BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Through the cast-iron gate and past the brick wall covered with ivy, Sister Brenda Motte treads reverently into a grotto where a Virgin Mary statue stands, palms facing heavenward.

Sister Motte points to the enclave behind the Blessed Mother. It’s here brazen dealers stash their drugs.

“They have no respect,” says Sister Motte, who’s 77 but looks a decade younger - dark hair peeping from under her black-and-white veil.

“This is sacred ground. But they’d kill their mothers for the next fix. It hurts.”

Over the past two months, sisters and teachers at St. Frances Academy in East Baltimore’s Johnston Square neighborhood have noticed dealers stashing drugs in their garden and at a playground across Chase Street.

The dealers sell in daylight, and many look the same age as the 320 teenagers who attend St. Frances, the only high school in the nation run by the Oblate Sisters of Providence, an order of black nuns.

A Haitian immigrant, Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange, founded the school 180 years ago. St. Frances became the first school to teach the children of slaves how to read at a time when it was against the law.

Frustrated with the invasion, Sister Marcia Hall, the principal, and councilwomen, residents and students marched Thursday, singing “We Shall Overcome” and carrying signs reading “Hope, not coke,” and “Peace Zone.”

As police sirens wailed, the 150 people prayed beside boarded-up row houses and vacant lots, where families fled decades ago.

When he grew up in Johnston Square four decades ago, says George Pinchback, dealers sold drugs, but not so openly on the streets.

Families moved out, he says, and drug dealers moved in.

Now he and other retired men plant roses and stand watch over their neighborhood in a vacant lot across from St. Frances that they converted into a garden.

“This is our neighborhood,” says Marcia Carter, 14, a uniformed ninth-grader from St. Frances.

“And we don’t want drugs in it.”

kvolkmann@baltimoreexaminer.com