If I chance to talk a little wild, forgive me; I had it from my father.

—W. Shakespeare, Henry VIII

Baltimore couldn’t be less like the farm. Instead of frogs, choruses of drunks sing on the street after dark. Instead of birdcalls, factory whistles. Instead of the spring and the stream, trains and The Baltimore Sun presses run through the night. By the 1840s, Baltimore is the second-largest city in the United States. Everything here is modern as can be, what with the new railroad connection, the factories, and the harbor, the air pollution, the water pollution, and the noise.

Pigs roam freely. So do packs of young white delinquents. Gangs like the Gumballs, the Neversweats, and the Cock Robins own the streets. An editorial in the Sun claims that the citizens of Baltimore are more plagued by wicked boys than the people of any other city in the nation.

For six years the Booths live in a rented row house. In 1846, Father buys the roomy brick townhouse at 62 North Exeter Street. The new home has a modest elegance. A Franklin stove. One bedroom for the boys and another for the girls. A dining room. Fleur-de-lis wallpaper flocked in yellow.

Green shutters frame the windows. Mulberry trees shade the yard. There is a gazebo in the back, a high stoop in the front, and, most conveniently, the tiny Struthoff grocery right next door.

Early in the evenings, when it’s warm and dry enough, when their mothers have had just as much noise and quarrel as anyone could possibly endure, the neighborhood children, all of them white, are sent outside to play together in the street.

It’s a short walk from the stoop to the Front Street Theatre—a palatial, Grecian-inspired venue that accommodates an audience of four thousand, the entire bottom floor reserved for horses and carriages. The Jones Falls waterway runs right past the back door.

Baltimore boasts four premiere theaters and is known nationally for its enthusiastic audiences. It also has the largest population of free blacks in the country and they attend in considerable numbers, except for those plays, like Othello, that they are forbidden to see.

—

The family has fractured.

Now there is the older set, most of whom are dead, only June and Rosalie remaining and only Rosalie remaining at home—a faction of one—the only child in the house who remembers, if barely, when their father was celebrated, wealthy, and sober. The only child in the house who remembers Frederick, Mary Ann, and Elizabeth. In truth, Rosalie, now called Rose, can no longer be counted a child. She’s twenty-two by the time they move to Exeter Street.