DC By the Book

Excerpt: As Esther stood in front of the Howard Theater, waiting for Randolph, beneath a neon marquee advertising Sarah Vaughan and Slappy White, she mulled over the etiquette of deceit. Recalling the words and actions that had brought her out of the house alone to stand waiting on the corer of Seventh and T for Randolph, Esther concluded that deceit depended for its power, on at least partial union with the truth. And so Esther told Naomi that she was meeting a friend. It was Friday night and across the street Scott's Billiard Hall was filled. Through the glass windows Esther could see men hovering around the green felt tables as intent as surgeons trying to save a life. Women in high heels and fox fur throws and men in zoot suits passed her on the way to the Stagedoor Bar and Grill, their walk, their smiles testimony to genteel lust. Howard University stood atop the hill, looking down at Seventh and T in fascination and disdain at the pool sharks, prostitutes, lovers, hustlers, good-time chasers, 'bamas, tan and high yellow mamas that gave the street its particular and peculiar kind of life. Seventh Street, dressed in neon, scented with the hungry perfume of passion, hummed and whistled and scatted its way into the night.

Excerpt: Naomi tended her houses like a garden. And of the houses she owned, none had bloomed beneath her hand with more grace than the house on Harvard Street that she now called home. The pale yellow-brick Victorian structure exuded a stern elegance and guarded the lives it sheltered like a sentry. The dwellings that lined the block achieved an almost royal distance from the street, separated from it by three, sometimes four levels of steps. These were homes approached carefully, wondering, as one neared the portal, if it was possible to live up to the expectations the inanimate yet forceful exterior imposed. Single families resided in only a few of the residences, most gave shelter to two or three families living on each of the three floors, sometimes even the basements as well.

Excerpt: The child ran past her to the front door, jumped on his bike and rode down the street. Naomi called after him. But all she could see was Logan pedaling towards Sixteenth Street. Two hours later Logan returned. He had ridden his bike past All Souls' Church and then to Meridian Hill Park. He had ridden his bike around and around the park, simply to keep from crying. Logan watched the waterfalls on the lower level of the park and felt covered in shame as enduring as the water.

Excerpt: St. Elizabeth's Hospital had been built on a three-hundred-and-thirty-acre stretch of land by slaves and patients in the early 1850s. During the Civil War, the institution, then called the U.S. Government Hospital for the Insane in the District of Columbia, served as a general hospital for wounded soldiers. Artificial limbs were manufactured on the grounds of the hospital for the thousands of men maimed by rebel artillery. Over one hundred soldiers were interred in a Civil War cemetery erected on the grounds. White oak trees flanked the main entrance road leading to the hospital, located just off Nichols Avenue in Southeast Washington, "across the river" from the rest of the city. At first glance, the green beauty of the grounds gave the institution an atmosphere of a beaucolic sanctuary that promised more than most ever found in the institution.

Excerpt: In the summer of his junior year in high school, Logan broke his leg when he fell off the diving board at the neighborhood swimming pool. He was treated by a Black doctor at Freedmen's Hospital, who, by his mastery of the art and science of medicine, defied a host of expectations about Black achievement that Logan secretly harbored.

Excerpt: One afternoon Logan drove Naomi to look at the house Randolph had left him in Columbia Heights. They sat in Logan's car, looking across the street at the three-story boarded-up pale brown Victorian structure. ... "This neighborhood don't look like it did when I lived here, but you can believe they're gonna fix it up," she assured him. "Subway's coming through. Whites gonna follow." A somber pall hung over the neighborhood now, as though the houses and the people in them were utterly exhausted by the pursuit of a fickle, unworthy promise. Although there were colorful murals, a gleaming municipal building, a few trendy upscale shops and restaurants paving the way for the impending white invasion, none of it camouflaged the absence of a coherent, vibrant core of concern, the kind that had once safegaurded and honored the same streets. The old people who remained were merely waiting to die. The young people felt no allegiance strong enough to change the streets into a community.

Excerpt: Paul Laurence Dunbar and Duke Ellington had once lived in LeDroit Park, originally conceived as an exclusive suburb of Washington. In 1873 Amzi L. Barber, one of the white founders of Howard University, purchased forty acres of university land for one hundred and fifteen thousand dollars. With the help of his father-in-law, real estate broker LeDroit Langdon, Barber employed an army of creative stonecutters, fresco painters and slate workers, who spent four years producing a neighborhood of unique elegance and grace. Sumptuous cream-colored Italian villas, dignified brick fortresses, pristine Swiss chateaux stood opposite medieval stone mansions and gothic cottages. Archways, mansard roofs, leaded glass or gingerbread woodwork enabled each home to flaunt its architectural individuality. By 1887 LeDroit Park was an exclusive enclave for white congressmen, professors and high-ranking military men. So exclusive was the neighborhood that it was considered a county with its own government. But LeDroit Park was also surrounded by a fortified fence with posted guards, an affront to the Black residents of nearby "Howard Town," who eventually tore the fence down. By 1888 negro families were settling in the area and by World War I the area was almost completely Black.

Excerpt: By midnight both the Central Market and the Pleasant Hill Market on opposite corners of Fourteenth and fairmont were ablaze, the fires igniting the grieving sky with glorious, awful presence. ... A Molotov cocktail had provided the first attack on Murphy's five-and-dime and as Logan ran toward it the white mannequins that had smiled haughtily from the front windows only hours ago lay armless, legless, naked in the entrance, their bodies part of a general carnage overflowing into the streets.

Excerpt: He had come full circle. His offices were located in the same neighborhood where he had grown up, where he had lived with his mother, where his grandmother had periodically raised him. Fourteenth and Park Road was not far from what had once been the heartbeat of Black Washington. As a child, there were Saturday afternoon double features at the Savoy Theater, games of tag in stately Meridian Hill Park. It was a Black world in which a wonderful democracy of conditions prevailed -- waitresses, doctors, preachers, winos, teachers, numbers runners and funeral directors, prostitutes and housewives, cabdrivers and laborers all lived as neighbors. The white world sat despised, irrelevant beyond the boundaries imposed by this community of grace. And yet Logan knew, even as a child, that Washington, D.C., did not belong to him or anyone who knew like the people he knew. ... Yet several blocks from where his office stood, the night Martin Luther King Jr., was killed, he had joined an anguished mob an hurled stones, rocks and bottles at police. Fire and looting had ravaged the commercial zone of the neighborhood. Twenty years later, squat, efficient, charmless apartment buildings stood where bakeries and record stores once gave the area a hublike activity.

Excerpt: Cora was living in a rooming house on Ninth and O streets. Room wasn't no bigger than a minute, but it seemed like a palace to me. She had a Victrola and had cut out pictures of Josephine Baker, Ma Rainey and Louis Armstrong and put them all over her mirror and the walls. Cora was what we used to call a good-time girl. Even down home, she was always the one knew where the fun was and if there was no fun happening she could make some. ... The woman that run the rooming house was a big old Black woman named Blue. All you had to do was look at her and you'd know how she got that name. And seemed like the downstairs where Blue lived was always filled with folks coming in all hours of the day and night. And it was always liquor flowing and cardplaying. We'd go over to the O Street Market and you could get pigs' feet and chitlins and fresh greens as good as down home. And Cora seemed to never run outta money. I figured that had to do with her never running out of men.

Excerpt: The news aroused Harvard Street, set it lurching into action like a giant unceremoniously roused from sleep. A light, harmless rain and fallen intermittently all evening, yet each time the showers ceased, the front stoops filled once again with people seeking relief from stuffy, humid rented rooms. It was early April, cherry blossoms had lavishly unfolded on the Mall, tourists had begun the first leg of their spring invasion of the city. And on Harvard Street third-graders jumped double-dutch after school, counting the days till June. Half a dozen houses on the street had given up sons to serve in Vietnam. And among the young men who escaped Uncle Sam's grasp, dashikis, beards and dark glasses had begun to sprout as camouflage and declaration. That night, drawn by some mutual instinct, people streamed out of the houses toward the main thoroughfare, Fourteenth Street. On Fourteenth Street stood the stores that housed the clothes they coveted to transform them into women of beauty and men of substance, the record shops that sold them the sound of their dreams and their breaking hearts, the cheap easy-credit furniture and appliance stores that furnished their homes, the big national chains, where they spent their money but could rise no higher than clerk in the store's chain of command, the Negro-owned barber shops, where they went for haircuts and to be rejuvenated like music, and Riggs Bank, where they could store their money but rarely get a loan. Swarming, restless and anguished, the people ran toward Fourteenth Street because the street determined the quality of their lives even more than the houses and rooms where they made love and babies and returned to at the end of the day. Fourteenth Street determined the size of their lives, the perimeters of their hopes in ways that they honored yet despised.

Excerpt: As Esther stood in front of the Howard Theater, waiting for Randolph, beneath a neon marquee advertising Sarah Vaughan and Slappy White, she mulled over the etiquette of deceit. Recalling the words and actions that had brought her out of the house alone to stand waiting on the corner of Seventh and T for Randolph, Esther concluded that deceit depended for its power, on at least a partial union with the truth. And so Esther told Naomi that she was meeting a friend. It was Friday night and across the street Scott's Billiard Hall was filled. Through the glass windows Esther could see men hovering around the green felt tables as intent as surgeons trying to save a life. Women in high heels and fox fur throws and men in zoot suits passed her on the way to the Stagedoor Bar and Grill, their walk, their smiles testimony to genteel lust. Howard University stood atop the hill, looking down at Sevent and T in fascination and disdain at the pool sharks, prostitutes, lovers, hustlers, good-time chasers, 'bamas, tan and high yellow mamas that gave the street its particular and peculiar kind of life. Seventh Street, dressed in neon, scented with the hungry perfume of passion, hummed and whistled and scatted its way into the night.

Excerpt: There weren't many lights on in the other houses on the street. his neighbors were mostly government workers who had to get up early in the morning to sit behind desks at the Pentagon, the Treasury Department or some other federal agency. And they were as proud of their jobs as of their children. Those jobs had enabled them to buy homes in this section of Northeast, Riggs Park. They made Randolph laugh for they fought litter and enforced a strict code of how and where cars could be parked and when clothes could be hung out to dry with a passion few could imagine giving any other endeavor. Their spacious ranch houses had made them proper Negros , worthy of the social integration that was inevitable, but which the whites still fought tooth and nail. They were not dangerous, they were merely ordinary, attending Church on Sunday mornings, committing their sins with discretion and a little more fear, counting the years until they were eligible for their pensions, joyfully building up enough debts to give them financially credibility but not to endanger the lives they had created.

Excerpt: He was born and grew up in Anacostia, named for an Indian tribe that once lived on the banks of the river that separated Washington of myth, pageants and history books from the grubby more mundane city across the river. Randolph's grandfather Ellis Spencer was a slave and declared contraband when the Union Army evacuated thousands of slaves to Washington from their native plantations during the last stages of the Civil War. Along with the other "human spoils of war," Ellis Spencer, when he arrived in Washington from the Virginia plantation where he had spent his entire life, was housed in a barracks, one of hundreds erected as temporary shelters in the swampy wasteland east of the Capitol. The government purchased large tracts of hilly, rugged, woodland, which was cleared by the freedmen who built homes on one-acre plots purchased with a subsidy from the government. Ellis Spencer built a one-room cabin in 1865 in what became known as Barry's Farm, a settlement of Negro freedmen. With unmatched civic pride and fervor, the inhabitants of Barry's Farm quickly organized a Baptist church and built a one-room schoolhouse. ... The newly freed slaves lived lives that were rural, often rustic, yet endowed with a pride that knew no bound, simply because, for the first time in their lives, their lives belonged to them. Emancipation Day, April 16, was in those days celebrated with a parade of floats from Anacostia to the White House and down Pennsylvania Avenue, to the Capitol and then to Lincoln Park, where Frederick Douglass might deliver a speech to mark the historic proclamation. And every year, in honor of John Brown, there was an excursion to Harper's Ferry.

Excerpt: When I saw Washington, D.C., for the first time in 1926, I thought I'd never seen a prettier place. Down where I come from, Spring Hope, North Carolina, there wasn't nothing, not a single thing, to compare with what I saw here. The big government office buildings, the White House, the Washington Monument... and this is where I saw my first street car. And the way some colored folks lived! Had colored professors at Howard University and colored folks had houses sometimes just as good as white folks.