DC By the Book

Excerpt: From the story "Common Law" -- As it happened, the man who knocked Miss Georgia down the stairs had been introduced to the pretty woman just two weeks before by Amy’s own daddy at the What Ailing Ya beer garden at the southwest corner of 5th and M Streets, N.W…. Georgia had always considered the corners of 5th and M as her lucky corners. One night in a rainstorm, she had found a diamond ring on the ground in front of the liquor store on the northeast corner, and on the southwest corner she had met her second husband as she came out of the Goldbergs’ basement grocery store.... "Georgia, this here my friend Kenyon," Amy Witherspoon’s father Matthew said the night he introduced her to the man who would knock her down the stairs and dare her to get up and come up for some more. It was a Thursday and the What Ailing Ya wasn’t very crowded. Georgia was one of three women in the beer garden, the only unattached one, and for more than half an hour she had been drinking beer in a corner booth a few feet from the jukebox, thinking about what numbers she would play tomorrow.

Excerpt: From the story "In the Blink of God's Eye" -- The house and its twin next door were always quiet, for those city houses were populated mostly by country people used to going to bed with the chickens. On the porch, only a few paces from the corner of 3rd and L Streets, N.W., she would stare at the gaslight on the corner and smell the smoke from the hearth of someone's dying fire.... That night in late January she watched a drunken woman across 3rd Street make her way down 3rd to K Street, where she fell, silently, her dress settling down about her once her body had come to rest. The drunken woman was one more thing to hold against Washington.

Excerpt: From the story "In the Blink of God's Eye" -- At last, after months and months, two days before the end of November, Melinda opened the door to her home at 8 Pierce Street, N.W. Her face said nothing when she saw Willie. Indeed, she looked over his shoulders and around him, as if she had been expecting someone who had never caused her pain. She sighed with disappointment.

Excerpt: From the story "Spanish in the Morning" -- In mid-August, my mother's baby brother came down from his life in Philadelphia and went with the girlfriend of the moment, the one who would break his heart, to buy "some quality" at Garfinckel's, a department store that had Negroes arrested if they tried to shop there. While the girlfriend could have passed for white among white people, black people knew their own kind. My uncle, in the darkest of his summer suits, walked two or so paces behind her, up and down Garfinckel's aisles, carrying two small boxes, wrapped and empty, a made-up chauffeur's cap setting ever so straight on his chemist's head. They were enveloped in youth and lived for games like that.

Excerpt: From the story "Spanish in the Morning" -- My father had wanted me to go Walker-Jones Elementary. The phrase "a stone's throw" was made for how close Walker-Jones was to us - less than a hundred feet diagonally across the intersection of L and 1st Streets, close enough for him to stretch and stretch and stretch an arm across the traffic of the intersection into some classroom and tug at one of my plaits or tweak my nose when the teacher's back was turned. Going there, in some ways, would have been almost like never going beyond the small world of my yard.

Excerpt: From the story "Common Law" -- "Ma'am, do you know which way is Ridge Street?" the man who would be her second husband asked, arrayed in a blue sharkskin suit. "I sure do. I live on Ridge Street. "Just come this way." He was a good husband, brought his paycheck home to her for many years, but he was forever homesick for Mississippi, and that was what did in their love, or so the children--who got it secondhand by listening in on grown folks' conversations--on Ridge Street said.

Excerpt: From the story "Common Law" -- Kenyon was kind of tall, depending upon how much leaning he did, and he was as light-skinned as Sweet Daddy Grace, whose church at 6th and M Georgia sometimes attended. She went to that church only because she admired Sweet Daddy's long fingernails.

Excerpt: From the story "In the Blink of God's Eye" -- Ruth and Aubrey had been two and a half months in Washington when the baby appeared, paid helpers in the various businesses Joan Hardesty ran out of the two-story houses at 1101 and 1013 3rd Street, N.W. She ran a little hotel at the 1101 address for colored people who were forbidden in the city's white hotels. She did laundry out back, and at the 1013 house people could buy supper five days a week and sit at the big table and enjoy their meal. The chickens in the back provided her with eggs, which had just gone up to three cents a dozen when the newlyweds arrived. People could also buy freshly killed chickens, though most of her customers preferred to take them home and wring the birds' necks themselves. There was a little blacksmith business, also in the back, but it had been failing since her husband was killed.

Excerpt: From the story "Spanish in the Morning" -- When it came time for me, my parents’ first girl, to go out beyond their gate that kept the world at bay and begin school, they chose Holy Redeemer, a Catholic School that was down L Street where we lived, up 1st Street, and all the way down Pierce Street to the corner of New Jersey Avenue.... my mother wanted her children to be educated by nuns and priests all dressed in black, the way it had been done down through the generations with her people. Taught by people who had a firm grasp of how big and awful the world could be.

Excerpt: From “The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River” -- ...Laverne Shepherd went into the Safeway on Good Hope Road, S.E., and for the first time came face-to-face with the Devil. That morning in the store, she had, like so many times before, taken a shopping cart from just inside the door and maneuvered it to the aisle farthest to the left. She neared a face-high display of canned pinto beans and glanced at a short shopping list after she took it from her sweater pocket, and when she looked up from the list of four or so items, the Devil was before her…The Devil was dressed in a splendid gray gabardine suit, and down through the metal rods of the empty cart Laverne could see that on feet small enough to belong to a little girl, he wore two-tone, black-and-white shoes….She had, after the birth of her son, tried to do good to put off as long as possible this day, the day of meeting the Devil. Sending money to the Salvation Army. Going to church every week until all that singing and preaching began to depress her. Trying to banish impure thoughts…the Devil had sought out all the women in her family, sought out millennia of women who had known the big and small of life before Laverne but who had failed to tell the Devil the answer of the ages. Laverne’s great-aunt’s grandmother had said that if the Devil could get the right woman in hell…he could wake the right woman on her bed of fire and ask about the answer.

Excerpt: From the story "The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River" -- On dishrag legs, she made her way a block and a half up Good Hope Road, and on a bench in front of Cleopatra's Hair Emporium, she sat.... She was back in the world, back in life, and was so glad that she felt like reaching out and touching a body or two passing by the Emporium. Two women went into Cleopatra's, and one of the women was saying she really wanted some bangs, but her companion told her bangs would make her face look fat. "But I really want them bangs," the first woman insisted...

Excerpt: From the story "Resurrecting Methuselah" -- Anita had picked New Day Arising because it was only blocks down from her D.C. government job at a nearly forgotten outpost on Minnesota Avenue in Northeast and because she thought her daughter should have some religion in her life, since they did not regularly attend any church.

Excerpt: From the story "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister" --After the cab turned off East Capitol onto 8th Street, Noah Robinson saw further evidence that trees were disappearing from Washington. Where were all the oaks and maples and birches, even the odd pear, apple, or peach tree, that had been there in the time when he did not yet know himself and city seemed always as green as his grandparents' idea of Heaven? Even when he had become responsible for a wife and children, the trees had still been there, reminding him year after hard year how far he had to go and how far he had come. Now the landscape of the city, high and low, seemed barren, no grand trees for children playing hide-and-go-seek, no spreading refuge for old people out in the fire of summer.

Excerpt: From the story "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister" --When he was seven, and his family first arrived in Washington, he'd had a teacher at Stevens Elementary School who taught her students about the trees of the city. Mrs. Waters hung her eyeglasses on a pink string around her neck and told them how lucky they were to have trees in Washington. The boy loved the teacher and he loved learning about trees, and he loved the way the trees told him through the teacher's words that he, pining for South Carolina, might yet be happy in this new world.

Excerpt: From the story "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister" --The cab now bumped its way over potholes up 8th Street. The tree devastation had extended even to the modest showy trees, the trees that the other Washington, known for facade and neglect, might have endeavored to save... The cab approached H Street, N.E. He could see that box after box meant for trees existed now only to support litter... The cab turned onto H Street. Noah forgave that street for being virtually treeless, for that had always been its way.

Excerpt: From the story "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister" -- He had courted Maggie up and down H Street, with all its stores and gritty life, one symbol of a people used to doing much with less. The darkness of the Atlas Theater on H had given him the courage to lean over and kiss Maggie's cheek that first time. She had not yet seen sixteen, and he still had the gentlemanly quality of the countrified South about him. Someone, some adult in a nearly empty theater, watching them the way adults once watched over all the children in Washington, saw the quick kiss and told Maggie's father, and he forbade her to see Noah for two months. Now, as the cab went along H Street, Maggie Robinson took her hand from Noah's knee and placed it over his open hand resting on his thigh.

Excerpt: From the story "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister" -- The cab came to a stop at North Capitol Street. The traffic light was out again, and the city government people had sent a policeman to do the work of the light. Noah turned his head and saw a black man with banana-yellow hair standing in the small crowd waiting at the corner. The man was bobbing his head to a tune that came through his headphones. Noah and the yellow-haired black man look at each other, and after a second or so the man raised his hand to greet Noah. Noah slowly raised his hand. "You know him?" Maggie said. "I think I did once," Noah said. "I don't remember. I do know it ain't long after ten o'clock in the morning and already he's made twenty white people happy."

Excerpt: From the story "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister" -- The taxi crossed into Northwest D.C... At 7th Street they turned left. Farther down the street was Lansburgh, a once-upon-a-time department store that white people in the past few years had made into a building of expensive apartments. His father had bought him a fifteen-dollar blue suit at Lansburgh when he was thirteen. He was wearing a suit now, as was often the case with men of a certain age, black men who had grown up comfortable with such attire because their fathers and grandfathers had done it that way. They wore sits out into the world the way knights and had worn armor; they wore suits even to baseball games and to shoeshine jobs.

Excerpt: From the story "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister" -- The city people made a show of putting their offices all about the city. "We Are Where You Are," their signs proclaimed. The building in Chinatown at 622 H had only five stories, though a city government woman in another part of the city had told Noah on the telephone that they could find Adam on the eighth floor. They found Adam on the fifth floor, where a man in front of the building smoking two cigarettes at once had told them "they keep all the boys." The piece of paper on the door said "824." the paper was flapping though there was no wind in the hall. The boy, their grandson, was sitting on an orange plastic chair beside a majestic desk, his back to them, his feet unmoving, a foot or so up from the floor. He was six years old, and they had last seen him when he was but seven days old, wrapped in one of the three blankets Maggie had bought for him at Hecht's.

Excerpt: From the story "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister" -- Noah and Maggie looked at each other. "Oh," Noah said. "You like their corned beef and cabbage, huh?" "Yes." "We'd better find a McDonald's or something," Maggie said. "I think he'd drink hemlock if we put it before him." They went to the McDonald's on E Street across from the fortress that was the FBI headquarters. Maggie and Adam sat at a place near the window while Noah got the food. "I got five dollars," Adam said while they waited. Don't you know food cost money, boy? Don't you know that? Black children gotta learn the value of money.

Excerpt: From the story "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister" -- For five weeks, Noah had been tending a new, frail tree in front of their two-story apartment building. He took the children out that evening with his can of water. The tree box was now eight straight days without debris, a record. There was an oak about midway down the street, the 1500 block of Independence Avenue in Southeast. It was sturdy, maybe owing to the prayers of the three older women who lived in the house facing it. Across the street, down near 16th, were the remains of a catalpa that refused to die.

Excerpt: From the story "Adam Robinson Acquires Grandparents and a Little Sister" -- The bonsai was a gift from his youngest daughter, who lived in the suburbs of Virginia, where tree with all the life of plastic had been put up to decorate the new developments... He had waited the first two years for the tree to wither and die, but it went on and on. Now he believed that it could live forever. In the National Arboretum he and Maggie had seen bonsai trees that had been living—"trained"—for three hundred, four hundred, five hundred years. If them, why not his own?

Excerpt: From the story "The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River" -- A car's horn tooted, and a woman shouted out the window, "Vernie, Vernie. See you tonight." The car was gone before she could say Yes, yes, they would see her. Her family would be waiting at Sears, Roebuck and Co. on Alabama Avenue—still another pair of pants for the boy, a tie for her husband and his assistant manager job at Murphy's Five and Dime Store. She looked down at her body. In a few months she would start to show. Should she buy new maternity clothes or settle for what was left over from her first pregnancy?

Excerpt: From the story "The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River" -- "I only want to be left alone," she said and began to walk quickly. But a man, reading a label on a can, was before her with his cart and she had to slow to make her way around him... Once they were around the man the Devil was at her side again. He began to hum, and with each note she calmed so that by the time they reached the end of the aisle, she wanted to know what he was humming. The fireplace on the second floor of her grandmother's house, the one nearest 16th Street, was the most inviting, created just for cold rainy days and hot chocolate and stories about people who had met death up in a snowstorm and survived. Her mother had never seen the house on Crittenden Street, had never seen her portrait hanging over the first-floor fireplace.

Excerpt: From the story "The Devil Swims Across the Anacostia River" -- Laverne looked at her cart, at the few items in it. She made her way around the shoppers to the door of the Safeway. The uncle had had a name but the more she tried to think of it, the more it fluttered out of reach. Uncle Somebody, please tell me your name. Outside, the sun was even higher and Good Hope Road was even more crowded. She looked to the left, toward the 11th Street Bridge. Why had all the men in her family escaped days like this? Why had the key to heaven been left with the women? Down where Good Hope met the bridge would be a good place for him to jump into the Anacostia River and swim over to the rest of Washington. She went to the right. There had never been a Saturday when she had thought that her son and her husband were not waiting for her on up the road. Now, something told her with utter finality that they were not there, that the boy was not standing and holding his father's hand, his little heart beating just to see her again. Something kept telling her she was alone. Laverne waded into the crowd, and the current of the colored people was so strong that it simply carried her on up the road.

Excerpt: From the story "Blindsided" -- After the white woman Roxanne Stapleton worked for in Silver Spring gave her a ride across the northern border into Washington, Roxanne, without much waiting, was able to catch the D.C. Transit bus heading down 14th Street, N.W... The bus was half full and Roxanne managed to get the first seat after the side door, her favorite spot...By the time the bus reached Rittenhouse Street, a woman had sat down beside Roxanne and the haze was already over her eyes. Roxanne blinked once, and her eyes started to clear, and then she blinked twice more and all was as before. Between Randolph Street and Park Road the haze returned and refused to go away with more blinking. It was October, the days growing shorter as they rushed toward the end, and she, ever a poor daughter of the universe, attributed the haze to the world's gradual loss of daylight.

Excerpt: From the story "Blindsided" -- She walked to 10th on the southern side of R to see if Tenth Street Baptist Church had changed the signboard in their yard. For nearly three years of living above Roxanne, she had enjoyed the little sayings they put there, though lately they had been rather tame. A year ago they had had the best yet: I COMPLAINED BECAUSE I HAD NO SHOES UNTIL I MET A MAN WHO HAD NO FEET. That had touched the Catholic soul in her, something she still thought about as she closed her eyes and opened her mouth and accepted the host.

Excerpt: From the story "Blindsided" -- It became not such a bad life, the life of a small store operator, and by the beginning of August Roxanne had assured herself that she could conquer "this blindness thing" or at least learn to live side by side with it... She could see herself becoming like the blind man with his milky gray eyes she used to see sitting on a wooden folding chair on the corner of 9th and F Streets, N.W., his quart-sized mason jar of donated bills and coins on a green handkerchief on the ground in front of him. Blowing on a silver harmonica when he wasn't mumbling to himself. "Blind man here, blind man here, blind man here just tryin to get by," he sang to passersby.

Excerpt: From the story "A Rich Man" -- The policeman in the unmarked car parked across 12th Street watched as Elaine stood on the edge of the balcony and jumped...The woman did rise, but before she did he saw another woman lean over the balcony dangling a bundle...Then Catrina released the bundle and Elaine caught it...Catrina jumped, and the policeman watched her pass momentarily in front of the light, and then he looked over at his partner...When he looked back, the first woman was coming up the slope of the entrance with the bundle in her arms and the second one was limping after her...Once on the sidewalk, both women looked left, then right, and headed down 12th Street. The policeman yawned and watched through his sideview mirror as the women crossed M Street.

Excerpt: From the story "Bad Neighbors" -- Even before the fracas with Terence Stagg, people all along both sides of the 1400 block of 8th Street, N.W., could see the Benningtons for what they really were. First, the family moved in not on Saturday or on a weekday, but on Sunday, which was still the Lord's Day even though church for many was now only a place to visit for a wedding, or a funeral. Perhaps Easter or Christmas. And those watching that Sunday, from behind discreetly parted, brocaded curtains and on porches rarely used except to go back forth into homes, had to wonder why the Bennington family even bothered to bring along most of their furniture. They had a collection of junk that included a stained queen-sized mattress, a dining room table with three legs, a mirror with a large missing piece in one corner, and a refrigerator dented on two sides.

Excerpt: From the story "Bad Neighbors" -- The next week the Thorntons at 1414 had their car stolen. The car was only a Chevy. Five years old, but that was not the point, said Bill Forsythe at 1408 next door to the Benningtons. His wife, Prudence, had complained about what a noisy heap the Thornton car was and the neighborhood was well rid of it. A man's property is a man's property, Bill said, even if it's one skate with three wheels. After the car was taken, someone called the police and they came out a spoke for some fifteen minutes to the Benningtons in their house.

Excerpt: From the story "Bad Neighbors" -- Sharon Palmer Stagg's car had been in the shop two days when she finished her shift at Georgetown University Hospital one Saturday in March. It was too late for a bus, and she thought she would have a better chance for a cab at Wisconsin Avenue and so she made her way out of the hospital grounds to P Street. She was not yet a nurse, but did have a part-time job as a nurse's assistant at the hospital, where she often volunteered on her days off. Just before 36th Street that night, she saw a small group of young men coming toward her, loud, singing a song too garbled for her to understand... Just before Sharon reached 35th Street, the group of young men came under a streetlight and she could see that two of them were white and the third was black... The black one touched her cheek and then her breasts with both hands and one of the white students did the same, and both young men breathed sour beer into her face... The white student who had not touched her pulled out a knife, the blade more than three inches.

Excerpt: From the story "Bad Neighbors" -- He turned on the light and inspected his side. "Shit!" he said. "Bad but maybe not fatal. Damn!" "Let me help you," Sharon said. He started the car up, and after looking in the sideview mirror he continued on down P Street, again slowly. Two patrol cars sped past them, and she watched him watching them go away in the rearview mirror. "Dead or alive, the black dude won't matter," he said to the mirror, joining the traffic moving around Dupont Circle. "But them white dudes are princes and the world gon pay for that." He became part of the flow going up Connecticut Avenue. "And it happened in Georgetown. They'll make sure somebody pays for that. But they were drunk and so describin might be a problem. Real drunk." He seemed unaware that she was there. "Thas why I never went to college, Derek. Black people gotta leave all their common sense at the front door. College is the business of miseducatin. Like them people would ever open the door anyway."

Excerpt: From the story "Bad Neighbors" -- They had crossed Calvert, they had crossed Woodley, and he looked at her for the first time since they entered the car. "I lied," he said. "I lied. Red wasn't a bad color. It was way good anough for you. Any color you put on is a good color didn't you know that? You make the world. It ain't never been the other way around. You first, then the world follows." They were nearing Porter. Two blocks from the University of the District of Columbia he stopped not far from her condominium building, which had one of the few doormen in Washington. "You can walk the rest of the way home," he said. "All the bad thas gonna happen to you done already happened."

Excerpt: From the story "Resurrecting Methuselah" -- The army doctor had told the sergeant that Washington could do for him what Okinawa did not have the equipment to do. "Watch. You'll see," the doctor said. A fleet of twelve ambulances and military medical personnel left the base just after sundown and transported the sixteen men and women to Walter Reed Army Hospital on 16th Street. And there the sergeant's daughter and his wife, who was already on her way to not being his wife, came to see him in his bright room on the third floor. They arrived on a Saturday, not even three weeks after the military people had torn into his body and cut away nearly a fourth of his chest.

Excerpt: From the story "Old Boys, Old Girls" -- The remainder of the time, he went to movies until the shows closed and then sat in Franklin Park, at 14th and K, in good weather and bad. He was there until sleep beckoned, sometimes as late as two in the morning. No one bothered him. He had killed two men, and the world, especially the bad part of it, sensed that and left him alone. He knew no one, and he wanted no one to know him. The friends he had had before Lorton seemed to have been swept off the face of the earth. [referring to Caesar]

Excerpt: From the story "Old Boys, Old Girls" -- An ex-offenders' group, the Light at the End of the Tunnel, helped him to get a room and a job washing dishes and busing tables at a restaurant on F Street. The room was in a three-story building in the middle of the 900 block of N Street, Northwest, a building that, in the days when white people lived there, had had two apartments of eight rooms or so on each floor. Now the first-floor apartments were uninhabitable and had been padlocked for years. On the two other floors, each large apartment had been divided into five rented rooms, which went for twenty to thirty dollars a week, depending on the size and the view. Caesar's was small, twenty dollars, and had half the space of his cell at Lorton... Caesar's narrow room was at the front, facing N Street.

Excerpt: From the story "Old Boys, Old Girls" -- To the left was 9th Street and all the rest of N Street, Immaculate Conception Catholic Church at 8th, the bank at the corner of 7th. He flipped the coin. To his right was 10th Street, and down 10th were stores and the house where Abraham Lincoln had died and all the white people's precious monuments. Up 10th and a block to 11th and Q Streets was once a High's store where, when Caesar was a boy, a pint of cherry-vanilla ice cream cost twenty-five cents, and farther down 10th was French Street, with a two-story house with his mother's doilies and a foot-long porcelain black puppy just inside the front door...He caught the quarter and slapped it on the back of his hand. He had already decided that George Washington's profile would mean going toward 10th Street, and that was what he did once he uncovered the coin.

Excerpt: From the story "All Aunt Hagar's Children" -- On Sunday, I cleaned my room and went to Ike's apartment, at 423 M Street. First I visited Miss Agatha on the third floor. She was glad to see me and I was glad for that. When I told her what I wanted to do, she gave me the key to her son's place below her. She herself hadn't seen the apartment since the night she and Alona, his wife, five months pregnant then, had found Ike. The landlord had had trouble renting the place even after it was cleaned up, Miss Agatha said, and no one had lived there since; colored people believed dead people should stay dead, but they also knew that dead people tended to follow their own minds. Clinging to Miss Agatha's dress was her granddaughter, not quite two years old. "Hi," the kid kept saying to me. "Hi hi." I nodded to her and went downstairs.

Excerpt: From the story "All Aunt Hagar's Children" -- My brother saw Anacostia one day when he was nine—the hills, the Anacostia River, the indescribable pleasantness, the way the wind came up over the river as if straight from the cooling mouth of God—and he vowed then that he would live there when he became a man. I, too, saw the place that day, but all I remembered was the chickens running around. And the little pig lounging under the shade tree.

Excerpt: From the story "All Aunt Hagar's Children" -- I left, went down to the corner of M and 4th, and stood there so I could see into Leon's store. The only man in it came out with a medium-sized paper bag and was walking on crutches. One of his legs had been cut off below the knee, while the other had been cut off above the knee. I watched him cross the street to my side and move past me so silently that if I hadn't seen him with my own eyes, I wouldn't have known he was there. No huffing and puffing, no rattling from the paper bag, no sound from the crutches hitting the sidewalk. Just a nothing spiriting on down the street. He looked mean and tough, but maybe that was just me trying to compensate for a fellow veteran who had lost so much. He said something to a little girl coming the other way and went into Miss Minnie's building. I got to the building and asked the little girl, who was holding an even smaller girl by the hand, if she knew the man.

Excerpt: From the story "A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of a Downtown in Peru" -- After the fireworks show on the Mall, they went back to the subway at the Federal Triangle stop, hoping to avoid the hordes at both Smithsonian stations. Arlene Baxter and Scott Catrell were there as well; their son, Antonio, was staying the summer with Scott's people in Philadelphia...She enjoyed the time with Scott and was not thinking as they arrived at the Federal Triangle subway platform a minute or so before Marvin, Marcus and Avis Watkins. The children had pushed ahead of Marvella and Francisco. He told them to wait, but the children were quickly separated from the adults, mainly by a large family from Seat Pleasant. The platform lights began to blink, announcing the approaching train, and one of the Seat Pleasant boys bumped into Marcus because someone was bumping into him. Marcus turned and pushed the boy back. "Yall tryin to squeeze me to death in this damn place!" Marcus shouted to no one in particular. When he turned back, Arlene and Avis had tumbled over the platform. Scott reached for them but was too late. The people who saw them down, down on the tracks were stunned for a long moment, stunned to see human beings in the no-man's-land of the subway system where riders had never seen humans before, not even workmen.

Excerpt: From the story "A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of Downtown in Peru" -- Arlene seated them on the couch facing the long window in the living room, but Marcus soon got up to look out the window onto Massachusetts Avenue and down 13th Street. "You live pretty high up," he said of the tenth-floor apartment, "but my uncle lives even higher in Maryland." Arlene sat in the love seat catty-corner the couch. She and Avis did not take their eyes off each other. "Oh," Arlene said to Marcus, who returned to the couch. "He live out in Maryland and they not afraid to put up high places. But in D.C., they pretty scared of bein high." He looked up at his brother, but Marvin, sitting between his siblings, said nothing.

Excerpt: From the story "Root Worker" -- The witches began riding Dr. Glynnis Holloway's mother again almost as soon as the older woman returned that third and final time from St. Elizabeths Hospital. As Before, the medicine—this time, a new brew of three different pills and a mauve liquid—that the St. Elizabeths people gave her did very little for the mother, Alberta Holloway; it served mostly to prevent her from knowing her own name for a few hours during the day.

Excerpt: From the story "Root Worker" -- Some ten years before, behind his daughter's back, he [Morton] had put a little faith in a televangelist. Five hundred dollars of "love offerings." Seven prayer cloths. Eight little gold-plated crosses. A visit with Alberta to the DC Armory where the televangelist showed up drunk, though most of the four hundred desperate people there didn't notice because they thought the man was just broadcasting God's words on one of the man's weaker channels.

Excerpt: From the story "Root Worker" -- St. Elizabeths Hospital across the Anacostia River was a very big place of land and many buildings and a few devoted workers. And some housewives and poets and a few children, the most innocent, had managed to find their lost minds there, only to lose them again.

Excerpt: From the story "Root Worker" -- Long before they reached 1st Street, N.E., Glynnis found that so much had changed, disappeared, but everything that was important to white people remained. Gonzaga High School. The railroad.

Excerpt: From the story "Root Worker" -- After 1st Street, she saw many of the places she had known as a girl were still standing, and that gave her heart some relief. She turned off K onto 6th and found a parking space and then she and Maddie walked down to K and turned east, toward the house at 727 where she as a girl had lived on the second floor. She recalled some houses from childhood as they went along, though many had been renovated and repainted. She had expected more white faces, but there were not very many. At the corner of 7th and K, Glynnis looked back and then forward again and wondered if the world seemed smaller because she was bigger or because she knew more about the world.

Excerpt: From the story "A Poor Guatemalan Dreams of a Downtown in Peru" -- When she was forty-three, and had not seen or talked to Scott for two years, they noticed each other at the 12th Street entrance to Hechts's—she was coming out, empty-handed, and he was going in. It was a very could day, cold enough to snap the bones of steel-driving men, a day when five homeless people would die in their sleep. "How am I doing at not ever contacting you?" Scott asked, smiling. Four months later, Arlene became pregnant with his child. "How," she wrote the Reverend Mrs. Campbell, "could two intelligent people of science be so stupid as to become pregnant?"

Excerpt: From the story "Common Law" -- Georgia had always considered the corners of 5th and M as her lucky corners. One night in a rainstorm, she had found a diamond ring on the ground in front of the liquor store on the northeast corner, and on the southwest corner she had met her second husband as she came out of the Goldberg's basement grocery store. "Ma'am, do you know which way is Ridge Street?" the man who would be her second husband asked, arrayed in a blue sharkskin suit. "I sure do. I live on Ridge Street. Just come this way."

Excerpt: From the story "Root Worker" -- And down on H Street there was Morton's Department Store, which Glynnis and Morton always joked was owned by him, but it had to be kept secret or the world would come knocking at this door wanting free clothes. Glynnis the girl thought she could hear the H Street gaiety, could smell the half smokes and hot dogs, could see some undeserving girl getting some dress that would be perfect for her.

Excerpt: From the story "Common Law" -- Two weeks later, on a Saturday morning in early July, Carlos woke in his bed at 450 Ridge and raised his hand and traced the cracks in the ceiling with his index finger. It was going to be a long morning because Amy had told him she was sleeping over at her father's mother's house and wouldn't be back until about noon. He had made three good male friends on Ridge, but they sometimes said nasty things about girls, about pussy and stuff, and he was worried that any day now they would say something bad about Amy and then he'd have to fight them, use his fists just the way his father had taught him. But maybe not; after all, the three had sisters and they would have to put their own sisters in that nasty bag they put all the other girls in.

Excerpt: From the story "Common Law" -- The children in the living room were not among those in the neighborhood known to be liars—the-wolf-is-comin-so-you-better-get-your-gun type of liars. Twelve-year-old Larry Comstock down the street at 412 Ridge was that kind of liar; people said they couldn't be that big a liar if their middle names were Liar. He lied like a grown man, people said. He said he saw his grandmother's best friend burn his grandmother's hair in a brown-and-white cereal bowl and turn around three times while the hair burned green and the purple and while the friend shouted Jesus get way back and Devil come forward. By the time people realized he was lying about that and most everything else, the two women, who had come up together from South Carolina when neither had child nor chick, had fallen out with one another, and Larry was on his way to reform school for breaking into houses and drinking people's liquor and falling asleep drunk in their beds with his dirty tennis shoes on.

Excerpt: From the story "Common Law" -- Abe was a step behind him, but Idabelle was standing on the sidewalk watching Kenyon, who started back toward 4th Street. The crowd made way. He got to 4th Street and turned the corner and the children and the grown-ups stopped following him but continued to shout "Boo"s and each one rained down upon him. Once fully on 4th heading toward M, he was free of them. He stopped mid-block and remembered that he had been two months sober. He felt weak, and at 4th and M he went into Leon's to buy two bottles of Rock Creek cream soda. He opened both bottles on the opener attached to the cooler and kept one bottle in the bag and drank the other as he came out of the store. He looked down M Street to where New York Avenue ran right into New Jersey Avenue. On that corner where he stood, wobbly, 4th took a dip and continued to dip all the way to K Street. Farther up M was 5th Street and What Ailing Ya. He went down 4th, drinking that soda. He remembered that there was a store at 4th and L. The two sodas he had would last him until he could reach that store and fortify himself with two more. The problem would be if that store didn't have cream soda. What would he do after that? What would he do?