This is my own story. It includes my own early avoidances while growing up cocooned in white Arlington County, and what I'm learning now as I tease apart the silken threads woven around me, to make good my escape from their confines.
I have more questions than answers. Which is just as well. The questions lead me forward. This story is not fixed, not a butterfly pinned to a wax-coated mounting-board for display, but a living, emergent quest that began in 2020, and continues to this day.
If these pages have the feel sometimes of a journal, it's that I'm transported by my discoveries. Some spring from events in my childhood reconsidered in a new light. Some arise from historic facts newly revealed, or from ones I've denied or overlooked and am free to absorb now. Other are gifts from black lives told over two centuries, from David Walker's Appeal to contemporary memoirs and the poetry and song of today's young black artists and scholars.
The process has been and continues to be transformative. Discoveries come along that awaken the chrysalis of my thinking in yet another way, inspire me to unfold my wings from dampness and spread them to dry, and to take flight. I am reclaiming the wholeness denied me in the compartmentalization enforced under Jim Crow.
What stirred me to action?
I wish I could say it came from some nobler impulse, like an epiphany to some prophet wandering alone in the desert.
But no. It was another murder of a black man. I won't dwell on the particulars, so I can get my own story underway. I will say for now: it was the killing of George Floyd by police officers, recorded by a steady-nerved teenage girl with her cell phone camera, that once again slashed open my cocoon, six and a half decades after that first time, when as a young teacher I stood at my classroom door and held that postcard in my two hands. This time, as an old man, I did not retreat. I rose in a deliberate way to the challenge.
Hence this memoir.
As a boy recently arrived in Arlington, I wondered where the garbagemen lived.
Not in Arlington, surely.
From the way the dogs barked at them, from their pale gray uniforms with thin stripes, maybe even from their no-nonsense teamwork in banging the metal cans around and trotting alongside the truck, I thought of them as outsiders. Hip outsiders, I would add now. At the time, I assumed they must live somewhere else, maybe across the river in Washington.
By the time I reached junior high school I was hearing rumors that Arlington did indeed have a separate neighborhood, this one also on a hill – Halls Hill – where colored people lived. But I assumed, with my typical avoidance, that if such a place did exist, then it must be in some distant corner of Arlington. For me, Halls Hill was shrouded in myth, like the unexplored regions of old nautical maps where cartographers penned elaborate cartouches or sea serpents looping dangerously off unknown shores.
Middle school was a gathering-place for such stuff, after the relative innocence of grade school. Our bodies were changing, and in the midst of hormonal upheavals we were encountering decrees of racism and gender biases, styles of self-presentation. We were sorting each other out variously by class, stages of pubescence, and prospects for popularity; taking each other's measure by our clothing and hair and our all-important shoes. My memories of middle school are a sort of coloring-book descent into hell.
One sunny morning in eighth grade, I was hanging out with other kids outside Stratford Junior High School, on the broad sidewalk where the school busses let us out.
I was hoping someone would notice my new DayGlo tie. Neckties were not part of our normal attire, but I was pushing the fashion envelope in a kind of nerdish way. I just couldn't wait for a school dance to show off this baby – a narrow knit tie that I'd purchased in D C at a store on Ninth Street a couple of doors from Waxie Maxie's Quality Music. It was DayGlo chartreuse with a single orange DayGlo horizontal stripe.
A kid I barely knew greeted me with a friendly smirk:
"How far did you have to chase the nigger to get that thing? All the way to Halls Hill?"
I recoiled. The kid's condemnation was clear, but it seemed aimed less at me than at colored people. It was an invitation to share a joke, probably even an weird try at friendship. I wasn't accepting either. The N-word took care of that. But as an eighth grader I didn't know quite how to respond in a way that was cool.
I didn't even know whether Halls Hill was an actual place, or just some kind of insult, and was way too cool to ask. I think I responded with a careless shrug and went my own way. I wore the tie again, I'm sure, but my ardor for it had cooled.
Not long ago, I e-mailed an old high school friend of my interest in learning more about Halls Hill. Kitty Sherwood Richmond e-mailed back, directing me to a recent memoir entitled My Halls Hill Family, by someone named Wilma Jones, a fourth-generation resident of Halls Hill.
Written primarily for her own extended family, and self-published in 2018, Jones's memoir opened my eyes to the black Arlington that existed all along, invisibly, behind the white membrane that surrounded us all in that strangely compartmentalized world.
Jones describes a neighborhood without paved streets or curbing; just gravel; houses dependent on wells and outhouses because Halls Hill was denied access to the public water supply and sewage system used by the rest of Arlington. The houses were well-kept, their steps and walkways swept clean. Some homes had wrap-around porches and were situated on deep where residents could tend fruit trees, grape arbors, and berry bushes, keep rabbit-hutches and chickens and pigs and cows. They had large gardens where they grew vegetables like corn, okra, beans, collards, and other greens. They could hunt squirrels and other small game in the adjoining woodland.
She recounts her own parents' struggle, working two and three low-paying jobs, to send Wilma and her four siblings to college; also, their legal efforts along with other parents to get their children admitted to Arlington's acclaimed public schools. Most residents of Halls Hill had more than one job outside in the white community, across the river in government cafeterias or as drivers, janitors, and cleaning ladies. Many had a side-hustles within Halls Hill doing things like car-repair, butchering, hair-styling, carpentry, canning, making pies, brewing herbal tonics, or distilling moonshine.
All this made for a close-knit community, where neighbors gathered for barbeques, ballgames, and church suppers, where adults kept an eye on all children, where a vibrant social life centered around church, rent parties, child-care, the volunteer fire department, and the informal swapping of goods and services.
Jones describes a hostility Negros faced in white Arlington that was far more virulent than anything I'd imagined.
"Jim Crow laws were thriving," Jones writes. "It was difficult for black people to purchase goods or receive services from white businesses in Arlington. If you did try to make a purchase, you risked being called 'boy' or 'nigger' and most certainly received poor treatment." Some white establishments required black people to use a rear door or transact business through a window in the alley.
That level of insult, along with the outright legal restrictions of Jim Crow, intensified black entrepreneurism within the Halls Hill community. Businesses included a funeral parlor, doctor, a maker of cough syrup, a general store, candy store, and two filling stations. The volunteer fire company had been organized in 1918, because the county's paid fire companies would not serve Halls Hill.
I find it staggering now to realize so late in my own life, how it was not just public facilities like schools and libraries that denied Negros access, but basic tax-supported public services essential to health and safety. I still struggle to wrap my mind around the inhumanity and really the insanity imposed by my own democratically elected local government. Arlington Hospital, where we all went, stood right next to Halls Hill, and had even encroached a bit into the one corner using eminent domain, yet would not accept Negros. People died because of this lunacy.
The volunteer fire company, Engine Company Number Eight, was a gathering-place for discussing political issues and voting, and also a source of pride – not only for the way its second-hand trucks were painstakingly maintained, but for the volunteer firemen's efficiency and their readiness to respond to fires in the surrounding white communities, where they often arrived ahead of the professional companies – despite taunts.
"In plenty of situations," Jones writes, "they endured racism from white citizens whose homes they were attempting to save."
Wilma Jones confirmed something I had read elsewhere and found hard to believe but was irrefutable. Halls Hill – already walled off by Jim Crow segregation, by biased local government and news reportage that turned a deaf ear to events in the black community – was separated from its nearest white neighbors by an actual physical wall.
The wall was six feet high. Built variously of wood and steel and concrete, it had been erected by abutting white homeowners in the 1930s with the permission of Arlington County authorities. That wall remained standing into the 1970s. It was there all the time I lived in Arlington.
Somehow that physical wall makes the irony even starker:
There they were on their side of the wall, those Halls Hill kids and their parents exploring legal avenues for gaining access to our schools so they could get a decent education that was unavailable in in their woefully impoverished, overcrowded school – advanced math and science and languages and secretarial skills – so they could get into college or otherwise make their way in the world. And there we were, on our side of the wall, in our well-funded schools, learning all those subjects and more, and deprived of precisely that strand of American history that had built the American economy from the beginning – which is to say, black history and the realities of slavery.
We learned nothing of black courage and black intellect and black struggle; nothing of the many rebellions. We learned nothing of Halls Hill's own unique history and its present realities; nothing of black celebration and joy, the role of the black church; nothing of the chains that remained in force not just in the tobacco and cotton fields of southside Virginia, but among our invisible neighbors on the other side of the wall.
Did l ever see the actual wall?
I'm not sure.
But I suspect I did.
Whatever glimpse I might have caught are fragmented and blurred. Maybe it happened after I'd learned to drive, when I was at the wheel of the family car prowling around looking for roads without streetlights where my high school girlfriend, Sally Lynn, and I could park and make out, where it's possible that a time or two my headlight beams exposed a glimpse of gray wall at the end of a dead-end street.
I could be making this up, but that patch of wall sticks in my mind.
In Arlington, the more blatant markers of Jim Crow were hidden.
Farther south in Virginia, at Greyhound and Trailways bus stations in Richmond, you saw signs posted over the separate entrances that said WHITE ONLY and COLORED ONLY.
Arlington had no actual bus station. The closest thing we had was Roslyn Circle, where the busses from either direction stopped at the Virginia end of Key Bridge.
Roslyn Circle was not the major subway station it has become now. Back in pre-subway, pre-Beltway, pre-Internet Arlington, Roslyn Circle was a little roundabout lined with seedy storefronts that included the three dusty brass balls of a pawnshop, a small four-story brick hotel with a newsstand below, and next to it a jewelry store with a common hallway that led upstairs to where a watch repairman and a shoe-cobbler plied their trades. Half a block away was the shoe store where my mother took me to be fitted for corrective shoes when I was seven or eight.
Roslyn Circle began to figure in my life when I was twelve, old enough to take the bus by myself into Washington for Saturday art lessons at Cornelia Yuditski's Creative Art Studio for Children and Young Adults. To get home, after standing at an easel applying of tempera to newsprint, I caught the bus home from K Steet that would take me either all the way into Arlington or, depending on its number, as far as Roslyn Circle, where I could transfer. There, I'd climb aboard a Virginia bus, hand the driver my pink transfer ticket with its time punched and sit down usually about halfway back.
The driver cranked a new destination into the sign-window. Then, because we were in Virginia, he'd issue an order for Negro passengers to move to the back of the bus. I don't remember the exact words he used, even whether he said 'Negro' or 'colored'. The order didn't affect me, and now I realize I didn't want to hear, or even see the blur of legs and feet going past my downward gaze. I do remember looking up to see the driver's blue eyes in the inside rearview mirror making sure that everyone had complied, because that was his job.
Once I recall a disturbance when a Negro man remained sprawled in deep sleep across the aisle from me. He looked utterly exhausted, or drunk, or both, with his head lolling on the seat-back, his mouth open and drooling. The bus driver came back and tried to nudge him awake. I think it was at the next stop that a policeman came aboard and managed to escort the man off the bus. That too is a blur. What I more keenly remember is the embarrassment I felt – partly on that poor man's behalf, but also for the rest of us who were witnessing this abrogation of the natural order.
I cringe now to recall that feeling. It was so white and remains so indelible.
The man looked helpless, exhausted. For all I know, he might have had a seizure or a minor stroke. But my response was part of the personal enclosure I was learning to spin around myself, so I could pretend the movement of feet past my seat was as natural as water running downhill, and now can't recall the bus driver's words. I remember only my wonder and revulsion for that man sprawled with his mouth open.
Just as vague is my memory of two separate drinking fountains. I think they were located in the common hallway next to the jewelry shop at Roslyn Circle. Above a grimy fountain was a sign that said COLORED; above the clean one, a sign that said WHITE ONLY. The message was clear. Anyone forced by their color to drink from the filthy one was humiliated; anyone drinking from the clean one was having their white superiority affirmed.
I don't recall seeing those starkly paired drinking fountains elsewhere else in Arlington. They weren't needed where Negros were made to mostly disappear.
People liked to say Arlington was "not really Virginia" because of all the government workers who'd flocked in from elsewhere. But under Arlington's surface modernity were the bones and sinews of the Old South.
Yes, this process of discovery I've described here is humbling. Yes, it brings pain. But it brings surprising joy.
To free myself of the cloying fabrications that surrounded me is cleansing. The discoveries beckon me forward – I was going to say 'to the next clear pool, waiting for me to dive in' – but metaphor aside, an actual pool comes to mind; one so vivid in memory that I want to carry you ahead several years beyond the main timeframe of my story, to something that happened in the summer of 1972.
I was 31. I'd dropped out of teaching to devote myself to protesting the war in Vietnam. I'd left my marriage. My wife, Ginny, couldn't understand my fury at the various pretexts for increasing the number of American troops and widening the conflict; my rage at the Gulf of Tonkin resolution; at Defense Secretary Melvin Laird's doublespeak in describing the carpet-bombing at the Cambodian border as 'offensive strikes of a defensive nature'.
I was suffering from burnout – despondent that Richard Nixon was still President, that the Vietnam war was still grinding on in the former rubber plantations and rice paddies of French colonial Indochina. My own efforts to end the war and bring American troops home by then seemed dogged and futile.
I wanted to escape. I continued to see my two young sons, but otherwise wanted to drop out completely from middle class respectability.
So I hopped freights.
The idea seemed original enough. Never mind it was planted somewhere by Jack Kerouac. John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie. A uniquely American enterprise. And I was going to meet my new girlfriend, Annie Shapiro, in Santa Rosa. So, it had that touch of romance. More than a touch. We'd sewed down-filled sleeping bags from a kit. They zipped together. I was left zip; she was right zip. She would drive west from New Rochelle with a girlfriend, while I made the trip by freights.
I hopped west through the July oven-heat of New Mexico and Arizona and ended up in a big freight yard at the northern outskirts of LA, looking for northbound. I met another man searching, as I was, for a fast freight we'd heard of called the Gray Ghost. Such a train is rumored around freight yards a lot, the stuff of tramp myth. Maybe a tease by brakemen in switchyards who are full of such lore. But we'd both heard of the Gray Ghost, this other guy and I, and we were both headed north up California's Central Valley, to see our respective girlfriends – mine in Santa Rosa, his in Oakland. He was a black man, about my age and build, and he called himself Chicago Lite.
At one point in our travels, Chicago Lite and I ended up at the edge of the Mojave desert, stranded, between freights. We'd abandoned the freight we were on, when its two engine-units were insufficient to make the grade up into the small brown mountains. We'd stood near the front engine and overheard the engineer on his phone trying to get another unit sent. He turned to his fireman with a chuckle and quoted the dispatcher saying everything was tied up 'tighter than a bull's ass in fly season'.
So we left that train and set off in search of water. Our supply of drinking water was meager. And the stink of our clothing was foul – not just the layers of dried sweat and smears of black grease you got from climbing over couplings, but the clinging miasma of diesel smoke particulates and rotten produce that is the price of riding for free in boxcars.
We walked toward a distant fringe of trees, which as we got closer turned out to be a cottonwood and some willows and sumac that overarched a gulch. At the bottom of the gulch was, sure enough, the trickle of a creek threading among the rocks. We followed that tiny creek, hoping to find a pool where we could jump in and swim or even enough to kneel and wash out our clothes.
The creek never amounted to more than a trickle. The closest we came to a pool was a place where the water deepened no more than the span of your hand. We stood looking at it.
"Too bad," I muttered bleakly.
Despair had become a habit for me – as if it were somehow the portion I deserved, for all my efforts struggling against the war. Despair served to amplify so much gone wrong in the world, and my teaching career and marriage come to naught.
Then I turned and looked down, and was surprised to see Lite had lain down among the rocks, fully clothed, the water seeping up through his clothes; eyes shut, a big grin spreading across his face.
Comprehension descended through me like water itself. I lay down nearby. I felt the coolness of actual water soak around the back of my head as far as my ears, felt it soak cool little fingers upward through my clothes. Felt a grin stretch across my own face.
No swim has ever felt so fine.
That's the nature of truth. You find it where you can, when you can.
The quest I've embarked on has such discoveries. Truth comes in trickles at times, other times in a torrent of whatever wild beauty or pain I can allow myself to feel in the moment.
You just have to be ready.