DC By the Book

Excerpt: In my dreams, I was always back in our house on Sycamore Street, a large, sprawling house that in remembrance was perfect. I remembered small, mundane things, like the sheen of the hardwood floors and the smell of the attic where my father worked.... I always thought of the attic as his house within our house. For my father had furnished he space, which was unusually large, with a cot and stereo speakers, a shelf of books, all on the periphery of the large space dominated by his paints, easels, and other materials.... Since he worked from home, so unlike most of the other fathers on Sycamore Street, my father owned our house in a way that other fathers did not.

Excerpt: Hollingsworth, Jacobs, and Lee was housed in a twelve-story glass and chrome tower on the corner of K Street. The entire east, west, and south wings of the building were occupied by the firm.... This was an edifice built for lawyers. I felt most days that if I could just get through that foyer, there was nothing in this life or the next that I couldn't do.... I was working at the firm as part of a program sponsored by George Washington University, where I was a junior. I interned through one of those liberal uplift programs that gave Black kids a taste of their chosen profession.

Excerpt: I was working at the firm as part of a program sponsored by George Washington University, where I was a junior. I internered through one of those libreral uplift progras that gave Black kids a taste of their chosen profession. I was a gofer and fill-in word processor because I could type pretty fast.... Mostly, I was just breathing in the atmosphere of a law office, not much more.

Excerpt: Adele has worked three jobs to purchase the brick, two-story house, supplementing her teacher's salary by giving Saturday afternoon piano lessons and helping one of her friends cater weekend parties. For much of Lena's childhood they had shared the house with Thelma Louise Jenkins, who rented the room next to Adele's. In "Miss Thelma's" room Lena was given small, surreptitious sips on Manischewitz wine and told stories about all the men Miss Thelma swore wanted her but who just weren't good enough. A milliner for Woodward and Lorthrop's, Thelma Jenkins lived in a region where the fanciful seemed necessary and beauty was the answer to everything.

Excerpt: Vermont Avenue Baptist Church sprawled over an entire block around the corner from Metropolitan. Sometimes when we'd drive past that church, I'd turn my head to see the wall-high, pink-skinned Caucasian-featured Jesus, arms extended, surrounded by an angelic glow, staring out through the glass doors of the church entrance. It was an unsettling sight. Jesus always struck me as an interloper, not a savior on this block, pockmarked by boarded-up houses, abandoned cars--the vision that met this savior as he stared out onto Vermont Avenue--graffiti-scarred building, small glass- and rubble-filled alleys that seemed to lead nowhere.

Excerpt: We had met the previous summer while I was sitting on the grass on the banks of the Potomac River, near Georgetown. I wasn't working, and sometimes I walked from George Washington, where I was taking an extra credit summer school class. I'd sit and watch people fish, pulling croaker, spot, and bass from the tranquil, muddy river. I liked the area a lot because nobody ever bothered me as I sat writing in my journal. The fishermen, the health nuts in their sleek, formfitting spandex suits, pedaling past, drenched in sweat and spurred by the belief they'd like forever, even the few people I couldn't categorize, they all left me alone. But Simon sat down beside me one day as though I had been merely waiting for him.

Excerpt: In high school a McKinley Tech, Lena watched Ellington pass her as he walked down the halls, his step assured, springy, and she'd call out to him, "Hi, Ellington James," always saying his whole name because it sounded to her like the beginning of a vow, a prayer or some promise she could not live without.

Excerpt: Streetlights flickered on just at he bus pulled up to the corner of the old Tivoli Theatre, where my mom had told me she used to go to the movies on Saturday afternoons where she was a kid. Back then, there was a crystal chandelier, marble staircases and floors, and elegant murals in the foyer and lobby. A balcony stretched the width of the hall, and the whole theater seated over two thousand people. But the Tivoli had been reduced to a boarded-up, brooding disaster. It claimed the corner of Fourteenth and Park road like some beaten but still possibly dangerous animal. A poster advertising a concert by King Sunny Ade was pasted on the side of the theater. The bus loaded up and pulled off sluggishly into a neighborhood that was an energetic jumble of immigrants and old-timers, those barely staying alive and the entrenched middle class. This part of Fourteenth Street was crowded with rib joints, funeral parlors, liquor stores, hairdressers, and bodegas.

Excerpt: Several months after Kenya's funeral, when Adele found that despite the comfort of her friends she remained bereft and unhealed, she sought out a support group. The group met in the basement of a northwest Unitarian church.... The knowledge that she was not alone provided no catharsis. But she returned, because in the small basement, which during the day served as a day care center, sitting in a circle on a folding chair, sipping stale coffee from paper cups, amid the innocent preschool decorations, was the one place she felt safe.

Excerpt: ...we found ourselves facing the park in the middle of Dupont Circle. It was ringed by blocks of commercial businesses, bookstores, record shops, banks. It was a classic Washington, D.C., summer night, sweltering, nearly tropical beneath the cover of slowly emerging darkness. In the parklike space, a cluster of men huddled around a chess game. The chess players were a muscular, T-shirted Black man with a goatee and a baseball cap on backward, a toothpick perched between his teeth, staring down a young white boy in a plaid shirt who had a cherubic pink-cheeked face. The game was surrounded by a circle of quiet, patient spectators. Throughout the park, male homosexuals walked hand in hand. A young woman in another part of the park in flowing African dress played bongos beside a man playing a flute.

Excerpt: Her favorite was the Portrait Gallery, home of the wonderful drawing of Langston Hughes by Winold Reiss, that made the portrait look like a dusky, thoughtful angel. They saw the faces of their people there more than any other gallery in town. Kenya sensed this too and called it the gallery where they could see "us."

Excerpt: The entrance to the building aced an alley and the whole structure huddled behind the new chrome and marble buildings that occupied Fourteenth Street a few feet away.... When we entered the parole office, which was really no more than a large, open, barnlike space stretching the length of the building and separated by room dividers, she introduced me to the secretary at the front desk, who sat doing a crossword puzzle. They chatted briefly but pleasantly, almost like old friends. From this outer section we could see my mother's parole officer, whose desk occupied a corner section. The walls around his desk were plastered with sentimental framed inspirational sayings printing in flowing calligraphy against backgrounds of incandescent sunsets, footprints in the sand, and bold, happy sunrises.

Excerpt: One Sunday April afternoon they were sitting on a bench at the zoo. Lena had bought Kenya cotton candy after an hour of visiting elephants, tigers, giraffes, and bears. She'd had to look away from Kenya, for her pocketbook was at her side. But when she turned around Kenya was gone. At first, of course, she did not panic.... Lena took a 360-degree turn on the bench and saw nothing.... The sloping grassy knolls that encircled the park had become impenetrable woodlands in Lena's suddenly fevered imagination.... If she didn't at least look down some of the winding circuitous paths that made up the zoo, which now struck Lena as an obscene maze, what could she do?

Excerpt: Simon studied buildings. We'd drive all over Washington and he'd point out the Egyptian influence in buildings from one end of the city to the other, from the Egyptian-inspired carvings on the doors of the Library of Congress to the Washington Monument, which Simon said was nothing more than an obelisk, "ripped off, stone from the pharaohs."

Excerpt: After high school Simon had worked as his father's assistant maintaining the L Street building.... Simon's building was one of those generic, characterless modern structures that possesses not a glimmer of individuality. The tenants were mostly the kind of people who, when I came to visit Simon and passed them in the hall or saw them coming out of the elevator, strained to avoid having to exchange a word with me. His apartment was a spacious two-bedroom unit at the end of the first floor.... A profusion of family photos were fathered on a small table near a window that looked out on 23rd Street.... After a while Simon's apartment became a kind of home to me, for there I could pretend.

Excerpt: A minute but perceptible emotional lift always overtook her upon entering the ninety-six-foot-high main hall of the station, with its white facades, its domelike ceiling, and columns, its overbearing sense of gratitude and homage to Rome and Greece. The huge promenade space held several restaurants and two white marble circular foundations. The overall sense was one of expectancy, as passengers hurried to board trains or shoppers browsed in the stores along the halls of the three levels.

Excerpt: At fifteen she felt herself to be virtually indistinguishable from her two best friends with whom she camped out in the rain in front of the Howard Theater to be the first in line for tickets to see James Brown, friends with whom she talked by phone each night, discovering like hypersensitive child artists, dread, passion, possibility in the mundane.