Life in Shaw

TNG is taking a much needed break from Dec 19-Jan 4. TNG will return with new content on Jan 5. Until then, please enjoy this post from the past year. Original post date: Sunday, October 14, 2007.

I approached the street corner on my way to work this morning I noticed a new pair of orange flip flops on the sidewalk, both pointing in the same direction toward the street, stride length apart.

It was as if the wearer, in a moment of decisive momentum thought "fuck this shoe shit", and left their flops without modifying speed or gait. Where this person went or that they went barefoot doesn't much matter to me. What moves me is that the decision was so fluid and efficient that no time was wasted in stopping to remove the flops in a methodical manner. Is this act evidence of grace, or just fuck it? Perhaps the two are necessarily conflated. Both seem evident as I attempt to define my new neighborhood.

Shaw is a place waiting to be defined as something more than what it can currently claim. The neighborhood clings to overt signs of poverty and hopelessness even as the forces of gentrification slowly spread a fresh coat of caucasian incursion from the sharp bristled brushes of homosexuals and DC townies. Everywhere the signs of restoration clash with those of poverty, and you rate streets in terms of how long it will take to make them submit. I describe my apartment's location as "the ragged edge between gentrification and Thunderdome", being that I am just across the border between Logan Circle and Shaw. I find it funny that so many I speak with think of Shaw as being distant and inaccessible, as if beyond the border of Logan Circle exists a desert that only black and Hispanic faces have the appropriate reservoirs of courage needed to cross.

When I moved here I was under the impression that I actually lived in Logan Circle, but even now that I know better I prefer to say that I live in Shaw. This is because it smiles. Dupont doesn't smile anymore, probably because it's tired from working so hard at being perfect, or maybe it's been posing so long that it forgot how. Logan smiles, but always demurely and with excellent posture, its thin lips slanted and closed while its eyes look down at you with old money disdain and new gayborhood supremacy without the benefit of either. Shaw, by contrast, is plump stretched lips and arched eyebrows with blood on its face and grit between its teeth. No desert here, its face says, daring you to believe it.

I find Shaw far enough away to feel like I'm in my own hood, yet close enough to visit his less interesting siblings west of 13th street. I'm a 5 minute walk from both BeBar and Nellies, but I've only gone a few times. I spend more time at the 7-11, which is less than a block from my house. It's common that I'm the only cracker in the joint, but I'm already known as a local of sorts, and sometimes a few familiar people tell me hello when I sit out on the stoop in front of the store. At any one time there are no less than 2 or 3 vagrants asking for money, but I ignore them. A number of them sleep on the sidewalk around the corner from the store, which I guess makes 7-11 a defacto community center. Last week, in the middle of the day, a friend and I walked past an old black man on a 7th street corner wearing ragged grey sweatpants with the legs bunched around his knees. He had no shirt, was barefoot, and with cosmetic eyes stared blankly into a void only he saw, his body an inconvenient obstacle to joining his mind, wherever it lived. Who is he? Where does he go? Who takes care of him? I remember his slack face, but when I think of him now I envision a cascade of bright green, orange, red, and white light emanating from his silhouette, a large 7-11 sign above his head. A freshly minted deity. A patron saint of convenience.

I walked by the Muslim brotherhood on a Sunday afternoon while walking down 7th street. They gave me some pamphlets they use to educate people about the non-violent nature of the Muslim faith and how radicalized Islam doesn't reflect the true teaching of their religion, a PR move much needed and infrequently replicated in their community. The literature informed me about their neighborhood watch group and how they aggressively try to shut down drug houses in the neighborhood. I saw several young Muslim men kneeling in the direction of Mecca, lying prostrate, speaking words of prayer in a manner I found beautiful and moving. Later that week I visited a friend and noticed that people, mostly African-American and Hispanic, inhabited the street at greater volume than in neighborhoods I've lived in previously. There is a sense that familial bonds run strong in this neighborhood, with many homes alive with people laughing, drinking, and dancing to music, sitting in their yard and barbecuing on the street. It gave me a feeling I haven't experienced since I lived in Louisiana, a joie de vivre you inhabit and express when life is hard and the need for release adjusts in kind.

I was having sex with my boyfriend one night, a month ago. It was so intense that the first few bursts of automatic gunfire was lost in the ambient sounds of urban living, but they continued beyond the threshold of where the mind convinces you that what you heard was a firecracker, a slammed lid on a garbage can, or the muffled backfire of an automobile. We stop. Silence. Stillness. "That was a handgun", I say, staring out of into the darkness beyond my open window. I've heard sounds like it three times in the last week, but I could never be sure. This time, I'm sure. Several days later I hear it again from my couch. I go to the window across from me and see bicycle lying in the middle of the side street across the road, near the metro stop by my house. Moments later there are police everywhere, shining flashlights, looking for lead in the late evening dusk. I know my boyfriend is taking the metro over so I call him, just in case. It's the first time I've ever been afraid of my neighborhood.

I'm told that there is a conflict between the "7th Street Gang" and the "9th Street Gang" that has led to the upsurge in small arms fire. I live between these two streets, so I experience their disagreements in stereo. Across the street, by the metro, there have been several muggings by a machete wielding villain. I'm told that at a local elementary school, four 8th graders have been relieved of their arms below the elbow, also from a machete, courtesy of MI-6 MS-13, the infamous El Salvadoran gang. One night, my friend Matt walked home from the bar and saw a black Infiniti jump the curb into the children's playground around the corner from my house. The car hit a post before being stopped by the fence. He ran over to see if they were ok, two women in the front seat, two men in the backseat. The men were laughing, the driver, cranked out of her mind, reassured Matt that "its cool, its cool, I can talk to the cops." Two black lesbians stopped to help, but the sound of rapid automatic gunfire in their vicinity inspired them to scatter, looking back, the sound of sirens filling the space of their departure.

One morning last weekend I was in bed, sound asleep after a night of excessive drink. I heard a man yelling out repeatedly as if in pain. My imagination provided me the image of a person stuck in their restroom, bleeding from a gunshot wound or some other act of violence. Should I get up? Should I call someone? What should I do? I then heard sirens. Lots of them, but nothing new in my neighborhood. My face never left the pillow. I went back to sleep. The next day I'm in Caribou Coffee on 14th and I see that the front page of the Washington Post has a picture of the Foster House, its top two levels in flames, a man stretching from a window waiting for rescue, burns across 75% of his body. There are other pictures of people on the street looking up, faces of concern, horror, and fear. The foster house is a low-income apartment building, and behind it are two housing projects. My front door faces the front door of the Foster house. I slept right through the towering inferno, and I never would have known it if I had not walked by a coffee shop and decided I needed to wake up.

When I hear reports of life in my neighborhood, "fuck it" and "grace" are the components that best help me define it because both are required character traits a person needs in order to live in Shaw. You need the former to plow through a life lived here, and the latter to believe enough in the spirit and potential of the neighborhood to come in the first place. It's pioneer spirit, in a sense, and those who possess it are always looking for a better opportunity (cheaper rent/sale price), the adventure that comes with living on the untamed edge, and the freedom to create something new in ways that older, expensive, entrenched places won't allow.

It's easy to pass through Shaw and mistake his smile as insincere or sinister, but if you understand it in context, you'll know that like life, a smile can be interpreted in many different ways, all of them true, or none of them. It's a matter of perception. You choose to perceive the spirit behind either. When I think of Shaw, that ravaged, smiling face doesn't scare me. I also understand that my perception, my inherent level of fuck it and grace, probably explains the distance between my perception and those who don't share it.