'The idea of shelter-this fundamental thing-is here evoked as a moment of betrayal or treason to my race or certainly a treason to a cause: the overthrow of historic segregation.' 'It's a complicitous critique of the position of the Black middle class,' Jackson says of a work fueled by the Guggenheim Fellowship he was awarded in 2019. Ruminations on his homecoming to racially bifurcated Baltimore form the backbone of his new book Shelter: A Black Tale of Homeland, where memoir meets history lesson meets the contemporary pursuit of social justice. But the Baltimore of his youth was both poverty-scarred and overwhelmingly Black-far removed from his now leafy pocket of white affluence.

This was not just a relocation for the Black, divorced father of two, but a return to a city where he grew up and still has family.

But for Jackson, hired as a Bloomberg Distinguished Professor of English and History, the move also fostered internal disquiet.

Stepping up the academic ladder and stepping into a handsome home engenders a prideful sense of achievement. There's a detached garage out back, a slate roof overhead, and a Doric-columned portico over the front door. (Apr.A very nice house: a meticulous, stone colonial some 2 miles north of Johns Hopkins' Homewood campus in one of the city's loveliest neighborhoods, Homeland. Agent: Regina Brooks, Serendipity Literary. In resonant prose, Jackson ably conveys the feuding aspirations and unease of the Black middle class: “I want my son to have the confidence of the people who owned the land, without having to hate himself for it.” The result is a stirring reflection on the meaning of home. applied to him”-while revisiting old haunts, surveying political wrangles over poverty and crime, and taking in a King Day parade that gets stymied by horse manure. On that peg he hangs an atmospheric history of Black Baltimore, sketching vivid profiles of famous locals-a tragic Billie Holiday, an ambitious Frederick Douglass who “refused to believe that the rules. He found the battle to maintain his house to the homeowners association’s standards a source of satisfaction-the yard-work scenes are epic and engrossing-but also of anxiety as he worried about implied accusations by old friends of Uncle Tom–ism.

In 2016, Jackson ( My Father’s Name) moved back to his hometown of Baltimore to take a professorship in English at Johns Hopkins University, and bought a house in the upscale white neighborhood of Homeland-formerly a slave owner’s estate and a far cry from the inner-city surroundings of his boyhood. A Black man makes a conflicted return to his roots in this bittersweet meditation on race and belonging.

Shelter by Lawrence Jackson