1966

The year 1966 stands at the center of the novel's narrative, a single year that contains both the personal transformation of Maddie Schwartz and the public upheavals of a city in flux. It is the year she leaves her husband, Milton Schwartz, sells her engagement ring, and begins a new life as a reporter, and it is also the year of the Maryland gubernatorial primary, the disappearance of Cleo Sherwood, and the murder of Tessie Fine. The year functions as a hinge between Maddie's old life and her new one, and as a lens through which the novel examines the racial and gender politics of mid-1960s Baltimore.

A Year of Personal Rupture and Reinvention

For Maddie Schwartz, 1966 begins with a decisive act of separation. In January, she takes her engagement ring to a jeweler and realizes she has already mentally spent the money she hopes to get for it, imagining a thousand or even two thousand dollars. The ring, a symbol of her marriage, becomes the seed capital for her independence. She hides it in the dirt of a potted African violet on her patio, stages a false burglary to explain its loss, and begins to dismantle her life as Mrs. Milton Schwartz. The year marks her transition from a wife in a kosher household on Gist Avenue to a woman living alone in an apartment she can barely call home, snubbed by neighbors who see her as the undesirable one in a neighborhood of maids and laundresses, milkmen and streetcar conductors.

Her reinvention is also professional. By 1966, Maddie has taken a job at The Baltimore Star, where she works as an assistant to Don Heath, a post that others in the newsroom dismiss as a dead end for a pretty girl. But the year gives her the chance to prove herself. She is sent to cover a party for Violet Wilson Whyte, the first Negro policewoman, celebrating her twenty-ninth year on the force, an assignment that introduces her to the segregated realities of the Baltimore Police Department. She also begins to investigate the disappearance of Cleo Sherwood, a case that the men at the Star dismiss because Cleo is a Negro woman. Maddie's anger at their callousness becomes a kind of tribute to her lover, Ferdie Platt, a Negro police officer she cannot be seen with in public. The year 1966 is thus the year Maddie learns that her ambition and her desires are both constrained by the color line and by her gender.

The Political Landscape of 1966

The year is also defined by politics. The 1966 Maryland gubernatorial primary is a central event, falling two days before Rosh Hashanah. Maddie volunteers to take the results, an inglorious job that she performs while typing vote tallies in the city legislative districts. In the Fourth District senate race, a newcomer, Clarence Mitchell III, is the top vote-getter, with Verda Welcome second and Ezekiel Taylor a distant fourth. The election reveals the limits of Cleo Sherwood's significance: Maddie realizes, in hindsight, that Cleo could not have swayed the election, that she had never mattered at all. The year also sees Spiro Agnew running for governor, a Republican who contacts a newsroom colleague with an offer of a press secretary's job, and who is the subject of laughter at the Schwartzes' dinner table over his confused speech at Gettysburg. The political machinations of 1966 are a backdrop to the novel's central drama, a reminder that the lives of women like Cleo are expendable in the larger game of power.

Race, Segregation, and the Changing City

The year 1966 is also a time of racial tension and change in Baltimore. Maddie observes the signs that a neighborhood is about to tip from white to black, the "Under Contract" and "SOLD" signs swinging beneath the original "For Sale" signs as covert code for "Get out now." She attends the ribbon-cutting for a new EZ Kleeners location in a changing neighborhood, where she meets Ezekiel Taylor, a man with the charisma of a successful businessman. The white women walking into Pietro's for their hair appointments would welcome the convenience of a dry cleaners, but they would not want Mr. Taylor as their neighbor. The year exposes the hypocrisy of a city where whites flee from black neighbors while relying on their labor, and where a Negro police officer like Ferdie Platt is denied a car and a radio, forced to walk patrols and use a call-box key. The segregated police department is a microcosm of the city itself, and 1966 is the year Maddie begins to see it clearly.

The Year's Enduring Significance

The events of 1966 have a long afterlife. Maddie's first-person account of her near death at the hands of Angela Corwin, who was convicted of the first-degree murder of Tessie Fine, becomes the foundation of her career at The Beacon, where she starts as a general assignment reporter in 1966 and eventually becomes a columnist. The year is thus the origin point of her professional identity, the moment she writes the Star out of her official history and remakes herself. By October 1985, when she speaks at The Woman's Club of Roland Park, she is introduced as a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a woman whose career began with that harrowing story. The year 1966 is the pivot on which her entire life turns, the year she stops being Milton Schwartz's wife and becomes Madeline Schwartz, reporter. It is also the year the novel's central mysteries are set in motion, the year a young Jewish girl is killed in a tropical fish store and a Negro woman disappears into a lake, and the year the city of Baltimore begins to reckon with the cost of its divisions.