photo by David Carpenter
photo by David Carpenter
Part of the story of the Kenilworth project is my own return to the neighborhood. After being away at college, then living in San Francisco for a year and going on a bicycle trip, I decided to move back to Kenilworth, though none of my family lived there any more.
I began to try to put flesh to my memories. I found myself trying to connect with a community much the same, yet also different from the one I remember as a child. Though Fellowship Haven Chapel is still there, the congregation is small. The area has many new residents, as well as many families that have lived there since before 1965 when my parents came.
Perhaps more important, I had changed. Though I lived in Kenilworth for several years in between colleges, I had not really experienced the neighborhood for myself as an adult. Now my task was to take ownership of my own community, to make a home there after my family had left. I wanted to find what Kenilworth meant to me now that I was out 'on my own.'
This is the story I have been keeping track of through focused journaling since I moved back here in February of 2003. Some excerpts from these journals are posted below.
Tonight, my friend Phil brings me home to Kenilworth from his house on Capitol Hill. After being gone for a year and a half, I have been living here about three weeks. We drive past the Quarles Street corner. It's past ten on a cold winter night early in March and still the place is busy. People hang out on the sidewalk. Dealers flash blue lights, advertising their wares.
"It's my goal to be able to walk past that corner without concern after dark," I tell my friend. "That might take awhile."
The mid-February snowstorm was a great thing to 'come home' to. Helping people dig out a good way for neighbors to see my face. I walked the whole 'hood with a shovel on my shoulder.
I am looking forward to finding a lawn chair or two and watching sunsets from the small hill that is my front yard. I am looking forward to people knowing me again. I am looking forward to walking these streets without fear.
* * * * *
Today I went out into the neighborhood to take pictures. Hung a camera around my neck and went out into the neighborhood.
Started feeling conspicuous, a lone white boy with a camera around his neck. Feeling shy about taking pictures. Picture myself standing in the middle of the street, camera to one eye, moving around to get the right angle. Stepping through the glass from broken car windows to get the right perspective.
People will notice, I think. This is not the sterile suburbs, or the impersonal crush of a downtown street: this is a neighborhood. It is a black neighborhood, and I am a white man standing in the street taking pictures. Perhaps they will think me strange. Perhaps they will think I am one of the police. I don't want anyone to think I am one of the police. They will think that already, without seeing me with a camera.
Or perhaps they will ignore me. And that might hurt more. Perhaps my whiteness means less to them than it does to me. Perhaps I make my whiteness feel conspicuous because I want to be important. Maybe I am like those who use their skin for power, or for excuses. After awhile, you see the whole present world noticing you for your color. You know they will look at you differently. But maybe that's not true.
The camera around my neck is a mediator for my skin color. It gives me a reason to be in the neighborhood. People will think I am a reporter. They will call me a photographer. I need a reason to be here, a lone white man walking the streets of a neighborhood that, for most of my life, I've called home.
* * * * *
Today Mrs. Barnes, my neighbor and a long time resident of Douglas Street, called to me as I walked past her house on the way to a catering job. "Come here," she said. "Don't you walk past this porch without coming in here and saying hi."
"Feel good to be out on your porch again?" I asked.
"Yes," she said, "and how are your parents?"
On the street, kids and kids and kids walking home from school. An ice cream truck parked in the same place every day half way up Douglas Street, at the end of the sidewalk that leads into Kenilworth Courts. Children swarming around the front.
I live here. I live here. I live here.
This place where I live, it's not easy. Sometimes I don't fit in. This place where I live.
Sometimes I'm tired.
How do I get out of myself and become a part of this place where I live? Is it worth it? Am I bold enough? Do I really see myself as one who wants to make this place his home?
The youngest of five children, by the time I came along my parents didn't want me going to the public schools. So I grew up in an odd assortment of small Christian academies getting a proper spiritually based education along with D. who drew the dirty pictures and M. who stuck his scissors in the electrical outlet and Ms. Y who threw the chalk at E.
Then I spent much of high school and a good bit of college learning how to be a white boy, and woke up one day eating humus and spinach dip with 'rustic breads' and wondering who I was and what in the world I had become.
I am trying to recover something, something dead or long dying in me- people I once knew, memories now buried, feelings I can no longer recall.
* * * * *
The tulips in front of my house, planted by hands other than mine, have been pushing their leaves up from the grass for the last several weeks. Bordering the front walk on either side for a few feet, there must be fifteen bulbs producing stalks. Now, the buds push up above the green, only three of them, three yellow buds from so many plants.
Lilac bushes bloom profusely. I tear a few sprigs off a giant one in the empty lot next door. Some boys are playing in the brush at the back of the lot. I poke around and see discarded chairs, a few old pieces of wood.
The sycamore tree there that we used to play in has been cut down. Mr. Johnson, gardener of Douglas Street and keeper of its memories, is dead, and the sycamore is cut down. What will become of my memories? How will I remember that which is gone?
In the sycamore's old place there is a pile of sand. Ants busy themselves in and out of holes made all through the pile. I remember when an old sheet of plywood and two two-by-fours were a treasure. I remember when a sheet of plywood and two two-by-fours were a clubhouse: on the ground, leaning up against the sycamore's trunk, or a clubhouse in the tree, a tree house up in the sycamore, its old and gnarled limbs spreading low and horizontal to hold the plywood floor.
I put the lilac sprigs in a vase on my desk.
My neighbor Mr. H. said to me today, "Your parents really stabilized this community. They came at the right time, and things were better."
A lot of the neighbors remember my father, my family. Many of them do not remember me until I remind them that I was the little one running around. Then they see it. "You Timmy's brother, aren't you." Or, "I used to go to school with Lois. How is your sister?" Or, "Mr. Lapp's your father? Oh, I remember you now." They know who I am through my family, and I know who they are through my family, or not at all.
* * * * *
Tonight after the big thunderstorm I come home to darkness and downed trees, no electricity and reports of a tornado in nearby Mayfair.
Crossing Kenilworth Avenue on the high pedestrian bridge feels eerie, cars passing underneath with only headlights for a guide.
Yellow police tape wraps four trees, sectioning off an area of the street where a limb has fallen and some wires are down. The tape is broken, residents impatient to drive on the street, heedless of the limb and fallen wires.
On Douglas Street, no lights shine. Still, I can see the neighborhood distinctly. The low clouds reflect a soft orange glow. They pick up light from everywhere else in the city where power still lives and diffuse that light into my neighborhood, my street. Tonight the lights of Capitol Hill light my neighborhood. The lights from East Capital Street light my neighborhood. The lights of Seat Pleasant and Cheverly and Brookland light my neighborhood.
Light from the White House bounces off the clouds and lands on Kenilworth. Light from Jefferson and Lincoln's memorials helps me see my way down Douglas St. Light from the National Cathedral filters through the clouds and illuminates the concrete steps down to my basement door. For one night, all the light of the city comes down into my neighborhood and dispels the darkness there.
Here is Kenilworth, city neighborhood, dim and peaceful like the country.
* * * * *
It is night. I am walking Douglas Street before I go to bed. I stand on the concrete traffic triangle at the top of the street and envision a planter spilling over with flowers, right there, to welcome people into the neighborhood.
An old gray four door car pulls up, stops at the stop sign. It begins to pull forward, then stops again.
A female voice. "You all right?"
Then a male, maybe seventeen years, gets half out of the car. He stares at me, hard. "What you doin'?"
"I'm thinkin' about a planter right here," I say, "a big planter with lots of flowers."
"Ain't no planter there," he says.
I begin to wonder what he intends. He is not looking at me as a friend would. I try a light-hearted response. "Yeah, but I'm thinkin' about puttin' one here, think how beautiful that would…"
"You better roll out." He interrupts me.
"What?" I ask to buy myself time, though it's obvious what he means.
"Roll out, man," he points down the street.
"But I live here."
"Roll out."
I try a different tack. I make my voice conversational. "Look, my name is Joe, I live on this street, OK?"
"Look, roll out now."
I don't know what he will do if I don't move. Should I stand my ground? Should I go? I know I have more right to be there than he, more right to stand on the ground of this neighborhood and call it my own. Once again, I am met with aggression in my own community, and I am essentially powerless in the face of it.
"F--- you," I should say, "why are you telling me what to do in my own 'hood? You roll out, you SOB, and get the hell out of my neighborhood. And don't come back."
That's of course what I should say, except that I am a pacifist who wants to conquer the world with love, peace and mutual understanding. Except that I am a Christian who shouldn't be cussing people out. Except that might make me dead, or at least seriously injured.
So I do the prudent thing and begin to walk down the street, still appealing to him as I begin to back away. "Look," I repeat, "my name is Joe, I live on this street, let's have a decent conversation next time we see each other, OK?"
He slips back in the car and they pull off. Threat averted, I walk back to my spot.
Later that night, on Anacostia Avenue I stop and talk to two men who are out having beer and cigarettes. They like the thought of a community garden across the street. "We need to do something positive, yeah," they say. "We could till the ground ourselves, don't need no big machine." They thank me for stopping to talk and speak my mind. I thank them for accepting my presence and my remarks without suspicion or hostility.
* * * * *
This task is too big for me. I am weary and this task is too big for me, too important for my unskilled pen to tell. Stories pile in dark corners, gathering dust. Stories lose themselves from memories every second, begging to be gathered but no one is there to harvest. Stories teem in the ponds of minds, in photo albums, on the lines of pages in diaries and journals, in newspaper print.
How do I tell so many stories? How do I tell so many things that need attention, that need to be remembered and to be told? But if I do not tell them then who? If I do not tell the stories, gathering them with care from dusty corners, how will they be told?
My harvest stretches before me, seedlings needing care and sun and rain. Seedlings promising rich growth, then fruit. Drought may dry them up before they flower. Storms may break slender stalks, or rain drown plants in too much wet.
I do not know if my harvest, now planted, will come to me. I do not know if I will reap, but I have sown and now wait for the increase. I have sown my seeds and green appears and I am waiting for the increase from the harvest god.
O harvest god give me strength that I may master this harvest and store its increase against future drought. Give me strength so I can reap enough that others may feed and be blessed. Make me only a hired hand that, working in the fields of my master, I may see the bountiful yield and go my way and be glad.
Fall came suddenly to the area last week. The children back to school, cooler temperatures, and a big full harvest moon. Some friends took me out to eat the night after my early September birthday and we sat at a sidewalk table and were almost cold.
The streets are much quieter at night, now. I have walked home from the subway around midnight and not seen a single person on Douglas Street. I have walked around the neighborhood at that time and seen two people, besides the inevitable congregants on Quarles Street.
* * * * *
Isabel comes to Kenilworth. We wait and wait for her and finally she comes, flinging a wet and windy tendril of herself toward our houses, lulling our senses, then bursting in suddenly upon us. It's hurricane season and for the last week she's been making her way toward the Mid-Atlantic coast. Now she hits hard at North Carolina's beaches and we begin to feel her presence in gray skies, then rain.
The federal government and schools are shut down today. Metro closed around 11 a.m.. My catering job, at the Air and Space Museum, has been canceled. "We can't have a big party without public transportation," the supervisor said.
Yesterday I prepared my house for her visit. I filled bottles with water and swept the area under the porch clean of dirt that might clog the rain drain there. Mentally I inventoried my stock of batteries, flashlights, candles.
A friend called to see if I was ready for the storm, then came over this morning with his dog. We walked through Kenilworth Park to the river, then around the long expanse of grassland that curves toward the smoke and steam of Pepco's coal-fired power plant, then back through Mayfair-Parkside and Eastland Gardens to my house.
Wind chopped at the brown river. Two snowy egrets and a great blue heron prowled the banks and the riverside trees. Wind whipped at my black San Francisco Giants hat. The dog roamed without a leash. Together we chased a whole fleet of Canadian geese into the air.
* * * * *
This morning I woke up and looked outside. The green bowl of trees cupping the green field across the street. Dew so heavy the grass glistens with water, though the sidewalks are not visibly wet. New sun cutting through clouds and trees to rest on lawn and houses and the remnants of gardens. A faint feel of water in the air. This end of Douglas Street quiet and almost like the country. My rural retreat right in the city. That is the tale of the morning.
Later in the day the wind came up and whipped everything around all afternoon. I went out on a bike ride. I turned the bill of my baseball cap backwards so it wouldn't get blown off.
In Kenilworth Park, there was a cross country race, the route following the bend of Kenilworth Park back toward the river. Small fifth-graders with scrawny legs, baggy team tanks, and running shoes, glided over grass and pavement in packs, already looking like long distance runners.
I stopped to watch a high school football game on the main field at Kenilworth-Parkside Recreation Center. The downtown Gonzaga against the new neighborhood school over by the Minnesota Avenue subway station. The white and purple Gonzagans fell back repeatedly against the determined running attack of the teens in dark blue and yellow. Cheerleaders yelled from the sidelines. People in the ragged, sagging Kenilworth bleachers sang happy birthday to one of their own.
Back in Kenilworth, the evening light fell slanty, whole, and full on the bank of trees beyond the open field across the street. It fell full on the sides of the single-family homes at my end of Douglas Street and on the orange brick facades of the apartments back behind my house. A black Impala unloaded a family, who gathered groceries from its trunk. In the park, a father taught two sons to throw brightly colored frisbee discs.
* * * * *
It's November. True "Indian summer" is upon us, as we call it around here, without regard for political correctness. We've had a small cold snap, with days only up to 60 and nights in the low 30's, maybe even a frost. The quick-change trees have already turned and are losing their bright yellow leaves, while the slower ones fade to brown or red a little every day.
Now, suddenly, the days are balmy again, and sunny, with highs in the 70's. Everyone is out. The trees don't know what to think. This is what you get in mid-fall when you live on land that wants to be a swamp. It's not all bad.
* * * * *
Today is a blustery day. The sun shines and a wind from the northwest courses through the tree tops. It makes me shiver as I sit on my front steps in shirtsleeves eating my lunch, trying to soak up all the fall sun I can before winter truly comes.
Leaves swirl up Douglas Street on furious eddies of wind. Mr. Johnson's screen door, his house abandoned since he died last winter, bangs against its frame. A neighbor struggles to take the cover off of his Mercedes, the canvas flapping. He tugs at it, rolls it into a ball.
From a faded yellow pickup parked on Quarles Street, a voice calls to my back. "Hey, light-skin. Come here."
A woman in her forties climbs from the cab. Her male companion steps out onto the sidewalk so she can scoot out the passenger side, like a churchgoer trying to get out the aisle end of a pew.
She wears dark pants, a black coat. "What you need?" she asks. She places one hand meaningfully inside her coat, like in all those pictures of Napoleon.
I understand that she wants to sell me dope.
"Why, what you got?" I lean against the fence and start the charade of buyer and seller who feel each other out before the sell. The conversation that means much but says little.
"What you lookin' for?" she asks, suddenly defensive.
My mind races for the next part to this charade, to think about what it might or might not accomplish. I end it. "Well, I'm out here lookin' for these kids that been drivin' a stolen car around…"
She is suddenly brisk. Muttering under her breath, she practically climbs back over her companion into the truck. The truck bed holds an old tire and a faded sheet of plywood.
"I thought you were lost or somethin'." She slams the door.
* * * * *
Tonight the snow falls straight down like rain. It's an icy snow that sticks on cars but melts on the street, the first snow of winter when winter isn't quite ready for such blessings. I look outside after an hour's detective program on the TV and see the surprise. I zip the heavy lining into my trench coat, pull it over my black and white checked flannel pants, and walk into a world seeking transformation.
The snow is heavy. I hear it hitting the street, the rooftops, the withered grass. It sounds like static slowed down. It sounds like the crinkle of wrapping paper and the slow zip of scotch tape. It sounds like the solitary peace I feel as I stand on the corner of Douglas Street and Anacostia Avenue and know I am at home.
The snow falls on Kenilworth tonight. It covers the roofs and the cars. It makes a circle on top of the car tire that someone left on the sidewalk a couple of days ago. It fills in the tracks a speeding Dodge minivan made through my yard. It sifts into the chinks in the piles of brick on my neighbor's lawn. It falls softly onto the dark hoods shadowing the faces of the drug dealers on Quarles Street.
Over the river and through the streets, only a few miles away, the same snow falls on the house of the President. Perhaps he looks out his window now and wonders how the people of his great city are taking this early snow. Perhaps he reads some briefing papers or attends a late night policy session. Perhaps he sleeps.
The same snow falls on the house of the mayor, it falls at the slim black line of the Vietnam Memorial. It coats the roofs over the heads of Jefferson and Lincoln as they pose, statuesque, under their marble canopies. It gathers in the grooves of Einstein's bronze shell where he sits in front of the National Academy of Sciences. It swirls softly between the buttresses of the Cathedral high on Mt. Saint Albans hill. In the bishop's garden, husks of rosebushes line themselves with white.
All around the city, on rich and poor, black and white, powerful and powerless, the snow falls, falls, falls.
* * * * *
Today the ponds in the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens surprise me. Though cold weather has stayed long enough to call it winter, I did not expect to see the white expanse, their flat tops frozen, thin ice with a dusting of snow. The grassy walks, too, powder their faces to hide the winter wrinkles, though the dirt and gravel lane around the edge of the property is bare. I look back at the indentation of my shoes. Someone else's boot marks have trampled next to mine.
I see little wildlife, only birds- ravens cawing overhead, a few seagulls wheeling in search of food, small clumps of twittering snowbirds that dart in clouds from tree to tree as I approach.
Back on the boardwalk over the marsh, I hear the crackling of the ice as the tide comes in and lifts the pale sheets, rubs them against wooden pylons. A few ducks swim in open water far from shore.
Recently the park rangers hung the "No Skating" signs on a few trees at the entrance to the gardens. In the forties and fifties the Lily Ponds were the place to skate in the city. After each cold snap the papers would proclaim the ice fit and folks would lace up their blades for an afternoon of gliding across the big show pond. Pictures show rosy cheeked lads and lasses, one couple flirting for the camera, the girl falling on purpose for the photographer and her beau lifting her up.
It's invigorating, this cloud-breath walk through nature's sleep. I wonder what the frogs are doing now, and where the turtles are. I wonder if mosquito larvae already plot the blood that they will suck come summer.
* * * * *
This is what my soul would know: the dust. Yet, still, my spirit strives upward. Against all cost, against all weight of earth, my spirit strives to return to the breath that gave it life. The weight of my soul must not weigh down the breath of my spirit. My spirit is but a finger lifted upward, and my soul the ring that gives my finger its heft. My soul is but the signet of my spirit and I wear it proudly. My soul and spirit shall return to the breath that gave them life when my body passes away. Do not remember my body, remember my soul and the spirit that gave it life.
I have labored to see the touch of God's hands upon the blight that grows where city spreads. I have looked for the flowers that bloom where grass is worn to dirt; I have planted them myself.
I have hoped to bring a reasonable clarity to those who live in a land of shadows. I have searched for light where darkness pools beneath broken streetlights; I have walked in these places and said my name.
With my pen and with my mouth I have named this place and I have named myself, and neither can be undone. In the place where names remain unspoken I have said my name aloud and held my head up high; what more can I do?
* * * * *
As I walk by the Fellowship Haven church building, the house that God built and in which my father preached, I see some neighborhood kids playing in the parking lot out back. They are all boys, and they lean against the chain link fence between the church and Mrs. W's house. The fence itself leans dramatically back under their constant weight. They take turns running across the lane and out of sight behind the building, as if they have a relay race going. I go to see what they are up to.
Behind the church, on the walkway between two small plots of grass, they have taken two of the mattresses from yesterday's sidewalk eviction pile and brought them here to form a makeshift tumbling pit. Each in turn runs and springs onto the mattresses. Run-jump, jump-twist, jump-flip. Run-jump and yell.
Some do back flips. Some just jump and act crazy. One does a front flip. They land on the mattresses, jump high and land on the grass at the other end. One twists the wrong way and lands on the pavement, taking the brunt of the fall with his hands and arms.
"Hi, Mr. Joe," they say and go about their fun. It's clear they are taking turns, self policing the line. It's clear that some are more acrobatic than others. The talented ones jump and twist with ease, putting a little extra height into their leaps to show off for me. The not so talented ones try to land stunts with studied concentration, perhaps a bit of fear on their faces. The group clown just jumps high and yells, shimmying crazily in mid-air. Everyone laughs.
I tell them to be careful, ask them to not lean so hard on the fence. Already, several sections will need to be replaced.
If I was my father I might shake my finger at them, tell them to stop, and drag the mattresses away for trash. If I was my father, they might not have stayed around to be finger-shook at. As it is, I cannot spoil their play. I was a child here, too. I remember how it was in this neighborhood, here where children make their fun out of the detritus of the big people's world.
* * * * *
What is home? What is the place in which we live? A collection of houses, bodies, hearts?
What does it mean to live in a place? What does it mean to live for a place? What does it mean to live in the place where the sun shines and does not shine, where we are glad and where we suffer every day?
This is the place we live: not a grid of streets, not rows of brick and wood. We live at the site of ourselves, our fears, our reliefs; we live in the ease found in knowing we are where we must be.
When the sun shines down, it passes through air and the light becomes our own. Feel the heat of sunset. Stand here and taste the shadows, the slant: light and dark, black and white.
Where the sun cuts these shadows is where we live and die, brief passage over a beautiful, ruptured earth. Houses come and go. People come and go. One generation fades and another rises to meet its future. We rise to beat the old drums, forgetting and remembering and forgetting again. We rise to forget the shadows, the sun. We rise to remember the dirt. We forget and we remember until we become the dirt. The sun shines on us- lumped, fertile, dust.
Then we go gladly into that fair night from which we came. We pass like the seedlings that wither in the harsh August heat. The seedlings wither and we walk to the place where our sojourn ends. We go to the deadly street corner; we enter the menace of the dark alley; we walk out on the waves. We slip in beneath the darkness to find the light. Then we go.
Keep in touch - Joe (lappjoe@yahoo.com)