We still … have a voice!
Sean Toole, SJ
Since high school, my favorite book has been Third & Indiana by Steve Lopez. The novel is about a teenage boy who gets caught up selling drugs in Philadelphia, where I was born. The boy’s mother enlists a priest to help find him by scouring the local open-air drug markets, including the corner of Third Street and Indiana Avenue, a real intersection in a real area of the city nicknamed the Badlands. The priest fails to convince gang members to release the child, and so instead, he does the only thing he can think to do: He starts walking up and down the block, interrupting drug deals, scaring away buyers, and calling out to long-suffering residents locked inside their homes to take back the community. With each lap, more porch lights come on and more people emerge onto the street. The neighborhood tentatively awakens from isolation and fear.
I joined the Jesuits in 2004, Cristo Rey Jesuit High School of Baltimore opened in 2007, and I have been here for one thing or another every year since then. As a scholastic, I had my students read that novel. They saw themselves in it. One teenager told me privately that I reminded him of the priest in the book. It might be the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me. These days, that young man is strung out on drugs, trapped in a neighborhood just like the Badlands.
Drugs, poverty, and the violence they beget all plague my adopted city of Baltimore. We have had three mayors and five police commissioners in the past four years. Two years ago, our per-capita homicide led all the big cities in the United States. It wasn’t even close: Fifty-six people were killed for every 100,000 city residents here, while the city that was third on the list had a rate of 28 per 100,000 — half our pace. Last year, fifteen Baltimore youths were murdered. The first person killed in the city, on January 1, was a child. The last person killed in the city, on December 31, was also a child. So far this year, Baltimore has experienced 26 more homicides than all of New York City, even though its population is fourteen times larger than ours. My principal told me this morning that the brother of one of our ninth-graders was just killed. He was 17.
Last year, our students started speaking up to address this ongoing horror. Every time a child is murdered in our city, students create a poster in the shape of a dove bearing an olive branch. We display the doves prominently in our windows along a major thoroughfare. Each poster bears the name and age of the victim, along with anything else we can learn about their life. Seven-year-old Taylor Hayes was shot in a car returning from an amusement park; her dove had a roller coaster track winding all around it.
When the year concluded, we could not just throw the posters away. Instead, students suggested we bring them on a peace march to Police Headquarters and City Hall. Leaving school, we stopped at each intersection to remember one of the children or another victim who had died there. As we marched, students led songs, prayers, and chants. My favorite shouted call-and-response chant was “We still … have a voice!” As we marched, an elderly woman leaned out her front door, raising her arms and cheering us on. I recalled the scene with the priest from Third and Indiana.
Outside the mayor’s office, we lit candles. A man waiting for the bus joined our vigil after seeing one of our doves honoring a boy whom he had coached in football. One of our students — also a graduate of the Jesuit middle school in town — tearfully eulogized his friend and requested that we all exchange hugs. That student kept his buddy’s dove, but the rest are now stapled to my classroom ceiling.
Saints of God, come to our aid. Hasten to help us, angels of the Lord. Bless our children who remain to help our city find peace.
