DC By the Book

Excerpt: Once there was everything here that black men and women in (and striving to become of) the city used to make their own world--banks, stores, nightclubs, restaurants, movie theaters. All are gone now, torn down or boarded up except the Lincoln and Howard theaters there is talk of renovating.

Excerpt: Hendrix was going to be playing at the Ambassador, an old movie theater some hippie entrepreneurs wanted to turn into Washington's Fillmore.

Excerpt: For a black kid going to a mostly white private school in Washington D.C., in 1967, that was no small thing. I wasn't part of the first group of black students at Sidwell Friends, just the second.

Excerpt: We're in one of those old mansions, in Kalorama, a faded Beaux-Arts grande dame, the balcony looking down towards what people who visit from other places think is Washington--the Capitol and the distant white icons of the monuments.

Excerpt: And Shepherd has only to look slant to see the thoroughfare bustling with actors and musicians, the Grays in town for a doubleheader at Griffith Stadium. ---------------------------------------- Note: It was the original stadium for the baseball team, the Nationals. The Howard University Hospital is now located at that site.

Excerpt: If he gives it all his attention, he can almost hear... Lionel Hampton at the Howard the night he and his band blew so strong they convinced a hophead in the balcony he could fly.

Excerpt: If he gives it all his attention, he can almost hear... Coltrane's world-weary sax at the Bohemian Caverns.

Excerpt: If he gives it all his attention, he can almost hear... Billy Eckstine's big band at the Lincoln Colonnade.

Excerpt: If he gives it all his attention, he can almost hear Duke Ellington's Washingtonians in the elegant ballroom of the Whitelaw Hotel.-------------------------------------Historical Note: It was used by important, well-known African Americans during segregation. It is now an apartment complex.

Excerpt: Summers had been cooler. But perhaps it had been only the house in LeDroit Park with its great brass trimmed, wood-paddled fans turning beneath high ceilings, the long white porch shaded and surrounded by trees.

Excerpt: At the end of the block, the Street spills into Anna J. Cooper Circle. Ahead is the house where Robert and Mary Church Terrell lived. Farther on to the northwest, but still in easy walking distance, is Howard University. The area is redolent with history--Langston Hughes lived nearby during a Washington sojourn, though Shepard isn't sure where. His own history suffuses him now, giddying him with nostalgia: The alleys where he played basketball before he graduated to the playground, the smell of chalk dust and the blackwash staining his hands after he stayed late to help the teacher clean the chalkboards. The walk home scanning the sidewalk for soda bottles to trade for penny candy at the corner store kept by the Chinese family that lived upstairs above it.

Excerpt: It was after eleven, and he wanted to be outside, just getting started where there were crowds, soft lights, and a saxophone moaning over a piano's spilled notes. He wanted to dance an elegy for the long-gone careless ease with which he had once thrown and caught the ball; wanted to laugh and drink and fool himself into believing that tomorrow would be better because yesterday was just a bad dream. And afterwards go to Ben's for a big helping of chili, with someone who would crumble the crackers on top for him as they talked and ate, watching the fancy men and the hustlers, and the just plain folks like themselves out for a good time Saturday night.