ABSTRACT
I live in a part of Washington, D.C., that white suburbanites called “the jungle” during the uprising of the sixties-perhaps still do, for all I know. When I walk the two-anda-half blocks to H Street, N.E., to stop in at the bank, to leave my boots off at the shoe-repair-and-lock shop, I am most usually the only white person in sight. I’ve seen two other whites, women, in the year I’ve lived here. (This does not count white folks in cars, passing through. In official language, H Street, N.E. is known as the “H Street Corridor”; as in something to be passed through quickly, going from your place on the way to elsewhere.)
When I walk three blocks in a slightly different direction, down Maryland Avenue, to go to my lover’s house, I pass yards of Black folks: the yard of the lady who keeps children, with its blue-and-red windmill, its roses of Sharon; the yard of the man who delivers vegetables, with its stacked slatted crates; the yard of the people next to the Righteous Branch Commandment Church of God (Seventh Day), with its tomatoes in the summer, its collards in the fall. In the summer, folks sit out on their porches or steps or sidewalks. When I walk by, if I lift my head and look toward them and speak, “Hey,” they may speak, say, “Hey” or “How you doin’?” or perhaps just nod. In the spring I was afraid to smile when I spoke, because that might be too familiar, but by the end of summer I had walked back and forth so often, I was familiar, so sometimes we shared comments about the mean weather.
