K and L Streets, Washington D.C. by Gordon Parks
This is only one of the black tenements that blighted Washington DC in the 1950's. It's located between K and L Streets. The running water and the outhouse are located in the yard. My family used to drive by a similar stretch of slums every day in southwest Washington, on our way to the Officers Club where we went swimming at a military base on the Maryland side. Whenever we reached this part of town, I'd stare out the windows of our Pontiac, see the expressionless black faces looking back. Big men often sprawled on the steps drinking beer, while tiny children played on the sidewalks and their mothers slumped in the doorways.
The DC ghettos fascinated and confused me. I wondered why so few of the buildings had doors. Usually there was only a gaping black hole, like a missing tooth in a mouth. The windows were broken too, some boarded up, but in those steaming summers, most windows just showed the empty sashes, with occasional flashes of shattered glass embedded in their frames. Each entryway had a small, beaten earth yard, often littered with trash and a sleeping dog, and bordered with a low tipping black wrought iron fence. In some of these yards, fragments of colored glass were pressed into the dirt in simple or intricate designs. In the sunset, driving home, the glass would pick up the last bits of light and glittered like jewelry.
This morning, the day after Obama was elected our president, I am trying to remember what I thought about those terrible DC slums. I didn't understand why black people lived there, but I also understood in a dim childish way, that their condition was unhelpable: as ancient as superstition.
Obama has said it's time to turn the page on race. I hope we do, because we've got a book full of ugly pages.
Last night, when I was finally able to sleep, I dreamed about Cutter Bob, my gleaming black cat who died a few months back. I dreamed I spotted him in the house, lying on his side dozing, and that I stroked his coarse bearish fur. He woke up and, as he did in life, he greeted me with his open-mouthed cat grin. I called out to my husband incredulously, Cutter's alive! And in my dream, my husband said matter of factly, Well, of course he is.
You leave the unconscious alone, and it'll grind you out some poetry. This was an Obama dream, I decided on waking. In my mind's eye, for a moment, I envisioned more than one beautiful black cat--one still alive and glittery with promise.
Today, I hope America has, finally, used up its dark hunger for terrible endings.
The DC ghettos fascinated and confused me. I wondered why so few of the buildings had doors. Usually there was only a gaping black hole, like a missing tooth in a mouth. The windows were broken too, some boarded up, but in those steaming summers, most windows just showed the empty sashes, with occasional flashes of shattered glass embedded in their frames. Each entryway had a small, beaten earth yard, often littered with trash and a sleeping dog, and bordered with a low tipping black wrought iron fence. In some of these yards, fragments of colored glass were pressed into the dirt in simple or intricate designs. In the sunset, driving home, the glass would pick up the last bits of light and glittered like jewelry.
This morning, the day after Obama was elected our president, I am trying to remember what I thought about those terrible DC slums. I didn't understand why black people lived there, but I also understood in a dim childish way, that their condition was unhelpable: as ancient as superstition.
Obama has said it's time to turn the page on race. I hope we do, because we've got a book full of ugly pages.
Last night, when I was finally able to sleep, I dreamed about Cutter Bob, my gleaming black cat who died a few months back. I dreamed I spotted him in the house, lying on his side dozing, and that I stroked his coarse bearish fur. He woke up and, as he did in life, he greeted me with his open-mouthed cat grin. I called out to my husband incredulously, Cutter's alive! And in my dream, my husband said matter of factly, Well, of course he is.
You leave the unconscious alone, and it'll grind you out some poetry. This was an Obama dream, I decided on waking. In my mind's eye, for a moment, I envisioned more than one beautiful black cat--one still alive and glittery with promise.
Today, I hope America has, finally, used up its dark hunger for terrible endings.
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