DC By the Book

Excerpt: Now she is a light flitting through the halls of the Old Carnegie Library. They closed it down, then gave it to the University of the District of Columbia. They stopped having classes there. The black folk left, went up into the Allegheny Mountains when the war started. She gets brighter as evening comes on. Now she is a light brightening out of nothing in the Children's Room of the Old Carnegie Library, out of nothing, because to a light there is no need for a way of getting there, through the front door, or through a window, or up from the basement stairs smelling of urine on days when the mild vagrants sat in the park. Down there damp they urinated against stone and cement. The door is locked. No one comes this way. Now she is a light, Johnnie, henceforth and forever a light who walked a grieved the holy city alone now a light in the Old Carnegie Library, writing in the Children's Room, on the second floor, a wincing aching gyre of light that whirlpools nothing into itself, there is only light in the light, only light. She moves out of the Children's Room into the hallway, leans first to her right beside the high display cabinets, then ahead a step upon the marble floor touches the doorposts of the room on the other side quickly, and then waiting, keeping there, a pillar of light beckoning, beaconing to no one, a light hesitating above the doorsill of the Science and Technology Room, no, not there, this is not the place, she whispers to herself my mother never sat in this room, she glances away, she returns again to the Children's Room, curves the separating wall to the Young Adult Room--she fidgets with the tabletops, a light. Johnnie. Now she is a light, after all she endured to know, a castaway light waiting again at the door of the Children's Room, yearning, watching, hesitating before descending, she fumbles with the vanished books that fall from her handlessness. --HISTORICAL CONTENT--> This area began to decline in the 1960s, as middle class residents fled the city and urban neighborhoods entered a long period of neglect. In the wake of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, many of the stores along 7th Street were destroyed. Other restaurants and stores closed as fewer people came downtown to shop. The opening of the MCI (now Verizon) Center in 1997 marked the beginning of this neighborhood’s resurgence, but many miss its grittier days.

Excerpt: Whispering through earphones in the basement in the Music Room, she hears the voices of the choirs of Third Baptist Church.... Among the voices, a voice, a child's voice, her mother, Patricia, from the Tiny Tots Choir.... They are singing at a church picnic. She aches and flashes helplessly toward the fried chicken, greens, potato salad, bread, rice pudding, butter cake, sweet, sweet, sweet candied yams. She smells the bitter metallic of the silver polish as the deaconess at the table inside the window prepares for tomorrow's communion. While the children in the gravelly yard are clapping and singing, preparing for celebration, she is a frantic light...

Excerpt: She walks to the pool in the amphitheater. Many years ago when Patricia was a child her mother brought her there alone without her two sisters Cynthia Jane and Eva and she stood clustered comforted with other visitors listening to be told that once there had been concerts in the summer. There was a shining paper to describe it. Patricia remembered it. Sunlight striking a glazed brochure in a hand between ivy pillars swearing that once there had been concerts in the amphitheater of Dumbarton Oaks that was so eaten away now with grass and ice and ancient mud washed up beneath leaves cracking the bricks with gray water. There were once musical concerts German leider and readings from Ibsen plays. Not anymore now.... The amphitheater is not like the surrounding gardens but is unkempt, complicated. There are entwined bamboo and evergreen and autumn winter trees so that at all times the laves are thick the steps crumbling the smell aboriginal mold for Patricia, a holy place secluded a place final as a sea with raw chill and blank decomposition to damp mulch, a place to go after seeing other gardens...