Get it straight: they’re not just out here to sling and shoot drugs. That’s where it all began, to be sure, but thirty years has transformed the corner into something far more lethal and lasting than a simple marketplace. The men and women who live the corner life are redefining themselves at incredible cost, cultivating meaning in a world that has declared them irrelevant. At Monroe and Fayette, and in drug markets in cities across the nation, lives without any obvious justification are given definition through a simple, self-sustaining capitalism. The corner has a place for them, every last soul. Touts, runners, lookouts, mules, stickup boys, stash stealers, enforcers, fiends, burn artists, police snitches – all are necessary in the world of the corner. Each is to be used, abused, and ultimately devoured with unfailing precision. In this place only, they belong. In this place only, they know what they are, why they are, and what it is that they are supposed to do. Here, they almost matter.

We want it to be about nothing more complicated than cash money and human greed, when at bottom, it’s about a reason to believe. We want to think that it’s chemical, that it’s all about the addictive mind, when instead it has become about validation, about lost souls assuring themselves that a daily relevance can be found at the fine point of a disposable syringe.

Welfare is a bribe – and a fairly good one at that. For more than two decades it’s been a bribe and only a bribe, stripped of the higher ideal that once accompanied the payoff. Those ideals called for a process by which poor and damaged citizens could be rescued and made whole, but such a process has proven more costly and problematic than anyone initially imagined. So the nation has retreated from that commitment, using check day as a rear guard. The pretense of salvaging human beings has been gradually reduced to a string of elemental transactions: Take this. Shut up. Stay put until next month when there will be more of the same. (p. 407)

That’s the irony of a drug arrest at the street-corner level: Locking up a hardcore fiend won’t close the shop or stop the product. It won’t keep anyone from the game, or pave the way toward rehabilitation unless a fiend genuinely wants to quit fiending. The real tangible benefit from day-to-day police work in the drug war is medicinal: A run-and-gun player gets hit with a charge and, like it or not, he gets a brief convalescence. He gets some food, some sleep, maybe even some antibiotics. He gives those tired old veins respite. Then, when the whistle blows, he’s charging out of the penalty box for more of the same. (p. 103)

Even the socializing effect of an alternative curriculum – the kinds of skills designed by desperate educators to get these kids to the most basic level of employment – has no real application on Fayette Street. Job interview techniques, cooperative learning, managing emotions, interpersonal discipline – stuff like that will get you hurt at Fayette and Monroe, where the rules of that corner demand not social skills, but unhesitating ruthlessness. (p. 309)

In Baltimore, as in every other beleaguered city system, the administrators and bureaucrats have for decades wrapped their failure in the latest educational trends, programs, and jargon, as if changes in approach or technique could ever matter. Back-to-basics, alternative schools, privatization, magnet schools, teaching the whole child – all of it offered up as slogans in place of meaningful endeavor, as if the Titanic could have reached the New York harbor narrows with a more seaworthy set of deck chairs. (p. 312)

On Fayette Street, the babies are born simply because they can be born, because life in this place cannot and will not be lived in the future tense. Given that fact, there is no reason to wait. The babies speak to these child-mothers and child-fathers, justify them, touch their hearts in a way that nothing else in their lives ever will. The government, the schools, the social workers, the public-service announcements wedged in between every black-family-in-the-suburbs sitcom – all wail out the same righteous warning: Wait, don’t make the mistake, don’t squander every opportunity in life by having a child too young. But the children of Fayette Street look around them and wonder where an opportunity might actually be found. The platitude is precisely that, and no one is fooled. (p. 258)

“Para cada individuo, ningún destino es cierto y la esperanza siempre perdura. Pero la esquina en sí misma es inmutable.”

“Han pasado treinta años y ahora la esquina de la droga es el centro de su propia cultura. En la calle Fayette, las drogas ya no son lo que ellos venden o consumen, sino lo que ellos son.”

If it was our fathers firing dope and our mothers smoking coke, we'd pull ourselves past it. We'd raise ourselves, discipline ourselves, teach ourselves the essentials of self-denial and delayed gratification that no one in our universe ever demonstrated. And if home was the rear room of some rancid, three-story shooting gallery, we'd rise above that, too. We'd shuffle up the stairs past nodding fiends and sullen dealers, shut the bedroom door, turn off the television, and do our schoolwork. Algebra amid the stench of burning rock; American history between police raids. And if there was no food on the table, we're certain we could deal with that. We'd lie about our age to cut taters and spill grease and sling fries at the sub shop for five-and-change-an-hour ... Come payday we wouldn't blow that minimum-wage check on Nikes or Fila sweat suits, or Friday night movies at Harbor Park with the neighborhood girls. No f---ing way, brother, because we pulled self-esteem out of a dark hole somewhere and damned if our every desire isn't absolutely in check.