The Boys of Dunbar by Alejandro Danois

Author:Alejandro Danois
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

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Wade was born in East Baltimore on December 9, 1944. His mother, Mattie, cooked and cleaned house—washing, dusting, scrubbing, ironing, and looking after her small apartment as if it were one of those big houses up in Milford where the prominent doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital lived. Mattie fussed over her two infant children, Bob and his sister, Delores, who was a year older, while her husband Edward put in long hours at the Sparrows Point Bethlehem Steel plant on the city’s southern tip in Dundalk. Mattie and Edward had fallen in love and married as teenagers in Buckingham County, Virginia, in a hamlet called Dillwyn. Word about decent union wages to be earned in Baltimore had filtered down there. Eager to escape a future of sharecropping the land that his parents and their parents had, Edward made his way up north. As Baltimore boomed during World War II and steel became king, the many people who relocated from the rural Carolinas and the Virginia Tidewater began to realize the American dream.

Edward Wade was among the more than five million African Americans who departed the farms and fields of the rural South and flooded Baltimore and other northern cities eager for their slice of the American pie. Although he landed in a segregated Baltimore, where the black population was squeezed into a few teeming neighborhoods on the city’s east and west sides, Edward had better prospects there than in the racially charged atmosphere in Virginia. Edward sent for his young wife in 1940. The couple rented a one-bedroom apartment in the 1900 block of East Orleans Street—five blocks from the current Dunbar High School—and started a family.

One day, in 1948 when young Bob was four years old, Mattie waited for Edward to come home from work. He never did. Like so many other cowardly men, he walked out the door never to return, abandoning his family.

Uneducated and with no work experience, Mattie had to take care of two kids on her own. Mattie Wade never asked anybody for a handout. She closed her eyes and prayed, refusing to be trapped by circumstances. Mattie found a job, first as a domestic, and later at S. S. Shapiro and Sons textile factory in the O’Donnell Street industrial park in South Baltimore.

Initially hamstrung to make the monthly rent, she pooled resources with her older brother Linwood and his wife, Edith, who’d previously made their transition from tenant farming in the South to the big city and were raising their own five children in a three-story house in Baltimore. Bob slept in a bed with his mother while his sister shared a bed with two cousins. The other three cousins shared another bed. Mattie would rise before the sun and leave her children’s clean, freshly pressed clothes laid out. By the time they woke up, she was hours into her work shift. Bob and Delores would eat their breakfast and make their way to school together.

Young Bob was an excellent student. Education

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