Ace in the hole

>> David Matthews interweaves tales
of Baltimore blacks, Jews and blues
in his memoir Ace of Spades

by JULIET WATERS

There’s a great snippet of dialogue in HBO’s The Wire that’s easy to miss because it happens right before a particularly brilliant scene. Two small-time Baltimore thugs are guarding a stash house that’s about to be held up by Omar, an openly gay neighbourhood gangsta, posing on this day as a geriatric paraplegic. Lounging on the steps of a rundown brownstone, unaware of their impending fate, one of the thugs is grumbling about some “ol’ white motherfucker” who recently asked him directions to the “po’ house.” “I’m like, uh, you kiddin’? Take your pick.”

The old white motherfucker is in fact looking for the Poe House, the house in West Baltimore where Edgar Allen Poe lived for many years with his widowed aunt, and wrote many of his early short stories. It’s a small museum not too far south of Bolton Hill, where David Matthews grew up in the ’70s, largely under the care of his ageing grandmother.

In Ace of Spades, he tells a story that resonates in many ways with the American gothic Poe originated. It’s the story of Matthews’ own life as a mixed-race kid with a father so black he could count Malcolm X and James Baldwin as friends, and a mother so Jewish she tried in his infancy to flee with him to Israel, until his father kidnapped him back.

“Bitch was crazy” was the extent of Matthews’ knowledge of his mother up until he was old enough to research her story. But his father never did have great taste in white women. Matthews’ early years were spent under the care of a second white wife who not only beat him, but once made him eat his own puke. When that marriage finally broke up, David found protection from two people: his grandmother, a mixed race journalist with deep connections to Bolton Hill’s black middle class, and Stefan, the mixed-raced son of a Vietnam vet with obvious signs of post-traumatic stress, and a Norwegian mother who Stefan summered with in Europe.

Matthews makes much of the fact that whenever he could, he passed as white. But this seems more than anything to have been the natural path of least resistance, rather than the moral choice he frames it as. Pictures of Matthews as a kid, on his MySpace page, reveal that he looked like a typical young, white Jewish kid. There was nothing Afro about him. Even as an adult, he looks about as black as Howie Mandel. So, why wouldn’t he gravitate to the racial identity that he was entirely entitled to identify with, if it made an incredibly difficult childhood a little easier?

The huge problem he faced as a Jew, however, is that he knew nothing of Jewish culture. That and the unapologetic racism of so many of the Baltimore Jews in his high school. No surprise he failed miserably. Matthews had no idea how black he really was until he reached community college and realized, through his father’s career as a black journalist, that he has a far more entrenched knowledge of black culture than many of his black classmates.

Even if his path is understandable, there are still problems of character. Matthews weasels his way through life like something out of Victor Hugo, or Curb Your Enthusiasm. He is a self-loathing, kind of creepy acolyte to boys like Stefan, who are fortunate enough to be born with more physical beauty, charisma and discipline than Matthews has. Still, self-effacement has been his salvation and he self-effaces with a Larry David level of genius that can’t help but endear him to his readers. Always by his side is the other anti-hero of this story, Baltimore: a complicated, difficult city with secret, freakish stories lurking around every corner. For a compulsive, gifted storyteller like Matthews, there probably isn’t a house in that tragic city that isn’t a potential Poe house

Ace of Spades by David Matthews,
Henry Holt, hc, 30pp, $24