mini-history of another kind of rot, that which centuries of institutionalized racism have caused in Baltimore. As the scenes of this sad journey played in her mind, triggered by the places we passed, she shared them with me.
“This was all farmland at one time,” she said of one of the endless strip-malls that appeared before us as we set out on Rte. 40, a.k.a., Baltimore National Pike. “My granddaddy’s farm was over there. Can you imagine that?” she said, almost incredulous, looking to her right at the so-not-country-now landscape
Then, on the left, came a restaurant that she noted was a children’s shoe store at one time. Carole told of the owners’ keeping live monkeys in the front window, smiling as she remembered how she and her siblings would come to see them. I laughed at the improbability of simians in a Mid-Atlantic store.
She spoke of her heartache at something all-too-common then: the way, for us, the poverty we were witnessing growing starker and starker as we entered Baltimore, was on the outside. For many, she said, this is their reality. I nodded my sad acknowledgment of this wretched fact.
And: On my friend, Gabriel Moreno.
“That shopping center was the first connected one in the area,” Carole said of a group of stores to our left. At first, I wasn’t sure what she meant by “connected.” Then I remembered how the struggle of African-Americans for civil rights was one she’d lived through, fought in, had been seared into her memory like the burn from a cattle prod. By “connected,” she meant the white and black sections were one.
As we passed boarded up home after spray painted wall after gorgeous mural trying to make it better, the potholed Baltimore streets in disrepair jostled the car up and down. Miss Carole lauded the CVS drug stores for being one of the few businesses that wasn’t a liquor store for sticking around in the city. Just then, two young men zipped in front of our car on bikes. I yelled something about how irresponsible and rude they were. Miss Carole noted that they just didn’t care about their own lives. I felt sick to my stomach then.
“Good for them for keeping those up,” Miss Carole said as we moved slowly past flowers in a windowfront planter, the kind that really does spruce up–mercifully–a dilapidated, gloomy house. We laughed when we realized some of them were plastic.
“Hey–whatever works!” I said as we laughed more. If we didn’t, we’d cry.
We arrived at the University of Baltimore (UB) School of Law Law Library. Magically, we got a parking spot right in front of the building the conference we were attending was taking place in. The first thing Miss Carole did was to remark that the caterpillar who still inched his/her/their way around her hand needed to find his new home outside the Law Library. She bent over and waited for him/her/they to scoot off her delicate, tapered, left forefinger.
“There you go,” Carole said to the larval lovely.
I decided the green bug she’d befriended was a “she,” and her name was “Carole the Caterpillar.” As Miss Carole had worked steadily and steadfastly to advance civil rights in Maryland for decades, so her namesake crawler-critter advanced her body off Miss Carole’s hand and into her new home. Miss Carole volunteered with, managed, and offered her organizing skills to countless political campaigns, activist organizations, human-rights groups over the years of her life in Maryland. Perhaps Carole the Caterpillar would find a fellow-insect friend to help her, in her new home in Baltimore, too.
It’s a city, after all, this new home to Carole the Caterpillar, that had made great strides in the area of civil rights for marginalized communities, thanks to activists like Miss Carole. But it still has a ways to go. Hopefully, through what we were to learn at gun violence prevention training we were on our way into, we could help it does so.
Also: On another friend, Eric Ebersole.
I’m grateful for your readership! Check back with me each week here at politicalpoetrypastiche as my linguistic, literary, and generally loquacious involvement in local politics takes on a mélange of prose and poetry genres. After all: All Politics Is HoCo-al™. Join me on Facebook here, find me on Twitter at @politicalpoetr3, and follow me on Instagram using the handle @politicalpoetrypastiche.