DC By the Book

Excerpt: We all lived in Shaw. And Shaw was a place where you didn't come to play around. The threat of bullets and beatdowns always hung in the air like the smell of burning tar. If you walked by the right building at the right time you might hear the Williamses arguing about their son Damien's crack habit or Mr. Harris on the third floor yelling at the newspaper about how the Redskins wouldn't make it to another Super Bowl in his lifetime. Or there was always Frank, who spent his days over on the playground impressing the little kids by showing them the bullet scar on his calf.... But Shaw was a little different than a lot of the other neighborhoods in Northwest. We went hard but we weren't anything like the cats down in Southeast or the ones in Northeast off of Montana Avenue. We were right between downtown and U Street, trapped between the suit-and-tie DC you saw in the movies and the place people burned down after they killed Martin Luther King long before I was born. To me that made us special, something more than just another name they called out at the go-go clubs on Saturday nights.... For us life started and stopped in those three or four blocks that surrounded the neighborhood playground, even though downtown DC was just a few blocks away.