“In America today, we are living in two nations. I live about 20 blocks from ‘the corner’ I described in my 1998 book about West Baltimore, which is avoided by most of the city. But it’s another America entirely. It takes a lot of effort to make the journey across the chasm that separates them, but that must be our work.”

My mother’s brush with death started out innocuously. She had a persistent “wheezing,” and while—as the days passed by and it turned into a cough—she knew it probably should have gone away by that time, it took too much energy to catch the required two buses to visit her physician. It could wait a little longer, she reasoned.