Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
CHAPTER 12
I SPENT THE NIGHT on the outskirts of Alexandria and in the morning drove into Wash-
ington. I remembered Washington from my childhood as hot and dirty and full of the din
of jackhammers. It had that special kind of grimy summer heat you used to get in big cities
in America before air-conditioning came along. People spent every waking moment trying
to alleviate it-wiping their necks with capacious handkerchiefs, swallowing cold glasses of
lemonade,lingeringbyopenrefrigerators,sittinglistlesslybeforeelectricfans.Evenatnight
there was no relief. It was tolerable enough outside where you might catch a puff of breeze,
but indoors the heat never dissipated. It just sat, thick and stifling. It was like being inside a
vacuumcleanerbag.IcanrememberlyingawakeinahotelindowntownWashingtonlisten-
ing to the sounds of an August night wash in through the open window: sirens, car horns,
the thrum of neon from the hotel sign, the swish of traffic, people laughing, people yelling,
people being shot.
We once saw a guy who had been shot, one sultry August night when we were out for a late
snack after watching the Washington Senators beat the New York Yankees 4-3 at Griffith
Stadium. He was a black man and he was lying among a crowd
of legs in what appeared to me at the time to be a pool of oil, but which was of course the
blood that was draining out of the hole in his head. My parents hustled us past and told
us not to look, but we did of course. Things like that didn't happen in Des Moines, so we
gaped extensively. I had only ever seen murders on TV on programs like “Gunsmoke” and
“Dragnet.” I thought it was something they did just to keep the story moving. It had never
occurred to me that shooting someone was an option available in the real world. It seemed
such a strange thing to do, to stop someone's life just because you found him in some way
disagreeable. I imagined my fourth—grade teacher, Miss Bietlebaum, who had hair on her
upper lip and evil in her heart, lying on the floor beside her desk, stilled forever, while I
stood over her with a smoking gun in my hand. It was an interesting concept. It made you
think.
At the diner where we went for our snack, there was yet another curious thing that made me
think. White people like us would come in and take seats at the counter, but black people
would place an order and then stand against the wall. When their food was ready, it would
be handed to them in a paper bag and they would take it home or out to their car. My father
explained to us that Negroes weren't allowed to sit at luncheon counters in Washington. It
wasn't against the law exactly, but they didn't do it because Washington was enough of a
