The cook up A crack rock memoir

in 1978, after four years away from American shores and the tempest of public furor, the hypnotic, if sometimes unpredictable, singer Nina Simone released her album "Baltimore." On the title track, Simone sang of dissonant times in her signature blues-tinged warble: "Oh, Baltimore, ain't it hard just to live, just to live." Thirty-seven years later, a two-week protest spurred by the death of Freddie Gray - the 25-year-old black man who suffered a fatal spinal cord injury while in police custody - seized TV screens across the globe, becoming worldwide news. What links Simone's album to the death of Gray and others is the inextricable and exacting thrall of Baltimore, a city that has served as cage and coffin for a legion's worth of black residents living in its western, southern and eastern corridors. And because Maryland's seaport city figures so commandingly in "The Cook Up," the latest book from the writer and educator D. Watkins, one is again reminded of Baltimore's sometimes inescapable pull, and how for those wading through its troubled waters, it is often easier to give in than to get out. Baltimore is perhaps best known for its tangled politics and its ever-swelling congregation of illegal drug outfits, thanks to David Simon's mid-aughts HBO show "The Wire," the haunting urban panorama that lodged itself into the American pop consciousness. This time, though, the city's wickedness - brought on by a trickling stream of bureaucratic failure through the years, from the early days of the 1960s segregationist police force to the more recent accusations of predatory practices among Housing Authority workers - finds a suitable host in Watkins's self-labeled "crack rock memoir." In East Baltimore, "people are gained, trusted, and loved as quick as they fade." It is important to keep the "fade" in mind as you traverse Watkins's terrain; it's what he fights so forcefully against from the book's onset, forgoing acceptance to Georgetown University for a proposition fraught with menace. The plan? To shepherd the drug enterprise of his recently murdered brother, Bip. Quickly fashioning himself into a well-respected player within the neighborhood, he lays claim to Madeira Street, a main artery in the community's core market. Over time, Watkins becomes known for serving the finest "Rockafella" (the neighborhood moniker for top-shelf crack cocaine) to an assortment of scabby-faced fiends, former athletes, single moms and 9-to-5ers. But as business booms - steeples of cash, silver-rimmed luxury cars and women are all in abundance at one point - the sting of trauma, and the manner in which its venom slowly overtakes the body, becomes unbearable for Watkins. "I never set out to be a part of that life," Watkins writes of drug dealing early on, "but that never stopped that life from setting out to be a part of me." When you are black in America, fighting against the "fade" - that is to say: battling against erasure - sometimes means doing things you would not otherwise do. That is the nature of trauma: It bleeds out in all directions. For Watkins, the pain of losing his brother propels him into a world where drugs are both profit and prescription. At only 18, he is self-medicating with marijuana, Percocet and vodka, struggling with depression while navigating the thick haze of street politics. After a handful of fateful encounters, Watkins resolves to flip his hustle entirely. He transitions from corner dealing to wholesale supply, weans off Percs, buys a bar with the money he's amassed and moves into a house in Bolton Hill with Soni, an Afrocentric woman with "Scotch-colored skin" whom he's fallen in love with. Only later does he let go of it all and return to East Baltimore on "the path to purpose," becoming an educator with a deep love for books by Langston Hughes and Sister Souljah. His decision is provoked by the brutal death of friends and the possible reality of jail time. "I could give back to the neighborhoods that my friends and I tore apart," he writes, eyes wide with hope. Beyond identifying some of the book's technical faults, it's hard to offer a critique of Watkins's account. Although the Los Angeles of my formative years was also peppered with instability, bloodshed and gang rivalry, it was worlds different from Baltimore at the close of the 1990s. And because storytelling can function as catharsis for black writers, there is a measure of value in the book's publication. Our stories, after all, were not always voiced by us. Words, for me and, I assume, for Watkins, are a means to personal deliverance. Other reviewers, those looking to feed a particular narrative about "inner city" African-Americans, might have been tempted to label his story "gritty" or his writing "street polished," but that would have misinterpreted his testimony, offering a shallow and one-sided distortion. This is why, as readers and as critics, we must mine deeper. I could have written at length about Watkins's lean, casual prose and how it was difficult to sustain throughout; situations often skyrocket unexpectedly or plunge without much explanation. But I would have missed the book's larger aim. The thread that connects "The Cook Up" with the author's previous true-to-life treatise, "The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America," and with his columns for Salon is, to me, of greater importance: It is Watkins's belief in the telling of black stories, in their ugliness and in their beauty. "I was depressed with my friends and the decisions they were making," he admits in the closing pages. "I couldn't do anything to save any of them." Oh, Baltimore. 'I could give back to the neighborhoods that my friends and I tore apart.' JASON PARHAM is a senior editor at The Fader magazine.

The author of the acclaimed The Beast Side (2015) inherited his brother Bip's big-time Baltimore dope business after Bip's murder. Watkins' story, told in hip-hop style with appropriate slang, is in large part a reclamation saga, a kind of rap dream, as Watkins transforms himself from drug dealer to teacher and writer (he has a master's from Johns Hopkins). The book is in the tradition of Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land (1965), Sister Souljah's No Disrespect (1995), and numerous other up-from-the-ghetto memoirs. It also evokes Jeff Hobbs' The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (2014) in its emphasis on promising black lives potentially cut short by drugs. Watkins, whose essays often appear in Salon and the New York Times, is a powerful writer, and he uses short chapters to heighten the quick-strike effect of his words, which often land like a punch in the stomach. The treatment of women in the drug subculture, as it is described here, will disturb many readers, but there's no doubting that Watkins is the real deal.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2016 Booklist

A memoir of growing up and selling drugs on East Baltimore's bloody corners. Watkins follows up his acclaimed The Beast Side: Living (and Dying) While Black in America (2015) with a personalized account of the lure of the gangster life for many inner-city black Americans, as well as the grim circumstances propelling them into it. The author opens with his beloved brother's senseless murder ("selling drugs seemed legal where you lived and he taught you how to be extra careful because bodies dropped every day") and chronicles how, devastated, he used an inheritance of drugs and money to enter "the game" himself. This occurred with incongruous ease, as his new crew retook an old drug corner. "Street fortunes were made and lost there," he writes. "My Uncle Gee had it for the longest." With canny promotion and good-quality product, Watkins established himself as a prominent, low-key dealer: "I could stack a few hundred grand without shooting anyone while I figured my life out, met some girls, and had some fun." Things proceeded smoothly, despite occasional violent incursions and Watkins' awareness that his operation, though discreet, fueled the community's most destructive aspects even while contributing economically to it. He ultimately extricated himself and entered college as his erstwhile colleagues paid the costs of addiction and felony charges. The author's writing projects keen awareness of both the mediated image of the young black dealer and the actual grim life prospects for a generation of his inner-city peers. His memoir's strengths include its bleakly humorous, original prose, which pinballs between stoned, brand-focused, hip-hop excess and a more contemplative tone, and the many true, touching, or disturbing small details from the fraught daily lives of America's black underclass. However, many narrative threads trail off unresolved, beginning with his brother's murder, which fuels the story yet is left unaddressed. A familiar story to fans of The Wire, but Watkins provides a gritty, vivid first-person document of a desperate demographic. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.