Three days after he was shot to death here, Ken Harris continues to haunt the New Haven Lounge. Flowers are piled outside the doorway of the Northwood Plaza jazz club, and messages scrawled on cards: “God bless your spirit.” “Thank you, Kenny, for fighting for our community.”
And, inside the club, you find its owner, Keith Covington, looking ghostly in the near darkness.
“You gonna open for business?” a guy asks.
“I don’t think there’s gonna be a business anymore,” Covington says.
Harris goes to his grave, and now we’ll find out about residual casualties. It’s not just a jazz club clinging to life because its regular patrons are anxious, it’s a shopping center and a surrounding neighborhood. You take down a decent man, you send an entire community reeling. Murder defines how it thinks of itself, it befouls the atmosphere.
When it’s the murder of a guy like Harris, a Baltimore city councilman who tried unsuccessfully to become its president, a man with a wife and two children, a man who came up from poverty and tried to bring others along with him — well, it’s a heartache for everyone.
So there is Covington, Harris’ old friend, who was there when one of the robbers shot Harris in the chest. Covington slumps into a long sofa in a corner of the club. He’s had the joint for 21 years. It’s a terrific, comfortable place, with live jazz on the weekends and big pictures on the walls of Eubie Blake and Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday, and a first-rate sound system where, at this moment, you hear Lou Rawls’ voice coming up from his torso as he sings “Georgia.”
“Probably a good time to play something real bluesy,” a guy says. “Something real mournful.”
Music in lieu of a scream, music to frame the darkest of moods to get everybody through the worst hours.
“For so long,” Covington, 54, says, “we’ve been screaming about conditions. The police know all about it. They knew we were held up last time. They know there’s open-air drug dealing out on that shopping strip, and thieves, and hot goods being sold. They have to know. We’ve told them.”
“And the police tell you what?”
“Same thing all the time. ‘We’re aware of it. We’re working on it.’ Their feeling is, if it’s in the shopping center, it’s contained, it’s not in the neighborhood. They can keep an eye on it better. It takes something like this to get everybody moving.”
Well, we’ll see about that. Late Monday afternoon, Covington says, police officials showed up at the club and informed him they would have “30 homicide cops knocking on doors, kicking down doors, all around the neighborhood,” searching for the killer.
And yet, you look around this neighborhood and ask, What’s going on here? The homes are handsome, the yards mostly well-tended. It’s the kind of neighborhood that looks like salvation to people finally escaping inner-city poverty, with Morgan State University right there and Johns Hopkins University not far away.
“It should be a great neighborhood,” Covington says. “It was a great neighborhood. You want the harsh truth? Maybe 10 years ago, we had the great transition. Homeowners to renters. People using these houses as income properties. Families from over there on the east side by Hopkins Hospital, where the old row houses have been destroyed to make room for the new biotech labs. Some of those people came here.”
Covington peers across the club’s late afternoon darkness.
“Does that sound harsh?” he asks. “Well, it’s time to say harsh things.”
Someone ought to say them. About an hour later, the Baltimore City Council met. You could watch the whole thing on the city’s cable channel. One by one the council members rose to unburden themselves on the killing of Harris, their former colleague.
It was heartfelt, and it was earnest, and it was pretty pitiful. They mentioned Harris’ friendship, his sense of humor. They said he was a gentleman. They talked about their own great sadness. Somebody read a poem.
At least one of them should have screamed to the heavens, and demanded to know why the barbarism never ends in parts of this city, and now it has claimed a man of uncommon decency.
At the Haven Lounge, Covington sits in the dreariness of late afternoon and mourns his old friend, and wonders whether his jazz club can survive this. He might have lighted a candle. But it seems more appropriate to curse the darkness.
