DC By the Book

Excerpt: At one time, when Friends School was a farm for summer residents in Washington, the Senior Shack in all probability housed small tools for crops--shovels, scythes and rakes, a hand plow perhaps and leather strappings. It was frame like the school, exactly square, painted white with two windows on either side just under the roof and a front door secured by a combination lock. Every senior at Friends School knew the combination, and it was a point of honor to tell no one else. Each year the combination lock was changed for the new senior class. There was one room inside, with furniture donated years before by Anne Lowry's mother from her summer house in Mississippi. The walls were painted lavender and decorated with messages kept within the bounds of propriety. The class of 1950 had been denied the use of the shack from January on because one senior had written FUCK on the wall in white oil-base. There were rules, of course. No smoking, no drinking, no sex and no use on the weekends when the school was empty, but the rules were cautiously broken year after year by an elaborate system of checks and balnaces whereby the people having sex or a cigarette on the white wicker couch from Biloxi were protected by appointed class agents.

Excerpt: Filip DeAngelis was the most brilliant high school running back in Washington.... So when he boarded the streetcar at Calvert and Wisconsin most of the people sitting in the rows along the window recognized his face. It was in the paper nearly every Saturday morning all year long except in the summer. It was a recognizable face--as black as any white man you could find, heavy-bones with a long sharp Roman nose... "You the DeAngelis kid?" the older man already in the sear said to Filip when he sat down. "Yes." -- "I seen you play." -- "Thank you." He said thank you often. That and "I'm grateful." -- "Grateful," Rosa would say, reading the morning papers. "What have you got to be grateful for? You work hard. You earn what you get. Next time they interview you in the paper don't you be grateful." -- "What do you want me to say, Mama? 'Sure I'm good, Mr. Povich. The best around. I got it coming to me."

Excerpt: "It's six o'clock in the morning, Filippo," she said quietly. "I was up all night.... I cannot be a mother with a son who goes out all night and doesn't let me know where he is." -- "I told you I'd be home late.... You've got to trust me." .... She shook her head. "You're my son and I haven't got you any more." She rested her face in her palms. "I don't know what to do." -- "Have you considered the Calvert Street Bridge?" The Calvert Street Bridge was an old family story. It was the most popular suicide bridge in Washington, and once when Filip was small, Rosa had rushed out of the house after an argument with Antonio with the announcement that she was going to jump off it.... "You usually think of jumping from there," Filip said. "I'm just reminding you."

Excerpt: Will Barnes had entered Sidwell Friends in fourth grade.... On the third day at school the fourth-grade boys took Will Barnes behind the old shed at Friends where they smoked cigarettes and shared dirty pictures. They tied him up. There was a large metal trash can behind the shed, which they filled with Will Barnes, capping the top, tying it around with rope and pulling it up a tree with a homemade pulley. Natty watched the end of this exercise from the playground.... When she got to the she no one was there. Only the trash can lying on its side with the lid still on. She took off the lid and peered inside. Will Barnes crouched at the bottom. His lip was bloody and he was crying. "I'm gonna tell on them," Natty said. -- "Don't." -- "I saw them pull you up the tree," she said. "They can't get away with that." -- "Fuckers." Will said. Natty had never heard anyone say that word before. "If you tell them, they'll do it to me worse next time."

Excerpt: Lafayette Park, located in front of St. John's Episcopal Church, across the street from the White House, was a gathering place of homosexuals. People crossed the park or passed by it on either side, but they did not sit down on benches, accepting that the park was covenanted land. Sam Taylor crossed the park many afternoons on his way home from work, crossed it this afternoon, and without conscious decision, sat down on a bench in the center of the park and opened the Evening Star and began to read. Al Cox watched Sam from the steps of St. John's Church. He had followed him from the FCC at 12th and Pennsylvania, watched him sit down...watched the thin, high-hipped young man in a red muffler pass by Sam once. Stop, look back and then join Sam on the bench. Sam put down the newspaper and spoke to the man on the bench beside him. It was--Al Cox concluded quickly, with the sharp energy of discovery--an arrangement.

Excerpt: Sam Taylor bought the house on Highland Place in 1947 when he first moved to Washington from Wisconsin. It was a Victorian clapboard farmhouse, painted white, with turrets and stained glass windows, built by Senator Percy from Rhode Island the same year that ground was broken for the cathedral, half a mile up the road. Senator Percy had died there although he had intended to return to Rhode Island in his retirement, and the house went to a Supreme Court justice who was robbed and beaten one September afternoon on his own front steps. An actress whose name did not survive except on the deed lived there with her companion in the thirties and sold the house to one of Roosevelt's people, a Jew, who was the first Jew to buy a house on Highland Place. He was an intellectual man with an accent, the neighbors said. His family was German. Shortly after the end of the war, he died, unexpectedly, and his widow sold the house to Sam Taylor.

Excerpt: Sam Taylor had few things and no interest in them. A watch, his fishing rods for Minnesota summers with his brother, the absolute necessities in clothes. He listed to classical music on the radio and took books out of the library except for history books, which he nought. He paid cash for everything and had one car. He had never owned a television, but didn't mention that at the FCC. Then, crazily, he bought Ellen extravagant presents from Erlebacher's on Connecticut Avenue--fur-collar sweaters with sequins and silk lace robes and a gold choke collar in which the tiny woman looked like a captured jungle kitten.

Excerpt: Sukey Moorehead read medieval plays and saints' stories. Nothing in her daily life was equal to her need to be overwhelmed. Her father, who followed the example of the early Christian martyrs exactly, was a minister out of his time and had taken over a white parish in segregated Washington in the late '40s and brought in Negroes, served hot lunches to the indigent with white parishioners' money and modernized the liturgy, believing that the church had a role to play in change. When Sidwell Friends had turned down Ralph Bunche's children because they were colored, Moorehead took Sukey out of Friends and put her in a Southeast public school where the whites were working-class and unsympathetic to a girl who read saints' stories.