During Homeland's first decades, Jackson would have been barred from buying there. Taney who led the Supreme Court during its Dred Scott decision denying Black people civil rights. Homeland, its now resident historian discovers, arose on the grounds of a namesake estate almost certainly built with enslaved labor by David Perine, a longtime friend of Roger B. Meanwhile, real estate websites say the median listing home price in Homeland is approaching $700,000, up more than 20% from last year.

Indeed, about the same time he buys in Homeland, the family sells his late grandmother's house in that other Baltimore for $5,000-less than the purchase price in 1965.

(Something, he writes, that had yet to occur in a family whose Baltimore roots go back nearly a century). Jackson justifies his Homeland mortgage in practical and patrimonial terms: a chance to pass some generational wealth to his children. Or, as he frames it in the book, some of his round-the-way friends consider him an Uncle Tom while his new address raises eyebrows of some progressive white colleagues who envisioned him settling in a 'diverse' neighborhood. '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. 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.

Shelter by Lawrence Jackson