_Elmer Martin’s revelation comprised three moments, one of which occurred on a baseball field in west Baltimore in 1981, when he coached a Little League team in one of the city’s worst ghettos. Through baseball he’d intended to provide black youths with a sense of discipline, some structure, perhaps a role model. But on the day team pictures were handed out, one boy of about eleven took Elmer aside. “They made me black,” he said, showing him the picture. “They made me too dark. I want to see if they can lighten me up a little bit.” A few teammates overheard this and piped up. If he got his picture lightened, they wanted theirs just a little bit lighter, too.

“They were ashamed of being black,” says Elmer; it was a shame he sensed even among his students at Morgan State University, where he taught social welfare. “Here was a generation of black youth who acted as if the ’60s never happened, as if they had some kind of historical amnesia.” Because despite the efforts of Civil Rights, despite the movements of Black Power and Black Consciousness, by the ’80s the emphasis on black history and culture had all but disappeared. “Black history was never institutionalized. It never found firm roots in the churches. It never found firm roots in the schools. So it never found firm roots in the family.” The problem was too deeply rooted for baseball to solve: “We needed a mechanism by which black images would have an impact on the psyche of these kids.”

Over the next couple of years, Martin and his wife, Joanne, a teacher at Coppin State College, searched for that mechanism. They considered writing books—academic, sociological, children’s, comic—but found the medium too one-dimensional. In the meantime, they took a trip to Europe—saw Paris, did the sights, debating all the while what the medium for telling history should be. In Spain, an epiphany—there at the mouth of the mountain where General Franco had blasted out his extravagant memorial to the fallen Nationalists, Valle de los Caídos. The stone cross at the mountain’s summit reaches 150 meters, with Herculean figures sculpted at its base. A pietà hulks above the entrance to the basilica itself. “The history,” Elmer says, “was just thrown at you.”

The scene triggered for him the memory of a day in 1972 when he and Joanne visited St. Augustine, Florida, a town with a Spanish tinge in everything from the verandas to the fountains—where Ponce de Leon’s mythic fountain is symbolized by a tiny spring, where the Alligator Farm hosts feeding shows at noon, and where Potter’s Wax Museum, cool and dark, provided the Martins an hour’s distraction. At Potter’s they saw Da Vinci at a sketch, Generals Lee and Grant surveying the valley, the Founding Fathers passing the quill. The wax standards. They thought little of it at the time. But in Spain that sullen Little Leaguer, Franco’s splendid cross, and Potter’s Wax Museum somehow all fused together and took root. At home in Baltimore, Elmer told Joanne what he had in mind—wax figures—and she understood.

They spent the next few months visiting wax museums in Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, the Carolinas. They sought advice, the names of sculptors, but found the industry to be guarded. The competition among wax museums is tight because the market is so limited, and most owners keep their secrets close. Finally, on a visit to the National Civil War Wax Museum in Gettysburg, the Martins were put in touch with Robert Dorfman, whose Baltimore studio supplies figures to nearly every wax museum on the East Coast. At the time, Dorfman charged up to forty-five hundred dollars per sculpture, head-to-foot. Humbled by the cost, Elmer proposed an experiment: he and Joanne would borrow four figures that were left over from exhibits that had closed—Mary McLeod Bethune (who founded an independent school for black children in 1904), Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and Nat Turner. They would set up temporary shows around the city to promote the museum, pay for the figures, and if the idea took off, and if they could generate enough money down the road, they would buy others. Dorfman agreed, and the Martins brought those first four—Bethune and the rest—to Mondowmin Mall in west Baltimore, where they billed their show as the Martins’ Exhibition of Great Afro-Americans. It generated only a pittance of money, mostly from people dropping coins at Douglass’s feet, but it got the word out. Working around his teaching schedule at Morgan State and hers at Coppin State, the Martins drove the figures to schools and churches and malls around the city and even into Pennsylvania. They stored them in a second bedroom in their apartment and hauled them out to gigs whenever they could. “We lived in a basement apartment,” Joanne says, “and we’d be up at first light carrying out these bodies and going back down with them at night again.” People got curious; some worried. “I was even stopped once by a state trooper when he saw Fred Douglass’s feet sticking out from under the hatchback of my car,” says Elmer.

They improvised and struggled. With a bank loan and money they’d been saving for a house, the Martins bought a storefront space in downtown Baltimore in 1983. The grand opening was a small affair, no advertising save for the flyers they stapled to street posts. The museum displayed twenty- two figures in all, with Henry “Box” Brown—the Richmond slave who packed and shipped himself to freedom—peeking warily from his crate bound for Philadelphia.

They waited all day for visitors, and not one showed until a busload of gospel singers drove past. They were visiting from South Carolina, singing at a church nearby, and were on their way to New York when the director spotted the storefront from the bus. The driver stopped, the singers got off, and the Martins had their first twenty visitors all at once. “We didn’t even have a gift shop,” says Elmer. “We didn’t have postcards, t-shirts, anything. All we had were buttons and some little chocolate dolls we called Little Harriet Tubman dolls. So we sold the buttons, and we sold the dolls. We sold out that day.”

News of the museum spread by word of mouth. Business was slow, successes small and unpredictable. Burdened with both teaching and running the museum, the Martins hired an assistant and paid her what they could, about thirty dollars a week. At one point they even pawned Joanne’s wedding ring in order to afford the rent. “Those first months were terrible,” Elmer says. “We had trouble paying the rent, paying for the figures. The bodies weren’t even good.” To save money, they’d been buying only wax heads and hands from Dorfman and constructing the bodies themselves out of chicken wire, plaster, and burlap sacks. “Sometimes the arms would be too fat,” says Elmer, “and sometimes the head would be too heavy and would sink into the body. I guess if you’re going to use chicken wire, you ought to at least have an artist you can pay who knows how to do it.” Providence helped now and then, like the afternoon when the owners of a mannequin restoration business happened by and told Elmer they could do a lot better than the bodies he had there already. The two parties struck a deal when the restoration company offered mannequins at low cost and deferred payment. The Martins got another twenty bodies out of it.

Within two years the Martins ran out of room on Saratoga Street. Busloads of kids started showing up, blocking the narrow street, and the neighboring store owners began to grumble. Just in time, a state senator named Clarence Blount took an interest in the museum and secured the Martins a grant from the state for one hundred thousand dollars, on condition that the Martins match that money. They taught their regular courses and drove from gig to gig, promoting and lecturing. They lived frugally and even left the shop on Saratoga to set up a temporary exhibit in the basement of the Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church. In 1988 they relocated to an abandoned fire station on North Avenue in Baltimore’s Eastern District, a zone that was commercially dead, where drugs were sold on the corners in daylight and other crimes were commonplace. But the Martins knew it was the right move—in part because they wanted that space, but also as a commitment to a neighborhood that needed them.

_All the neighborhoods along east North Avenue have been crippled by poverty, and the toll of neglect is evidenced in the fast-food joints with bullet-proof counters, the handful of cut-rate liquor stores, the pair of methadone clinics—even at the Stop Shop & Save food market, where the Coke machine in the parking lot is locked tight in a red steel cage. Here GORE-LIEBERMAN stickers add the American colors to the plywood of boarded-up row houses, and two enormous, historic cemeteries mark the length of a mile. The Eastern District is the last place you would expect a tourist to visit. But between the cemeteries and the churches, on the corner where the fire trucks once rolled out, the sidewalk in front of the Great Blacks in Wax Museum is, on most days, crowded with children. Buses usually line the block from end to end. Some of the children out front wait patiently to enter, and others flit around in hyper, anxious spasms. Many of the children exiting seem bewildered, squinting in the sun, while others are no less spasmodic than when they entered an hour earlier. A few dart over to Nardi’s hot dogs next door and then gather on marble stoops to eat in cliques.

Inside, the museum’s lobby is cool and bright. A wax figure of W. E. B. Dubois stands in a corner near the entrance, facing the ticket booth in the center of the room. Taking up the entire west wall—impossible to miss—is Hannibal, a little cockeyed and furious, crossing the Alps on his plaster wartime elephant. The elephant is actually the size of an elephant. The Alps are painted on the wall behind it. The placard at the animal’s foot provides the context, summarizing Hannibal’s march on the Romans with some forty thousand men and forty of these beasts, an assembly that throttled “the largest army ever put into battle during ancient times.”

Through narrow double doors is the main exhibit, a large space theatrically lit and crowded with dioramas that form a more or less chronological path. Each diorama represents a phase of history, its title painted in thick, vaudevillian script. At the far end of the room, you can see John Henry standing with a sledgehammer raised one-handed, and, behind him, Bill Pickett, a black cowboy, wrestling a dwarfed, long-horned steer. This is the “Western Frontier,” but it is decades away still. To get there you must pass the first exhibit, “The Slave Plantation,” where a five-hundred-pound bale of cotton from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, sits below the portrait of a sweating, slumped, whip-scarred back. Beside it, a wax figure in tattered denims displays one of the “tools of punishment and control.” It is an iron belt and collar, both spiked and studded to cut flesh. These are connected to a rod that runs up the victim’s back, from which rises a tree of eighteen tiny bells. The bells’ music originally warned others of the pain of insurrection, and the figure here holds a curious posture, with one hand in his pocket and the other to his chin as if in doubt.

Turning away from this, you face the hull of a boat, a cross-section of the stern that takes up the entire wall. Through a doorway in this facade, you descend a small flight of steps toward the sound of recorded grunts and moans, down into the hold, where, to your right, is a room completely undecorated save for three sets of figures. This is a small gallery of punishments—a slave in the stocks, another being force-fed, still another receiving an iron collar. In the room to the left is the hold, where slaves were kept. The noises of the voyage wash over you from speakers overhead. Here an entire wall is divided into various small quarters: the “Men’s Quarters,” in which torsos are packed back-to-chest next to a shelf of coffin-sized spaces where slaves sleep two to a board, scarred feet and heads peeking out. In the “Boy’s Quarters,” small, skinny figures stare out coolly, detached, their necks locked in thick silver collars. There is a compartment for “Refuse Slaves,” the label given to those who were too crippled or feeble to fetch a price worth tending to them. There is a compartment for “Sick and Dying Slaves,” where one figure appears to be decomposing in his own excrement. Giant rubber rats stalk the corners and investigate the bodies. In the “Women’s Quarters,” a pale, half-stripped sailor wrestles a pair of girls to the floor, the prelude to a rape. Scattered throughout are a dozen plates to read, most of which are taken from the recorded observations of Alexander Falconbridge, a slave-ship surgeon. It is so dark, the plates are barely legible.

Some of the figures here are meticulously sculpted, while others look a little slapdash, their faces warped, their bodies incomplete. But the context seems to override the technicalities, and where it does count—where, for instance, a woman hangs stripped and bound by her wrists after a session under the whip—the details are menacing: those scars on her backside are so deep that the flesh is exposed, the blood in the crease of the scar just bright enough. It is fresh and harrowing.

Passing through the last narrow hallway leading back to the main exhibit, you hear the refrain that you realize has been repeating underneath the ship’s noise the whole time. It is now the only word audible: a long, low whisper, “Remember.” Large portraits of three slaves hang in this hallway, so narrow and claustrophobic you are practically nose-to-nose with the faces of the slaves themselves. They impart a haunting demand, and their stares are what you leave with.

What remains is the rest of the African-American experience, as interpreted through such dioramas as “The Black Church,” which has a symbolist, brimstone spirit. Here hangs an American flag. Superimposed on it are three martyrs, each of different races—African-American, Native American, and Hispanic—crucified on miniature crosses. In the foreground Andrew Bryan, who founded one of the first black Baptist churches in America, kneels at the foot of the scene, while Richard Allen, founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, lifts his face to God from his corner of painted fire. Nearby, in the “Islamic Tradition,” Bilal, the first Meuzzin, bears the rocks of torture under which he refused to honor the idols of Mecca. Further on, John Brown, in all his bloody, evangelical fury, shakes his rifle high and waves his Bible, while Nat Turner crouches in the reeds beside him. Along with Toussiante L’Ouverture, they complete the “Slave Revolts.”

Down the hallway, Henry “Box” Brown, with his thick, quiet, unsettling stare, waves slowly (literally, with a slight creaking) from his crate. It is the same Henry Brown from the Saratoga museum, only the hand moves mechanically now. In the crowded diorama “Explorers,” Matthew Hensen, his crazed expression not unlike Hannibal’s, claims the North Pole for the explorer Robert Peary, who in 1909 laid claim to the feat himself. Here Hensen is in the background, while a polar bear (actual, stuffed) paces the icy slope in front of him. In another diorama a girl uses a “coloreds only” fountain. A gallery of black authors includes likenesses of such writers as Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin and even one of Alexander Pushkin, the Russian poet who prided himself on his “African blood,” which he inherited through his maternal great-grandfather, an Abyssinian prince abducted as a child and enslaved by Peter the Great, who later made him a nobleman.

The show is dense, both carnivalesque and deadly serious. Some of the models are better than others, some dioramas more expressionistic than accurate. Marcus Garvey, for instance, looks alive enough to rise up from his chair and walk out. His expression is that of suspicion. However, the diorama for “The Space Frontier”—which depicts Guion Bluford, the first black astronaut into space, guiding his outbound vessel—imparts the idea better than it actually replicates the scene, using defunct IBM monitors, blinking lights, and circuit motherboards attached to the walls of a cockpit.

There are several awkward moments in the tour, when verisimilitude is interrupted by a flaw or short cut, or just by circumstance: a toy animal, a missing finger, a corner jam-packed with placards and figures because the Martins have simply run out of space. Considering that most of the audience are children, maintenance is a constant necessity. “Kids get curious,” Joanne says. “Even though we have signs everywhere telling them not to touch the figures, they still touch them, squeeze a finger off, or something like that. Like when Malcolm X was popular not too long ago. Back then his glasses would always disappear because kids were convinced that they were Malcolm X’s glasses. And then they started popping off his fingers, taking them as souvenirs.” 

However often a figure is marred by a curious hand, these disruptions are on a superficial level and are offset by the fact that imitation is only part of the experience. This takes some getting used to, because imitation is mainly what wax museums are about. They tend toward entertainment, with educational trimmings: one doesn’t expect density or gravitas. One doesn’t expect something so personal. So while the Great Blacks in Wax Museum suffers from a lack of touches here and there, it is also deeply confrontational. No violence or injury of the African-American struggle is too grim to be included in the show, and this is why you succumb to it: the gravity of the message overwhelms the medium. You expect a sideshow, but you get a testimonial. Juxtapositions become disorienting, consuming, tense. Benjamin Banneker, a self-taught astronomer of the colonial era who published the most popular almanac of his time, who helped map out Washington, D.C., stands next to a wall of advertisements for Black Joe Juice Grapes and pickaninny postcards—suggesting perhaps how one of the most brilliant minds of the Colonial era became virtually unknown by the twenty-first century. Upstairs, near the gift shop, fast-food franchise owners, entrepreneurs, and congressmen share the company of jazz musicians Billie Holiday and Eubie Blake. Just a few yards from them is a shrine to Emmett Till, the Chicago boy who was murdered for whistling at a white girl. Elaborate, paper-doll angels hover in the corner. And across from them hangs a symbolic collage called “Children in the Struggle,” which includes children trapped in file cabinets; a diorama of Jocko, George Washington’s boy slave who froze to death tending the would-be president’s horse, thus earning tribute in a statuette that became the progenitor to the lawn jockey; and there is the diorama of Ota Benga, an African pygmy boy displayed in a cage with chimpanzees by the New York Zoological Society in 1905. The juxtapositions, the whiplash shifts, the unflinching directness of the darker truths occur throughout, with no apologies or reservations. And wax, it seems, was the only way Elmer Martin could’ve pulled it off. 

_The curiosity with wax figures dates back to the reign of Alexander the Great, who kept a wax sculptor among his court to mold the likenesses of famous persons. 

The patrician families of Rome used wax for death masks as well as for figurines presented as gifts during the festival of the winter solstice. By the fourteenth century, Europeans used wax sculptures in funeral rites and sorcery rituals and even in traveling exhibits in which the models of monarchs were toted through villages to impress upon the royal subjects the image of their king. 

In eighteenth-century Switzerland, a physician named Philippe Curtius began using wax replicas of anatomical parts for his medical studies. Soon he realized a financial potential when patients, out of curiosity, would ask for wax replicas of their own faces. Curtius sculpted wax miniature faces for plaques and picture frames, and eventually developed his niche into a showcase of life-size figures. In 1770, through a well-placed connection, Curtius moved to Paris and opened an exhibition of wax figures called the Salon de Cire. He then hired his niece, Marie Grosholtz, as his apprentice. Early on, she completed a likeness of Voltaire, which led to a position as teacher of sculpting and painting to the court at Versailles. During the French Revolution she returned to Paris and was forced by a mob at the steps of her home to make her first death head, that of an aristocrat who had just been decapitated. Other mobs returned with other heads, and Grosholtz had little choice but to fill the orders. The wax heads were set on spikes and paraded through the city with the human ones, and, presumably, when the human heads were too rotten to carry, the wax heads took their places. Grosholtz was ordered by Robespierre to sculpt the death masks of both Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, which she did by retrieving their heads from the pile of corpses in Madaliene Cemetery, just outside of Paris, and casting molds from them. Eventually she sculpted the death mask of Robespierre himself, even of Murat while he lay dead in the bath.

By 1802 Grosholtz, now Tussaud, had left her spendthrift husband to bring her figures to Great Britain, where she used them in a traveling exhibition for over thirty years. She used concrete, mud, straw, and wood for bodies. She set up an exhibit of the fallen French royalty and intellectuals—including Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette—and billed it as “The Separate Room.” This would later become the famous Chamber of Horrors when she opened a permanent exhibit in London in 1835, and it remains a part of the Tussaud attraction to this day.

It wasn’t until 1949 that George Potter, an eccentric banker of inherited wealth, opened, in St. Augustine, America’s first wax museum, an exhibit of over one hundred figures he purchased from various European wax sculptors. His show included European royalty, presidents, authors, and historical persons, and in the 1950s and ’60s dozens of wax attractions sprouted across the country. Their strange reputation was galvanized by such venues as cheap haunted houses, by Movieland and Ripley’s Believe It or Not Museum, and even by Vincent Price’s film House of Wax. Today many of the smaller museums are disappearing as the value of real estate surpasses the value of the exhibition itself. “I know of maybe ten or twelve museums across the country,” says Pete Carsillo, the sculptor for Potter’s Wax Museum. “There may be some I don’t know of, but I doubt they’ll be there much longer.” Despite his love of the craft, he admits to being a little cynical about the business. “A modern audience isn’t drawn to wax museums like it might have been in the earlier part of the last century,” he says. “People mostly stumble into them. Madame Tussaud’s is the exception because of marketing and name recognition and because they’re constantly coming out with contemporary personalities that are ultrarealistic. That’s what draws people.” To the Martins’ advantage is that their purpose is educational, which allows them to pursue grant money that other wax attractions must do without.

A measure of the bygone popularity of wax exhibits, and an idea of what drew the crowds to them, can be found in Gene Gurney’s book America in Wax, an armchair tour of wax museums published in 1977. Most of the museums listed in the index no longer exist, and the scenes featured in the book have by and large disappeared with them. But they reflect the tie between wax and the history books’ most popular images: Leif Ericson, for example, setting foot on North America; Columbus mapping out his voyage for the Franciscan Friars; Columbus landing; Cabot landing; Brigham Young arriving; Juan Ortez being spared by the Seminoles; DeSoto mingling with the Cherokees; a voodoo dance and the first crap game in America (both set in New Orleans); George Washington in genuflection at Valley Forge; Washington crossing the Potomac; Washington standing; Daniel Boone, armed; Abraham, his knife drawn, with Jacob on the hill; Adam understanding Eve; Mohammed wrecking the idols; Hindus cleansing in the Ganges river; an ample Cleopatra in her bath; goblins and werewolves creeping through windows; Indians creeping through windows; Winston Churchill; Chinese laborers; legions of movie stars; Hawthorne, Hemingway, and Poe; several George Washington Carvers, Martin Luther King Jrs., and Booker T. Washingtons; just as many Ben Franklins, a couple of which move and talk.

For Tussaud’s and its imitators, aesthetics is the point, and the wax figure is both the means and the end. Your proximity to fame is the thrust. And eventually, what does one wax figure of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have over any other? The answer lies, perhaps, in context. At the Martins’ museum, he doesn’t appear at the end of a chronology, per se (Colin Powell and Nelson Mandela appear before him), but as a kind of epilogue to a narrative. The story is packed, religiously expressed, and includes even that which some, both black and white, would rather repress.

Perhaps no diorama in America has the same historical impact as the Martins’ most recent exhibit, “The Lynching Exhibit,” arranged in the basement of the museum, where the hum of the air conditioner fills the room. All the walls here are covered with news clippings, photographs, postcards, editorial sketches, and poems, all lamenting the existence of lynching. A list of five thousand victims reaches from floor to ceiling. Ida B. Wells, the journalist who campaigned throughout the late nineteenth century against the practice, stands in one corner. Encased in glass is an eviscerated torso of wax, accompanied by the photo of the murdered body it represents. In glass along the far wall are wax feet and limbs, jars preserving wax ears and eyes and genitalia. A clipped braid of a black girl’s hair has been tossed around a baseball trophy. Human parts like these were all distributed as souvenirs to the mob during lynchings. In another glass box are the replicated burned remains of “Zacharia Walker, Lynched August 11, 1911 in Coatesville, PA.” Walter F. White, the black writer whose skin was so pale he was often mistaken for a white man, noted in 1928 that while the number of lynchings had decreased since 1890, the severity of violence in these cases had actually worsened and more often than not included the “almost unbelievable torture of the victim.” One of the most gruesome cases White recorded is illustrated here, in the exhibit’s main diorama of the lynching of Hayes and Mary Turner.

After the murder of a white Georgia farmer, a lynch mob set out after a disgruntled field hand they suspected had done it. Failing to find him, they simply turned on Hayes Turner, who happened to work for the same farmer, and hanged him. He wasn’t an official suspect, but he was close enough. When the news of Hayes’s murder reached his wife, eight months pregnant at the time, she vowed to have the men responsible arrested. So the mob sought her out, found her hidden on a farm several miles from where she lived. White describes “a hot May sun beating down” as they bound her ankles and strung her up by them; how they doused her with gasoline and motor oil, then set a match to her body. “Mister,” White recalls one of the mob telling him a few days after the murder, “you ought to’ve heard that nigger wench howl!” White describes the clothes burning off her body, her body burning, and afterward, when one member of the mob took his knife and “ripped open the abdomen in a crude Caesarean operation,” drawing out the fetus and crushing it under his boot.

The mob buried both Mary and the fetus in a shallow grave, an empty quart of whisky for a headstone and a cigar stuffed in the neck for a bouquet.

In the diorama, the Turners hang together, Hayes on the right, his overalls torn where the mob has castrated him. His severed penis lies in a small pool of blood on the ground, just under his elevated feet. Two small wax cats approach it. His face is smeared and splotched and scarred. The woods painted in the background are bright and dense. On the left, Mary hangs by the neck (not the ankles), and a member of the mob begins to perform that “crude Caesarean,” his hand pulling out the fetus by its head. The cats, the plate tells you, are not there simply as some random detail, but are part of the story, foreshadowing more violence. After the fetus was extracted, they were sewn into Mary Turner’s belly, and bets were placed on which cat could dig its way out first.

This is violence delivered as still-life, to varying degrees of precision, accompanied by the testimony of news and official records. The central question again is whether or not the medium is appropriate to the message, especially since children are the majority of the audience. “Some people complain about the museum,” Elmer says. “They say it’s too violent. But you can’t understand black history, you can’t get to the strength, the resilience, and the faith—all those things—until you deal with the trauma and the pain and the suffering. And if you don’t confront the suffering, you will never see the character and dignity of black culture.”

In the corner of the lynching exhibit is the diorama called the “Boulevard of Broken Dreams,” a back alley where child zombies shoot up and fire pistols and lie dead in mounds of trash and pools of blood. On the placard above, the theme is spelled out for children to understand: “Now we lynch ourselves.” And though this diorama is overwhelmed by the other images in the room, for the Martins it is an integral part of the history being told in this particular exhibit. “We don’t see history as occurring in a vacuum,” Joanne says. “First and foremost, we try to make connections between the past and present for young African-Americans. None of what we do makes any sense if we don’t make that connection.”

_When the Martins finally moved into the old North Avenue station in 1988, they learned firsthand about the burden they had agreed to take on. “The ministers and funeral home owners in the neighborhood told us: just because you’re a museum, don’t think that everybody’s going to see it as a sacred institution,” Elmer says. “It might be sacred to you, but even churches aren’t safe. People have been robbed going to funerals. So we want you to know what you’re up against, that you have to establish some ground, that you’re here and that you’re going to be here. In other words, you have to gain their respect.”

By the time they were warned, they’d already been broken into. The night after they moved in, the office they had bought next door to the firehouse was robbed, supposedly by addicts looking for cash. The thieves took the phones, an answering machine, a copier, some artwork, and four wax figures, two of which were those the Martins had started with, McClaverton and Douglass. “That was incredible to us,” Elmer says, “that someone would steal wax figures.” Soon he got a call from someone who claimed to know how to recover Douglass and the others—an extortion job. So Elmer put the word out (everything in this neighborhood works by word of mouth, he says) that he wasn’t interested in getting the figures back, that he simply didn’t want them. Sometime later a boy who volunteered at the museum told Elmer he’d actually seen Douglass at a house party, where a man standing in the middle of the room raised Douglass’s head by the hair and said, “I want all you to know what happens to people who mess with me. Mess with me, and I will cut your motherf—ing head off.” And that, Elmer said, was the last they heard of Douglass. Elmer replaced the missing figure with a giant plaster image of Douglass’s face that he sculpted himself.

Time and again the Martins were encouraged to move the museum out of the neighborhood to the Inner Harbor, a tourist zone of paddleboats, gallery boutiques, a Hooters, and a big aquarium. There one might stroll over from the Hard Rock Cafe or the ESPN Zone or dozens of small enterprises that cater to eating, drinking, spending, and walking around near the water. But it was an impossible fit. “There’s a myopic view of what works and what doesn’t,” Joanne says, “and once we made the decision not to move, that we were going to stay here and make the city see the potential of this neighborhood, then that became a struggle as well.”

So the Martins confronted the neighborhood problems themselves. Joanne had the phone company remove a phone booth on the comer, a popular contact point for dealers, and Elmer went so far as to tell the dealers on the corner to move. At six-and-a-half feet tall and broad-shouldered, a kind of regal presence, Elmer at least had the physical advantage. “It went fine,” he says. “It went very, very well. I just told them, ‘Look, you can’t do business on this corner. You just can’t do it.’ ” Was he thinking about getting the police involved? No, “because that would’ve set me up for something to happen. But I did tell the dealers we’d be locking horns. I’ve never had enough sense, I guess, to be afraid of the community I lived in. I guess they could see that.” The dealers eventually left, and the block is now radically different from when the Martins first moved in, they say. But this neighborhood, like the entire Eastern District, still struggles. Police presence has picked up considerably and has had some effect, but the Eastern District still has far to go before it can define itself apart from the poverty and violence that has stifled it for so long. Just last Memorial Day, in fact, twelve people were shot, one fatally, in a gang-related hit in the next neighborhood over from the Martins’.

Baltimore’s gangs are, of course, a problem too large for the Martins to solve, but their loyalty to their neighborhood has had an effect. The museum has become a bedrock of intrastructure and has plans to grow. After the city awarded the museum a grant of fifteen million dollars, the Martins made their next move, which was to buy as much property as they could. Today the whole block, save for seven buildings, belongs to Great Blacks in Wax. The plans include exhibits for the Negro League, musicians, and black architects, not to mention a library. “We want to expand the museum into a mini-Smithsonian of black history,” says Elmer. “We want it so that people can come up here and spend the entire day getting immersed in black history and black culture, right here on this block. It would allow us to hire folks in this community, be the hub of development for this community.”

_This past June the Martins set out for Egypt as part of their research for an exhibit on spirituality and religion. “Egypt has always been written out of the African experience,” Joanne says. “The notion that there are parts of it that are uniquely African is still somehow strange. We’re talking about a country that had over thirty dynasties and a mix of cultures, some of which are very African.”

They cruised the Nile. They saw Cairo, Abu Simbel, Aswan. They swooned at the layered vistas: the river, the fertile valley, the bright and limitless desert. At the Valley of the Kings, descending the hill from the temple of Hatshepsut, Elmer confessed to the tour coordinator: “If I could choose a place to die,” he said, “if I could choose where and when it happens, I think I’d choose to come back and die in Egypt.” She laughed at him, said something flippant about bliss and afterlife, and Elmer laughed with her. They descended the steps of the temple and with the others began their way back out of the valley.

Throughout the trip, the ship’s porter had been turning down the beds each evening and dressing them with towels and robes twisted up in the shapes of living things. The first night on the ship, upon entering their cabin, the Martins were startled to find what looked like a swan on the bed, only to turn on the lights and discover it was a bath towel cleverly knotted. The night they returned from Hatshepsut’s temple, they found a fat little idol of a man—a kind of Santa Claus— twisted from a robe. They laughed at it, set it aside, and Elmer told Joanne he was going to rest a little before that night’s dinner party. Not long in the room, he collapsed; at just fifty- four, his heart had failed him.

A week later, an emotional memorial was held for him at Morgan State University with over twelve hundred people in attendance. The ceremony included a traditional Sankofa dance—the best Joanne had ever seen—and songs from the Morgan State choir. Senators and governors attended, and the Baltimore papers praised Elmer at length. “It was amazing,” Joanne says. “It wasn’t a situation where we had to put a program together and see who we could get to come to honor him. People called us. They wanted to be involved. When Elmer talked about his death, he always said he wanted us to make a joyful noise, and that is most certainly what we did.”

Now Joanne must revolutionize a neighborhood—no small enterprise, especially in this city. But she has momentum in her favor: almost three hundred thousand people visit the museum each year, and half of them come from outside the state. That she can run Great Blacks in Wax as an important institution is without question; what remains to be seen is how the story itself evolves, how the seed grows. Joanne had always been the more practical one in the marriage, the one for whom the creative process was defined by dealing with those things that allowed Elmer to do what he wanted to do. Elmer often said that his ideas were simple, and that Joanne’s genius helped articulate them. “I know he wasn’t just saying it,” she says, “but I still don’t think it’s true.” She would argue that what you witness here is a more singular vision. “Everything you see here,” she says, “begins in the head of my husband.”