How Baltimore’s Blackness made me a bold creative | GUEST COMMENTARY
When I was a child, the Baltimore I knew was exclusively Black. My family has deep roots in and around the city that trace back at least five generations. One large family blended with another large family and then another until my network of cousins, aunts, and uncles spiderwebbed across the metropolitan area. Surrounded as I was by Blackness, I moved through the world armed with an audacity fueled by the people who made up Baltimore as I saw it.
The demographics of the Montebello-Coldspring neighborhood where I grew up were the product of white flight in the 1970s. My grandparents moved into the house overlooking Lake Montebello alongside a couple of other Black families and, before long, all that remained of its former white Protestant residents was the statue of Martin Luther perched in an open field. The community as I knew it felt idyllic and cinematic. We’d make fresh cobbler with the peaches from Mrs. Wilson’s tree. Mrs. Peggy — the neighborhood baker — kept us loaded with fresh bread, cookies, and 7-Up cake. My own house overflowed with kids as my grandmother became the person for after-school care, all against the backdrop of oak trees, a verdant open field, and a vibrant blue reservoir. Fireworks lit the summer sky after Orioles games at Memorial Stadium and past the car barrier at Herring Run Park was a hidden cove perfect for skipping rocks.
My Black Baltimore was fuel for the imagination. Every birthday, anniversary, cookout, holiday or cool summer night hangout sang with the most incredible oral storytelling. Tales built on decades of shared history let fear be dulled with time and wrapped in laughter until it was appropriate for a child’s ears. For my grandfather — a World War II veteran — werewolves, demons and vampires replaced the human combatants he faced while deployed in Germany. He claimed you could see a monster peeking out of the mansion at the far end of King’s Cemetery. He kept us away from the abandoned Montebello State Hospital with ghost stories. My aunt taught me to divine a storm by the shifting color of Lake Montebello and the position of the leaves in the trees. My other grandparents warmed their winters with their living room fireplace, flames crackling as merrily as any mountain cabin. Everything held magic and possibility and was so rooted in Blackness that it felt inextricable.
My Black Baltimore was The City that Reads. The adults in my life — both my family and the white teachers who I believed all lived in Baltimore County — hunted down Black books to fill my voracious literary appetite and overflowing bookshelves. From the Fred Crump Jr. fairytale series bought from friends at the beauty salon to Virginia Hamilton books slipped into my stack by knowing librarians, I could always find myself in books. Whatever magic I didn’t see around me, I pulled from those pages. It left me feeling that the absence of Blackness in the fantasy novels I loved most was merely an oversight. The writers limited themselves by making all their heroines blonde and pale and blue-eyed, but my imagination — made of stronger stuff — recast all those girls in my own image. A Black girl ruled in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles series, a Black girl struggled against the curse of obedience in “Ella Enchanted,” and a Black girl reshaped the universe as she pleased in “Of Two Minds” because my Baltimore told me the possibility was true.
My Black Baltimore gave me the audacity I need to be an author. The foundation of that magical east-side childhood colored with emerald grass, vibrant trees, rush hour traffic, corner stores, characters and love firms up a foundation that refuses to be torn down. My Baltimore makes me bravely go forward, but it’s my Black Baltimore that lets me know I don’t go alone.
Brittany N. Williams (brittanynwilliams.com) is a Baltimore native and author of the Young Adult fantasy novel “Saint-Seducing Gold” (2024), the second book in The Forge & Fracture Saga.