DC By the Book

Excerpt: On that cold and sunny Thursday in January, I stood with the inaugural class of Our House at the corner of 10th and Pennsylvania, waiting for what we assumed would be the presidential motorcade. The entire school had come--all twenty-eight of us--on what would be the first of our many field trips into the city of Washington. We had heard Carter's earnest, sermon-like speech over loudspeakers from the National Mall--"together, in a spirit of individual sacrifice for the common good, we must simply do our best"--then we'd migrated en masse to the parade route. Across the street from us stood the Department of Justice, and just behind us the FBI. "We're surrounded," Tino said to his group of charges. "One flase move and we're done for"... As the Presidential motorcade came crawling up Pennsylvania Avenue, Dawn and Stephanie began to cheer, followed soon after by the rest of our school. At first all I could see where police cars and a staggered line of Secret Service agents in trench coats, then, in the distance, a bright spot of blue. Anticipation washed over us like a wave. "It's Rosalynn!" someone yelled. Then, like a news show come to life, there they were walking toward us: Rosalynn in her cerulean wool coat waving to the crowd; Amy in big round glasses and mukluk boots, holding her mother's hand; and Jimmy, the thirty-ninth president of the United States, flashing his famous smile. The rest of the Carter family trailed behind: sons and grandkids, brother and sisters, nieces and nephews, the whole lot out for a stroll on this wintry day, just an ordinary family, too much like the rest of us for limousines. Doing research many years later, I'd learn that Rosalynn had packed her own picnic lunch that morning, and that the flaring wool coat, which seemed so bright and new buttoned tight over her trim figure, was in fact six years old. The Carters crossed 9th Street, and when they were no farther away than the distance from our front porch to the street, Molly yelled out, 'Hi, Amy!' Then 'We love you, Amy!' As she passed, the First Daughter turned and waved in our direction and the whole school erupted in cheers."

Excerpt: To escape, I grabbed my basketball and headed to Pierce Park, at 18th and Kalorama. The court was blessedly empty, under a powder-blue dome of sky. I tightened the laces on my high-tops, adjusted my Pacers headband around my hair, which spilled down my neck in staticky waves. What a relief to be out of the house--as big as it was, it could feel like a trap. I pulled up from the top of the key and did a reverse lay-up off the swish. I shot around the world--corner, side, elbow, free throw, lay-up, elbow, side, corner--then ran out to fifteen feet and did it again. I was starting to break a sweat and had just flipped in a lefty underhand scoop when I heard someone call my name. "Daniel, check this out." I wheeled around to see Cleo on the other side of the eight-foot fence. She had her own ball, a standard orange Spalding; she launched a shot, missing the rim by a couple of inches. She asked for the ball back, and on her next try she sank a high-arcing thirty-footer. "All luck," she said, joining me on the court. She wore green shorts with white piping and a gray practice jersey with the letters OLPH, for Our Lady of Perpetual Help.

Excerpt: It was only after we'd settled in...and made a series of bootless efforts at attracting students to our school that we realized our house sat in a no man's land at the convergence of three separate and economically distinct neighborhoods. It would be a while before I'd understand the layout of the city and the social complexities of these neighborhoods' encroachments upon one another, but for now I knew only this: we were on the border, and every direction seemed like a new front. To our south and west stood Dupont Circle, with its Beaux Arts mansions, neoclassical embassies and lavishly appointed townhouses, while to our east, across 16th, lay Shaw and Logan Circle, the longtime home of the black bourgeoisie, most of whom had left midcentury for the northern tip of the city. The grand Romanesque and Italianate homes had been converted into apartments and boardinghouses, and the poverty that once pressed at the neighborhood's flank had now spilled over, bringing with it vandalism, burglary and drug-related crime. From my bedroom I could see the northwestern edge of Shaw and the lower half of Meridian Hill park, where my mother said I could never go. "Think of Sixteenth Street as the Berlin Wall. You're not allowed to cross it," she decreed after reading in the Washington Post that the park had become a marketplace for heroin and other drugs. So when I left the house on my own I could only head west toward 18th and Columbia Road, into the heart of the closest neighborhood to our house. My mother assumed that Adams Morgan was a lot like Dupont Circle: prosperous and benign...I would discover that in this city of clear divisions between rich and poor, grandeur and decay, Adams Morgan was a true melange, resistant to the power brokers' attempts to homogenize the neighborhood.

Excerpt: “We’ve got our school”. He opened his arms. “You didn’t think I could do it, did you, Val?” My mother didn’t believe him at first, but over the course of a month he convinced her. As if by magic he even produced pictures of a place: a magnificent whit Victorian house on the corner of 16th and Hill streets in Washington, D.C. “Is it a mansion?” Molly asked. “Better”, he said. “A free mansion and it’s all ours”. Later, my father told me that the house wasn’t free.