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Porchtales is a podcast by HumanitiesDC, Washington's humanities council, and an independent affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Each season we work with a guest producer to focus on a historic or cultural topic and dig deeper to learn and celebrate the unique experiences that shape our fascinating city. Whether jogging by the capitol or driving along the California coast, Porchtales listeners get to experience DC through the eyes of those who make up the fabric of our nation's capital. Have an idea or a question, send us a note at programs@humanitiesdc.org
*Any views expressed in this podcast do not necessarily reflect those of HumanitiesDC or the project’s funders.
Podcast Open:
This is Porchtales, a HumanitiesDC show where we get to experience the District of Columbia from the history to the culture, to the arts. In each season, we'll hear from the experts, the doers of DC. So, get comfy and maybe grab a few friends as we gather on our porches to learn on a deeper level and celebrate what really shapes our nation's capital.
Katie Davis:
Welcome to the second season of Porchtales. I'm Katie Davis, your guest host, and this is Lanier, stories from the block that raised me.
Music Herman Burney
Metal finds metal, and then the rope starts to move over the pulley. Pull, pull until the two double-wide doors are flush against the ceiling of the firehouse. It's August 1968 and the doors are opening for the hook and ladder. There is a man driving the back of the truck surrounded by a wire cage.
Cleeak, cleeak, and the rope is sliding. Climbing. That is the sound I was trying to name as I curled into bed. The first night in our new home. It shared a wall with the firehouse. My mom was new too.
We hadn't lived with her for five years, not since I was four, and not since mom and dad gave up on their marriage. Now mom had us back. A friend she met playing bridge, Barbara Nelson found us this house in Washington, DC, a few doors down from hers. There was one Nelson kid for each of us, Jimbo, Sam, me, and Hester. The baby was the extra. The rent was low because of the ripped screens and rotten porch railings, not worth fixing when so many were leaving scared after the riots a few months earlier.
Speaker 3: News Archive
This late development, a large fire is now reported at the corner of 7th and L Streets. In North West, tear gas has been used to disperse a crowd of people near the fire.
Speaker 4:
WPGC.
Speaker 3:
We again urge you to stay in your homes, to not become a party to the violence. If you're a doctor you can volunteer your services to help today.
Katie Davis:
I was nine when we moved to Lanier Place, August 1968. I could tell something had happened, but I didn't know what, I listened as the firemen scooted their chairs along the cement, propped their feet against the wall, and replayed how the city burned. More than a thousand fires. People died trapped inside buildings, and the fireman kept saying, "14th Street is gone, just gone."
Speaker 5: Reporter
I see no one replacing Dr. King. That's why all America lost.
Speaker 3:
Look, man, we're at war with the United States. Don't let anybody fool you.
Ruth Webster:
I'm Ruth Webster. In 1968, during the riots, I was at home. But immediately upon seeing the riots, I went to the Office of Change Incorporated, of which I was at that time, chairman of the board. I have never been to a war. I've never been a part of a war. But it looked as if you see the movies and as if we had just been at war and been attacked by an enemy. I was born here. It makes you cry. It was terrible.
Poet Gaston Neal:
This is Gaston Neal. In the '60s, I was the director of the New School of African American Thought. And of course, that was right on 14th Street, 14th, and W. And I remember walking down the street and felt free for the first time in my life. For the first time in my life, you felt you had control over this. No matter if it was 20, 30, 40 blocks or half the city, and you knew that control was very, very temporary, but it was there.
Speaker 3: News DJ
That's 10 minutes before four o'clock on WPGC. The curfew for the District of Columbia goes into effect in 10 minutes at four o'clock.
(radio jingle)
Poet Gaston Neal:
These cars are roaring all over the place and fire engines and fires going on. Then I remember, I was at the top of the hill, and I happened to look down and I saw these eerie lights flashing, rolling slowly, and I said, "Wow. What's that?" And then I began to realize, I said, "That's the advance. That's the procession of all the armored half-tracks and all the 101st Airborne." And all of a sudden, all the streets got quiet, and they came slowly up the street, almost like a funeral possession with the lights slowly flashing. And then you could look at the AR-15s and the 30 caliber machine guns, and you could see all these troops sitting up there. Most of them were black, by the way. At that point, we no longer controlled the streets.
Katie Davis:
Mom told me years later that her world got smaller after the riots. Whites weren't welcome anymore at the after-hours clubs on 14th Street, and she missed those clubs. Everyone mixing, drinking, getting plates of chicken and greens from the stove in the kitchen. Mom's boyfriend, Pete, was black and he could still go, but they started to invite their friends to our house to play bid whist on Sundays, and mom fried chicken. And I remember a man, his name was Love singing acapella in the hallway. When he left for his nightly gig, I went out on the porch to see if anyone was watching Love and his band leave our house.
Nat. Sound Football game
Speaker 7:
Me and you versus...Dawit and Mike.
Jose:
All I got to say is Mike is too tall.
Katie Davis:
One of the first things I learned when we got to the block was how to play street football with my brothers, the Nelson kids, and Dean McDonald from the building on the corner. Our street was one-way, for the fire trucks, and we only had to look up to Ontario Road before we hiked the ball. That was our field. And Dean was our quarterback. He had a strong arm and sometimes he threw to me, the rest of the boys never did.
Dean:
God. We would have what? 10 kids out here every day throwing the football. And at one point the police I would remember would come along and take our football. For what reason? I don't know. But we would have several parents run out the house and yell at the cops. We get our football back.
Katie Davis:
The game was touch, but we slammed into parked cars and each other. My younger brother, Sam, knocked his tooth out, with the root and we found it in front of the Fenoy’s house. The dentist said he couldn't fix it, but most things could be fixed.
Dean:
You could fall down, get cut up or banged up, run to the firehouse and be out in 30 seconds and you're ready to go. As a kid, you heal real fast. But its great comfort knowing that the firehouse was right there and there were always parents looking out for all the kids. So that was real good.
Speaker 7: Nat. Sound Boys Playing Football.
Jose, call it in the air. Call it in the air.
Jose:
Heads
Katie Davis:
If Lefty was on duty, he came out and called permanent quarterback and split us into teams. We ran harder, paid more attention because a fireman was playing with us. The men we loved were always outside on the street and they didn't announce it in any way, but they were our guardians.
A jumble and scuffle on asphalt. The runner leaned left, but then skittered right then leaned away from an outstretched hand and touchdown. I loved the dodges and the fakes, the daring decisions on fourth down with seconds to go. And I loved running and sometimes I’d just run down the street and forget to turn around for the ball. Jimbo said, "Turn around, Katie. That's the point of the game."
Dean huddled us up. "Okay, I'm going to fake to Jimbo, but I'll run it." And hut one, two... "Oh, hey. Hey, Mr. Austin." Mr. Austin, a single father of two girls walked up to the curb and stopped the game. Everyone on the block listened to what he had to say. Kids and neighbors.
Speaker 9: Montage of neighbors
Oscar Austin, yes, indeed. Worked for years at the Hilton.
Speaker 10:
He was the local pest control guy.
Speaker 11:
He had great pride in his job. He worked at Naval Surface Weapons. He was the janitor.
Speaker 10:
He would always walk up and down the streets or chanting these sayings. "Don't be a fool, stay in school."
Speaker 9:
"Stand tall on your shoes and drift on through."
Speaker 12
He had his car all decorated up.
Speaker 10:
He used to put these megaphones on the top and wear this sombrero going around, "Don't be a fool, stay in school. Don't be a fool. Stay in school." And he was on a mission. I guess that was his calling.
Katie Davis:
Our mission was to play and play and play with breaks for the corner store. But going to the corner store could be dicey. Warren Butts was one reason. He showed up on some school days to eat breakfast with us. Mom gave Warren a bowl and he poured Frosted Flakes and Rice Krispies together. After school, Warren played football with us, and when he heard corner store, he’d demand I buy him something. And I did. He was too big to mess with.
Some nights Warren came when my mom called us in to eat. Hester Nelson, who was around six then was the youngest of all of us.
Katie Davis:
Did your mom just let you go out on the street? Was she comfortable with that?
Hester Nelson:
Absolutely. My mother let us do whatever we wanted whenever we wanted to. It's like the children ran the show in my household. We did whatever we wanted, didn't matter, and we had no curfew or anything like that.
Katie Davis:
And when she had to come looking for you, where did she often find you?
Hester Nelson:
She never came to look. She would just yell our names and we would round up at the front step. She would sort of yell, and then we would just all of a sudden appear out of dark alleys and... Oh, I remember we used to, with Claggett Reed, we used to play Planet of the Apes in the back of his house, and we were really crazy then. And she would call his mom to call in the backyard to get us, so it was effortless to find us. She didn't have to go too far.
Katie Davis:
We treated Dean like a brother. He was with us all the time. When he was 17, Dean asked my mom if he could move into our house. Mom said, "Let me check with your mother." And Dean's mother liked the idea because he'd be out of the house, but she'd be able to see him through her screened-in porch three doors away.
Dean:
God, I've practically grown up in your house. Well, I have grown up in your house and just the wonderful meals that your mom would provide for the whole street. There wasn't a day that would go by that. People wouldn't stop by, especially at dinner time, which was a wonderful time to stop by here.
Katie Davis asks question:
And my mom said that Bobby Nelson would call Jimbo, my brother, every night and say, "So what are you guys having for dinner?"
Dean:
I think we all did that. We would wait and after school and see what we were doing, and then ask what time are you having dinner? And we would all sort of walk by, knock on the door, and see if Jimbo was home. But we knew it was dinner time and your mom never refused any kid or anybody to come in and be welcomed at our table.
Katie Davis:
Dean continued to live in our house until he was in his mid-thirties and getting married. He looked for a place to buy in our neighborhood but couldn't find anything he and his new wife could afford, so they moved to Silver Spring.
We were always going to the corner store, and it was a crazy game of hopscotch past the firehouse, past the old greenhouse home to broken-hearted Tuffy, who never recovered from being too short to become a fireman. Down the street of chimney-to-chimney row houses. Every sidewalk square, different and every square known. The Crazy House starts right here. You better jump it because Hitchcock will get you. And jump that one too, because it's got Peyton's blood on it. If you touch it, he'll come back and get you.
Down, down under the tunnel of leaves to the corner store.
We looked in to make sure that the white dog was behind the counter, not roaming the aisles. The owner, Wayne, was a huge white man, and he drove in from the suburbs every day to take our dimes, and he brought his white German Shepherd to give customers the double hard stare. Whites were scared because of the riots, and blacks were angry in 1968, furious about the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. Inside the store, Wayne sat on a milk crate behind the counter. He didn't say much when I gave him my money, in and out as fast as I could. Wayne didn't seem to like anybody in the neighborhood, black or white. And we knew the dog would bite us with just a nod from Wayne. Tony and Mary Godwin, though lived just across the street from the corner store, and they knew Wayne.
Mary Godwin:
Oh, I remember him very well. He was really, really nice to me. Nice to the kids, nice to... He was very good to his customers. I loved the dog. He had a big white German shepherd, and I loved the dog.
Katie Davis:
I was afraid of the dog there.
Mary Godwin:
Oh, really? Oh, I loved the dog. My kids loved the dog. And that's why he liked us, I think because kids would scream and holler, "Ah, the dog." And get the dog upset. And then because he'd have the dog in the store and everything, for protection or just because he was his pal. But my kids loved that dog, and he liked us because the kids would go and hug the dog, not afraid of the dog. So, he really got along better with us, I think, because we loved that dog.
I remember, he had the best bologna in town. The best bologna. The kids loved the bologna.
He had it like a deli, and he made sandwiches and all that stuff.
Speaker 14: Tony Godwin
Those were lean times at that time. We had bologna sandwiches one day and the next day was a big treat. We fried the bologna.
Mary Godwin:
We loved that bologna.
Tony Godwin:
And it was great. And they had a better brand of soft drinks in them days which most Jewish delicate contestants, the best soft drink you could buy is Francs. And they had it. And you would throw Coca-Cola and Pepsi in a dump if you ever tasted these.
Katie Davis:
A couple of years later, I got bolder. "I'm going to the corner store," I said. My brothers, the Nelsons and Dean dangled their legs off the firehouse wall and gave orders: Two pretzels. I want a jawbreaker, Hostess cherry pie, Sugar Babies for me, and a pack of Camels for Lefty. If you make the trip for Lefty, you get to keep the change. Hester, Barbara Nelson's youngest was the corner store queen in those days.
Hester Nelson:
Well, my relationship with the corner store was fairly unique because when I was very young, I started an account there and I was a candy freak at a very young age, about six years old. I was a really scrawny kid, and I never ate anything but candy. So, one day I decided, "Well, I'm going to have my candy connection secured." So, I decided, "Okay, I'm going to set up an account and I'll just have them bill my mother and father every month." So, I remember one month having this outrageous bill and my parents, I don't know if they got upset or not, I don't think they did, but I owed like a hundred dollars, which was a lot of money. And I would buy candy for everybody. And well, that's why everybody loved me.
Katie Davis:
We learned that money could buy power and maybe love. By that time though, Mattie owned the store. Mattie was African American, and she had bought it from Wayne about a year after we moved in. She hung a sign out front in daffodil yellow, Mattie's and new smells mingled with the wash of ammonia. Sausages hissed from a twirling spit and red-hot peppers hovered in a jar like a lava lamp. The aisles had Crisco Twinkies and Hostess cherry pies, and the names were so spry, we double dutch to them. Crisco, Twinkies, cherry pie.
You jump in and so do I.
Adults came to play the numbers, the underground lottery. My mom bought a black cape on sale at Woody's department store with three brass numbers sewn on the collar. No one knew what the 512 meant, but that same day, mom bought the cape, she walked down to the corner store and played $2 on the number and boxed it.
She paid her rent with the money she won. Mom believed in luck, good and bad. She was six when her mother died of cancer, and 11 when her stepmother sent her away to boarding school. Counting on numbers made sense to mom more than counting on family.
Mattie wrote down each number carefully. Her wrists were glazed with sweat every morning as she put the slips of paper in her apron pocket. And the same people came back in the afternoon to see if they hit the number. That was the best time to crouch by the bottom row of candy and listen. That's how I learned about Peyton getting stabbed. Someone said, "Oh, he deserved it." Another woman said, "He was harmless." And Mattie hushed them both.
In the summer, we made the trip to the corner store barefoot running from tree box to tree box to cool our feet in the powdery dirt. Freeze pops were held first to our foreheads and then to our tongues. Or Mattie sold us half a Popsicle. "Don't you break it, let me." And we went back later for the other half. In August with no air conditioning, ice was an all-day affair.
Mattie's was home base. Touch it, and you were safe. Once in the fifth grade, I ran all the way across the Calvert Street Bridge with Bobby Godwin chasing me because I wouldn't give him a kiss. He lived a block away, but his street was another country. Guys on the corner took what they wanted. I jerked open the screen door to Mattie's and shot in. Then I began poking through the bottles of Rock Creek sodas. Mattie gave me a look, "What are you looking for, Katie?" Then Mattie glanced out the front window and came from behind her counter and cracked-open the screen door. "Now go on Bobby and leave this girl alone. Just go on." Bobby walked away slowly though to save face, but he left.
Corner store safety. I was away at college when the Kims bought the store. They left Matties's sign-up. Mr. And Mrs. Kim were unassuming like that. They made change quietly. The screen door was taken out and a glass door bolted in only a hushed wheeze and a tiny bell to announce the customers. They hired Mohammed from Sierra Leone to stock Dove Bars next to the popsicles. The new inventory captured the shifting people on my block in the 1980s.
Mohammed:
This is the Laughing Cow Original. Laughing Cow. And this is finest baby Havarti. These are all French words.
Katie Davis:
They still sold lard and Crisco. Something I had to go get when mom was going to fry chicken. The Kims kept those staples alongside the French bread and pints of Ben and Jerry's. A few times a day, Mohammed untied his lottery apron and squeezed into the storage room to pray. He was smiling softly when he slipped back behind the register. One day, nine-year-old Nathan pushed two Twinkies and a pack of Oreos over the counter. Mohammed shook his head. "Too much sweets. Nathan, you can only buy one. Only one." After Nathan left, Mohammad lowered his voice and told me, "The boy is eating sadness. Just eating sadness since his grandmother died."
Another day, Salah, the owner of the gas station across from the corner store, pushed in behind me and he was mad because I wrote a letter asking him to clean up his property. Mrs. Kim asked me to write the letter and like a good girl, I did. I stood at the counter as a rosy flush spread up to Salah's ears. "You fucking bitch. How dare you call me dirty." I started to respond, but Mrs. Kim shook her head no, Muhammad stood above us on a milk crate, punching in lottery numbers, and he met my eye. Mrs. Kim slipped her hand over mine and left it there. Corner store safety.
Mrs. Kim sold the corner store, and a developer knocked it down and put-up condos.
Muhammad left without saying goodbye, but I like to think he's in Ohio with his sons and family. I still believe that one day he'll stop by, and I'll find him there in that space that is gone. I spend a lot of time in spaces that are gone now on my block.
Music
Endless thanks to David Schulman, who always helps me. This is his music we're listening to. Also, I'm still in awe that Herman Burney let me use Papa's Folk Song to open the podcast. Thank you, Herman.
The editor is Mary Rose Madden, the engineer, Flawn Williams. Dan Collison of Long-Haul Productions shared his archive tape from the DC riots. And I'm Katie Davis. Next week we'll profile a porch sitter and the neighbors who relied on him. Like Tina.
Tina:
He's always there to protect the kids, to watch out. He was just like the monitor. The street monitor or whatever. He was always looking and investigating and making sure everything is right. Copacetic all the time. He, he's always like right there. He was just very outspoken. He never hesitates to tell you how he felt about anything. He never hesitated about that. And if he saw something that didn't look right, he would make sure and take care of it. Or he just made sure everything was safe for everybody around. He was always like the protector. Different people started coming into the neighborhood and thinking they could do any and everything they wanted whenever they wanted, and nobody would really react to whatever was going on. He would always react, always react to any type of situation. That was a bad situation. He would always have his 2 cents to put in, but it was different, much different. Nobody was there to really watch over us, watch over the neighborhood, make sure everything's safe. That's, that's a lot what I miss about him. 'Cause he was always there to protect us.
Katie Davis:
The porch sitter. Next on Lanier, look for the next episode where podcasts are available and keep jumping the sidewalk squares.
Podcast Close:
Porchtales is produced by HumanitiesDC. If you want to share your DC story, check out the link in the show notes, and be sure to rate and review us wherever our podcast lives on your favorite podcast player. This season is made possible by funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.