BALTIMORE _ Todd Douglas figured there was wasn't much time left to pay his respects. So last weekend he rode his bicycle to the little memorial garden in a Northwest Baltimore business park to see her for himself.
He'd been surprised to read of the strange odyssey that brought to Baltimore the ashes of 1920s New York writer Dorothy Parker, the grande dame of the Algonquin Round Table. Douglas learned more in an old documentary, then visited the grounds where her ashes rest beneath an oft-quoted epitaph: "Excuse my dust."
He looked down on a mound of loose dirt.
Gone was the circle of bricks inlaid to invoke the round table. Gone was the memorial plaque that proclaimed Parker "defender of human and civil rights." After 30 years at her resting place on Mt. Hope Drive, the ashes of Dorothy Parker have been exhumed.
"It was a little sad," Douglas said. "This poor woman hasn't had any rest in her afterlife."
Where did she go? Douglas peered into the nearest windows: all dark. He stood all alone.
Just last year the grounds of the 1950s office complex had served as national headquarters for the NAACP. But the brick buildings had fallen into such disrepair that leaders of the civil rights organization said renovations would cost them more than the $3.8 million complex is worth.
They moved into a downtown high-rise last year. Within months, the organization announced plans to relocate to D.C. Of course, that left Dorothy Parker fans in Baltimore with questions.
"I immediately called up the NAACP and said 'What the heck are you going to do with Dorothy Parker's ashes?'" said Laddie Levy, a retired English teacher at McDonogh School. "They called me back and assured me: something appropriate."
NAACP spokeswoman Aba Blankson told The Baltimore Sun two months ago that her organization was discussing options with Parker's family. But who? What options? Blankson said she didn't know.
Parker's ashes previously went unclaimed for years. Once they had been shelved in the obscurity of a lawyer's office. Their unlikely journey to a Baltimore business park was recounted recently in The Sun.
"It was striking news to me that she was laying here in Baltimore," Douglas said. "It just seemed so unusual, you know? The fact that she was such a New York icon, and how she wound up at the NAACP headquarters in Baltimore."
Born in 1893, Parker wrote for Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. She won acclaim for her poems and short stories. But she's best remembered as a wit of the Algonquin Round Table, the circle of influential New York writers, critics, and actors whose boozy lunched and piercing repartee became an enduring scene of the Roaring Twenties.
A century later, Parker's quips remain a hot item on coffee mugs, posters and T-shirts. One favorite of Douglas: The first thing I do in the morning is brush my teeth and sharpen my tongue.
Lesser known was her commitment to social justice. Parker was arrested while protesting the dubious murder case against Italian anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti. She raised money for the legal defense of the Scottsboro Boys, nine Black teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama. In her searing, satirical story "Arrangement in Black and White," she presents a fashionable white woman who's filled with moral superiority after greeting a Black singer at a party.
"I liked him," she said. "I haven't any feeling at all because he's a colored man. I just felt as natural as I would with anybody."
Still, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was reportedly puzzled when Parker died of a heart attack in 1967 _ 73 years old, widowed and childless _ and left him her estate. Parker wanted her $40,000 to benefit the civil rights movement, but she left no instructions for her remains. Her ashes languished in a lawyer's file cabinet for years.
When gossip columnist Liz Smith heard of this, she asked readers to help. In October 1988, a crowd gathered to watch Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke and The Rev. Benjamin L. Hooks bury Parker's ashes and dedicate to her a memorial garden outside the NAACP headquarters.
The McDonogh teacher Levy was soon visiting with his English classes to delight in her irreverent epitaph. He found the high school students drawn to Parker's writings.
"It's the humor, the sarcasm," he said. "She felt very strongly about social issues and especially about racial issues, about men and women, misogyny and such."
Last month, the NAACP didn't return messages about what the organization would do with Parker's ashes. But the article in The Sun brought several offers of help. Some wanted to donate money, or even a burial plot.
"We were offering a final resting place here at no charge," said Gary Buss, president of the historic Arlington Cemetery outside Philadelphia, the site of an old Quaker farm owned by abolitionists. "It'd be just a perfect place for her."
Arlington Cemetery volunteer Paul Sookiasian said the NAACP didn't respond to the offer. The organization's spokeswoman did not return messages Thursday from The Sun. So it remains unknown what's happened to Parker's ashes. Worse yet, it's a slight to a city that takes pride in its literary reputation. After all, Baltimore claims the graves of figures such as H.L. Mencken and Edgar Allan Poe.
"So many ignore the rich literary history we have in Baltimore," said Andrea Lewis, who runs literary programs for Maryland Humanities. "It's undeniable that having had Baltimore as Dorothy Parker's final resting place is important to this history. It saddens me to learn that her remains have been relocated without having had a broader conversation with the city's literary community."
Tuesday afternoon, there was no sign the dirt once held a literary landmark. The parking lot was empty; the windows dark.
Then a grounds worker called out: they dug her up last week. No, he doesn't know where they took her. He said there will be a story about it in the New Yorker.
