It is December 16, 1954, and young DeWayne Wickham is rushing home from the third grade with his school pictures. He hurries over to the small clothing store on Pennsylvania Avenue where his mother works, pushes past a customer and shoves the pictures into his mother's hands.
"Here ma," he says, grinning with excitement.
"Are they free?" she asks.
DeWayne's grin disappears.
"Well," sighs his mother, "maybe we can buy a couple of them. We'll see what your father says."
But young DeWayne never found out -- at least not directly.
His parents failed to come home that night. They were last seen together a few hours after DeWayne's mother, Sylvia DeChase Wickham, got off from work. The next morning, police found the family car parked at a construction site in West Baltimore. Inside the car, they discovered that the father, John Wickham, had shot his wife once in the head and again in the chest. He had then killed himself. He left behind a note blaming what he did on money problems, including his concern that he could not afford Christmas gifts for his children. Scattered on the floor of the car were DeWayne's class photos.
Today, DeWayne Wickham is a syndicated columnist for USA Today and the Gannett News Service. He writes about the impact of his parents' death in "Woodholme: A Black Man's Story of Growing Up Alone." The autobiography will be published in May by the Farrar, Straus, Giroux publishing company.
The story revolves around Mr. Wickham's experiences as a young caddy at the Woodholme Country Club in Pikesville. He had intended to examine the relationship between the black inner city caddies and the club's Jewish members. But "Woodholme" quickly evolved into more.
"This story is about my middle passage," Mr. Wickham says. "That's why it begins with my parents' death when I was 8 and ends at 18 when I enter the military. And as a subtle sub-plot, it is the story of young black men who went to Woodholme in search of an escape from Cherry Hill."
Mr. Wickham is a former Sun reporter and a longtime friend and colleague. We were sitting in his handsome home in Owings Mills -- about as far away from his bleak origins as you can get.
"Writing this book has been very cathartic for me," he says. "We [DeWayne and his brothers and sisters] were all greatly traumatized by what had happened to my parents, but in different ways. For myself, I know I had built a wall within myself. I didn't talk about it. I didn't touch it. Everything about my early life had been lost to me."
Maxie T. Collier, a psychiatrist who once served as the city's commissioner of health, told me shortly before his death last fall that the black community was in a state very similar to clinical depression. And Mr. Wickham's story reminds us of the holocaust of pain that has gripped the urban nation. We see evidence of this pain in the daily accounts of violence and drug abuse in our cities. We see it in the tightly wound faces of passers-by and in the bitterness that permeates a lot of urban-oriented art, such as rap music.
What we often fail to appreciate, however, is how many people rise above this universe of hurt.
As individuals, blacks are in constant emotional turmoil, says Mr. Wickham. "We are oppressed and at the same time very courageous. We are fearful, but at the same time we are up to the challenge. Maybe we had to be this way in order to survive. But what we need to do is publicly grieve; we need to flush out our emotional systems so that we can move on." A number of my colleagues have tried to assist with this "public grieving" recently. In "Laughing In the Dark: From Colored Girl to Woman of Color," Washington Post reporter Patricia Gaines tells how she overcame a term in jail and drug abuse. In "Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man In America," journalist Nathan McCall chronicles his struggle against the lure of the streets.
I doubt that any one work could do justice to the immensity of the black community's anguish. But each story represents yet another piece of the mosaic. Each story, we can only hope, is another step toward the final healing.