Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington, D.C. 9781501711626

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Upscaling Downtown

The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues A SERIES EDITED BY

ROGER SANJEK A full list of titles in the series appears at the end of this book.

Upscaling Downtown STALLED GENTRIFICATION I N W A S H I N G T O N , D.C.

Brett Williams

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright © 1988 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1988 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1988. International Standard Book Number (cloth) 0-8014-2106-3 International Standard Book Number (paper) 0-8014-9419-2 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 87-27350 Printed in the United States of America Librarians: Library of Congress cataloging information appears on the last page of the book. Cornell University Press strives to utilize environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are also either recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. Cloth printing 1 0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Paperback printing 10 9 8 7 6 5

To Colleen, Bobby, and Lucy

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Contents

ix

Preface Introduction

1

1. Revisiting the Symbolic City

7

2. Reinventing the South

24

3. The Meaning of Home

52

4. The Struggle for Main Street

76

5. Tele-visions of Urban Life

100

6. The Invention of Community

121

References

145

Index

155

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Preface

This book tells the story of a Washington, D.C., neighborhood to which many people have fiercely attached themselves. By looking at a time of stalled gentrification, it details rich promise and some missed possibilities for integrated urban life. I lived and worked in "Elm Valley for ten years, moving from the rented row house I shared with a friend and her three sons into a large, deteriorating apartment building and then into another rented row house with my husband and children. I conducted many hours of formal interviews with women, men, and children I met in shops, restaurants, taverns, churches, day-care centers, hallways, and alleys and on street corners. I also attended innumerable neighborhood meetings, visited in many people's homes, and was a full participant-observer in the life of the community. My family and I have now left Elm Valley. We outlasted many others of our means because we were even more fiercely attached than most. I thus bring to this story many of the insights, as well as the liabilities, of what Renato Rosaldo (1984) has called "the positioned observer." In writing this book, I have often wished that the neighborhood were less dense and complex. I have

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longed for a more straightforward story line and for conflicts that were more clear-cut. The entanglements I explore, however, seem true to the ambiguities of city life and to the nature of ethnography. No longer do I easily vilify the residents I disagree with, and it is harder to dismiss them with cliches. Nevertheless, I am saddened and angry that people must work so hard and with so little lasting success to build a meaningful community. All the place-names I use in this book were borrowed from rural North Carolina. Like many of the residents of Washington, D.C., the names are real but transplanted. It will soon be apparent, I think, why I feel I must try to disguise the place. I have tried to camouflage the residents as well, and therefore I cannot thank many of the people I should. I feel uncomfortable about usurping the voices of Elm Valley residents, but I did so for two reasons. First, some wanted to remain anonymous. Revealing the names of those who did not mind would have caused other names to emerge as well. Connections among neighbors are complicated and precarious, and I do not want to disrupt them. The second reason reflects the nature of ethnographic fieldwork, which depends on daily interactions over time. I could not monitor and frame every encounter to offer people conscious authorship of what I would eventually write. This problem was especially complex in part because I lived in Elm Valley for so long, and in part because I married out of my logical group. Marrying out helped me see different perspectives more clearly, but it also allowed me to "pass" in some situations. I have decided that it is not fair to take too much advantage of those encounters by identifying those who may now feel that they revealed too much. Of those outside Elm Valley, no one has been more helpful than John Henry Pitt. If race and class were not real, he would have written this book. Others who have helped me understand the community include Catherine Allen, Le-thi [x]

Preface

Bai, Maria Beamon, Olivia Cadaval, Cristina Espinel, Therese Jones, Ruth Landman, Freeman Mason, Joan Radner, Patricia Rabain, and Patricia Rickenbaker. Although they have never been to Elm Valley, Susan Draper, Robert Emerson, Christopher Geist, Harold Gould, Douglass Midgett, Robert L. Rubinstein, Barrie Thorne, and Tony Larry Whitehead at various times reviewed pieces of this work, pointed out complexities I had missed, and saved me from embarrassing mistakes. Laura Shields recorded many hours of television programs about city life which I simply could not bear to watch any more. My friends Warren Belasco, Geoffrey Burkhart, Micaela di Leonardo, William Leap, Kay Mussell, Leslie Prosterman, and Karen Sacks talked to me often about evolving versions of the book and offered valuable suggestions for how to make it better. The D.C. Community Humanities Council and its extraordinary staff at the time, Beatrice Hackett, Cleve Harrigan, and Lillie M. Stringfellow, encouraged, guided, and funded several cultural programs in the neighborhood which allowed me to try out my ideas and expand my research. Students, colleagues, and staff in the Department of Anthropology and the American Studies Program at American University tolerated the distractions and supported me immeasurably in writing the book. Without the encouragement and advice of Roger Sanjek, I might never have written it. Finally I thank Laura Helper and Peter Agree of Cornell University Press and my copy editor, Alice Bennett, for their help in bringing the book to publication. BRETT WILLIAMS Washington, D.C.

M

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Upscaling Downtown

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Introduction

This book explores the complexities of life in a varied urban neighborhood I call Elm Valley. Here a core of longterm black American residents has welcomed many newcomers in the past ten years, including refugees from East Africa, Central America, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean and, most problematically, prosperous white middle-class property owners. For several of these years, rising interest rates and a faltering housing market delayed what otherwise would have been rapid and dramatic displacement. These years of stalled gentrification framed an anomalous time when the most unlikely groups of people tried to live together as neighbors. The story of their attempts opens rare windows on the difficulties as well as the possibilities of achieving racially, ethnically, and economically integrated cities. The residents of Elm Valley share a physical setting and participate generally in a national culture of overwhelming presence in the District of Columbia. Yet their visions of the neighborhood and the city and their strategies for living there have varied a great deal. It appears today that these differences will be resolved at the expense of the poor. Although this book tells the small story of one neighborhood's transformation, in a larger sense it is about how peo-

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Introduction pie attach different meanings to objects such as gardens, houses, sidewalks, stores, and streets—objects that anchor their everyday lives. These meanings are many layered. They are often distorted by national cultural processes, which offer us houses as homes; quaint, safe tourist tracts as communities; commoditized versions of ourselves as inauthentic or traditional, yuppie or ethnic. We may engage these confusing, shifting, weightless meanings with others of our own. We may share those meanings with our neighbors or, as in Elm Valley, disagree desperately about them. The book is about our battle with cliches. Through the ways people try to build meaningful lives, we can see both the profoundly alienating social forces we all must confront in modern America and also the ways we try to anchor ourselves in worlds of our own making. I argue that those who insist on vivid, detailed, interwoven, textured worlds build the most satisfying urban communities. This book has six chapters. In the first I describe the regional and metropolitan setting. Washington, D.C., is a symbolic city with a paradoxical colonial history. More than any other city in the United States, Washington juxtaposes national culture and a vibrant underlife. Although American myths hold that Washington is somehow nowhere, in reality it is firmly anchored in a regional economy that has drawn those displaced from the often-depressed Carolinas to staff the city's service sector. Elm Valley is only one of several neighborhoods that have experienced a strong tradition of civic activism, vital, continuing links to the upper South, and the disruption of rapid residential flux in recent years. Chapter 1 locates Elm Valley's long-lasting core of black American residents in terms of the social, economic, historical, and regional forces that brought them there and that have ultimately dislocated the generation moving into adulthood today. In the chapters that follow, I introduce each group of resi[2]

Introduction

dents chronologically as they have appeared on the local scene and place them in their niches of shared space in Elm Valley. In each chapter I move in and out of Elm Valley to trace the larger cultural processes that influence life there. In most chapters I highlight neighborhood conflicts, because those conflicts illuminate residents' passions and concerns in particularly sharp ways. Chapter 2 explores the Carolina traditions lived out by Elm Valley's core residents. For thirty years these residents have rebuilt Carolina culture through the shared lore of alley gardens, through the exchange of medicines and delicacies, through fishing and feasting among metropolitan kin, and in visits, exchanges, and the construction of an alternative economy with relatives who bring the Carolina harvest to the city. Carolina foods have been almost alone in resisting the relentless merchandising of nostalgic, neoregional, neoethnic dishes often marketed to the younger white professionals who are among Elm Valley's newest residents. I argue that Carolina culture helps black residents resist mass media messages about Washingtonians by allowing them to construct alternative identities and relationships based on ties of friendship and family, history and place. This symbolic anchor is not without contradictions, given the true grimness of some of the areas former Carolinians have left behind. Nonetheless, in many ways it is a powerfully renegotiated oppositional identity, which knits together neighbors and draws families together across the city. Carolina families span a wide range of incomes and occupational categories, and younger members often reside in Washington apartments or in the suburbs. In the next chapter I move to the apartment buildings and to renovation, deterioration, and movement in and out of Elm Valley. Although the neighborhood is unique and complex, its location in Washington and its social history as one of the first places in the world to experience gentrification allow us to use it as a model for the interaction between national culture [3]

Introduction

and varied urban living. Chapter 3 introduces new white homeowners and new Latino renters, unraveling their, and old tenants', conflicting perceptions about inhabiting an urban place. The chapter explores how apartment dwellers and the owners of houses see each other's lives and build ideas about one another. In Elm Valley, row-house renovation mirrors the relentless decline of the large apartment buildings, most of whose residents have been evicted so that the owners can rehabilitate them for wealthier people. To understand owners' feelings about renters, as well as renters' complex emotions about owners and about one another, I had to look outside Elm Valley at the powerful commercial connotations that, since at least the 1950s, have clustered around the word home. Circumstances in Elm Valley have challenged many of these connotations, yet the metaphor —that a house is a home and that a person who owns a house has special cultural qualities—provides a divisive frame for urban encounters and tenant activism. It also bares the contradictions and pain of displacement. In chapter 4 I turn to the ways the circumstances of renting and owning shape public life. Elm Valley makes tangible the abstract intersection of class and culture, as the passion for interactional depth that is firmly rooted in black American culture is bolstered by the constraints of dense living. Through the work of the street, male renters build a vivid, detailed repertoire of biographical, historical, and everyday knowledge about community life. Main Street, Elm Valley's central forum, has grown to be the focus of harsh feelings and escalating conflicts. In part this reflects the interaction between class and culture as new owners' resources, preferences for metropolitan breadth, and conflicting search for variety and community distance them from the main street and alienate them from its men, who seem to have become emblematic of the problems of living with renters. I have found it impossible to discuss modern urban life [4]

Introduction without noting the influence of network television, a powerful medium for framing unfamiliar encounters. Chapter 5 focuses on the new late prime-time divide, with programs aimed at class-based audiences, often portraying members of one social class to those in another. Whereas poorer people prefer shows that feature wealthy families and may exaggerate the advantages of house living, middle-class people are drawn to programs that treat city life and the poor. This parallel gentrification of both television and Elm Valley has significant consequences in everyday life. Elm Valley's children are the most happily and unselfconsciously integrated of its residents, linked across almost every boundary that divides adults. Among the institutions and traditions that bring them together, none has more force than the imaginary characters they borrow from television. Through shared language, costumes, props, and games, the children translate a popular culture form (which is relentlessly and pervasively merchandised) into folk culture. Superhero/action figure/team culture has become an important pathway into child culture for refugee children, separated otherwise by language, culture, style of family living, foodways, and dress. Children build a strong and unifying set of folk traditions rooted in a meaningless television paradigm. This poses very important questions about the future of communal traditions in their lives. Finally, chapter 6 introduces the refugees who have immeasurably enriched and complicated Elm Valley life in recent years, importing foods and languages beyond what most older residents have known. This chapter also offers a sort of epitaph for Elm Valley, echoing a widespread sense among residents that the years of integrated living are over as gentrification and displacement speed up. Through two lastditch and somewhat polarized efforts to invent community, Elm Valley provides important lessons for preserving urban variety. In the first, a group of mostly newer homeowners

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Introduction has sought to create a community of memory, preserving what they see as the sense of living in a particular time and place by taking control of the built environment in Elm Valley. The second effort has involved a deliberate attempt to engage in the politics of culture by drawing on folk traditions as a model for cultures of resistance and on the symbolic strategies of metaphor and bricolage to produce community festivals with indigenous meanings. Both speak to the importance of grounding international and national forces in everyday life, but they also address the difficulties of grass-roots organizing that must look outward and inward at once.

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[1] Revisiting the Symbolic City Washington is a city of northern charm and southern efficiency. —John F. Kennedy

The City as Cliche Symbols and stereotypes surround Washington, D.C., and offer its residents a bounty of cliches. Catch phrases meant to capture the city's identity have included President Kennedy's "northern charm and southern efficiency" and President Nixon's "crime capital of the world." Blues musician Huddie Ledbetter thought it a "bourgeois town" and commemorated it in his song of that name. Jean Toomer and Langston Hughes were among many in the black cultural elite who were torn between the glimmerings of southern folk tradition they sensed here and a cityscape they found lonesome, pretentious, and alienating. Most recently, American Studies scholar Joel Garreau excludes Washington from his "nine nations of North America" because it "is so consumed by itself and lumps it with Hawaii, Alaska, and New York in a separate chapter entitled "Aberrations." Garreau glibly expresses a widely held view that Washington is an unanchored place where no one really lives except those [7]

Revisiting the Symbolic City who get rich from the growth of an isolated, Byzantine bureaucracy that has nothing to do with the rest of us. "Except for the black poor," he writes, "Washington has the highest per capita income in the nation" (Garreau 1981, pp. 67, 100-104).! Garreau's blithe dismissal of 70 percent of the city's population is typical of those portraits of the city which do not see its people as real. Complementing such stereotypes is Washington's international role as a metaphor for the nation and its less known but increasingly spotlighted position as a stage for national and international black politics. As a center for the antilynching, antisegregation, voting-rights, and antiapartheid campaigns, Washington has often seen its destiny linked to black political issues elsewhere. Such connections reflect both black activism within the District and also the occasional sensitivity of federal politicians to their own black constituents. Washington received limited home rule only after the civil rights movement had enfranchised black voters in other places; its current quest for statehood may rely on those same voters, since the District's residents have no votes in Congress. This strange constellation of stereotypes and symbols that make up Washington's anomalous identity has contradictory implications for its residents: living in a place denied meaning by outsiders, they find their political acts sometimes take on meanings that stretch far beyond their own city. Living in a political colony, they have nonetheless been able to construct a vibrant, sometimes oppositional place. As unrecognized residents, they have often turned their attention and i. Other scholars, most notably Hannerz (1969) and Liebow (1967), have offered vivid ethnographies of Washington life. Their reports, however, do not really explore Washington as a place within a region or as a city where national cultural processes are peculiarly problematic. For an interesting discussion of family migration from South Carolina to Philadelphia, see Ballard (1984). [8]

Revisiting the Symbolic City energies toward building neighborhood life. Even more than most of us, Washington's people must battle inappropriate cliches in an effort to build meaning.2

Inside Downtown The cliches that treat Washington as a symbolic, political, isolated, floating metropolis obscure its place in a regional, national, and world economy where people migrate to find refuge and work. At first glance the downtown neighborhood of Elm Valley seems to offer stereotypical urban characters. Its main street is lively with black and Latino men who could provide background for the television show "Hill Street Blues" or for media warnings to tourists who might venture too far from the mall. Young whites might delight reporters seeking former antiwar activists turned upscale consumers as they start Volvos, board buses, and mount bicycles to ride to work. Many Americans "know" one-dimensional caricatures of those who live in Elm Valley. But the people and the place are much more complex. From a nineteenth-century tract comprising several large estates, in the early years of this century Elm Valley grew up around a trolley-car turnaround, becoming an inexpensive settlement for commuting government clerks. Its modest row housing combined the integrity of private houses with the economy of shared walls and lots. Its present commercial 2. Washington's anomalous identity may best be understood by contrast to the way residents of New York City sometimes express a wry, reflexive sense of being part of a place to which they link their own identity. One man, for example, recently explained to me very simply why his family had never considered moving: "We're New Yorkers." A second popular and folk portrait consistently contrasts Washington to Baltimore, which many observers feel is a more authentic city where, as one taxi driver put it, "people are here to stay, not like in Washington where they change with every administration."

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Revisiting the Symbolic City strip of mostly mom-and-pop stores, along with the prominent residential porches, recalls an era when people took the streetcar home from work and shopped in the community. Like other parts of Washington, the neighborhood welcomed many new residents during the depression and the war years, and its several large apartment buildings reflect that second period of development. However, the community's definite physical boundaries, including busy main avenues and large parks, have kept away through traffic and largescale commercial development. Proud of a long tradition of inward-looking civic activism, in the past thirty years Elm Valley has seen dramatic residential changes. For the first half of the century, Elm Valley remained an all-white community of varied ethnic groups, whose shopkeepers lived in the neighborhood and whose churches served the local residents. The 1954 Boiling v. Sharpe decision legalizing integration in the District of Columbia brought massive white flight, and by 1970 the neighborhood was 80 percent black. In the past fifteen years refugees from Central America, Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Caribbean have filled the basements of row houses and crowded into small apartments. Joining them, at first slowly, then more quickly since 1975, have been middle-class whites, coming for a variety of reasons. While unique in its intricate variety, Elm Valley displays representative patterns of urban succession: streetcar suburbanization as city dwellers agreed to commute in exchange for a more bucolic life away from the blighted city center; black in-migration and white flight as the cities were abandoned to those considered poor and dangerous; gentrification, as whites returned to the city, finding that they would rather not commute and in some cases discovering that they valued the excitement of city life. This rather comfortable, largely working-class community in the heart of Washington's service sector stands in contrast

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Revisiting the Symbolic City to Washington neighborhoods with different migration and settlement histories. Some of these are farther from the city center, settled and stably black since the nineteenth century, and more prosperous. A different kind of contrast separates Elm Valley from communities in the District's Southeast sector. Settled as post-Civil War communities of freed slaves, these neighborhoods were left behind as the city turned its back on the water and were later filled by those displaced from more desired neighborhoods. This book looks at how these varied groups have tried to reconcile conflicting views about how to live urban lives. Each pocket of Elm Valley will be opened up and its contents explored in detail. I begin with those families who occupy the center of Elm Valley and whose own connections to the Carolinas demonstrate Washington's place in a regional economy.

Washington in Its Region "I have a spot in Soldier's Home to which I always go when I want the simple beauty of another's soul. . . . Washington lies below. Its light spreads like a blush against the darkened sky. Against the soft dusk sky of Washington. And when the wind is from the South, soil of my homeland falls like a fertile shower upon the lean streets of the city. . . . I saw the dawn steal over Washington. The Capitol dome looked like a gray ghost ship drifting in from sea. Avey's face was pale, and her eyes were heavy. She did not have the gray crimson-splashed beauty of the dawn. I hated to wake her. Orphan-woman" (Toomer 1927). In Cane, a landmark of the 1920s Harlem-D.C. renaissance movement of black writers, Jean Toomer most appropriately suggests that Washington is filled with displaced southern people. Residents today uphold a long-standing myth that the city is an

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oasis for blacks. One black man, a resident of twenty-five years, impressed this upon me while watching on television the Martin Luther King, Jr., birthday gala staged in three cities. As commentators offered the view that Washington audiences were "stodgy," this man repeatedly pointed out that the Washington audience was the only one that was integrated. He saw this as proof of his contention that Washington was a good place to be black and to live together with whites. Many others share this belief, which to some extent is mythical, given the tremendous, lasting economic disparity between blacks and whites in Washington. But the myth influenced even the earliest migrations of blacks to the city. From its first days as the national capital in the early nineteenth century, Washington welcomed runaway slaves and black freed people seeking refuge. Because the federal government in the nineteenth century was small and legislators preferred to stay in the capital only a few months a year, slaves and free blacks enjoyed greater freedom and wider job opportunities than in other cities. From being a town with southern ambience that offered the bonus of northern abolitionist congressmen, Washington quickly came to house a settled, stable community of black workers who built the city and served as carpenters, barbers, shoemakers, caterers and chefs, blacksmiths, plasterers, bricklayers, peddlers, hucksters, gardeners, clerks, messengers, porters, waiters, clerks, and domestic servants. The early trickle of migration between 1820 and 1850 swelled after the Civil War as refugees from the South filled Washington's downtown, formed riverside squatter settlements, and built communities in its alleys (Borchert 1980; Brown and Lewis 1971; Fordham 1987; Green 1962, 1967; Lewis 1976; Smith 1974). Many more people came to Washington just after World War I and again after World War II. Like those who came earlier, the immigrants of the 1940s were fleeing political op-

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pression and economic turmoil in the South. Those who came to Elm Valley during this period, like their counterparts in Philadelphia, New York City, and other parts of Washington, left particular local areas joined to specific urban centers, largely the tobacco, cotton, peanut, and truck farm area of North Carolina's eastern coastal plain. Taking advantage of emerging big government as earlier migrants had of small, they filled some jobs in the federal government (as clerks, typists, janitors, and errand folk) and many more in the growing city as domestics, custodians, taxi drivers, cooks, and waiters. In many ways black economic life in the Carolinas retraces southern economic history. For many years after the Civil War the southern elite kept its agricultural bias, relying on land as a major resource and gearing its industrial strategies toward enhancing the value of agricultural products, keeping wages low, and holding nonowners on the land. Like other states, until after World War II North Carolina remained primarily a region of small farms and factories, heavily dependent on just a few labor-intensive crops, relying on sharecropping and tenancy, especially for black laborers. The Carolinas are distinct for their economic dependence on tobacco as well as on cotton and rice, and for their many small-scale furniture, textile, and tobacco factories. Until the 1930s most black families lived in rural areas, managing to subsist within a system that demanded they live and work on the land, supplementing agricultural production with segregated, low-paid, seasonal day work in the factories. Wages stayed low in spite of a great deal of labor unrest, because there was political and military support for the factory owners and because many poor tenant farmers and sharecroppers formed an unskilled and needy labor pool. Some white tenants and fewer black ones were able to accumulate the credit, reputation, and eventual surplus they needed to become landowners. But for the most part the tenancy/

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sharecropping system served as a sort of collecting ground for Carolina blacks and supported the low-wage industrial system. The transformations in Carolina agriculture that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century were fairly representative of the regional transformation of the South during that time. With the depression, farm income plummeted. New Deal measures such as the National Recovery Administration's minimum-wage guidelines often hurt black workers, since they might be fired to help factories comply. The Agricultural Adjustment Act, which offered farmers cash to restrict acreage, spurred an American enclosure movement as tenants were removed from the land to keep production down. In North Carolina new allotment legislation determined which farms could grow tobacco and how much. The allotment system was granted to farms with a history of tobacco productivity and was enormously successful in keeping supplies down and protecting native farmers, but it worked and continues to work against black farmers, who are less likely to inherit allotments or to build the personal contacts helpful in leasing them (Groger 1982; Jones 1980). Complementing and sometimes sparked by New Deal legislation, technological changes in North Carolina industries (such as wood drying, waterproofing, and finishing in the furniture factories and the mechanization of cigarette rolling) made all the industries except tobacco much less dependent on hand labor. In the 1940s mechanization throughout the South decimated the farm population as tractors replaced tenants and encouraged large-scale, capital-intensive farming. Farms increased in size, and many more tenants were displaced. By the mid-1960s the transformation was nearly complete. During this period many blacks left the Carolinas for Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington, and New York, inspired by the experience of World War II, encouraged by

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the boom times of big government during the depression and the war, and unquestionably displaced at home. Those who came to Washington during this period achieved mixed success. Confronting a notoriously nonunion, low-wage, service-oriented city, their fortunes rested on luck, skills, connections, and perseverance—and in particular on seizing a timely historical moment. They found opportunities forever lacking in the Carolinas, but they also bumped up against the rigid job ceiling that Washington offers blacks. They left behind relatives whose land loss continues, who are the lowest-paid and least unionized industrial workers in the country, and whose farm income is likely to be under $4,000 a year (Daniels 1941; Hendricks 1939; Flowers, Cooper, and Smith 1972; Fordham 1987; Jones 1985; Parramore and Wilms 1983; Perrow 1982; Shields 1972; Wright 1986). Although those who came to Elm Valley had found life untenable in the Carolinas, they migrated at a rather flush time in the Washington economy and secured inexpensive housing in the wake of white flight. They and the relatives who followed them occupy a wide range of places in Washington's economic, social, and geographic structure. For illustration, I shall document in detail the migration and settlement of one such family.

The Harper Family The Harpers have lived in North Carolina for 150 years. They took their name from the plantation where their ancestors once worked and the county that bears that name.3 3. The Harpers appear here as patrikin for several reasons. First, I was struck by the unusual importance of male as well as female agency in keeping up connections among Harper kin. If I had written about the family from the point of view of Louise Harper, who married in, one could

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Revisiting the Symbolic City

Fig. 1. The Harper family

Shortly after World War II, members of this family began moving to Washington, taking advantage of a time when they could find better opportunities than those available in the bleak, repressive economic setting of the North Carolina coastal plain (see fig. 1). The first to migrate, and the present moral center of the Washington branch of the family, was Walter Harper, sixty-five, who came to Washington in 1945 after serving in World War II, eager to escape his tiny see better how central she is in gathering relatives during the summer and at holidays, in counseling and managing the problematic younger cousins, and in acting as a moral center in the same way that Walter does in Washington. But when viewed from Washington, the family is composed mainly of men who moved and married there, following Walter and Josephine. Lonnie and Carolyn are active in organizing family affairs, but their other female cousins moved out of the Carolina-Washington region. Though the women who married Harper men keep up ties to their natal kin as well, they tend to keep the groups somewhat separate (for example, by celebrating holidays with one or the other). Thus, although the kindred of one of the male cousin's wives would include many non-Harper relatives, I have chosen to emphasize the Harpers' identity as a family.

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hometown. He first moved to the Southeast sector of Washington, where he rented an apartment, found a job as a security guard, and married Darlene, who held a clerical job in the federal government. Two years later his sister Josephine joined them, finding work as a domestic and soon marrying and moving to another apartment in Southeast Washington. In 1951 Walter and Darlene's daughter Carolyn was born, and the next year Walter returned to North Carolina to "get Lonnie [his orphaned niece] and bring her up." In 1960 Walter and Darlene bought an inexpensive house in Elm Valley, "the first black to move onto this row." After their divorce in 1967, the neighbors on the block became Walter's lifemates. By 1970 the house was paid for, and the neighborhood had become 65 percent black. After financing Carolyn's education at Howard University through the tuition benefits granted him as staff, Walter left that job to begin driving a taxi. Josephine died in 1981 of complications from diabetes and gangrene, having raised her three granddaughters after her own daughter died. Walter's sister Mildred had died earlier, and his other siblings have remained in North Carolina. His sister Mary moved with her husband Samuel to Rocky Mount to work as a domestic and a tobacco rehandler. Walter's brother Cornelius and his wife Dorothy moved onto a white estate and served most of their lives as chauffeur and cook. Their brother Charles and his wife Louise moved onto her parents' farm, raising and butchering hogs, growing small amounts of peanuts and row crops such as melons, beans, and squash, and supplementing their income through carpentry and domestic service. (Louise worked for white families around town and also spent periods in New York City.) Today Louise is nearly retired; she spends two days a week at a senior center sewing and doing embroidery, and she works hard in the kitchen and in their garden. Charles remains active raising hogs. These siblings' fortunes varied

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over a narrow range, with Charles and Walter, as property owners, clearly the most secure members of the family. Their now-widowed brother Cornelius lives in a rented hovel, tending his garden and fishing in the mornings, visiting and socializing in the afternoons. In contrast to this generation's willingness to remain in North Carolina, all of their children have tried at least brief sojourns in Washington, and a few have moved even farther. These cousins' fortunes have varied, reflecting different migration strategies, changing occupational opportunities, and the fluctuating ability and willingness of senior kin to give them help. The most dramatic illustration of the cousins' varied fortunes emerges from a tragic accident that killed Walter's brother Henry and his wife Lorice when their seven children were young. These siblings' ages ranged over about twenty years, and their lives have reflected this range as well as their options and strategies as foster children. Walter and Darlene brought Lonnie, the youngest daughter, to live with them. They supervised Lonnie's adolescence closely, helped her complete high school, and saw that she found a good government job. Lonnie married Herbert Parker, a bank officer, and they and their son Kenneth live in Maryland. Lonnie and her cousin Carolyn are among the most urbane of the younger generation, firmly settled in the civil service and in Washington. Their solidly middle-class lives are a tribute both to the wider opportunities of the 1960s and to Walter and Darlene's assistance and care. Lorice and Henry's oldest daughter Marjorie and their youngest son Herman came to Washington to live with Lorice's sister Ida (who had come north "with two girl friends" because "there was nothing really to do"). Ida raised Marjorie and Herman along with her own daughter Gloria; as adults Marjorie and Gloria moved to New York, taking the teenage Herman with them, and Marjorie kept him until he was grown. Gloria died in her twenties, but Herman and

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Revisiting the Symbolic City Marjorie have worked for twenty years at hard but steady jobs (he as an engineer and she as a hospital food-service worker). Their spouses have also worked at secure jobs: Herman's wife Grace is a computer programmer, and Marjorie's husband William drives an oil delivery truck. Clearly, growing up in Washington during more open economic times, with adult kin who were fairly secure, has helped these four cousins build stable lives. All have remained married to the same persons, begun to raise children, and bought houses and cars. All five are based in the city; they welcome kin who come to visit there but seldom return to North Carolina, which Marjorie calls "too dead." Lorice and Henry's three other sons (Robert, Stanley, and Ben) lived off and on in Rocky Mount with their Aunt Mary or their father's mother, and in the country with their Uncle Charles and Aunt Louise, who badly needed their labor on the farm. None of the three finished elementary school. In the early 1960s, when they were in their late teens, Robert and Stanley followed their Uncle Walter to Washington, traveling with their Aunt Mary's son Cornelius and Louise and Charles' sons Charles and Joseph. (A younger cohort of male cousins, including Ben, Mary's son Ralph, and Mildred's son Odell, remained in North Carolina during this time.) These older cousins all moved through Josephine's and Walter's homes as they arrived in Washington. Charles Jr. arrived in 1960 because he "didn't want to stay on a farm." Living with Walter for the first two years, he first worked as a cook and in a few years found a job as a florist's assistant, where he has remained for twenty-five years. Married twice, he now lives with his wife Doris, a career civil service worker, and his daughter Laura in their own house in a far suburb of Washington. Robert, Cornelius, and Joseph lived with their Aunt Josephine for several years, then stayed in a succession of rooming houses in Elm Valley until Cornelius

[19]

Revisiting the Symbolic City

and Robert married and Joseph decided to return to his parents' farm. Robert has worked for twenty-five years as a cook; he and his wife Lucy, a day-care worker, share an apartment in Elm Valley. Cornelius moved back and forth between Carolina and Washington during the 1960s before settling permanently in Washington toward the end of the decade. Cornelius has been more marginally employed $s an electrician, though he has many skills. He and his wife Gayla live with their two children in another suburb; they rent and move every several years. These older cousins are all in their forties, and all survived the move to Washington and took advantage of the relatively good opportunities here in the early 1960s. Stanley is the only one of this older cohort of cousins not to find work. He spent several years in a Virginia prison, moved in and out of sheltered living situations, and now lives in isolation from the rest of the family, who find him too violent when he drinks. Among this older group of cousins, only Joseph remains based in Carolina, though he spends many months each year at the home of his brother Charles and his sister-in-law Doris. He comes to Washington to work as a carpenter but returns frequently to care for his parents' farm, tend his garden, collect plants for wines, teas, and medicines, and chop and sell firewood. His cousins joke that he always returns on the first of the month, "when people have the money to pay him." The younger cousins include Robert's brother Stanley, the deceased Mildred's son Odell, and Mary's son Ralph. These younger cousins, all in their twenties, have fared badly. Odell and Ralph have moved back and forth between Washington and Carolina many times, unable to find steady, tolerable work in either place. In Carolina they have lived with Mary; in Washington they stayed briefly with their other relatives after Walter grew tired of them. As the older cousins move into positions as relatively senior kin, only Cornelius

[20]

Revisiting the Symbolic City

and Gayla remain willing to open their home to these more difficult, less sophisticated, rowdier younger kin. In 1986 Ralph went to prison in Carolina on drug charges; Ben, Ralph, and Odell continue to have trouble finding jobs, though Ben and Ralph have been inventive in pursuing opportunities ranging from technical schools through factory work. Robert has found work for each of them at times in the restaurants where he cooks, but these arrangements have never lasted. It is difficult to talk about their life experiences in contrast to those of their older cousins, because their lives are ambiguous. In part, they have failed to achieve the minimal trappings of middle-class status, and they sometimes feel less successful than their kin. In part they are simply less domesticated, less willing to settle for hard work and lives they consider monotonous. Less socialized, more liminal, they cling to a freedom somewhat outside modern times. The lives of the next generation may take even more divergent paths. One of Charles Jr.'s sons from his first marriage has already spent time in prison. All of the family's currently unmarried teenagers have babies, and all have left school. These teenagers grew up in very conventional homes, but during economically bad times and with little hope of building interesting futures. None of them have jobs or see available semiskilled jobs that they might be able to do. The two girls are raising their babies in their parents' homes, and the Harper family has welcomed them enthusiastically. Marjorie travels home to Washington each summer, for example, bringing her daughter's and son's daughters as well as her dead cousin Gloria's adopted daughter, Shantelle, to stay with her mother's sister. However, this cohort of cousins seems somewhat lost in the family; they lack the skills and the interest in Carolina traditions that have knit the Harpers together, and they are not very interested in one another, at least as teenage peers. The Harper family is widely dispersed, from North Caro-

[21]

Revisiting the Symbolic City lina throughout Washington, to New York; and in Washington only Lucy, Robert, and Walter live near one another. Nonetheless, they stay in close touch: Walter, Robert, Cornelius, Charles, and Lonnie telephone each other every day. Lonnie and sometimes Carolyn organize regular family feasts, to be described in chapter 2. They also see their share of family conflict, mostly between spouses, but in jealous exchanges between male cousins as well. As Harper kin telephone, visit, argue, exchange children, and gather for summer vacations and holidays, the ways their family illustrates both social history and Washington's regional economy are striking. First, family members occupy a limited range of occupational and economic positions, which tend to descend with time and age and to reflect dramatically changing opportunities for blacks in North Carolina agriculture and the service economy of Washington. Those in Walter's and Robert's generations have worked very hard all their lives and achieved modest success. Those who follow will not be so fortunate. Walter's place in the center of Elm Valley life is echoed by his neighbors, all of whom testify to a moment in Washington history when integration and economic prosperity seemed promising. But that moment was short, and the promise was elusive. Also, this family includes kin as varied as the extraordinarily straitlaced Marjorie, the urbane and confident Carolyn and Lonnie, the wayward, wayfaring Ralph and Odell, and the bawdy, country Uncle Cornelius and very rural Aunt Louise, who seem to belong to another century. In their variety they testify to movement out of a seemingly isolated pocket of North Carolina and into a sophisticated international city. Yet through Uncle Cornelius's rich store of stories about Carolina misadventures, and through their own work at it, they keep alive the wry memories of their own past selves and the taut connections between Washington

[22]

Revisiting the Symbolic City

and Carolina that seemed so powerful and eerie to Jean Toomer while eluding other observers of Washington life. The next chapter explores the ways these connections knit families like the Harpers together in the city and also branch out to neighbors in Elm Valley.

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[2] Reinventing the South Knowing that there was such a thing as outdoors bred in us a hunger for property, for ownership. The firm possession of a yard, a porch, a grape arbor. Propertied black people spent all their energies, all their love, on their nests. Like frenzied, desperate birds, they overdecorated everything; fussed and fidgeted over their hard-won homes; canned, jellied, and preserved all summer to fill the cupboards and shelves; they painted, picked, and poked at every corner of their houses. And these houses loomed like hothouse sunflowers among the rows of weeds that were the rented houses. Renting blacks cast furtive glances at these owned yards and porches, and made firmer commitments to buy themselves "some nice little old place." —Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

The varied fortunes of the Harper family illustrate the political, historical, and economic connections between the Carolinas and Washington, whose service sector has grown from the poverty displacing blacks from the rural Carolinas. The emergence of big government, the (sometimes related) shifts in southern agriculture, and the landmark civil rights decisions of the 1950s opened up jobs and houses in Washington to a generation of migrants who, like Walter Harper, came north to build better lives in the city. Their place in history, and its intersection with residential flux in Elm Val-

[24]

Reinventing the South

ley, means that we find in this neighborhood a generation of relatively successful migrants. Their success, as well as the ceiling most of them eventually met, offers dramatic testimony to the opportunities and constraints that black people from Carolina meet in Washington. Being black, from Carolina, and in Washington is of course not the same for everybody. However, certain experiences were characteristic of the post-World War II generation of migrants, who have drawn up other relatives and with neighbors and kin have rebuilt Carolina traditions in the city. Members of this generation worked very hard to make a living, support a house, care for other kin, and build a community. They took advantage of a window in Washington time that allowed them to rebuild rural traditions on a base of property ownership and shared safe space. Their descendants, as we will see in chapter 4, face the problems of reworking these traditions in rented apartments, in dispersed suburbs, or on Elm Valley's main street. Thus the story of Walter Harper's alley is a sad one as this generation dies, and as many of their descendants meet even harsher constraints today. This chapter explores the meaning of the transplanted cultural traditions Carolina migrants rebuilt in an international, sophisticated, and potentially alienating place. What does this rich, self-defining constellation of traditions mean as an adaptation to city life or as a potential culture of resistance? Why should people who, by many measures at the polls, are among America's most progressive citizens keep alive the southern past?1 i. The city council has a long and impressive history of progressive legislation, ranging from gender-free divorce and custody laws through early divestiture of interest in companies doing business in South Africa, penalties for insurance companies that discriminate against those carrying the AIDS virus, and strict gun control. Under its home-rule authority over the District of Columbia, Congress has contested several of these measures, overruling the insurance legislation and attaching to a 1986 tax package an amendment forbidding the District to finance abortions for

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Reinventing the South I begin by locating Carolina culture in Elm Valley's core group of women and men in their middle years, working in service jobs or recently retired, hanging on to lives they have valued in a neighborhood where today they can barely afford to stay. I trace it through the net they have woven in the interstices of the city structure, including the places where they shop and work, the homes of their kin, and the connections to Carolina. I concentrate on the processes through which Carolina culture is expressed among neighbors, friends, and kin, primarily through gardening, fishing, feasting, and the construction of an alternative economy. Elm Valley residents cast their nets both wide and deep. I conclude with a discussion of how Carolina folk culture endows both the South and the city with meaning and how it might be linked to oppositional politics.

The Alleys of Elm Valley The developers of Elm Valley built and sold row housing, designed to offer the semblance of private houses along with the economy of shared walls and lots to the working-class and middle-class workers who first settled there. The tiny yards, inexpensive heating, solid brick construction, lovely architectural rhythms, and deep communal rear alley spaces were attractive to black families who found them suddenly, dramatically vacant in the 1950s and 1960s, in many cases being resold by speculators. The deep alleys hold the most important clues to black Elm Valley life. Although many people sit out on their front

poor women. These actions make the autonomy of statehood very appealing. The proposed state constitution, ratified by city voters though not yet accepted by Congress, guarantees everyone a job or an income and mandates equal pay for equal work.

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Reinventing the South porches as well, most interaction among neighbors without real yards occurs behind their houses. Now almost entirely paved over in an effort to solve Elm Valley's parking problems, the alleys still reserve tiny patches of soil for gardening, which complements other back-door activities such as hanging up laundry, taking out garbage, cleaning rugs, feeding animals, and minding children. Here neighbors cement neighborly interaction and reroot Carolina tradition. Nestled between two rows of especially small houses built in the 1930s, Walter Harper's alley captures in microcosm both stability and change in Elm Valley. Framing the alley community at its two ends are a Baptist church (white, Episcopal, and local until its members moved to the suburbs and a more cosmopolitan black congregation purchased the building) and a large detached house owned by a city politician. In between, the tiny row houses open onto the alley and are oriented toward the back. Walter lives on the Saratoga Street side, surrounded by neighbors who, like him, arrived in the early 1960s (see fig. 2). Next door lives an eighty-year-old white woman who has been in her house since it was built in 1937. Now a widow whose children and grandchildren live in Tennessee, retired from a university position as a secretary, she remains active in a nearby church and cares for her senile neighbor across the street. The only white resident of the alley to remain after the racial shift in the 1950s, she is still surprised by the mass exodus. "You know why they left," smiles Edna Hanrohan, "but you couldn't find better neighbors. I remember after my husband died, everyone looked out for me. They would at least send the children over each day to knock on the door and make sure I was all right." Three doors down from Mrs. Hanrohan lives Mrs. Jones, who came to Washington in 1957 from Raleigh-Durham, North Carolina. Also a widow, she has one daughter who has moved to Pennsylvania but brings her children to live with

[27]

SARATOGA STREET

Drawing by Alice and Susanna Grady

C U M B E R L A N D STREET

Fig. 2. The residents of Walter Harper's alley

Reinventing the South

Mrs. Jones off and on between jobs. Mrs. Jones has worked since she arrived as a housekeeper for a judge and his family. Herbert and Shirley Garrett live across the alley on the Cumberland Street side. Once residents of the Carolina coastal plain, they have lived here since 1960, when they bought their house for $12,000, "the first black on the block/' Mrs. Garrett has always worked "taking care of apartments." When her first employer died she easily found another place, for her housekeeping skills are renowned in the condominium complex where she works. Mr. Garrett is a retired city worker, president of a senior citizens' organization and head usher at his church, where his wife is active in the women's club. Next door to the Garretts lives Mrs. Walker. She has been a housekeeper at Howard University since coming to Washington from Asheville, North Carolina, in 1951, and she bought her house from an Italian-American barber in 1963. Mrs. Walker retired in the summer of 1986 because "you know after thirty-two years on the same job you get kind of cranky." Her husband, a taxi driver, died in 1980; her daughter, a single parent, lives in Maryland with two young children. Her brother Pool, somewhat retarded and severely alcoholic, lives with her; he spends much of his time caring for his dog and frequenting Elm Valley's main street. Although she suffers from arthritis, Mrs. Walker has enjoyed retirement, joining her "retiree buddy" to go to sales and meetings and visit the sick. Her next-door neighbor is Mary Malone, a former daycare worker whose husband suffered a heart attack while having his hair cut in 1980, "when he had just begun to live, after working hard all his life." Childless, she is affectionately involved with her twenty-one nieces and nephews, whom she sees as remarkably successful: "They're doctors, lawyers, professors, and everything." (One sister died in 1986 after raising twelve children, participating actively in club, sorority, PTA, and church life, and working in hotel service for

[29]

Reinventing the South thirty-five years.) A close friend of Mrs. HanroharTs (of whom she says, "Now that's a neighbor"), Ms. Malone is widely loved for her generosity and thoughtfulness.2 Each day she brings Pool's little dog the leftovers from her own dinner; in the summertime she often greets the garbage collectors with a pitcher of lemonade; and alley children know that each holiday they can expect an Easter basket, a bag of candy, or whatever is appropriate. One summer, admiring Walter's grandnephew's skill at basketball, she sent Walter to Zayre's discount store to buy the boy a small basketball set she had seen on sale. "That boy's going to be a ballplayer," she insisted. Ms. Malone is also renowned because, as Walter puts it, "she can talk shit." Neighbors find her always ready with a wry or barbed comment. Of a little boy she finds mischievous, she said "here comes hell on wheels," and of a neighbor who left a tricky will, "Can you imagine—on your way to heaven and you do something like that?" Seventy-six years old, retired, and active in club life, Ms. Malone rarely goes out, but she hosts frequent barbecues for relatives, club and sorority members, and friends, along with her new companion Mr. Friendly, who has become a pillar of alley life himself. They enjoy celebrating their cross-church relationship (she is a lifelong Catholic and he is a Baptist deacon), because "there are twelve gates to heaven and you can get in any one," but both are somewhat leery of the increasingly dramatic presence of foreign newcomers in the neighborhood. Ms. Malone is especially upset about the confusing behavior of "all their children" during church services. In the next house lives Ms. Margie Harris, formerly from South Carolina, retired from domestic work and widowed in 1984 when her husband died of heart trouble. He was a retired trucker who worked at the local grocery store offering 2. I use Ms., Mrs., and Miss as those in the alley do.

[30]

Reinventing the South

people rides home for whatever they wanted to pay. Ms. Margie has spent the past ten years in very active church work. She particularly loves the women's choir and her work as chair of the Sick and Condolence Committee, and she has many close friends from these groups. She is an avid gardener and fisherwoman, and she has three children of whom she is enormously proud. Two have stayed in the area, including a daughter whom she picks up at 5:00 A.M. and drives to her work at a hospital and a son who lives with her. Her other daughter lives in Atlanta, but she sends Ms. Margie's grandchildren to spend each summer, and Ms. Margie returns the visit every Christmas. Walter considers Ms. Margie the heart of alley life; he looks forward to walking home through the back each day so he can joke with her, and he appreciates her watching his house whenever he is gone. When Ms. Margie drives to Atlanta to pick up her grandchildren, she is accompanied by her young neighbor Johnnie Mae Reed, who says of Ms. Margie, "We go everywhere together/' Johnnie Mae lives next to Mrs. Jones at the opposite end of the alley. She and her husband are in their early thirties, she a day-care worker and he a bulldozer driver. They moved onto Saratoga Street in 1971 after speculators had rented out their house for about ten years to people Mrs. Hanrohan believes were prostitutes, as well as to a "nice Jamaican family." Both their children were born there. In the house next to Ms. Margie live Ms. Marie, her three dogs, and her two grown sons Henry and John. Frequent visitors are her three young grandchildren, who live with their parents in a nearby apartment building. These residents compose the core of the alley community. Longtime pillars of the neighborhood, Inez and Calvin Green, have been absent since 1985 when Mr. Green died of kidney failure and Mrs. Green moved to a senior citizens' home. As members of this original generation die, the

[31]

Reinventing the South

changes in the neighborhood are accelerated. For example, the Greens' house is now occupied by a young black couple who work for the government. These dashing, handsome, socially active young people break many of the alley's rules; they drive fast through children at play, squabble over parking spaces, and leave their dog outside barking at night while they are away. Ms. Margie insists that "we never had any trouble in this alley until they moved in." Mr. Garrett believes their disruptiveness testifies to the fact that they are renting. The two houses between Mrs. Hanrohan and Mrs. Jones are occupied by whites. In one house a young but highranking government employee lives alone. He is renovating the house himself but has angered his neighbors by first building a very high fence around the back. "I don't know what he's trying to hide," muttered Mr. Green. Mrs. Hanrohan sums it up: "Nobody likes that fence." Walter believes that black families in the alley are more likely to build decks for observing alley life and staging events, while whites are more likely to build high fences and enclosed patios to seclude themselves. This man also annoys neighbors by roaring into the alley in his car and making such announcements as "I want these children supervised." A long-standing, powerfully shared alley tradition holds that all the adults "look out for each other's children." His life-style and the inappropriate behaviors linked to his life course are echoed on many other streets in Elm Valley where younger owners meet older ones. Next door live the Goodhews, he a doctor, she a teacher who has chosen to stay home for a few years with their baby daughter. The Goodhews keep up close ties with kin in other states and friends throughout the region. Through their painstaking, skilled efforts at gardening and through their shared affection for alley children and especially their pets, these newer residents have tried unusually hard to fit into the alley community. Michael frequently

[32]

Reinventing the South

brings his dog out to join residents' grandchildren at play and jokes about the troublesome barking dog at the other end: "We finally got the kids grown out of their Big Wheels, and now we have this." Several features of alley life are immediately distinctive. The first is that the alley has a core of elderly, mainly retired people. All, like Walter, are part of a circle of dispersed kin; all belie popular notions that the elderly are the dependent members of kin networks or neighborhoods. In the alley as well, the elderly are in charge, and their younger neighbors rely on them to watch their houses and their children and to give them advice. Sometimes the only family members to own property, often the only ones with flexible domestic space, these residents are likely to keep and transport children and grandchildren and to house grown adults. When they die, they leave their children houses valued at nearly $100,000. The aging population influences alley life in other ways as well. The high death rate, especially for men, makes elderly men in the alley rare and valued today. The five funerals for men during the past ten years have brought residents together to prepare food. On funeral mornings the alley mobilizes, with each household sending covered dishes and money to the home of the mourners. Death comes very hard to the alley for several reasons. Mr. Garrett said of Mr. Green's death, "It hit me more than with a relative, because I have to miss him every day. I guess I'll get over it." Alley life is so dense that each death leaves a deep, shared hole. As residents age and get sick, they are less able to tolerate long, emotional funerals and wakes, so fewer attend. Death is a stark reminder of everyone's approaching death and of the death of the alley community. Johnnie Mae, a true leader in the work of death, mobilizes neighbors to bring food, go to funerals, and come to the house later, yet she finds the death rate hard too, because she feels that her chil[33]

Reinventing the South

dren will grow up, and she and her husband will age, in a more remote, less textured kind of place. She notes, as do others, that none of the white newcomers have ever brought food or attended a funeral. Surviving residents appreciate having others who will bring food and care for them when they are ill and who will listen to the intricacies of their increasingly annoying ailments, such as glaucoma, arthritis, and "pressure." How, why, and when the pains come and go are topics to detail and embroider. Mrs. Garrett, who has recently begun to have heart trouble, is very grateful that she can always find someone around to discuss it or to distract her when it comes. When Ms. Malone was bedridden with a bad knee, her neighbors brought her meals during the day until her daughter could come at night. Still another striking feature of alley life is its density. Especially in the spring, as children tumble out with bikes and balls and people begin to plant, sights, sounds, and smells fill the alley and people become enmeshed in one another's lives. When a neighbor, well regarded for his care in maneuvering his white van slowly through the ever-present group of playing children, began to drive carelessly, it took almost no time for everyone to learn that his wife had been seen drinking with notorious street-corner men in a local bar, that his children were often locked out after school, and that he was no doubt distressed and distracted by the turn of events. When Walter bought a new car, he first consulted a Dodge dealer he had seen bringing home demonstration models across the street; but then he opted to buy a Ford from Johnnie Mae's brother-in-law. This density is best observed in the socialization of new residents. Although several of the people who have moved in or through in the past ten years were potentially disruptive, they have learned that the residents of the alley are lifemates, with many shared memories, stories, and terms of [34]

Reinventing the South

order. Long-term residents talk of the differences between those who are renting and those who are owning, but the density of alley life and the ways they come to know their neighbors allow them to make many exceptions, especially for those who try hard to discover alley rules. Some rules are flexible and some are not. Fast driving and improper garbage disposal are quickly censured, but the barking of two alley dogs, maddening to newer residents, is tolerated. Walter, for example, holds that "dogs have always barked in Elm Valley, and white people have nothing to say about it." In another example, a new woman trying to call her children into bed at 8:00 P.M. found her decision challenged by a number of grandparents arguing, "It's too early to put those children to bed. They want to play." It was daylight savings time, still light outside, and the alley was full of children. Though sometimes intrusive and annoying, this density gives more meaning to personal events and everyday life: when Walter helped his nephew learn to ride his bicycle without training wheels, most of the alley either turned out to cheer and offer advice or peeped in silent encouragement from behind curtains and doors. When another grandnephew was learning to roller skate, Mrs. Garrett was quick to offer numerous tips, including tying a string around his waist and pulling him down the alley, "so that he can do it himself." Such communal participation seemed to make these triumphs more meaningful. Residents are nearly unanimous in their self-conscious pride in their neighborliness. Many agree that "there's no neighborhood like this one," and Mrs. Hanrohan is emphatic in claiming, "It's much, much nicer than it used to be [in the 1940s and 1950s]. We didn't use to care about each other like this." Such comments sustain the larger vision that "we never had no trouble until they moved in." This is a romantic, not quite accurate myth, but it shows, I believe, that in a difficult, sometimes alienating city the alley offers a [35]

Reinventing the South

safe and known place and that people who live there find life denser and richer, though harder, than in many other neighborhoods.

Transplanting the Foods of Home The alley community highlights Carolina foodways and brings residents together to share advice, techniques, and vegetables. Since it is a seasonal place, interaction diminishes during the winter, but back doors open and people emerge as spring arrives and neighbors begin to plant. As Mr. Green once said, "Everyone puts in a little something." Mrs. Jones, Ms. Malone and Mr. Friendly, Mrs. Hanrohan, and Mrs. Garrett fill their yards with flowers, and Mrs. Goodhew found this an important way of entering the alley community, since she also plants flowers.3 Neighbors also grow many kinds of vegetables, including okra, green beans, sweet potatoes, peppers, corn, and tomatoes. But these are widely considered supplemental crops. As Walter puts it, "Number one I gotta have my garden, and number one in my garden is my collard greens." Collard greens almost monopolize space, time, admiration, and concern (see Comely, Bigman, and Watts 1963). In many gardens they are the most visually prominent crop; they grow very large and enjoy a seven-month season, often lasting through November. Mrs. Walker speaks of collards as the bellwether of a garden, sometimes marking off black Carolina tastes from those of white gardeners, who place more emphasis on tomatoes. When the plants thrive they reflect one's skill as a gardener and may ratify the desire to participate in the alley commu3. Although foodways appear in few ethnographies of urban life, Boggs (1929), Childs (1933), Comely, Bigman, and Watts (1963), Halpern (1965), Jerome (1980), and Shimkin, Shimkin, and Frate (1978), do discuss their importance in knitting together migrants to the cities of the Midwest.

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Reinventing the South

nity. The thick roots and great, wide leaves of these healthy blooming plants are appropriate metaphors for being settled and committed to the alley world. These neighbors' kin, if they can move to the suburbs, also plant large plots in their yards, again dominated by collards. Those who stay in apartments may let this tradition lapse.4 Throughout the season neighbors exchange praise, warnings, and advice about the collards. They share many tips about when to plant and harvest. Some argue that it is lucky to plant on Good Friday; others say a gardener should wait for the full moon. Ms. Margie says her grandfather insisted collards be planted on March 15. Much concern surrounds the frost at the end of the season. Most gardeners believe the frost should "set on" (or "hit") their collard greens once to make them tender. The most daring and experimental will let the frost sit twice, which produces extraordinarily tender greens; but to let it hit three times is to risk their rotting or dying. A continuing conversation follows the collard greens through to harvest, as neighbors predict and act on the vicissitudes of each season and devise ever-changing tactics to trick urban animals like rats, dogs, raccoons, and opossums. As new neighbors move in and decide to plant, they often depend on what longer-term residents have figured out about how to build soil, fertilize, and defend against pests. Mr. Green advised his neighbors to fill jars with flour, punch holes in the lids, and sprinkle the flour on their greens; this seems to keep bugs away. Many argue that fertilizing greens with fish heads produces an excellent, powerful taste; Walter claims that this is because "in Carolina there were no sewers so we had to bury our fish heads." Mrs. Garrett links this to 4. Many other researchers have noted the central place of greens in slave, soul, and Carolina diets. See, for example, Abrahams (1981), Cornely, Bigman, and Watts (1963), Cussler and De Give (1952), Hand (1964), Hendricks (1939), Joyner (1971), and Otto (1979, 1984). [37]

Reinventing the South

the Cherokee practice of burying half a fish head with each kernel of corn, a tip she says Indians taught slaves. Neighbors also share tools. Before his death in the early spring of 1985, Mr. Green hung his tools on a tree in his backyard and insisted that people could borrow without asking. Gardening well in the city can entail complex, demanding research into metropolitan offerings in seeds and seedlings, trips to suburban markets to buy young plants and fertilizer, building and rebuilding soil, and constructing massive terraces. On his retirement Mr. Green took apart his own and his wife's bureaus and used the drawers outside as planters, thus avoiding large roots in his backyard. For the most part these gardens flourish, a tribute to the care that has gone into creating perfect, composite soil in the heart of the urban landscape and into nurturing the greens themselves. Gardening is a crucial way to socialize and incorporate new residents, as Mrs. Goodhew learned when she marched out to remove the previous owner's iris so that she could plant her own flowers and vegetables. Gardening also complements an extraordinary concern in the alley for foodways and growth. Just as Ms. Malone feeds Pool's dog, Mr. Garrett takes scraps to Ms. Marie's three dogs each day and leaves a pile of crumbs for the pigeons. Mrs. Hanrohan feeds sparrows throughout the winter. People share food at birthdays and funerals. The alley is truly a dramatic stage for celebrating the annual cycle, the repetition of seasons, the return of perennials like roses and iris, the promise each year of new growth. This concern with repetition, cycles, life, and growth in old age is expressed both in child keeping and in gardening, and through it residents both root themselves in the alley community and recreate the world of Carolina in the city.5 5. Snead (1984) argues that repetition and improvisation, so that "the thing is there when you come back to pick it up," are fundamental qualities in black culture, emerging with particular clarity in such forms as

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Reinventing the South Fishing and Feasting among Metropolitan Kin Rebuilding Carolina traditions cements alley life and helps neighbors nurture community. Working at these traditions also draws residents out of the alleys for wider interactions with dispersed relatives, who are knit together through a continuing recommitment to the past. As we saw in tracing Walter's family history and the settlement patterns of the alley, Elm Valley residents are likely to house younger kin for short periods throughout their lives. For example, Walter's grown daughter Carolyn loves to joke that she is going to move back in with him, since she "can't find a husband." He responds with a collection of stories about how much she and Lonnie worried him when they lived at home. Family lore celebrates the hardships fathers suffer when living with teenage and adult daughters. Families also participate in widely dispersed metropolitan kindreds, who come together to exchange services and to gather and share foods. Many events and tasks bring Walter's family together—from a child's problems with homework or a visitor from another state through advice on a diet or a broken-down car to the exchange of foods. Most important, relatives come together to go fishing and to produce feasts. Like gardening and cooking, fishing is shared by women and men. Several women in the alley love to fish. But in the Washington branch of the Harper family fishing, like other foodways involving meat, is monopolized by men. Beginning early in the spring and throughout the summer, men fish for herring in the Potomac and Anacostia rivers. Walter usually fishes with his nephews and with his neighbor who comes from Raleigh-Durham. Others' fishing groups include brothers, cousins, fathers and sons, and a group of Carolina instorytelling and jazz. This may be another example of valued repetition, highlighted in the alleys by the experience of shared aging.

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Reinventing the South laws and friends. Men usually bring home several buckets of the small, pungent fish, caught both with nets and with poles. Although some men occasionally go farther away to catch other fish, this early morning trip for herring is a widely shared routine, demanding specialized skills and knowledge concerning the time of year, time of day, locations, routes, and pace of the herring runs. Many choice spots, from the chain bridge to Virginia, to Thompson's Boathouse near the Kennedy Center, to Haines Point in Southeast Washington vary in value through the year. Men may leave at 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. and return by 7:00 A.M. They then clean the catch, preserve it with coarse salt in plastic buckets, and eat it for breakfast throughout the year (usually fried in cornmeal). Some eat herring only on Sundays, others all week long. This well-loved delicacy is traced without hesitation by these fishermen to rural Carolina. As the summer continues Walter and his nephews fish for perch, bluefish, and shad, and they may travel to Chesapeake Bay to go crabbing.6 The most important events punctuating the annual cycle are the various family feasts, outdoors and indoors, often held on holidays and birthdays. At these feasts relatives enjoy comparing the taste and cooking style of each other's greens (Childs 1933; Comely, Bigman, and Watts 1963). Collard greens are big, tough plants that cook down into a much smaller mass. People refer to them, both raw and cooked, as "a mess of collards." They seem an unlikely object for discerning tastes. Yet they are at once highly individualized and surrounded by intricate, hotly debated, shared lore. Within their families, gardener/cooks pride themselves on their own carefully cultivated styles, and in most families relatives characterize one another's greens vividly and pre6. On herring in Carolina diets, see Baraka (1966), Daniels (1941), Joyner (1971), and Otto (1979, 1984).

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Reinventing the South cisely. The characterizations often stress cooking strategies, which vary enormously. Many cooks add pork, but they take pride in the type (and the amount) they choose. This can be fatback, neckbones, ham hocks, or bacon, varying from just a morsel to a portion equal to the greens. Some cooks stress adding lemon, vinegar, or cooking oil; those who harvest before the frost often add sugar. Some cooks prefer an extraordinary salty taste. Some chop the greens very fine; others keep the leaves long and tangled. Those who link their strategies closely to Carolina claim the most traditional way is to add potatoes and cook the dish until everything is so well done that the greens and potatoes blend. Louise, however, feels that greens cannot taste the same away from "Carolina soil." Yet individual distinctiveness goes far beyond cooking —beginning with fertilizing, nurturing, and harvesting strategies and continuing through cooking time, seasonings, and serving style. Many people freeze collards so that they can enjoy their own throughout the winter. Each person's greens do in fact look and taste unique; they vary in sweetness, saltiness, and pungency. Collard greens stand for a process that offers opportunities for many variations on a theme. They are also deceptive in their hulking, characterless appearance. Like a painter's canvas, collards allow for striking personal creativity. In growing and cooking collards for feasts, kin express themselves by the ways they transform widely shared expectations that greens be served and by where they locate themselves in a broad field of acceptable techniques. When relatives come together to eat, at Thanksgiving, Easter, Father's Day and Mother's Day, the Fourth of July, Labor Day, Christmas, New Year's Day, and occasionally birthdays and Memorial Day, collard greens are almost mandatory. The other compulsory item, again deeply rooted in rural Carolina culture, is pork. One man, describing his New Year's feast to me, laughed, "I cooked three kinds of pork

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Reinventing the South —chitlins, pigs' feet, and ham." This same man has become famous in his family for a personal recipe for barbecuing a side of beef in his backyard. But he makes it clear that this is something he learned in Washington: "I can't remember ever eating beef in Carolina." People share many parts of the pig, eating them both with vegetables and on their own. Although chitlins have through the years received the most publicity, in Washington pigs' feet and ears, chopped barbecue, and barbecued ribs seem to be special favorites, with barbecue—like collard greens —providing an arena for different cooks to experiment with individual styles. One man describes his barbecue sauce: "I go through my cabinet and put everything in—but always garlic and vinegar or lemon. Then I run through my bar and throw in every kind of liquor I don't want." Most barbecue chefs are more precise and more secretive, but all seem to have definite ideas about what makes their barbecue the best and about how it differs from (most typically) the barbecue of Texas. Robert and Cornelius, for example, love to tease each other about the secrets and intricacies of their own sauces. What is true of sauce is true, I believe, of the pig in general. Like collard greens, pork is also a chef's canvas, offering enormous variety in shape, size, boniness, and fleshiness of raw material. It thus gives cooks many arenas for creative variety.7 Several distinctive styles also accompany the sharing of food. For example, some families clearly separate eating and drinking liquor. People cook a stovetop full of food for the day and then let it sit, either when having company or when 7. Again, many writers have stressed the place of pork in southern and soul foodways, especially for the Carolinas. See Baraka (1966), Boggs (1929), Botkin (1949), Daniels (1941), Forrest (1983), Hand (1964), Hendricks (1939), Joyner (1971), Otto (1979, 1984), and Wilson and Mullally (1983). On Carolina barbecue see Botkin (1949), Daniels (1941), Hendricks (1939), Joyner (1971), and Zobel (1977).

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Reinventing the South spending a Sunday at home. Walter claims that his family drinks to wake up but eats to sleep. Thus an afternoon's drinking may come to an end with a large meal. Walter's nephew Robert jokes that eating pigs' feet is risky because it makes you talk in your sleep. Walter enjoys swapping stories with his relatives during these meals; one of his favorites is about the Carolina relative who had always cooked biscuits for her brother every morning. She swears that the day after his death his ghost showed up for breakfast. Both women and men cook, especially for holidays. When planning a Father's Day celebration for Walter, Lonnie had to be firm and explicit when telling her kinswomen that the women had to cook. This may reflect in part a migration strategy as mothers prepared their sons for urban life. Charles says, "My mother taught us all [listing a number of sons and nephews]. She always said, If you find a woman and can't live with her, at least you can cook.'" It also might well reflect some of the exigencies of a difficult rural life where men had to learn domestic skills and pull their own weight. Many men find work cooking in Washington, because the city offers mostly service jobs. In any event, in these metropolitan families the men cook often and well.

The Connection to Carolina Washington's black families may have relatives living in other cities north along the migration corridor that extends through Baltimore and Philadelphia into New York. Most still have some kin in several generations who have remained in Carolina, in depressed Piedmont cities like Rocky Mount and in the very small towns and farms of the east, which Marjorie Harper describes as "all laid out." "It's so quiet there," echoes her daughter. People revive and reenact their connection to Carolina often. They travel back and [43]

Reinventing the South

forth to visit frequently, send children to spend summers hunting and fishing and farming at home, bring older relatives up for medical treatment or a rest, and reorganize households by, for example, sending an unemployed young man north to look for work. Marjorie enjoys reminiscing about Walter's first trips back after he had moved to Washington: "He came in a car and bought us fruit and everything. We thought he was rich!" Carolyn and Lonnie Harper recall that as children they spent a month and a half with one grandmother, then rode with their Uncle Cornelius to spend the next month and a half with the other. Charles's and Cornelius's children continue this practice today, spending half of each summer with Mary and the other half with Louise. To visit Carolina is to watch kin flow in and out of their home places, especially in the summer or during the holidays. Some of these kin create more problems than others. Charles's son Joseph, for example, regularly travels back and forth, working at odd carpentry jobs in Washington arranged by his relatives at their homes or their neighbors', or sometimes at their workplaces—for example, in Robert's restaurant. Walter's sister comes to Washington for dental care. Three of Walter's grandnephews and grandnieces spend their summers with his brother on the farm so "they'll stay out of trouble." On the other hand his other nephews, who come to Washington several times a year expecting hospitality and sometimes help, are considered burdensome, for they enjoy drinking and carousing and find it difficult to get dependable jobs and stay employed.8 8. The patterns Shimkin, Shimkin, and Frate (1978) sum up for Holmes County migrants to Chicago are also expressed among North Carolina migrants to Washington, who visit, foster, and reorganize households in order to get medical care, reassemble at holidays, remove teenagers from city streets, or return the retired and disabled to the country. See also Jones (1985, pp. 159-69) and Jones (1980).

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Reinventing the South Residents of Washington also share in the fruits of the January hog killings and of the Carolina harvest, which because of the mild climate and long growing season, continues for much of the year. Men from farms often return to them in January, either because "my parents won't kill any hogs unless I'm there" or simply to appropriate one to bring back to Washington. I have never seen a hog killing, but men's descriptions make them sound very close to longtime Carolina traditions: they shoot the hogs in their very small brains or "knock them in the head with an ax." They then scald them in boiling water and butcher them, often preparing the chitlins at once. In Carolina families will sometimes barbecue hogs right away, laying them out over a pit and cooking them about eight hours, which is "not that long if you keep yourself together." One man sometimes brings a pig home to barbecue over an improvished pit made of cinder blocks rather than a hole in the ground. Many stories and legends surround the killings and barbecues. Charles Harper's favorite is about the time he dozed off while watching the pig roast and his brother and cousins "sneaked up and ate the whole pig up—they put barbecue sauce on it and everything!" Sometimes young relatives will bring the harvest north to share. This may trigger mixed emotions, for some migrants have painful, bitter memories of sharecropping or helping out on the family farm. Robert describes digging potatoes "until my fingers were bleeding, and my uncle wouldn't even let me go to school." Also, some of the disdain for the rural South in metropolitan Washington seeps into the way people come to see their home. Thus they sometimes look with scorn on gifts of clothing from relatives in the South, for example, and may talk disdainfully about those "Carolina shoes." But mostly good humor and appreciation seem to surround the continued sharing of North Carolina crops, which may include cantaloupe, watermelon, squash, cucum-

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Reinventing the South

ber or watermelon pickles, peppermint and spearmint to be replanted in alley gardens, raw peanuts for roasting, wild pears, homemade cherry or blackberry wine, and sassafras and cherry bark for colds. The greatest emblematic gift is the delicate wild green poke sallet, available only in very small batches for a short time each spring. Rural emissaries also give their urban kin tips, such as how to plant celery and pineapple as houseplants or when to harvest mint to dry for wintertime tea. One woman claims that only "Carolina hands" can cultivate pineapple as a houseplant. They help with making home delicacies such as cantaloupe cocktail or plum and cherry jelly. They search the urban landscape for native wild onions, which are used in healing puncture wounds, cuts, and burns. Joseph Harper is especially skilled at making wine, tea, and liniment. He reminds his relatives how to use boiled pine needles to cure colds, peach tree leaves to cure an upset stomach, spearmint to "refresh the body/' peppermint "to warm the body in winter" or cure a stomachache, and cherry, sassafras, and sage for multiple ailments. He scours the alleys and highways for herbs and has even found a number of cherry and sassafras trees along the Beltway. Most of what he knows he learned from his grandmother, a skilled healer particularly known for treating wounds with junction weed and spiderwebs. He often brings Carolina seeds during the winter so that his relatives can start them indoors; in the spring he joins his brother, uncle, and cousins to go fishing; sometimes he travels on with news and gifts to visit kin in another urban place. He returns home faithfully at the first of the month to collect money from people who buy wood from him, since they receive checks then. Men like him seem to be crucial in bringing a continuing infusion of Carolina culture into Washington. In fact their roles make it clear that culture and the Carolina connection are not items but [46]

Reinventing the South

processes and that growth and the harvest are appropriate idioms for capturing them. 9

The Many-Layered Meanings of Carolina in the City Thus the Carolinas are lived out in the city as neighbors gather over gardening, as dispersed families come together to produce, prepare, and enjoy the foods of home, and as friends exchange remedies and special treats. Through Carolina traditions Walter Harper and his neighbors build alley life and reach out to kin in Washington and at home. Their world is a rich if invisible one, in some ways and for some families truer to the preservation and celebration of folk traditions than to the actual communities they left behind in Carolina. I have called the activities and process of this world "culture" because I think the life of Carolina in the city expresses three important qualities: a shared appreciation of style, a reworked system of meanings, and a continuing interplay of constraint and creativity. First, Carolina culture celebrates cycles, repetition, and texture. By texture I refer to dense, vivid, woven, detailed narratives, relationships, and experiences. A passion for texture seems to shape such long-standing black American cultural traditions as storytelling, blues music, children's games, jazz, and the dense lyrics and heavy percussion of go-go, the newest, Washington-based style of urban black music. All these expressive forms rely powerfully on repetition, improvisation, and the exploration of sometimes narrow situations through many emotional, sensory, interpersonal, and reflective voices (Borchert 1980; Kochman 1972; Levine 9. Ginns (1982) discusses similar North Carolina remedies including onion poultices, ginseng, sassafras, garlic, and cherry bark.

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Reinventing the South 1977; Snead 1984). A passion for texture is bolstered by the circumstances of renting, which encourage and reward a deep ethnographic concern for local life. We will see that this passion for repetition and texture appears in other arenas of Elm Valley life as well; in the density of apartment life, in the attention to thick, rich, interwoven local detail that shapes the street life of this and other Washington neighborhoods. A passion for texture is not always rewarded in American society, and more middle-class strategies for urban living aim at breadth instead. Yet it is an approach that ethnographers, as well as novelists, often favor. In several ways it is a style that suits the emergence of Carolina culture in the city. The particular foods central to Carolina cuisine offer opportunities for displaying individual preferences and tactics in every sensory detail. Collards, ribs, and herring —which seem bland as raw foods—end up on the table as rich, complex blends of decision making beginning with the start of organic life and widely discussed all the way along. Furthermore, North Carolina itself is an extraordinarily textured state, stretching from true islands into Appalachia through small-scale communities offering seemingly endless variations in ecology, terrain, and style of life. To be from North Carolina can mean almost anything. And in weaving Carolina folkways through Washington, those who hold onto them create an interstitial regional life linking the political and business centers of the city. Second, Carolina culture embraces a shared system of meanings about history, race, and place. The roots of Carolina folkways are certainly in black culture, but the emphasis today seems different from the celebration of soul in the 1960s. It is also important to declare that despite the southern exodus blacks are not homogeneous and should not be so seen. It may be that these shared foodways offer continuing opportunities to make distinctions and discriminations, first between blacks and whites, but now among blacks as well.

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Reinventing the South In expressing a Carolina identity, black Washingtonians celebrate regional and cultural specialties. At the same time, former Carolinians reclaim the South, invest the South with particular meanings of time, roots, and trust, and through reaffirming those meanings in Washington, reclaim it as home as well. By texturing a symbolic, international, sophisticated urban place with rural, androgynous, traditional foods, they renegotiate its identity and make it their own. It might be most appropriate to label this folk culture, since through Carolina style and meaning people reaffirm that they are part of a group. As they do through culture nearly always, people build responses to forces and situations that then reshape their lives and that they in turn act on and sometimes transform. In Washington these forces have included labor migration, urban colonialism, a racial job ceiling in the service sector, the constraints of poverty and dense living, a taste of independence and the everelusive chance to shape a black-run state. The response has included a great deal of national and local activism around issues of race, class, and civil liberties. Central to the response as well have been the politics of culture, expressed in the literary, musical, and artistic renaissance of the 1920s, the celebration of soul music and soul food in the 1960s, today's go-go, and I believe, the foodways of the Carolinas. The working people of Elm Valley increasingly feel the commercial impact of selectively nostalgic values. The gentrification of our cities, our television shows, and—through the "lite" marketing revolution—our foods means that we must take into account mainstream marketing forces as a cultural-political force. American studies scholar Warren Belasco has documented a pervasive mainstreaming process that begins when the left adopts a nostalgic folk product to make a political point (such as blue jeans, soul food, or burritos during the 1960s). In the past twenty years we have seen much of this revolt retailed through Levi Strauss and

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Reinventing the South Gloria Vanderbilt, Pizza Hut and Popeye's, granola-yogurt bars and Quaker natural cereals. Yet the neoethnic, neoregional marketing of the 1960s' politically based countercuisine has left black foods in general, and Carolina foods in particular, unspoiled. Why have they escaped untainted the otherwise relentless marketing of nostalgic folk foods from Taco Bell through Po' Folks to "dirty rice" at Popeye's? If pseudo-Cajun and home-cooked Italian, why not country Carolina or neosoul? Many answers are worth exploring, from the long, hard color line in black/ white foods, through the split between the black and white left at the time of the political emergence of the countercuisine, through the possibility that some whites perceive blacks as cultureless (Belasco, n.d., and pers. comm.).10 The second puzzling question is why the residents of Elm Valley hang on so tenaciously and gladly to foodways that are received with indifference, if not disdain. It is hard to imagine foods more oppositional to self-consciously healthful, gourmet diets. Most residents chuckle at southern dress; few play Carolina blues. Is it an accident that these traditions seem very working-class based, that some more cosmopolitan black residents consider them insulting and demeaning but that, for example, the radical chair of the D.C. Statehood party is an expert on gardening traditions? Is it an accident that the grandchildren of the Carolina gardeners have built go-go—the most oppositional, longest unappropriated, nonretailed musical tradition in years? Is the combination of discrimination and defiance important in the emergence and evolution of Carolina culture? Willis (1984) writes of novelist Toni Morrison that her 10. Rob Rubenstein pointed out to me that many whites see blacks as having no culture. For an interesting discussion of what might be the potential gentrification of some Carolina foods, see O'Brien (1983), who describes North Carolina's historic restaurants featuring sweet-potato muffins, roast pork loin, and Cornwallis yams.

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Reinventing the South "eruptions of funk" aim to repair the alienation that plagues urban blacks displaced from the South. Through sensual intrusions from the past, Morrison suggests, her characters can step out of empty, commodity-tainted relationships into a social world that is more of their own making. They reverse cliches and suggest alternatives to someone like Toomer's "orphan woman" Avey. Perhaps one can say much the same of Carolina culture in Elm Valley. Carolina traditions are a complicated weave of adaptation, opposition, co-optation, and response (Abrahams 1981; Day 1982; Limon 1983; Williams 1977). Carolina culture extends the hope that people can create alternative identities by anchoring themselves at the intersection of family and friendship, history and place. The life of the Carolinas in Washington has made the secret city richer and more livable as older residents build ties, save history, and offer their children the continuing possibility of constructing cultural and political choices. Displacement and poverty in Elm Valley threaten this world, however, as new grandparents in their thirties, living in apartments, gradually lose the gardening, fishing, and cooking skills of their older relatives. The transformations in Walter Harper's alley capture in a small way the larger battering that Carolina families now take in the city. In the following chapters we will see some of the ways Walter's younger relatives navigate in a faltering world where they can no longer rely on Carolina traditions to cement communities.

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[3]

The Meaning of Home Home is where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in. — Robert Frost Home is the way people feel about a place. — Ruth Kraus Home's just around the corner there— but not really anywhere. — Langston Hughes I've been here twenty-four years. It feels like home. But you know, we've always rented. — Mary Bell, Elm Valley resident facing displacement

I turn now to another block in Elm Valley, representative in expressing dramatic change. Rosewood Street houses one of Elm Valley's apartment buildings, constructed during the 1930s and 1940s as working-class and middle-class housing for the many new people moving to Washington in those boom times for government and related service jobs and integrated with the rest of Elm Valley in the 1950s and 1960s.

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The Meaning of Home

In the early 1980s most of these buildings were emptied and renovated as condominiums. Elm Valley has only two unrenovated apartment houses left. In the Manor, mostly black families who have rented for a long time have recently begun to give way to a few refugee families from Central America. As the Manor deteriorates, its residents see the renovation of row housing across the street and new white residents moving in. This upscaling mirrors the decline of their own building, the displacement of its residents, and the gutting and clearing of the buildings next door where many renters had longtime friends. The contrast between what they see, what they get, and what they can expect helps frame their interpretation of events in the Manor and the ways they act to counter those events. In this chapter I will introduce some of the residents of Rosewood Street—those who have lived there many years and those just moving in. I will concentrate on how renters and owners see one another and, through glimpses outside, on how these perceptions intersect with larger visions in American culture about the characteristics of houses, or "homes" as we like to call them, and those who own them. This interaction among ideology, common sense, and everyday strategies and experiences has shaped several sharp conflicts in Elm Valley today. In part these are battles over the meaning of home as a metaphor that influences Americans to judge themselves and other people and also to resist their own and others' evaluations.1 i. To give some idea of the discrepancies on this street, three-bedroom houses sell for approximately $280,000. One-bedroom apartments across the street vary in price, for whenever there is a turnover management can legally raise the rent. Some very long-term renters may therefore pay as little as $150 a month for apartments that today would rent for $555. There is not as much variation in renter income that this might imply, however, for newer tenants generally crowd many people into their apartments to share the rent. In many settings occupying a house as opposed to an apartment would

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The Meaning of Home Renters Facing Owners

Walter Harper's nephew Robert has lived in the Manor for twelve years, first alone, now with his wife and two small children. His life in Elm Valley reveals many of the tensions lived out by the generation that followed his Uncle Walter's, as he balances Carolina traditions against the more constricted economic times he experiences as a renter in the city. Robert came to Washington in 1965, lured there with his cousin Joseph by the urging of their other cousin Cornelius. They stayed with their Uncle Walter for a few months and with their Aunt Josephine for a year, then moved into Elm Valley, where Robert lived for about seven years in apartments, hotels, and a rooming house he shared with several other men. Joseph soon returned to his parents' farm in Carolina, though he is a frequent visitor. Cornelius left for a Maryland suburb after the riots in 1968. Robert began work in 1965 sweeping parking lots for the Marriott restaurant chain. A skilled cook who had been well taught by his grandmother and Aunt Louise, he quickly moved onto the food line cooking hamburgers and later to a smaller chain in Maryland. There he met a young white entrepreneur who wanted to open his own seafood restaurant. Impressed by Robert's diligence and intuition as a cook, he asked him to come to work there. Robert likes this job because of the family atmosphere and the autonomy and trust not be such a meaningful indicator of social class. For example, in some places people of very different means are able to buy houses; in other places people who are fairly well-to-do may rent urban apartments. Elm Valley is only beginning to have fashionable high-rise apartment buildings and condominiums. With almost no exceptions, renters are poorer. The only exception seems to stem from age: some young whites with professional jobs share the rental of what one observer called "the ubiquitous sunny group house"; and some of the older black families who were among those to integrate the neighborhood are probably not much better off than some of the younger tenants.

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The Meaning of Home

that characterize his relationship with the owner. He works six days a week from 11 A.M. to 11 P.M., with Mondays off. He brings home $200 a week, a salary considered good in a notoriously nonunion industry revitalized in the 1980s by cheap migrant, immigrant, and refugee labor in Washington. In 1983 Robert married a nursery-school teacher from Rocky Mount, North Carolina, who had lived in Elm Valley with her brother for about eight years. Lucy earns minimum wage in the low-paid day-care industry. In their own way both, but especially Robert, are passionately attached to Elm Valley. They choose to remain tenants in the deteriorating Manor rather than to rent a more luxurious apartment in the suburbs. They do not even contemplate buying a house because they could never afford one in Elm Valley; and since they have invested so much time and money there as renters, digging in and building ties, they feel they could not give up the community. The black residents of the Manor are varied, but they share certain qualities. Most have been there a number of years; Robert and Lucy are among the more recent tenants. They live next door to Harry, city engineer, and his wife, Rose, who has stayed home for a few years with a severely disturbed son. Now that this boy is allowed to attend public school, Rose is looking for work at local fast-food restaurants, for her family lives very close to the edge on just one salary. They have been in the Manor fifteen years. About half the residents are couples or single parents in their twenties and thirties with small children. Many of the others are elderly people living alone or with spouses, siblings, or children. On Robert and Lucy's other side live a couple with three children and a mother and daughter. Because Robert works very long hours and enjoys the public life of Elm Valley, Lucy has spent much more time than he in building ties with other residents of the Manor. She and Rose lend each other money, do laundry and walk to the store together, occasion-

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The Meaning of Home ally exchange child care, and chat every day. Lucy is also close to Mrs. Caldwell and her daughter across the hall, with whom she visits almost daily, as well as to the woman who lives between them with three children and her all-buthusband and to women with and without children throughout the building. She has met these other acquaintances on the elevator, in the halls, standing in front of the building, or in the lobby. Some who are especially stressed by jobs and domestic responsibilities are likely to impose on Lucy for help, leaving their children with her on weekend afternoons and even overnight. Lucy's complex network of ties has been a continuing source of conflict with Robert. The homeowners moving in across the street are also varied, and to some extent their political sensibilities are changing. Gentrification in Elm Valley began very slowly in the early 1970s. Among the first new whites to buy were a lawyer and a nurse who moved onto Rosewood Street. A political activist when he was at Harvard Law School, Mark wanted to live in a varied urban neighborhood, and he chose Elm Valley because then it was eminently affordable. Susan, who works in the nearby business district, is a native Washingtonian who had moved to the suburbs and was eager to return to the city she remembered fondly from her childhood. Their neighbors Richard and Harriet, also white, came about six years later. Harriet is an art dealer and Richard is a doctor, a passionate architecture buff who loves the beautifully rhythmic row housing and streetscapes of Elm Valley. He has been very active in local efforts to preserve the neighborhood's historic qualities. Harriet hates to drive and was drawn by the convenient bus to work and by Elm Valley's central location for doing business, meeting artists and other dealers, and hosting and attending cultural and social events. Among their other owning neighbors are a former history teacher turned realtor, several university professors, two other lawyers, one couple active in the enviornmental

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movement, and a newspaper reporter. Unlike the residents of the Manor, most came to the Washington area from many different places, following jobs rather than relatives. Their reasons for moving to Elm Valley are varied as well, and mingle the pragmatic, the political, and the nostalgic. In the next chapter I explore in more detail the urban pathways that express these motives. Here I want to look at how these varied and complex people see one another through the prisms of social class, cultural background, and everyday experiences.2 Renters and owners do not enter one another's homes, but looking across the street allows them glimpses of each other's lives. When owners look at the dwellings of tenants, they see an impersonal shared facade with no options for outdoor tasks beyond fixing and washing cars. Mark complains that the apartment building blocks the sun. Some comment on what they consider to be an astonishing parade of foot traffic and a great deal of hauling. Rather than owning cars, most tenants depend on the multipurpose pull-along wire cart that is a centerpiece of low-income urban life. These tenants who prefer the public laundromat to the Manor's capricious ma2. These adults are of course among those labeled and belabored in the media as yuppies, a tiresome cliche echoed in everyday Washington talk that refers to the city as "Yuppieville" and its stores and nightspots as "chichi." "Yuppies" are often identified by the products they consume; in fact, the term often stands for those who grew up and exchanged politics for consumption. At other times they are described as people who never have time for friendships or as parents who try to place their children in prestigious schools and then obsessively monitor their academic development. Although in Elm Valley adults seem to live out this cliche in purchasing houses and in some ways "consuming" "state-of-the-art urban lives" (Garfield 1986, p. 7), I think many of them would argue that they are not yuppies. As with other shallow labels, those labeled resist and reframe that one and try to balance issues of consumption, politics, life-cycle demands, and personal identity. As Kunen (1986) writes in Time's "Strawberry Restatement," "Things to do today: Renew car insurance, add to IRA, smash the state" (Allen 1979; Arnebeck 1985; Garfield 1986).

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chines join others who tow groceries and small children. All these sights seem embarrassing, since they testify to a less controlled presentation of self, a perception shared by some tenants who complain about having to display their dirty laundry and who line their carts with plastic garbage bags to preserve what privacy they can. Renters see owners engaged in optional, honorable tasks such as carpentry, painting, and gardening. They do not haul laundry away from home or dispose of trash in front of their houses. Their tinkering and renovation ironically mirror the deterioration of the Manor. In addition, most of tenants' domestic duties are defensive, aimed at fighting back filth in their overcrowded apartments. When families postpone washing dishes, let food sit out overnight, or fail to mop their floors after meals, they invite the pests that are especially troublesome if they must sleep where they eat. Many one-bedroom apartments shelter from four to a dozen people, who may sleep in the living/dining area and, for example, keep their shoes under the coffee table. Robert and Lucy share their bedroom with two toddlers who wreak havoc in the apartment throughout the day. Such intensive use means recleaning the small space every day to reap the largely negative rewards of fewer roaches and mice. The more optional and expensive puttering tasks renters observe across the street cast these circumstances into sharp relief. These same tasks also signal to tenants the owners' control over the facades of their houses. Tenants feel strongly their own lack of such control. For example, they are not allowed to use the grass in front of their building to play games or mind children. If they do, the resident manager may emerge with a shrill public reprimand. This lack of control is obvious in other ways as well. Tenants would like to have a say about such strategic decisions as installing a security system, controlling pests, or permanently repairing the elevator and the boiler. Many feel at the mercy of machines that swallow

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money more reliably than they dispense goods and services. The erratic support system of the Manor makes everyday life a gamble: Lucy and Robert often return home loaded with groceries, one child in a carrier and another in a stroller, to discover a broken elevator and face a four-floor walk upstairs. Or they may put off baths and shampoos until morning only to find then that there will be no hot water for three days. The laundry room is a special source of indignities; residents have to stand in line for the few machines that work, jealously defend their places between loads, and negotiate the treacherous transition from washers to even scarcer dryers, often running cold. Even when renters are inside their apartments, conversations and quarrels, the smell of meals, and the sounds of music and television seep thorugh the walls and out into the halls. Embarrassing substances drip through the floors and ceilings. As Rose puts it, "I know everybody hears our little family things." And they do: her husband is a notorious drinker who enjoys playing Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech at top volume when he is high. Other families' secrets erupt as well, as a bathtub might overflow, smoke filter out, or a woman chase her husband out into the hall. Finally, tenants find telling the places where they see owners, outdoors but in charge, on their porches, in their yards, shoveling the snow from a small patch of sidewalk. These transitional spaces highlight the easy movement outdoors and back inside that tenants lack, for they must negotiate with others the buffer zones like hallways, elevators, and stairwells. While they enjoy meeting neighbors in these places, tenants feel vulnerable there as well (Jacobs 1961; Reed 1974). The annexes to a house also bear witness to greater space inside (which families can use to separate eating, sleeping, and recreation) and to a more flexible domestic organization. As Mark and Susan sit and read on the porch while their children play outside, supper simmers,

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and the dryer hums in the basement, they offer dramatic testimony that they can divide things up in ways not open to parents who must lug small children with them to the laundry room. Thus these glimpses of owners' lives reflect features of life in a house and the rights and privileges that accompany owning one: easy access, choices about tasks and companions, negotiable space, taking the domestic offensive, and orchestrating a flexible family. To some extent renters exaggerate the advantages of the row houses, which to many Americans do not share the archetypal qualities of the freestanding single-family house. (A suburban visitor to Elm Valley once remarked to me: "There really aren't any houses here, are there?") Row houses are compromised in part because they share walls and lots. One woman felt obliged to apologize to neighbors on both sides for her son's "cussing" during every televised Redskins game—"You would have thought he was the coach," she complained to neighbors. Even the prestigious porches are none too private, though owners often act as though they were. Richard enjoys reconstructing the battles between his neighbor, a psychologist, and her husband, who sometimes goads her: "I know more about human behavior than you ever will!" (Richard likes to lounge on his own porch with his brother, because he relishes the opportunity to drink bourbon outdoors in his pajamas. Even though neighbors see him, laugh, call out, and wave, he jokes that if it's on your own porch you can do just about anything.) Other owners argue, however, not only that they are more vulnerable to criminals in their houses, but that their already overburdened time is stretched by the need to maintain an appropriate public facade. Regardless of the real differences in privacy between row houses and apartment buildings, the distinctions significant in Elm Valley are those tenants find pertinent to their own [60]

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circumstances. Robert summed it up when he declared emphatically, "When you have your own house, you have privacy and say-so!' He had been struck particularly by an experience of circulating petitions seeking permission to close the block for a street festival. Whereas each owner had to sign the petition, the resident manager's signature sufficed for the several hundred residents of the Manor.

"Your Building Is Going Down, Down . . . "

After thirty years of reasonable stability (even though tenants live there on one-month leases), in the past five years the Manor has begun to change. As whites have displaced blacks across the street, the Manor's population has aged and very slowly begun to move out. With each new occupant, rent-control law allows management to raise rents. Fewer black working-class families can afford to move in. With the aging of the building, a few young whites and several large Latino families have arrived. The women of the Manor have built important ties with one another, based on the density of apartment life and people's recurring needs for loans, help with child care, and talk. Unlike the alleys, whose sociable season is spring and summer, socialization becomes especially dense in the winter, when women caught inside are likely to feel the building's problems most harshly. Women's friendship and neighborly networks were at the heart of efforts to resist the deterioration of the building. The women were angry about the malfunctioning machines, upset by the erratic heat and hot water, and especially concerned because the stairs and hallways were emerging as popular places to socialize, smoke, and drink. They initiated a campaign of petition signing and letter writ-

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ing. While many persuaded their brothers, sons, fathers, and husbands to sign as well, the petitions and letters passed into each household through women. The most telling feature of the women's written complaints is the way they were verbally framed. These frames reveal a sense of having paid with rent money and time for a home, a place to belong and feel secure. These women added a moral dimension as they called up a relationship between building a home and the kind of people they were. They cited personal qualities to legitimize their requests. For example, each woman noted in her letter how long she had lived in the Manor: "I have lived here for eighteen years"; or "This is the first time in thirteen years I have had to complain"; or "We have been here eight and a half years and have cooperated with the agency in every way/' The women asked for more say about transitional places and the mechanical support system. Their demands did not appeal to universal human rights or even to local law. They demanded particular privileges because they were a particular sort of people: moral, concerned, and settled. Ironically, the glimpses they have managed of owners' lives seem to have encouraged them to identify with them as responsible citizens. These personal letters offered many details about the women's everyday lives: "I am often home alone in the afternoons, and it is very cold." The management corporation's response, however, was a less personal, masterful mass memo. Beginning "Dear Tenant," it mentioned the tenants' complaints as well as the grievances of owners across the street about litter on the lawn. It grouped hallways, stairwells, the laundry room, and the lawn as "public areas" and used them as evidence that tenants of the Manor were not like homeowners after all: they dump trash on the floor, they leave graffiti in the laundry room, they use the stairwell as a bathroom. Tenants should improve themselves, for "It's your

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home." Lumping all tenants denied the exceptional homeowning qualities the women attributed to themselves. The message was that such discriminations are inappropriate: whereas the women had invoked the cultural attributes surrounding connections and commitments to a place, management responded by defining them by class. Tenants offered different explanations for the rapid and distressing decline of the building. One theory held that management was allowing it to deteriorate on purpose so that long-term tenants would leave. Turnover allows landlords to raise rents; and if the building deteriorated enough to be condemned, the owners could gut it and convert it to condominiums. But few renters believed management would collaborate in the building's decline; many felt that owners would want to keep responsible people in the building and would certainly want to keep the property up. Another view suggested that a recent change in resident managers was responsible. Like many other mediators, resident managers give owners a face; they personalize landlords to tenants at the same time that they are known as tenants themselves. In theory they are neutral and fairly powerless mediators, there as go-betweens for owners and tenants, to everyone's benefit. In practice they are rarely neutral enough to jeopardize their jobs. As one manager put it (in response to a tenant's complaint that because of his negligence her friend's ceiling had collapsed and almost killed a baby): "I only got one friend, and that's the man who gave me my job." This manager, "Mr. Ironsides," rarely responded to tenants' requests for repairs. While gentrification stalled and Latino tenants moved into the building, he died and was replaced by a woman who proved competent and prompt at managing repairs. Mysteriously, within a few weeks tenants began to mutter that she was "too nice," "too weak," and "too soft." Mr. Ironsides reemerged in the public memory as a [63]

The Meaning of Home hero, a man who had "roamed the halls with a blackjack" keeping order. Ms. Johnson's unpopularity was partly a matter of timing, since the building's population was becoming more diverse and bewildering, and partly a matter of gender. Some of the hostility, too, reflected ethnicity: a Jamaican labeled "African" by the custodial staff, she was seen as too lenient toward other "foreigners." This hostility black renters felt toward her illuminates the other source of dramatic change in the Manor and black renters' conflicting feelings about it.

"The Do Drop Inn," or Home as Sanctuary Many black renters placed the bulk of the blame for the building's problems on the "Spanish people," half a dozen extended families recently arrived from El Salvador. Among these families are Ana Martinez and her cousins. Ana first moved to Elm Valley to be near Maria, a friend who had married a North American and come to Washington. After her divorce, Maria moved into the Manor with her three sons. She now has an extensive network of clients for whom she does domestic work, and she used it to find Ana a place as a live-in housekeeper and babysitter. As the civil war in El Salvador grew worse, Ana's aunt and uncle, their baby boy, and three other young adult cousins followed her to Washington, where they now share a one-bedroom apartment in Elm Valley. Another family, the Garcias, fled by car from a refugee camp in the capital, having been displaced by the military from their small farm. They are especially striking in the Manor because, in addition to three teenage children they have eighteen-month-old triplets. Mrs. Garcia's mother also lives with them. Both sets of families wax and wane as friends and kin come through and need shelter. Most of the young people have found jobs working for a con[64]

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tract cleaning service at a nearby university. Ana continues to commute to Maryland during the week and on weekends returns to the Manor, where she enjoys partying with her cousins. Her aunt has obtained a job with a Salvadoran restaurant owner in Elm Valley. Lucy found one of the cousins work as an aide in the day-care center where she teaches. The complaints of black women and men tenants against these families differ in revealing ways. Women tenants have complained many times that "Spanish people use the hall like a porch." The young men like to congregate in the halls, and they often fail to manage the interactions of public life in time-honored local ways, such as by moving discretely away from a woman approaching or by offering a wholesomesounding greeting to signal benevolent intent. In addition, they cheerfully break bothersome rules: one group, for example, simply commandeers the service elevator whenever the passenger elevator is stuck somewhere. Most striking about black women's antagonism toward these young Latino men, however, is their use of labels emphasizing ethnicity rather than gender and age. Most people are leery of groups of young men hovering in an ambiguous place, but what tenants stress in encoding these groups is that they are "Spanish." Perhaps the stress on ethnicity reflects general barriers of language and culture, but in the Manor cultural differences loom particularly large in Latinos' transformations of domestic life space. As large extended families in desperate straits, they crowd many people into their small apartments. Other tenants claim that "one might sign the lease and then they sneak all kinds of others in." Not knowing exactly who or how many occupy a unit disorients other tenants, and their confusion is compounded by irritation at the efficient dispersal of Latino family members to manage tasks like laundry. Those tenants who had developed ways to beat the laundry-room rush soon found that there was never a time when several elderly Latinas were not in

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the laundry room minding infants and washing many loads of clothes. Even more annoying is the houselike use to which Latino families transform their apartments. On two floors domestic networks spread out over several apartments, but because they share many tasks and responsibilities, they flow between these units, leave their doors open, and encourage their children to play in the halls. They do in fact use the hall like a porch. A hall is the closest thing to a porch that tenants have. It is an important transitional area for storing trash on the way to the trash room, packing shopping carts, and chatting. Informal dress and even nightclothes seem to be acceptable in the hall (Reed 1974). Latino families are drawing a fairly appropriate analogy between hall and porch that is consistent with the living arrangements most have known at home. But to other tenants this use of the hall as porch highlights all its contradictions: this great shared indoor porch in which there is neither privacy nor say-so demands some sort of cooperation in limiting interaction. Families who use it detract from others' right to have the hall not used. Women see these behaviors as proof that the Latino tenants are not like homeowners. Some are concerned about the preponderance of men in these families and argue, "Women make an apartment more like a home." Others stress transiency: "They think this is the 'Do Drop Inn'; they're like college students; they don't care about keeping it up because they don't want to make it a home." Men phrase the problem a little differently. Many male tenants feel that Latinos "use the hall like the street" and that they do not make the appropriate overtures for sharing public space. In turn, they attribute all anonymous troubles to Latinos, including the trash-room fires that grew common during the winter of 1983 and one episode in which fifty tires were slashed. As one man put it, "Spanish people only come [66]

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out at night, because they think they're white then. Black people do what they want during the day."3 Most of the refugees define homes differently than Elm Valley's long-term tenants do because they have radically different priorities for it. Many want to offer shelter to fellow refugees and in fact use the promise of shelter to encourage kin and friends to emigrate. They are not so interested in keeping the property up or in building ties. They want to use home as a sanctuary. Even those who may want more privacy soon face a choice between cutting off fellow refugees and doubling up. Their desperation has created scenes in several apartments featuring rows of cots and numbers of depressed and displaced people.4 None of these things are particularly clear to other tenants, who know little of the circumstances in Central America that have propelled these refugees north. The theory 3. Although Latinos have long been in Elm Valley, and though a number of churches and social action groups have reached out to refugees and even become sanctuaries, the growing more political, poorer population since 1979 has met increasing hostility there. Refugees are often blamed for messing up and ruining the neighborhood, depriving their neighbors of jobs, and not showing respect. In one disastrous fire, fifteen refugee men who died in a basement where they had sheltered were quickly labeled by newspaper and television commentators, as well as by some of their neighbors, as "transients" and "itinerants." This category, however, reflects their different use of the home place, Latinos' use of the Manor's halls is echoed on the Elm Valley streets as former residents now living in Maryland drive in, park, and greet kin and friends, who gather round the cars to socialize on evenings and weekends. This domestic use of the street angers some of the other residents; one commented, "They throw out their dirty diapers on the street and everything." 4. Some of the long-term Latino residents of Elm Valley come to find renting very irksome. One woman who came from Guatemala twenty-five years ago phrased it this way: "You know that when you pay rent, you feel like you're putting money in a hole that has no bottom. And you worry that the day you can't pay, that's the day they're going to knock on the door. But when you buy your house, you know that one day with all the money you're sacrificing you will own it."

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The Meaning of Home they have built to explain the Manor's decline relies heavily on the immediate and concrete details of building life that they can observe every day. Whenever one family moves out, it is replaced by another of lesser quality. This gradual exchange of good tenants for worse ones means that the building inevitably deteriorates. Management is at fault "because they don't screen new tenants," but the problem is essentially one of mobility. If tenants move out, there is likely to be something wrong with the building anyway; those who come in are by definition not settled or committed, and if they are willing to move into a declining building, they are double suspect. Speaking a different language and bringing culturally distinct and inappropriate traditions for inhabiting space further complicates the problem. In the Manor, black women tenants argue that by settling in and taking an active, moral interest in a building you can act like a homeowner. This ethos then frames the rhetoric through which they demand particular privileges and services. The frame turns out to be a divisive one that then leads to blaming other tenants for problems with their landlord and for the decline of their building.

The Metaphor of Home and the Specter of Displacement For centuries "house" and "home" have carried very different meanings. As early as the third century "house" referred to a physical structure designed for human habitation. By the twelfth century it included such places as apartments and living rooms, but by the nineteenth it had narrowed in meaning to designate a more specific type of building. Since at least the tenth century "home" has stood in contrast to the more physical "house" by the qualities it evokes of warmth,

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The Meaning of Home security, belonging, settledness, the way people feel about a place and one another. But beginning in the 1880s, advertisements such as the one in the Kansas Times-Star for "a fine home at 1223 Broadway" began to offer empty houses for sale as something more than that (Ehrlich et al. 1980, p. 125). This promotional usage grew widespread in Washington in the 1950s, and today the commercial substitution of "home" for "house" is so complete as to go practically unnoticed except by language purists, who continue to complain, for example, that "an unoccupied house is not a home though it may have been once and may well be again." We refer to homeowners, home prices, home buyers, home-improvement loans, and home mortgages. What we once called house trailers we now call mobile homes, and gentrification has brought with it the grating term "townhome." These marketing phrases have passed into popular parlance so that we may think of houses and homes as synonymous, even though "home" sometimes retains its more traditional connotations.5 5. Information on the history of words comes from the Oxford English Dictionary, Ehrlich et al.'s Oxford American Dictionary, and the Evans' Dictionary of Contemporary American Usage. Children's author Ruth Kraus wrote, on the verge of a significant change in usage in the 1950s: "The little house had become a home. 'Home' is a way people feel about a place. These people felt that way about the little house." The quoted complaint comes from the Morrises' Harper Dictionary of Contemporary Usage; others are even more strident. Nicholson wrote in 1957 that "a home is a dwelling place for a family or household. Its commercial use for house (as in 'A row of stucco homes is now under construction') is incorrect and offensive" (Nicholson 1957, p. 239). Evans and Evans (1957) claimed that "usage and the relentless optimism of real estate dealers have made 'home' now practically the equivalent of'house.' The old connotations of family ties and domestic comforts 'home' once carried have been obliterated." Rawson (1981) waxed even more indignant, arguing that it is grasping and pretentious to substitute a phrase like "lovely home" for the more straightforward "nice house." Otherwise, he insists, "home" is used only euphemistically to refer to institutions like boys' homes and group homes

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The Meaning of Home What began as a marketing strategy may well have become more central to a broader process of hegemony in American life. For example, when urban residents telephone for taxis, theater tickets, or airplane reservations, operators routinely ask when taking the address: "Is this an apartment or a private home?" Everyday talk thus reinforces the contradictory implication that only a house is really a home. The single-family detached house seems to have become a symbol for success, happiness, independence, and privacy. Among their very first artistic accomplishments at about age five or six, children draw the model freestanding house, a milestone at least one teacher in Elm Valley bemoans as indicating that they will no longer draw so imaginatively. For Father's Day, Elm Valley's 1986 kindergarten class produced paintings featuring the archetypal house/car/tree/bird/cloud configuration, though many had rarely seen such a place in real life. Advertisers are the great metaphorists of American society, and we have grown accustomed to hearing that products stand for happiness, love, beauty, and sex appeal. Because advertisers frequently reshuffle the qualities they have arbitrarily attached to objects, all of us face problems of knowing, of breaking the code, of navigating the symbolic consumer worlds we face each day (Agnew 1983; Booth 1978). A "house is a home," however, is even more sweeping and confusing than most advertising metaphors, for in this one a physical structure stands for relationships among people as well as for their ties to a place. Constance Perin's (1978) informants from the fields of urban planning and development and the housing and banking industries not only used houses (or "property") as metonyms that are not homey at all. See also Rubinstein (n.d.), on the meaning of home to elderly people in Philadelphia; Rakoff (1977); and Rybczynski (1986).

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for their occupants, but offered criteria for distinguishing those who owned houses from those who rented apartments. They considered owners more independent, more responsible, more likely to care for their property, better decision makers, better providers, more stable, and more rooted. They saw renters as socially incomplete: too young or too old, not committed to their community, unwilling to take responsibility for families, or unable to provide for them. Perm's informants explained these differences in two ways. To buy a house in the first place one must be the sort of person a homeowner is—properly traversing the ladder of life and accredited as a social adult by a bank's willingness to provide a mortgage. At the same time, owning and inhabiting a house encourages good character and valued social behaviors, in part by liberating owners from the problematic social relations surrounding tenants' shared use of common facilities. Thus her informants accept and reinvent—through such mortage talk as "y°u qualify" or "y°u can handle it" —the metaphor, attaching to those who live in houses qualities ranging from straightforward financial success and independence through much deeper character traits and, most tellingly, connections and commitments to a community. To people in these industries class resources stand for culture. Because this renaming of houses as homes reaches so far in American culture, I shall explore the ways Elm Valley residents actually experience one thing in terms of another, which is the essence of metaphor, and suggest ways they test, revise, fight over, challenge, and use metaphor as well (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). As they navigate this symbolic world, they reveal a great deal about the power of cultural forces as well as our resilience in doing battle with cliches and attaching our own meanings to the places where we live. First, everyday life in Elm Valley gives the equation a hard test. This is true, in part, because homeownership is changing in American life. Many of those who expected to

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The Meaning of Home buy have not been able; many people in the middle class find to their surprise that they are living worse than their parents. In Elm Valley, as in many parts of the country, a family needs two very good incomes to keep up mortgage payments, which are always well over $1,500 a month for those who bought after 1975. We saw in chapter 2 that most young adults today cannot expect to buy houses or live as well as their parents who moved to Elm Valley in the 1960s. Many of the new owners have relied on down payment assistance from parents. Thus associations between housing, independence, and adulthood are challenged both in Elm Valley and in the country at large.6 But owners rather than renters are the disruptive and transient residents in Elm Valley. The next chapter explores more fully the variety of their connections and commitments to the neighborhood, which range from cosmopolitan ignorance of it through deep concern for social, political, and architectural issues. Neither owners nor renters see ownership as a monolithic measure of either rootedness or character. Susan, in fact, is terribly worried about how ownership has narrowed her own outlook: "Once you buy a house, you have to evaluate everything in terms of property values. That's all you can think about—How will this affect the value of my house?" And Mark, who once prided himself on his social conscience, tiredly justifies defending his pro-historicpreservation stance to tenants concerned about displacement: "I just can't worry about that anymore. I'm tired of fighting one scuzzy developer after another. I just want to rest and enjoy my family and my house." Yet another young homeowner, debating what kind of people really care about 6. Harney estimates in the Washington Post that by 1990 ten million families who in earlier times would have owned houses will be stuck, most permanently, as apartment renters. Harney is concerned about the broken compact between American society and those people who believed that if they worked hard they could have houses.

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the neighborhood, commented, "And I don't mean yuppies, because all they care about really are property values." Thus even owners themselves worry about the narrow, privatizing, anxious materialism that they see as attached to the experience of owning a house. Nonetheless, their limited glimpses of tenants' lives do shape the way owners see renters, as we will discover more fully in the next chapter. Earlier I described the ways houses appear to renters: the space, easy access, choices about tasks and companions, rights over facade, and general domestic flexibility that renters have translated into issues of privacy and say-so. These themes hint at the issue of ownership while masking it as well. What seems to emerge as renters navigate this metaphoric world is something like what Raymond Williams (1977) has called a "structure of feeling." Lucy, Robert, and their friends know that they have worked very hard and will work very hard for the rest of their lives. They know that they are well rooted in Elm Valley. Yet they see their powerlessness as renters highlighted by people across the street. They articulate their unease as a structure of feeling that questions implications about their own self-worth. Thus, in framing their arguments for adequate maintenance of their building, they play on the ethos attached to people who own houses by claiming that they are like them. They attack the metaphor by claiming that class is not culture, that the Manor is their home, and that culturally they are similar to those living in houses. While arguing, in a sense, that ownership should not determine minimal rights to decent housing, they at the same time misconstrue the domestic circumstances—the connections and commitments—of Latino families. They thus challenge the equation that a house is a home and that homeowners are the best adults in American society. At the same time they appropriate the homeowning model of personhood. The home metaphor thus provides them with symbols that work in con[73]

The Meaning of Home tradictory ways to aim, twist, deflect, and articulate conflict, and ultimately to mask class. The second way the home metaphor works in Elm Valley emerges as renters face displacement. I first noticed this in talking to members of some seventeen families from the building next door who for several months after receiving notice of eviction refused to leave because, they said, there was nowhere else to live. Some said they would "put up little cardboard shacks" (in the park across the street) rather than leave Elm Valley. The most telling comments came from the man they elected their president. Demanding $10,000 settlements for each family before they would agree to move, this man said, "This is our home and we want something out of what weVe put into it." He had lived there thirty years. He added, "I've been paying money into this building for years, and I deserve more than the $120 the landlord wants to give us." After his building closed and he was in fact displaced, this man returned to Elm Valley nearly every day, sometimes selling shrimp or crabs he had caught in Morehead City, North Carolina, and sometimes just to socialize. Many of the other displaced families come back as well: in one case a woman returns to work as a crossing guard, her daughter comes to babysit, and her husband socializes with his friends on the street. All three also enjoy gathering in the thrift shop on Main Street. New owners buy a piece of a place and feel that through property they have put down roots in the community. Many tenants in Elm Valley have known for a long time that they will never have the capital or the parental stake to buy a house. Unable to buy houses, they have bought time and used that time to dig in and build ties. Rent buys nothing but shelter for the day, yet the circumstances of renting encourage the connections and commitments that attach renters to a place. People have to value and people grow to value a community where they pay rent as a home in the [74]

The Meaning of Home word's most traditional sense. These renters too expressed their anger over the threat of displacement, in part through efforts to align themselves with the qualities with which the home metaphor endows owners—settledness, commitment, connections, control. They rightfully claimed those qualities for themselves. In the Manor today Rose and her husband Harry face a second kind of displacement, as they try to purchase a small house in the far reaches of the Maryland suburbs. They have been depressed and humiliated by the search for a house they can afford and by seeking financing. They believe they will have a better material life in Maryland. Harry, though, anticipates the discomfort and alienation of what many Americans take for granted, "Having to drive out to get milk, and not knowing the man who sells it to me." He maintains though, "I'll be back here every day anyway." Rose is very worried that she will be lonely, stranded at home with a young child and no car, though (she hopes) with some friendly neighbors. They face the same lack of choice as those who buy houses inside and outside Elm Valley: a house is not really a home. The metaphor is a fragile one, and as soon as we grasp it, it begins to disintegrate (Sandor 1986). Thus, as people move in and out of Elm Valley, they must reconcile the complicated, contradictory meanings of "home." As a commodity it largely defines who can and who cannot stay. As a cluster of attributes it becomes a measure by which people judge themselves and one another. It is the quintessentially private commodity that pretends to offer a full, rich interpersonal life. And above all, it captures all the tensions of a consumer society, in which we are encouraged to seek gratification through private roads but can rarely find it alone.

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[4] The Struggle for Main Street

Main Street is for many the heart of Elm Valley. For the past ten years residents have disagreed bitterly over what it should look like and how it should work. These disagreements reflect deep contrasts in how groups with different class and cultural backgrounds see and use the city. This chapter begins by describing a day that Robert Harper might spend on the street, operating under constraints his Uncle Walter largely avoided but trying still to make the city one he can live in. His day offers an opportunity for understanding widely shared strategies of male renters, who tend to appreciate and enjoy the things they know well. Their ways of seeing and using the street further illuminate the passion for texture that guides many black residents' vision of the city. I move next to new homeowners' sense of the street, with their more metropolitan quest for variety, and to the struggles that reflect these conflicting perspectives. Both ways of living in the city are riddled with difficulties and tensions. I believe, however, that a densely integrated community demands the more intimate and ultimately more accepting views that allow many renters to give other people the benefit of the doubt because their complexities, if not fully [76]

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known, are anticipated and often forgiven. Those who range more widely must necessarily rely more on broad, sometimes harsh, judgments of their neighbors. Robert Harper visits Main Street every day, often several times. On Monday, his day off, he is there most of the day. This is how he spent one Monday in the summer of 1986. Robert was on the street early to "meet the guys." He stopped for coffee at a Greek-owned restaurant, where he met his Uncle Walter to collect some fish Walter and Joseph had caught the day before. He also hoped to run into a Jamaican acquaintance so he could ask him to fix his television set, and when he did, they arranged to meet again that night at Robert's apartment. He went home to drop off the fish and collect some greens he had prepared over the weekend, then returned to Main Street to deliver the greens to his friend Charles, who had picked up a couch for him the day before, and to do some grocery shopping. He stopped in at a store he calls "Bobby's" (this is not the name on the sign), run by an elderly white man for about a dozen years. He paid the tab that had accumulated during last week's wait till payday, bought a few items on credit, and took them home. By now his small children were awake, and Lucy had to leave for work. Robert and his son Walter baked a lemon cake for a woman who works in the local consignment shop, operated by a social service agency creating sheltered employment for the mentally ill. With his daughter Louise riding in a backpack, Robert and his son delivered the cake and picked up some clothes that the manager had saved for him, labeled PLS HOLD FOR ROBERT, all in Lucy's approximate size. He chatted with the manager for a long time while his son and her son watched television in the back. She was happy to see him because she had just learned that she could move the shop next door, to just-vacated premises that were larger and more desirable. She had been frustrated, though, because "none of the gossips have come by." They planned a [77]

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grand opening, and Robert promised to make chopped barbecue for it. Robert next visited the barber shop where his old friend Mr. Garcia, a third-generation barber from Belize, cut Walter's hair. Mr. Garcia speaks little English and is inclined toward very short cuts. After several disastrous experiences that angered Lucy, Robert has learned to hover over Mr. Garcia shouting "Trim! Trim!" Then they stopped into the pharmacy, owned by a man from Surinam who is married to a co-worker of Lucy's. Robert chatted with the Latino youths who gather around the cash register there and exchanged greetings with the owner. He then took his children across the street for pizza, stopped to buy cornmeal at a Korean grocery store where a number of his friends from the street now work, and then bought the children ice cream at this man's brother's shop. He picked up some dry cleaning and stopped in at a liquor store (both businesses owned by a white man for many years) where he contributed to a fund for a couple who had recently been burned out and discussed plans to have Robert's cousin Joseph do some remodeling there. Robert then moved outside to the street corner. There he learned from his friend Ted that another friend had been found dead in his apartment late that morning. Ted was devastated, for this man had been his "walking partner," but he said, "As soon as I get my group I'll be all right." After discussing the details with a number of his friends, Robert headed home to cook supper and tell Lucy the news. At the last corner he stopped at the video store to rent a Disney movie for his son. Though some bemoaned the coming of the new video store as a sure sign of upscaling in Elm Valley, Robert worked, as he had with others, to socialize the new owners. He refers to the store by the name of its manager, who watches for new movies Robert and his family might [78]

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like. As he turned the corner to his apartment building, Robert was stopped by the custodian of the next building, who warned him that the father with whom Lucy car pools might be selling drugs. Robert then "went on in," planning to be out again by himself that night. Robert's days on Main Street seem dense and repetitive to an outsider; he relishes, however, the nuances that make each day's interactions unique yet familiar. His commercial relations, obviously, are intertwined with friendships, and vice versa. One day does not do justice to these entanglements: each relationship has a number of convoluted historical twists. Robert has known some of these business people and street friends for twenty years. He has helped break in new ones. In his view, life on the sidewalks blurs into life inside the stores as he exchanges goods and services in both places and mingles commercial and personal dealings. Lucy finds him inefficient and envies the time he spends lounging on the street with his many friends. She resents his frequent shopping trips, often for one or two items, and what she sees as his regular abandonment of her at home. But Robert's day illustrates larger patterns among male renters in public life.

The Work of the Street The work of the street reflects in part the small, uncomfortable apartments, where people feel they cannot entertain, and the financial strictures that prevent renters from traveling freely. Although women use the street during the day, and though there are women on the street and linked to the street at night as well, they do not gather there in the clear and dramatic ways that men do. We have seen that women's networking strategies seem more varied and are somewhat more likely to be carried on inside, whether at

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The Struggle for Main Street work, at church, in club life, in the alleys, or inside their apartment buildings. The work of the street seems to be largely the preserve of men. 1 On the street men bolster family economies. They network and they pool. They swap services such as rides, repairs, and hauling, and they exchange goods such as clothing, small appliances, furniture, food stamps, and things brought from work like crabs, tostados, pesticides, and cleaning fluids. Men often trade goods for favors—souse meat or "gas money" for a ride, pirated or homegrown vegetables for babysitting, playing a number in exchange for "a taste," help with moving for a crib, homemade soup for a watch. Sometimes men organize small cooperatives for a trip to a suburban farmers market to shop in bulk. The pooling and swapping that are so important to the poor and so often the concern of women here constitute an activity in which men also share. Some men earn their living by street work. One man owns a truck that he uses for hawking surplus vegetables bought from suburban gardeners, moving furniture, delivering appliances, and salvaging trees to sell for firewood. Another man sells dresses, coats, and jewelry on the street and is generally available to sweep and run errands for shopkeepers, pick up a fish or barbecue sandwich for office workers, i. I borrow here a way of seeing these activities from di Leonardo's (1984) phrase "the work of kinship" and from my own studies (Williams 1979, 1984) of kinship among Chicano migrant workers. I do so with the reservation that we may be labeling too many different activities "work." But it does seem to capture both my sense of the economic importance of the street and also what men claim is important about spending time there. Robert Harper blurs the boundaries between economics and sociability on his job as well, where he discusses with the delivery people, letter carriers, mechanics, fire fighters, and police officers who come in to eat issues like "the way to Philadelphia," which neighborhoods he might move to if he is displaced, child-care resources, and how to get his vacuum cleaner fixed. The phrase is biased, however, toward what men would like to have women believe.

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and mind children for passersby or deliver them to nursery school. Men like these are conscientious and self-conscious custodians of the street, keeping careful track of what goes on during the day and often sharing information and delivering messages and warnings. Other men do not live from street work but look to it to solve routine problems—to find information about a city bureaucracy, to look for jobs, to get appliances repaired, to locate help with moving, and to fill ordinary, everyday needs. The street as work looms large in family negotiations: men stress its financial benefits when they bargain for time away from their homes: "I have to try to run into Ben so I can tell him Maria needs firewood"; "I have to deliver these greens to Harper so I can tell Jimmy to come around and fix the stereo"; "How do you expect me to find a job if you won't let me go to the tavern?" But the men of Elm Valley, like their counterparts in other cities, love the street (Hannerz 1969; Liebow 1967; Suttles 1968; Williams 1981). It is fruitless to separate the financial benefits of street work from the other attractions of street life, and the men of Elm Valley would not do that, for finance is interwoven with a great deal of trust and talk, lasting social relationships, and the detailed knowledge that works just as well to manage problems as to cook up deals. In the intricate world of the street, men do all they can to understand the details of one another's biographies. Because they memorize others' reputations, they tolerate a great deal of deviance and diversity. I was first struck by this early one morning when a slightly tipsy man approached me carrying a big sharp chisel. I was grateful when another man called out, "Just getting off work, Curly?" and proceeded to tell me that Curly worked all night cleaning and repairing office buildings. I particularly appreciated this exchange because the second man had tried to make me feel safe on the street, but there are many other examples. One man is well liked but

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The Struggle for Main Street known to be a pickpocket; those he steals from generally blame themselves because they know this, and they know that he knows they know. Another man is known as a soft touch but a terror "when he's drinking," yet another as a soft touch when he's drinking. Others are known to be "not drinking," a personal career linked to problems of health, family conflict, alcoholism, or probation.2 Another example of the way the men on the street value history and detail comes from a "public meeting" usually attended by new owners but advertised as a time for neighbors to talk to the police about proposed changes in parking regulations. Everyone was surprised to see an elderly black man who was once active in civic life and still active on the streets, but an unfamiliar face at these meetings. He had come because he had recently received a ticket while parking "just to run into the store," and he was furious because he was on the street every morning and watched others park there without getting tickets. His point was that the police should not give tickets unless they historically, consistently do so and are known to do so. The street is also an arena for preserving the culture of the Carolinas through foodways, remedies (junction weed boiled with a penny for chicken pox, wild onion roots boiled with butter and Calvert whiskey for a cold, earwax for chapped lips), and expressions (to be pleasantly tipsy on Calvert is to be "high as a Georgia pine"). Men identify real friends as "from Carolina" or "from my home town." One delicacy that is especially prized in public life is souse, a dish disdained in some circles because it is a chilled block made from the 2. There is a well-recognized Elm Valley tradition that allows men to take part in all the same activities as others without sharing liquor. One man, a nondrinker, was given a gala thirtieth birthday party at the local tavern, for example. I think it is important for ethnographers to recognize the "not drinking" tradition, since our tendency has been to document and stress the opposite.

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scorned parts of the pig. People who enjoy it consider it among the world's best foods, and many Washington men have cultivated souse making as a personal art. They may cook it several times a year and then exchange slices of it for money or a variety of favors and products. Souse meat is an appropriate symbol for the personal, dense, textured smalltown world of the street. It is an ancient Carolina treat, demanding time, dedication, and the background of the Carolinas, linking them to the Pennsylvania Dutch migrants who brought it into southern Virginia. It seems to have a special role in knitting friendships on the street and in the shops. On the street people share urban lore as well, organizing complicated neighborhood lotteries around football games and sharing stories about the numbers, playing strategies, lucky wins, or narrow losses ("That's how the numbers get you"). Many residents agree that the more dire their straits, the more they are obliged to play. Beyond financial possibilities, however, numbers strategies and lore are much more than work—a person's regular number, his (or sometimes her) evolving tactics for choosing a number and deciding where to play it, and his biography of wins and narrow losses are important parts of identity. Each person is a complex weave of vivid everyday detail acted out on the street. The world of the street draws in the shopkeepers and blurs divisions between shopper and seller. Men like Robert organize all their shopping within Elm Valley. They have long-term relationships with some of the older shopkeepers that may involve credit or part-time employment. As new stores open the men entrench themselves there, coming to be known by name and to mingle and complicate relationships, crossing all the usual boundaries of urban consumption. They may arrange lay away at the drugstore, barter at the thrift shop, contributions for their children's schools from the new grocery store. They define their needs so they

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can be satisfied in Elm Valley, and then they redefine and stretch what the neighborhood has to offer. It is on the street that we see most clearly the passion for texture that is central to the renters' neighborhood world, a passion that emerges from the interplay of financial constraints and cultural traditions. This passion for texture is much like the "thick description" valued by folklorists and ethnographers (cf. Geertz 1973). It includes a decided preference for depth over breadth, an interest in rich, vivid, personal, concrete, tangled detail. It involves repetition, density, mining a situation from many facets and angles. A joke, a story, a teasing line can be retold and rephrased many times as long as the emphasis varies slightly. Inside apartments I saw a love of texture in a desire to fill empty spaces with artifacts and objects and to manage the density of domestic life by weaving through it the sounds and colors and rhythms of television. We will see it emerge in chapter 5 in renters' interest in programs like "Dallas" and "Dynasty" that offer vivid, concrete, detailed, long-lasting entanglements. It is clear in many residents' preference for local over national news, for stories that can be followed from beginning to end. It is clearest on the street in the intimate knowledge men build of one another, in the ways that roles, institutions, and relationships are complicated and rewoven, the formal and informal sectors become muddled, and interactions are intimate and multifaceted.3 3. What I am calling "texture" may be similar to what Snead (1984) refers to as "repetition" in black culture. Snead argues that all culture is really the culture of culture, or the nurturance of concepts and experiences that lend self-consciousness to a group, and that it offers coverage in the face of threats and thus promises continuity. Black culture, Snead argues, highlights repetition, sometimes repetition to make a difference, so that "the thing is there to pick it up when you come back to get it," and the magic of the cut, which makes room for accident and rupture. Although Snead looks mostly at literary and musical forms, street and alley life in Elm Valley may offer similar versions of this theme.

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The Struggle for Main Street The Look of the Street Elm Valley's Main Street, with its small-scale, familyowned stores serving local rather than metropolitan customers, has in a sense remained the same since the early years of this century. It has housed laundries, small groceries, barbers and beauty shops, carryouts, liquor stores, and very little else. Its stores serve people on their way home from work or out walking on the weekends or at night. In another sense the street has changed dramatically. Until the late 1950s, many of the owners were white—largely Irish, Italian, and Jewish—and lived nearby. In Elm Valley's watershed years after Boiling v. Sharpe, many of these owners retired or moved away, and by the mid-1960s Main Street was almost entirely black owned, with one or two Chinese and Latin American establishments. By 1986, although the character of the street stayed much the same, men like Robert found it symbolically quite different. Only one black business—a struggling variety store that sells gadgets—remained from the 1960s. Black owners had been replaced by a few whites, but mostly by Latin Americans and Koreans, who bought stores throughout the metropolitan area after the riots of 1968 (Wheeler 1986). These owners, with a few exceptions, lived far from Elm Valley. Many, however, have worked very hard to fit into the personal world of Main Street.4 Residents of Elm Valley are remarkably, starkly divided in how they evaluate Main Street, which all want to see as the 4. Lani Sanjek noted to me that the Korean business people in Elm Valley may have done so well there because they learned from disagreeable experiences in other cities. Like their counterparts elsewhere, these business people have almost mythically large families of workers and powerful metropolitan organizations, churches, internal lending arrangements, and communications networks. See also Wheeler (1986). Those in Elm Valley have adapted remarkably well to what appears to be a Carolina-based way of living in the city.

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The Struggle for Main Street heart of the neighborhood. While saddened that black owners have been so dramatically displaced, Robert and his friends exaggerate the first point of view, which celebrates the homeyness and "knownness" of the street. There are very few classy commodities on Main Street, and thus little of the brand-name hoopla that most Americans deal with every day. Because shopping is so involved with memories, friendships, and ongoing arrangements like babysitting and gossip, it is repetitive, relatively communal, and not very alienating. Although many would prefer fewer canned foods and more fresh ones, they argue that prices are generally lower there than at the big chains and that the variety is ample. But far more important than what is there is how the street works. One way to understand this is through four shopping expeditions outside Main Street I took with Elm Valley residents. One was with Lucy and her children to suburban Maryland to visit Toys-R-Us and hunt for shoes. Because the children were screamingly hungry, we also had to stop at a Wendy's restaurant for lunch. Although I was driving, Lucy complained bitterly throughout the day that you had to drive everywhere out here, that we could see nothing but fast-food restaurants and chain stores, that Maryland was "nothing but highways and malls." As we sat down to eat Lucy muttered, "Another joyless meal in Maryland." Another day I misguidedly persuaded Lucy to take her little girl crosstown to a special at a hair-cutting chain. Even I was struck by the superficial chitchat that stood in stark contrast to visiting Mr. Garcia's and urging "]ust a trim! TRIM!" While such franchised establishments may try to introduce intimacy by using customers' first names, Mr. Garcia had worked in Elm Valley for twenty years. Lucy knew members of his family, spoke to him on the street, and watched him go next door to eat soup each day. In his shop she could watch out the window for friends and call them inside. She could see photographs of neighborhood festivals, records in Spanish he sold

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to local teenagers, and a stockpile of toys he collected for the holidays. Rather than taking her chances on an unfamiliar barber, Lucy knew exactly what Mr. Garcia was likely to do that she did not want, and she had learned how to thwart him. While to outsiders his shop might appear crowded with inappropriate items and people, Lucy seemed to like both knowing to some extent what to expect and also exploring for changes in detail. On another occasion I accompanied Robert to a Safeway grocery just over the District line. He refused to go in, sending me instead. When I returned he said, in disbelief: "Look at this parking lot. Nobody knows each other here. No one's saying Hi to each other or anything/' Yet another time, I walked with his Uncle Walter just outside Elm Valley to a chain drugstore to buy something unavailable in Elm Valley's pharmacy. As we waited in a long line, I was astonished to hear Walter complaining in a loud voice, "I hate this place. They don't care about people. They don't even open the other registers so we would't have to wait. This store has always been this way. They can't even keep their workers. There's always someone new here. They must not pay them anything!" These shopping experiences, which many big-city residents take for granted, were extremely alienating for Lucy, Robert, and Walter. Shopping outside Elm Valley seems lonely, frustrating, and hypocritical. For all three, the commodities available—what's there—are not nearly as important as how you work the place and how you make it work for you.5 Many new owners, however, see the street as tawdry. 5. Agnew (1983) contrasts economies based on household production, which anchors the symbolic structures of a community and makes people accountable to each other, to those more intensive and extensive markets usually evolving in production for exchange. In those broader markets the gap between purchaser and seller increases, bringing with it problems of identity and accountabilty. Agnew feels that the fluidity of the mass market dislodges the meanings we attach to products. Perhaps the residents of Elm Valley experience this larger process in microcosm.

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The Struggle for Main Street Perhaps because residential gentrification was stalled for several years or perhaps because Main Street is not a metropolitan thoroughfare, Elm Valley has almost no commercial gentrification. Although the commercial strip boasts an art store and an antique store, there is no "Plants, etc.," "Ribs, Wings, 'n Tings," or "California Cafe." Thrift shops, "variety" stores, dry cleaners, and liquor stores rely on numerous clients rather than on wealthy ones (cf. Hennig 1982). Most new homeowners find the stores uninteresting, inadequate, unpleasant, and sometimes frightening. They feel threatened by the groups of men who stand talking, and they feel mocked by the ubiquitous "variety" stores, termed by one new owner "nothing but grocery stores that sell beer." Many are overwhelmed by the many small shops that stay alive through licenses to sell beer and wine. Some new owners claim that these stores "victimize the poor" and argue, "We don't want one more drop of liquor in Elm Valley." One man, a realtor, vows that his agency is there "to clean the neighborhood up" and complains, "We need a florist. We need a bank. We need a good restaurant." When I asked him about the Greek, Malian, Salvadoran, and Guatemalan restaurants there already, he replied, "We deserve better." Michael laughingly pleads, "All I want is a place where I can buy twelve kinds of mustard." One cannot help but note some irony in this search for variety. I know of few neighborhoods in Washington that offer the actual cultural variety seen in Elm Valley. One can buy banana leaves, mangoes, pickled octopus, cockles in brine, goat necks, Salvadoran cheese, and souse loaf, to say nothing of plantains, tortillas, collard greens, and every conceivable part of the pig in just one grocery store. But upscale, more middle-class gourmet variety, which often comes from mainstreaming ethnic or counterculture foods, is conspicuously missing (see Belasco 1985, n.d.). One cannot buy pesto, Brie, tofu, sesame oil, stoned wheat thins, or alfalfa sprouts

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The Struggle for Main Street in Elm Valley. And this kind of gap sends new owners shopping throughout the metropolitan area, often on the way home from work.

The Quest for Variety and the Metropolitan Vision We saw in chapter 3 that new owners' reasons for choosing to live in Elm Valley vary a great deal, ranging from a passion for its architecture and streetscapes through a more cosmopolitan attachment to an urban downtown world to nostalgia for a diverse ethnic community. As far as I know, however, even those who hope to find community there range outside Elm Valley in very different ways than renters do. New owners may find Elm Valley tawdry, exotic, fascinating, or quaint, but they also see it as strategically located for reaching out into the metropolitan area to meet their needs and those of their families. Their strategies reflect some of the complexities of class cultures, including varied resources for travel and indoor activities as well as radically different visions of what a neighborhood offers and how to build pathways of urban life. Many are dealing with the difficult contradictions involved in wanting to support local business, trying to build rich, healthy lives as they have learned to define them, reaching some kind of truce with a consumer society, meeting escalating material needs, and providing the best for their children. Some abandon Main Street altogether, while others make it a focus of frustration, concern, and activism. All bring to Main Street a belief in breadth rather than density and a quest for variety rather than repetition, which means that they see and use the street very differently than renters do. The search for variety is especially acute for people with children, who must look outside Elm Valley for swimming pools, good schools, playgrounds, soccer teams, and violin

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and ballet lessons. These are rich, often difficult quests for learning and authenticity, for giving their children the resources they need to build lives more meaningful and individuated than they believe most members of this society easily find. As children join metropolitan soccer teams and ballet classes, as they travel to the suburbs to swim and shop, their parents try to make these experiences and groups meaningful. They organize car pools and co-ops, and they look for schools where there will be other white children from Elm Valley. They sometimes try to build lessoned communities with lasting relationships, by organizing annual picnics and parties, or constructing teams of children whose members will play together for a number of years. Elm Valley's new generation of parents navigates a difficult thicket of contradictions: they want a diverse community, but they want the best for their children as well. Although their children probably receive many class-based advantages from the parents' search for varied, authentic experiences, child life in Elm Valley becomes extremely segregated with age, as these parents distance themselves from the social system of the neighborhood. Renters are struck by the contradictions of this quest as owners avidly support their children's athletic teams, whose members may have in common only the immediate experience of playing and a shared name. Robert once laughed that he much prefered Elm Valley's twentyyear-old Thanksgiving football playoff of "the young against the old." We saw from following Robert around for a day that people like him emphasize what children can and should learn from the street, and it is common to see men minding children there. In one unusual but representative case, two men with two toddlers apiece grew to know one another because one was assigned to be the other's doctor and noted from his patient's file that they were neighbors across the street. The children began to play together, but their paths soon split.

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The doctor had bought a house in Elm Valley before it was fashionable, and he enjoys its international variety. But he was determined that his children would not suffer culturally because of his decision. When the doctor was in charge of the children, they went to a park in a wealthy neighborhood, took swimming lessons in the suburbs, or visited museums. The patient frequently minded his own children, but he saw their early developmental tasks differently. Although he took them regularly to Elm Valley's seedy park, he also let them play on the sidewalk while he talked to his friends and took them shopping and into taverns with him. He patiently herded them to the store, allowing them to inspect every plant and animal, vehicle, pothole, stairwell, and construction site that caught their attention along the way. He taught them to greet and joke with shopkeepers, bus drivers, and people on the street. He wanted them to learn details, nicknames, reputations, stories, and histories—what to expect and predict, how to capture texture for themselves.6 Few owners avoid the neighborhood completely; most take mixed paths through the city. One woman, for example, devotes many hours of volunteer time to a local nursery school, for she feels that her son, when younger, received a valuable multicultural experience there. But now she sends him to elementary school outside the neighborhood. A strong advocate of hiring local people for domestic work, repairs, and child care, she shops in remote parts of the metropolitan area and does not walk through Elm Valley because she considers it unsafe. (To some extent gender crosscuts 6. In fact, I have noticed similar strategies among grandparents, who in poorer families have a great deal to teach those in the middle-class looking for ways to manage two-job child rearing. Black families especially have a well-established tradition of child keeping whereby grandparents or greataunts and -uncles routinely keep children most of the summer each year. Many grandparents in Elm Valley keep the visiting children almost entirely at home and among kin, so that they can really learn, for example, the rich details of a particular alley.

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class in limiting women's movement at night; however, cars do provide shells for metropolitan travel to those who own them.) Another woman, active in a bid to have Elm Valley named a historic district, has also led a fight to stop a local grocery store from placing advertising leaflets under windshield wipers. One day neighbors held a meeting on this issue. It came out during this meeting that the woman leading the fight did not know that this store underpriced the city's supermarket chains or that upon arriving in the neighborhood the owner had hired only local unemployed people in an effort to cement neighborhood relations. It had not occurred to her to shop there. Her assumption would be incomprehensible to many tenants; they had learned as much as they could about the new store as soon as it opened, in part through the new workers, who gave the owners an immediate pipeline to the street. Other owners juggle buffering and involvement in a number of ways, but strategies that may be appropriate for famlies can create problems for the community. Elm Valley already houses institutions inherently segregated by class: buses, church-basement day-care centers, laundromats. Other places that might mix people across class lines and encourage small contacts are segregated by default (Jacobs 1961; Love 1973; Merry 1981; Molotch 1969). These range from the local elementary school through shops, taverns, and parks. That owners leave the neighborhood to find more elaborate toddler parks is especially hard on female tenants with small children. Women work parks to build contacts with other parents so that they can organize play groups, car pools, baby-sitting co-ops, birthday parties, and everyday friendships (Swartley 1983). Most women are wary of Elm Valley's one rather inadequate park, which therefore remains in the hands of men. Many men do take their children there, but most hardly need another arena for building contacts.

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Thus the greater financial resources, shopping, and childenrichment strategies as well as the more metropolitan vision of many new owners deprive them of access to the street. Just to hint at the complex interplay of race, ethnicity, and residence, the more extended and established black households are nearly always tied to the street through at least one male member. Women and men among the few longer-term white residents of Elm Valley work either the streets or the alleys. Mrs. Hanrohan, for example, came to me one day with a copy of a neighborhood newsletter detailing the problem of "street harassment" in Elm Valley. She asked me, "Do you feel harassed on the street?" When I said I did not, she replied, "I thought maybe it was just because I was old. I've always just spoken, ever since I've been here. I just always speak and I always told Jim [her son] just to speak." Tenants in group houses or small apartments, even if they are white and new to Elm Valley, are less likely to own cars, more likely to walk and to know at least some of the shopkeepers who are tied into street talk. But very few of the newer white owners pursue these arenas; thus they rob themselves and Elm Valley of a truly integrated public life.7

"How Can We Get the Bums off the Street?" Those who use Main Street and those who do not perceive each other differently. One day several men prominent on 7. Many of the owning families do seem to entexture particular places, revisiting a special park, a small museum, or the federal dinosaurs. They bring to these places the same ethnographic affection that for many renters is an encompassing, definitive strategy for living in a neighborhood. One woman, for example, drives through heavy traffic with a small, unpredictable baby to do her grocery shopping, a strategy she tried to make comprehensible to me by explaining, "I know where everything is, and I always know I can find parking."

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the street explained their vision of the situation: The newer owners are different from the older "racial whites" who are "stuck in [Elm Valley] with its cheap beers and cheap [black people] because they're too old or too poor to move." The newer residents "move in but don't associate." In part they may be afraid: "They hear a lot of garbage when they go outside the neighborhood to associate." This "garbage" is not challenged because those who hear it do not get to know the details of their neighbors' personalities. But mostly they do not associate because "they just don't know how—they weren't raised up that way." Although these men feel strongly that the newer residents should "learn how to speak on the street," their assessment is fairly benign in its stress on cultural background. Robert feels that the look of Main Street on Saturday mornings symbolizes the situation: "You see white people out in their wrinkled old clothes. Black people are all dressed up; they have their new hats on and everything." Their attention to detail also contributes to these men's feelings about the new owners. Some of the men on the street cite neighborhood history as a reason to feel benign: whites have always lived in Elm Valley; integration was fairly painless; prejudiced individuals stand out and can be known. Some of these individuals, however, are regarded with affection simply because they are known. For example, one of the tavern owners is an eighty-two-year-old Kentucky native who feely uses racial epithets, who organized hard for John Connally's presidential campaign, and who tries to persuade blacks that they should support the party of Lincoln. She is widely considered a stingy and temperamental employer and a vindictive, erratic hostess. Nonetheless, many details of her life are known: her concern for alcoholics, her close friendship with a flamboyant, hard-drinking elderly gay man, her personal rescue of a popular retarded man, the joy she takes in children. Her case demonstrates, I believe, the ex-

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The Struggle for Main Street tent to which a passion for detail and texture ultimately leads to a forgiving worldview, a vision that believes most life situations are likely to play out a number of contradictory possibilities. In addition to excusing their neighbors' ignorance of street life on cultural grounds, some male tenants suggest that the class resources pumped into Elm Valley life are worth the irritation. Property owners demand and receive decent city services, so that now Elm Valley's streets, traffic lights, and curbs are better repaired and its trash is more reliably hauled away. New owners also bring volunteer time, money, and knowledge to neighborhood activities: they organize block parties, renovate the local library, and heal the elm trees.8 Owners for the most part do not reciprocate this goodwill; their feelings seem to vary from indifference to tolerance or compassion to vague unease or active dislike. They lack many of the tenants' inclinations to build detailed cross-class portraits. Tenants (and certainly not the men on the street) do not bring tangible class resources into Elm Valley life. New owners do not call on neighborhood memories in evaluating biographies; many have a broader, more metropolitan vision rather than an eye for local detail. In any event, new owners are not often motivated to explore the texture of Elm Valley life. Their feelings toward tenants in general are not 8. Henig (1982) writes of gentrification that although planners expected it to boost cities' financial resources by increasing tax revenues and decreasing demand for social services, this has not happened. New owners demand more, back up those demands, and dislike contributing to the public sector in exchange for services they are more likely to find elsewhere. This appreciation of class privilege in a multicultural situation is similar to what Rosen (1979, 1980) found in his research at a preschool: there middle-class parents stressed a desire to expose their children to cultural differences; poorer parents stressed the status of a school that middle-class children attended and a desire to reap the benefits in skills and resources that would help their children excel in school later on.

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at issue here; my concern, like theirs, is the way some owners' more extreme feelings about the men on the street (as standing for tenants) are splitting Elm Valley apart. Late in 1983 a cluster of angry residents organized what they called "Elm Valley's Corridor Committee." During their early months they distributed memos and handbills attacking the men on the street and citing particular abuses such as loitering, littering, crime, profanity, drug transactions, and drinking. "What can we do about public urination?" queried one flier. Eventually this group circulated a letter to Elm Valley households with a list of demands, including foot patrols with guard dogs. The city's charter establishes an elected council for each neighborhood, composed of five members representing small districts within the area. Hearing murmurs of support for the Corridor Committee, this council invited city officials to a public meeting to air the complaints. The Corridor Committee's chair set the tone, asking in her introductory remarks, "How can we get the bums off the street?" The committee's paper war had gone unnoticed by tenants, for it occurred outside the social system of personal exposure and talk that they see as structuring neighborhood life. The meeting was another matter. Few tenants attended, for they feel that the neighborhood council is a property owners' preserve. What most considered the vicious contents of the letters had leaked out, however. Several of the more central and colorful men from the street therefore attended the meeting out of anger and curiosity. Also, the more politically active but usually distracted residents came to argue against what they saw as racist rabble-rousing, as did some of the men from established black households with ties to the street. For the first time Elm Valley had a forum where people could talk and interpret acts across class. At the meeting the owners made momentary alliance with feminists who did not want to be harassed on the street.

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Others expressed concerns broader than those toward men, as they despaired over the large Latino families who drove in "from Maryland" on Sundays and gathered around their cars with Elm Valley friends and kin. Trying to reconcile some of these interests, a white renter who also works as a nursery school social worker suggested that when walking the street a person "salute each man." She argued that the men on the street feel they make it safer, because they watch out for their friends and also know what goes on. They know who is likely to mug someone, and after a mugging they will hear about it. Some of the black householders commented that outdoor toilets might address the public urinatioti problem and that large trash cans might help with litter. A Latino leader argued that the men on the street "don't have homes." The only man from the street to talk complained that "the police always come down on us but not the Spanish people." The outcome of this long, angry, and complicated meeting was the triumph of a liberal solution: elected officials repeated their reluctance to "enforce manners"; the police chief cited "people's right to use the street"; beat officers explained the difficult logistics of arresting someone urinating outdoors; and the council was charged to explore available social services. The wide appeal of the Corridor Committee is puzzling, however, especially since it grew among people who had chosen to live in a varied urban community. To some extent class cultures can help explain this appeal: we have seen that the interplay between traditions and resources that expresses class culture encourages owners to choose breadth over depth in everyday life. The virtues of this choice are obvious, as these families preserve access to those facilities that they feel enrich and broaden their lives and that offer them continuing advantages in school and at work. Yet probing for depth, texture, and intricacy seems to be a more successful strategy than buffering and juggling density if one

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The Struggle for Main Street wants to carve out a comfortable life in Elm Valley. Grasping the neighborhood's texture depends on a rich public life of inspection and exposure for at least the male members of renting families. Yet this passion for building and exploring texture stigmatizes those who have figured out how well it works to build a community. Main Street will continue to be a sore spot and a focus of struggle. Residents debate and bemoan almost every new store. The ubiquitous variety stores, clearly the most inexpensive to operate and the most successful locally, paved the way in 1986 for a chain variety store that might displace them all. Because it would be open all night, Robert thought this store might help Elm Valley, "because the police will come here for coffee instead of leaving to go way uptown." His was a lonely view in the debate, as owners worried about how big the sign would be, whether there would be suburban-style parking, how many people from poorer areas would be drawn to the neighborhood, whether the facade would be historic. Central concerns were expressed here about the importance of the built environment, the value of small business, how well the neighborhood could handle strangers, and fundamentally how Main Street should look and work. The coming of the large chains reveals the contradictions involved both in the quest for variety and in the struggle to build a dense, textured, repetitive, inward-looking place. While it is tempting to say that owners should stay home more and turn their attention to the commercial problems fairly typical of a working-class neighborhood, it is clear that if they could they would transform Main Street into a different kind of place. In addition, there are certainly class advantages to using the whole metropolitan area for shopping and the enrichment of children, and some of those who stick close to home realize that. When I offered to take her tenyear-old son swimming one day, for example, Johnnie Mae

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The Struggle for Main Street (an extremely resourceful, competent, and caring woman who thinks little of driving to North Carolina or New York to visit relatives) was enthusiastic: "I've been wanting him to learn so much." That longer-term residents of Elm Valley do not venture far into the metropolitan area may reflect in part their memories of harsh segregation and discrimination and their fears about what might happen in unknown whitecontrolled territory, as well as discomfort with what is not known. The flip side of a passion for texture may be injured self-esteem and some deep fears about not knowing what to do or how to do it. The problems involved in the struggle for Main Street include discovering how to help the street do what it does well, how to preserve its density, without victimizing those who have made it what it is and continue to rely on it.

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[5] Tele-visions of Urban Life

In the preceding chapters I have moved in and out of Elm Valley in an effort to link everyday life there to recurring processes in national culture. Television bridges these two worlds as it brings national culture forcefully into residents' homes. Television fills a huge place in the private, domestic, and communal life of Elm Valley. To some extent it replaces public life in offering neighbors messages about those in other class and racial groups. To a large extent it grounds the shifting meanings of home and community by offering Elm Valley residents concrete views of houses and neighborhoods. And to an extraordinary extent, late prime-time television has reflected, reinforced, and framed changing urban life with an increasingly class-segregated array of programs. These include both transplanted daytime soap operas and innovative, gentrified dramas in late prime time. The programs speak to radically different audiences. All help shape neighbors' views of each other and of ambiguous situations, but at the same time residents attach their own meanings to the weightless places television offers them. Television cannot be understood without exploring what people watch; why, when, and how they watch it; what they say about it; and how they feel it influences their everyday lives. Thus, I

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begin this chapter with a discussion of many renters' ways of using television to manage the density of apartment life without sacrificing domestic connections. I explore the programs with special appeal, which are often those that offer personal views of wealthy families. I then turn to the very different programs important to the newer owners, which I see as gentrified television, providing cross-class, police officers', Bothering" views of the poor. I argue that in analyzing television's influence in an integrated community we must look at what people do with what they see, which is most obvious in the last constellation of shows I discuss: the paradoxically unifying medium of children's programming.1

Television in Apartments The Manor's dense living, in combination with the poverty of its families, is battering. Using a small space intensively, cleaning it defensively, and lacking the resources to expand or transform it, families need to work out ways to make that density bearable. We have vivid evidence from other crowded situations that the poor draw on family ties to gather and scatter among various small cells (Stack 1974; i. Although idiosyncratic textual analyses have dominated scholarship on television (Goethals 1981; Marc 1984), I think it is very important to look at television through other lenses. Cantor and Pingree (1983) and Gitlin (1983) both offer insightful analyses into the sociology of television production, which I in no way feel compelled to redo here. In addition to understanding the political and economic forces that influence programming, we need to consider how people see and reinterpret programs in light of their own lives. Both my research in Elm Valley and my experiences in college teaching have convinced me that we cannot assume we know how viewers will see television. As just one example, my own interpretations of rock lyrics have sometimes differed drastically from those of my students, many of whom find, for example, Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the USA" an extremely patriotic song.

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Tele-visions of Urban Life Williams 1980). Black families in the Manor do not really have this option. Renters like Lucy and Robert rely more on texturing domestic density by weaving through it varied sights, sounds, and rhythms. This strategy is apparent from viewing their apartment, which to the middle-class observer may seem intolerably cluttered. Besides obviously useful objects there are numerous bookstands, small tables and chests, diplomas, paintings and photographs, knickknacks, and artifacts such as wood and china animals, copper plates, empty bowls, statues, wood blocks, baskets, football memorabilia, specialty glasses, and steel chests. Sometimes Robert talks of how he needs to fill what seems to him to be a glaring empty space. But by far the most important way to fill space is to turn on the television. Television enriches apartment life in three ways: as background, as rhythm, and as texture. Like other renters, Lucy and Robert keep the television on most of their waking time at home. Although her friend Rose faithfully watches daytime "stories," Lucy cannot because she works long hours in the day-care center. Rose and Lucy are usually home alone with sleeping children at night, but they discuss programs regularly when they meet during the day. Robert's best friend Ralph sleeps with the television on, commenting, "I wake up every time my wife tries to cut it off." Sometimes when I asked what people were watching, I found they had no idea and then asked why the television was on. I received such explanations as "It's my background" or "I use it kind of like a radio." Television seems to lend color, sound, and action to apartment life. Families use television to frame conversations, to fill awkward pauses, to provide conversational material and background hum. It enlarges and enriches the confines of an apartment, and it widens the concerns, expands the opportunities for interaction, and dilutes the concentration of crowded families, whose

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members can tune into television, establish a well of privacy, and yet remain part of the domestic group.2 This is especially true for women, to whom the rhythms of television can be very important. Favorite programs punctuate the continuing background drone of the television and draw them more actively to their sets. Although Lucy and other renters in the Manor have formed close ties with one another, and though they keep in touch with other relatives and friends by telephone and visits, they have less freedom than men to roam the streets of Elm Valley at night. The metropolitan area is cumbersome, even by car. The local area is not especially safe at night. We have seen that Robert and many of the Manor's other male tenants are passionately attached to the world of the street. To the extent that the women they live with are older or confined with small children, their apartments can be somewhat privatized, largely female worlds in which favorite programs offer a promise of continuity, something to look forward to and speculate about during the week. Anticipating "Dallas" is especially important to women likely to be stranded at home, because men like it too and sometimes plan to be there to watch J. R. Ewing, whom many see as the quintessential trickster. As men grow older they are likely to retire to more television and therefore a more androgynous family style, but while they are young this is rarely true. In one extraordinary case a man who lost his leg to diabetes retired from the more public world of the neighborhood to a life where television and the telephone (for talking to all his friends from the 2. Other studies document an inattentive, sporadic pattern of television viewing by many Americans. Such findings seem to cast doubt on purely etic analyses of the appeal of single programs examined by exploring their content in isolation from other factors, and they indicate that network programming strategies that focus on sequencing are on the right track (Goethals 1981).

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street) were extremely important. But most men will come home for a program only if it has special appeal. Beyond serving as background or rhythm, television enriches apartment life in ways that become clear when we examine how residents discussed the programs they labeled "my favorite," claimed to "arrange my schedule around," or tried to watch "every night unless I'm drunk." Men strikingly preferred late-night or suppertime reruns because they are in their apartments less and choose the action-adventure programs that tend to be on then: "Kojak," because "I like the way he maneuvers his self around," perhaps Johnny Carson, "because hell say anything and do anything—like I once saw him pull his clothes off." Many women preferred programs such as "Dynasty" and "Dallas," dramatic series treating wealthy, troubled families. I spent many hours talking to women about these programs and about why they enjoyed watching such shows. Much less precise than men, women seemed to be afflicted with what Levine has called "sacred inarticulateness," by which he meant people's inability to describe their most sacred institutions, offering instead "vague responses, statements to the effect of It's hard to explain this one, but if you were one of us and did it, then you would understand'" (Levine 1972, p. 140). In explaining his search for such sacred institutions in this country, Levine writes: "Apparently they should be felt to be good for you, but in ways which are a little difficult to define for an outsider." Lucy and her friend Rose said many times to me, "If you watch it, you'll see," and they were correct that watching these programs was the key to understanding their appeal. As we watched we came to share a continuing concern for particular characters, and talk began to flow that we could drop and pick up again on the ups and downs and ins and outs of these characters' lives, domestic circumstances, and romantic and financial complications.

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Tele-visions of Urban Life Some of the characteristics of these programs seem to make them particularly appealing to those who rent. For example, "Dynasty," "Dallas," and their imitators (such as "The Colbys" or "Falcon Crest") are house dramas, which exaggerate the advantages of living in a house. At the E wings' ranch house for example, two sons and their wives and children reside in semiprivate suites; even when one of the couples periodically splits up, husband and wife may stay on separately in the large house to be with their son. Rose noted once that they all enjoy breakfasting outside and conducting tense, private conversations on stairs, balconies, and patios. Family and facade flexibility thus get special stress; viewers are encouraged to appreciate the privileges of the rich without necessarily approving of their behavior. The families of late prime time also enjoy seemingly unlimited discretionary spending, often jetting to remote parts of the world, sometimes by private plane, buying and selling large businesses almost whimsically. They give and attend lavish parties with exquisite food for hundreds of people. When Pamela Ewing goes shopping with her mother-in-law she comments, "I guess I shouldn't buy this blue dress because I have ten others just like it." The children enjoy private swimming pools and extravagant toys such as intricate electric trains and giant stuffed animals. These material advantages become the grist for engaging, often speculative, discussion and debate. Also of interest are the troubled domestic and romantic relations of these large, extended television families, in which interactions between women and men are often stormy.3 The large families form a cushion against which romantic conflicts are played out. In these families women do what di Leonardo (1984) has called "the work of kinship," a job made extremely difficult by 3. The best female-male relationships on these programs emerge between brothers and sisters, who are very loyal to one another.

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the nefarious business dealings and sexual liaisons most of the men engage in. Women, however, hold the families together, offering refuge to those in trouble and counseling the estranged members in continuing efforts to patch up problems. Even more interesting to many women, however, were continuing debates over the television writers' efforts to stretch their credibility. Rose and Lucy often debated how in the world a woman could tolerate J. R. Ewing or how anyone could believe he would get away with his current sleazy scheme. Part of the fun seems to be trying to guess how writers would manage the death of the actor who played Jock Ewing, the mysterious attempted murder of J. R., the oneyear exchange of actresses for Miss Ellie, the bogus fires, bombs, and drownings that end each season, and in 1986 the apparent death of Bobby Ewing, which turned out to have been a year-long dream. The women's efforts to outguess the writers as well as their ongoing sense that writers will try to trick them demonstrates that they are not simply duped into a false identification with a family like the Ewings. These programs offer renters the same kind of texture that is so valued on the street. A program like "Dallas" provides vivid, historically interwoven concreteness. Most interactions occur between pairs of characters in sequence. These actions are dense, repetitive, heavily nuanced, and many layered. To really understand each interaction may require a long, deep acquaintance with the characters and faithful attention to the neverending plot, which has evolved over a number of years. Attentive viewers grow to know each character in painstaking detail. As renters texture an already dense domestic situation by weaving in more density, shows like these favorites are appropriate vehicles. Thus television plays several roles in the lives of Elm Valley's renters. It aids their efforts to make their lives more

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Tele-visions of Urban Life meaningful and dense. Their favorite programs offer exaggerated portraits of people who live in large houses with big families; and they offer these portraits in highly repetitive formats. They certainly glorify consumption and thus both repel and engage those who might like to consume more. While program content is important, the form of its presentation is powerfully appealing. And most important, television helps to dilute families and knit friends and offers its viewers the opportunity to actively reengage the messages of national culture.

The Gentrification of Prime Time Partly because newer owners have more space, easy access to the outside, and more money for metropolitan ventures, they tend to find television less important than renters do. Yet the gentrification of late prime-time television draws many of them to their sets. Producers of the 10:00 P.M. programs that have appeared in recent years often reach out to affluent, liberal, educated viewers who will appreciate the technical classiness, extraordinary acting, and complex visions of shows such as "Hill Street Blues," "St. Elsewhere," "Cagney and Lacey, and "L. A. Law."4 These programs appear at 10:00 P.M. because some of the rules change then to allow more sex and violence. Also, they are close enough to prime time to expect a fairly large audience of people who are finally home and perhaps too tired to do other things. Their affluent audiences have drawn pre4. Although it is popular among police officers (Hanson 1983), I have not been able to find any renters who watch "Hill Street Blues" in Elm Valley. The question of how and why class cultures form around television programs and their accompanying commercials is an important one. Networks put class-segregated shows up against each other, with NBC so far cornering most of the market for gentrified programming.

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Tele-visions of Urban Life mium advertising dollars and kept several of these programs on the air despite sometimes dismal ratings (Gitlin 1983, 308; Hanson 1983; Marc 1984). Viewing habits in Elm Valley support larger-scale demographic studies of these audiences. Many of the newer owners watch at least one of these programs faithfully, often after a very long day at work and the general exasperation of persuading their children to go to bed. Michael calls "Hill Street Blues" the "best show on television" because of its intricate plots and interesting characters and the way it "treats reality, but with humor"; Susan prefers "Cagney and Lacey" because of its sympathetic portraits of tough, competent women. Many of the writers and producers of these programs share some of the socioeconomic characteristics of the urban gentry. They are well educated, liberally inclined people in their mid to late thirties whose political leanings and perspectives on American culture are seen in their deliberate, self-conscious attempts to undermine racial and gender stereotypes. Their traditional heroes and heroines—police officers and doctors—do work they find meaningful. Whitecollar crime and upper-class bungling, indifference, and evil are commonplace. They seem eager to see police officers as well intentioned, hardworking, and empathic. Most important, "Hill Street Blues" and similar programs offer gentrified television, paralleling the gentrification of the city and filtering messages about cities through everyday life. Priding themselves on their realism, writers for "Hill Street Blues" and the other shows portray urban life but do not celebrate it. The clues lie in the look of at least "St. Elsewhere" and "Hill Street Blues." As Gitlin notes, "Hill Street Blues" has a dense, dirty, edgy, nervous look, purposefully achieved by using hand-held cameras in the opening sequence and through such tactics as having minor actors walk in front of or between those talking on screen and allowing

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Tele-visions of Urban Life simultaneous talk. Watching it gives one the feeling of density, chaos, and crisis (Gitlin 1983). "Hill Street Blues" and "St. Elsewhere" especially offer content that reaffirms form. Both present visions similar to those described by Lejeune and Nicholas (1973)—the professional police officer's way of seeing a city that mugging victims come to share as they reinterpret social life after the disorienting shock of misunderstanding a scene and being mugged. This vision, part of the urban officers' and doctors' responsibilities, must assume that nothing is as it seems, that surprise and violence lurk everywhere, everyday, that nobody is to be trusted. In the 1983 premiere of "St. Elsewhere" a distraught husband drives his car through the emergency room wall; in later episodes an emergency room patient smashes his doctor on the head with a bottle; a resident rapes several of his colleagues; the IRA bombs a nearby restaurant; a young doctor's wife slips, falls, and dies in the shower; a sexually active plastic surgeon gets AIDS; another resident's wedding refreshments poison the guests; one patient stabs another with his dinner knife. In the newer program "L.A. Law" a young boy shoots a prosecuting attorney in the hallway of the courthouse. Marc (1984) quotes Gabree (1981) on this characteristic of "Hill Street Blues": "Death must come, as it does to real cops, randomly, unexpectedly, tragically. In the first episode, for instance, two officers are suddenly blasted by a gunman in the middle of a gag about having their squad car stolen. . . . Instead of the numbing throb of violence that is the pulse of most action shows, Hill Street's violence erupts with the shocking impact of a police strobe on a bloody corpse." The heroes and the victims of sudden violence are very predictably liberal, well-intentioned people who must reassess their own views after some of their urban experiences. On "St. Elsewhere" Yale-educated physician Phil Chandler is bombed while helping out at an abortion clinic; popular

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Tele-visions of Urban Life Oregon-based, knapsack-wearing Jack Morrison gets raped in a prison. In fact, all of the program's young doctors who participate in a community-service project inspired by the hospital director's visit to Ethiopia suffer mightily in the experience. On "Hill Street Blues" an easygoing and sympathetic officer walks into a liquor store to buy a cigar and is killed by a robber, and its most steadfast liberal, Lieutenant Robert Goldblume, suffers continual affronts to his liberalism as he watches the poor abuse one another and meets a number of attacks himself. These heroes are almost invariably in their thirties, wise enough to know something about life but young enough to learn. Often led by older men, they are most likely the really active players in the urban drama. Unlike programs like "Dynasty" and "Dallas," where older women have most of the advantages, younger women excel and capture our interest on the gen trifled programs. What might be racist on these shows is tempered somewhat by the ever-present good minority: good black, Latino, and Asian doctors, nurses, orderlies, police officers, and lawyers are there. Rare moments of cross-class understanding occur: two street people touch the staff of St. Eligius with their loving concern for one another; an aging doctor with cancer exchanges tender words about jazz with a cocaine dealer. There are occasional cracks at the system, as when Detective Lacey argues in defense of a seemingly corrupted Cambodian that "chasing the brass ring in America could make anyone crack"; or when the audience of "St. Elsewhere" is brought painfully to witness the barriers to the supremely talented, empathic, and rooted orderly Luther's dream to become a physician's assistant; or when a frustrated Vietnam veteran on "Hill Street Blues" captures a dangerous criminal only to be lied to and betrayed by the chief of police who promises to reward him. Such moments, however, are powerfully counterbalanced by more vicious views of the poor. [HO]

Tele-visions of Urban Life In contrast to "Dynasty" or "Dallas," "Hill Street Blues" especially is a drama that counterpoises the relatively sane police station against a world of streets and apartments. Needless to say, the streets are chaotic—filled with drug addicts, gang violence, the crazed homeless. Interethnic violence is rampant and increasingly includes Asians arrayed against Latinos or blacks. While applauding this realism that addresses, for example, the consequences of unemployment, Gitlin regrets the failure of the program to offer an occasional social movement or moment of solidarity. (Perhaps in response to his criticism, in 1986 "Hill Street Blues" portrayed a long, interesting landlord-tenant struggle in which the judge sided with the tenants.) "Hill Street Blues" allows viewers private glimpses behind the tantalizingly closed doors to poor people's apartments, which in real life viewers are unlikely to see. Officers not infrequently have to break in, and they almost always find a sordid situation—a fragile nuclear family with a drunken, abusive husband, a deaf child, a suicidal wife, and a son who eventually kills his father; an apocalyptic maniac with an arsenal; an incestuous family; a Vietnam veteran holding his wife and son hostage. Although individuals are often portrayed as brave and good, they usually lack support systems. Help must come from the generous and concerned representatives of the station: lawyer Joyce Davenport pays the deaf child's special tuition; activist Faye Furillo confronts an unmarried father in court; Officer Bobby Hill befriends the veteran's child; Officer Lucy Bates adopts the neglected and abused son of a heroin addict. Gitlin argues that "Hill Street Blues" gives us a sense that "the cities as a whole simply do not work"; that "race and class tear this society apart"; that, in contrast to Joe Friday of "Dragnet" or any of the more decisively heroic early television police, "Hill Street Blues" officers merely hold on, managing messy and morally ambiguous problems as best they can for the moment (Gitlin 1983, pp. 312, 275). I believe

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Tele-visions of Urban Life that "Hill Street Blues" and to some degree others of these programs are extraordinary urban vehicles for cross-class communication. In Elm Valley I could usually predict correctly that, for example, if "Knots Landing" played against "Hill Street Blues," or "Hart to Hart" or "Dynasty" against "Quincy" or "St. Elsewhere," poorer people would be watching wealthy television characters and vice versa. Therefore the portraits that appear may powerfully color how middleclass residents and poorer ones view each other. The stress on the human consequences of social problems, which is worthwhile in its own right, may lead to more fear and unease among Elm Valley's homeowners. They see, framed by an uneasy and unpredictable city, many crazed and violent people but very few supportive, creative poor people in control of their own lives. Thus they may get from television an important sense of how poverty batters and victimizes people, but these people may turn out to be their neighbors, to whom they cannot remain remotely sympathetic. Everyday life is crucial here as media portraits influence interactions and as interactions seem to reaffirm those portraits. "Hill Street Blues" viewers live near people who seem to resemble television characters publicly but whose private lives are hidden. Certainly television does not shape how viewers see those other people. But I think that it does guide assumptions Elm Valley residents feel they must make about everyday life and that it does lead them to interpret and frame ambiguous scenes with more unease, fear, and distrust. These programs thus speak powerfully to the uncertainties of new owners, although a direct connection between watching them and growing more hostile might be difficult to prove. One woman articulated a connection she sees between "growing addicted" to these shows and feeling afraid, for example, of dim corners, flights of stairs, or alleys. In another example from the public meeting described in chapter 4, an

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active member of the Corridor Committee told of looking out her window one night toward the Manor. There she saw a man, in front of his window, stick a needle in his arm, shoot up, fall down, and die. For several reasons I doubted this event. It would have been very hard for her to see clearly from that far away, and I was positive that if something like that had happened other residents and I would have learned of it. I also felt certain that as this woman began to tell her story she believed it. But as she continued to talk, in a brightly lit room full of ordinary people, it seemed that the story came to sound unlikely even to her. It may have been an ambiguous situation for which she provided a dire script that reflects her own anxieties and uncertainties about Elm Valley. This is not to argue that sanitized, romanticized visions of people in other social classes and ethnic groups are more appropriate or that television producers have conspired to stir up cross-class antagonisms. But it is hard not to speculate that Elm Valley's sympathies might have been more elastic and lasting had television provided less damning and frightening frames for viewing city life. Some critics have argued that these shows offer high television art; that in contrast to programs aimed at inattentive or unintelligent viewers, they demand to be watched. Their close-knit stories, often extending over several episodes, their disdain for redundant establishing shots and expository lines, challenge middleclass viewers. While certainly innovative and interesting, these programs may not really demand more attention than "Dallas" or "Dynasty" over the long haul. They do, however, range more quickly, superficially, and broadly through a metropolitan and varied cast of characters. They thus reflect some of the strategies for city life discussed in chapter 4. They also offer powerfully negative views of the poor in the city as exotic, often repellent "others," and these views are filtered through the eyes of the police, whose job it is to be

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Tele-visions of Urban Life suspicious. While it may be impossible to know exactly how such programs have influenced Elm Valley life, it is not hard to see why most renters avoid programs that validate bizarre stereotypes of people like themselves.

Culture and Consumption in Childhood Lucy and Robert's children Walter and Louise have many opportunities to interact with other children. They play with others in their apartment building; they often visit their Uncle Walter's house and join his neighbors' children and grandchildren in the alley; they enjoy regular visits with cousins on both sides; they attend a multicultural nursery school; and they sometimes meet on the sidewalk outside their building or in a nearby park children of all ethnic and class groups in Elm Valley. Much more than the adults in their lives, they participte in an integrated community. These small children invent and play many kinds of games, from the folk games they learn in nursery school and from each other to the pickup play so important to urban (especially alley and street) life and games inspired by playground equipment. They "go camping," jump rope, play freeze tag and "old lady witch," improvise games with toy cars and stuffed animals. Yet their most widely shared play is rooted in television. Programming for children on television today is strikingly formulaic. Adults may recognize its roots in the Superman many of us grew up with, but the twists and complexities are monumental. After-school and Saturday-morning cartoon shows present heroes on teams, always arrayed against teams of evil players who chase and capture them. On these teams, He-Man and his sister She-Ra stand out as dominant in the old Superman mold, but they gather impressive support from backup characters, including both human friends and

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Tele-visions of Urban Life animal helpers. Other versions in the drama of good versus evil are even more teamlike: Mask Invaders, including Hurricane, Vampire, Thunderhawk, Rhino, Venom, and Con: dor; G.I. Joe (a code name for a group of American soldiers), which aligns Barbecue, Iceberg, Flint, Duke, and Seahawk against the forces of Cobra; the Transformers, which pits Autobots (such as Megasupreme and Optimus Prime) against the Deceptions; the Thundercats (including Cheetara, Lionel, Tigra, and Wileycat, who fight the forces of Mumra; and more recently Silver Hawks and Defenders of the Earth on weekday mornings. Even Superman has become just another member of the Superfriends, a group of heroes including Wonder Woman and Batman, who used to stand alone. Each team offers a twist on the familiar corporate theme. Many transform from one state of being to another: He-Man is disguised as the cowardly Prince Adam; She-Ra as the pampered and sheltered Princess Adora. They range in combinate form from the animal-human Thundercats through the straightforward American G.I. Joes to the wholly machined Transformers and Voltrons. They have animal friends such as He-Man's Cringer/Battlecat and an array of more sophisticated vehicles, weapons, castles, and fortresses. All offer children the vision of good, strong, competent characters who battle against evil in perpetuity. Many parents tolerate these programs because, in spite of their militarism, they sometimes convey values parents share. Almost all offer competent, fighting female characters who reflect a very clever programming strategy of retailing feminism. Some parents feel that the toys these shows promote give their sons the excuse to "play with dolls." Most good human teams feature black characters. He-Man is purposefully nonviolent; he has never really harmed a living thing and concludes each program with a pat moral. Each episode of Silver Hawks concludes with a brief science lesson. Although most teams fight to defend the status quo, one

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Tele-visions of Urban Life mother defends She-Ra precisely because she is leading a never-quite-successful rebellion against an unjust and oppressive regime.5 Parents, of course, debate the value of these programs at length. Some are more concerned about them than others. Many in this harried neighborhood simply do not have time to do battle with television for their children's attention. Some of the new owners forbid their children to watch these programs or even to watch television at all. Yet this rarely limits participation in this hallmark of child culture in Elm Valley. This culture is paradoxical as both a culture that celebrates consumption as a way of seeing, knowing, and acting and, on the other hand, as being as well rooted in a folk group as the Carolina traditions preserved in the alley gardens. Gitlin (1983) argues that the overriding message of television in general is an amoral ode to the blessings of a consumer society. Nowhere is consumption more glorified than in programming for children. Not only in the commercials, which Elm Valley's children can recite and sing in meticulous detail, but in the programs themselves, manufacturers have constructed the most intricate and elaborate tie-ins between programs and products in the history of television. This culture of consumption is important on several levels. At the simplest, the programs spawn dolls (or "action figures") that reproduce the cast of each show. Engelhardt refers to these dolls as "bonded groups" with "highly specialized personalities" (1986, p. 45). Children enthusiastically 5. Many of these programs aim particularly at boys. Girls do watch some of them, however, though as they grow older they move more toward less militaristic programs like the Smurfs, Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, and Rainbow Brite. (Boys are more likely to move away from these shows to very militaristic programs like the Transformers.) She-Ra was a brilliant invention, for little girls previously had to struggle to find a place for themselves in the He-Man cast as "He-Girl" or as his friend Tila. One four-year-old girl from a Vietnamese family said to me of She-Ra: "I like her because she's a woman. She has that long hair and that sword."

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Tele-visions of Urban Life collect and share a wide range of dolls, usually beginning with the Superfriends or with creatures such as Beastman, Ramman, Fisto, Skeletor, Mossman, Man-E-Faces and the like from He-Man. As they grow older, they move on to G.I. Joe, Mask Invaders, and eventually Transformers. Children also buy animal and vehicle carriers for their dolls—Swift Wind or Glimmer for She-Ra, Gambolfish or Snowcat for G.I. Joe. They buy special weapon packs, castles, and fortresses. These toys are advertised conspicuously during the programs, displayed prominently in toy, variety, drug, and grocery stores, and promoted through word of mouth by children themselves. The brand names for these toys have taken on a life of their own as they legitimize other objects, from sand pails through bedsheets, underwear, bathing suits, pajamas, lunchboxes, bicycles, and even Halloween costumes and birthday cakes. They truly contribute to what Agnew (1983) refers to as the transformation of the rites of passage in our lives to passages of style, as many children's birthday parties have Smurf, Rainbow Brite, Superfriends, or Transformer themes, with logos from these programs adorning invitations, loot bags, napkins, plates, cups, and cake. Children demand this legitimizing through brand name for many objects and events in their lives.6 6. Character licensing began modestly with the appropriation of Buster Brown to market shoes in 1904. By the late 1970s Hanna-Barbera boasted that its characters appeared on 4,500 different products. Tom Engelhardt (1986) has provided a probing analysis tying the Reagan-inspired deregulation of children's programming in 1983 to the burst in program-length commercials and television-linked toys in the 1980s. Essentially, creative entrepreneurs in the toy and greeting-card business created back stories for their products and then sold the programs for syndication. They thus saved the character-licensing fees they had once paid networks and gathered the profits for themselves. Their success was made possible because under President Reagan the Federal Communications Commission dropped many of its constraints on children's programming, including a regulation limiting commercial minutes per show. Thus an entire program could be a commercial.

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Tele-visions of Urban Life I have been shocked many times to hear children assign status through brand names. After visiting a new friend's home, children return to list the "bad" toys that child owns. (The "bad" designation applies only to television-based toys and was invented by children, presumably to signal separation from or victory over adult gatekeepers.) I once watched a group of children gather around a woman and her son parking their car on Rosewood Street. As the little boy emerged with a brand new Castle Gray Skull, these children murmured both enthusiastically and regretfully, "What a nice Mama" and "I wish I had a Mama like that." After a large, festive birthday picnic in the park my own son remarked, "I didn't get much toys for my birthday." In response to my incredulous reply (the back of our car was filled with gifts), he explained, "I didn't get any bad toys." Beyond presenting children with toys they need to own, legitimizing their possessions and celebrations, and offering them status in the world of other children, child consumer culture is most disturbing on a deeper and more complicated level. In a brilliant essay, Agnew (1983) discusses the confusion in consumer culture between acquiring things and knowing. Consuming, he argues, often reflects "a passion for the code," a need to navigate the "forest of symbols" through which advertisers attach clusters of attributes to products. Because so many new products are introduced each year, advertisers must continually reshuffle the symbolic qualities (sex appeal, down-home ethnicity) that they have attached to other products (mouthwash, toothpaste, lemonade, or pizza). As travelers in consumer culture, we need to be ever vigilant about recontextualizing these weightless attributes. Agnew is more interested in how advertisers pose these problems of knowledge than in how we solve them. But though he does not research the ways people actually behave, Elm Valley's children almost exaggerate his claim that as members of a consumer society we learn to treat con-

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sumption as knowledge. For children, learning is deeply tied to acquiring knowledge about brand-name television characters and toys. They learn hundreds of complicated recombinant names such as Psykill, Eternia, Etheria, Rokkon, Grizzlor, Clamp Champ, Snout Spout, Man-E-Faces, Psyclone, and Man-at-Arms. They frequently exchange information with one another, sharing knowledge as they list names, trace genealogies and relationships, detail qualities, and debate who can beat whom. Acquiring this knowledge is an intricate part of child culture, and it is disturbing because it is both meaningless and at the same time deeply meaningful: they learn to celebrate and honor consumption in a universal language that knits together children in an ever-transportable and recreated kind of community. But at the same time, children's commodities are unlike many that adults learn and consume because they are deeply communal and participatory. They link children across all the boundaries that divide adults.7 Children from different class and ethnic groups, ranging from newer white children (even those whose parents forbid them to watch television) through refugee children from Central America and Southeast Asia, talk about programs, exchange evaluations of different characters, compare possessions, and invent their own games. They tie towels around their necks, swing from trees and monkey bars, build caverns and castles, reinvent and recreate themes from their favorite shows. I once watched a group of children improvise an intricate web of yarn for G.I. Joe figures to gracefully slide from tree to railing, and I have seen them recreate the battles of He-Man and Skeletor with garbage can covers and sticks. Program-length commercials 7. With the recent development of expensive, high-tech, participatory toys and shows by Mattel and Axlon, where children can shoot the bad guys with their own home laser guns, this unifying quality of the medium will most likely be lost, and class-based viewing cultures will emerge in children's television.

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Tele-visions of Urban Life and character licensing cannot control how they perceive and reinterpret their toys. They truly transform popular culture into folk culture and make it their own. By the time they are five or six, Elm Valley's children move into other worlds. White children almost inevitably leave the neighborhood for private schools or more prestigious public schools, for soccer, music, and swimming lessons, and for expensive summer camps. Integration has not lasted long enough for teenage life to be mixed; and integration will soon end. Therefore the puzzling questions posed by child consumer/folk culture may never be answered: Is the only basis for community really just empty commodities? Or does human creativity in playing with mass media forms offer profound hope for building bridges across barriers? Are children liberated or enslaved by child consumer culture? Are they learning to see and build their lives in an ultimately empty, weightless way? Or might they have built Elm Valley into a truly integrated community had they had the chance to live out their first mixed experiences? These are the complexities of television frames for city life in Elm Valley. Although we tend to think of television as a unifying medium, it is segregated by class, except in childhood. We have seen that it offers a poor substitute for public life, that it speaks to and reinforces privatization and prejudice in many instances, but that for children it offers rich material for folk creativity.

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The Invention of Community

This chapter traces two arduous efforts to invent tradition in Elm Valley. In one, a group of mostly newer homeowners sought to create a community of memory. In the other a more varied group tried to implant a festival tradition that celebrated Elm Valley's diversity. Both attempts to invent Elm Valley were efforts to play with and recreate the cultural past, ironic in a severely dislocated neighborhood where long-term residents were moving out and newer ones moving in, challenging the way the neighborhood looked and worked. This serious dislocation somehow seemed to make appeals to the past important and appropriate. Although the two versions of the past described below might in theory coexist, in reality they were profoundly at odds. Both were important exercises in symbolic action; both revealed the power and the limitations of grass-roots efforts to create community. I shall conclude the story of Elm Valley with a discussion of each movement and tell why ultimately both failed to relate to and preserve an integrated neighborhood. I begin, though, with a description of the refugees who inspired one attempt to invent tradition.1 i. Eric Hobsbawm writes of the invention of tradition: "Invented tradition' is taken to mean a set of practices, normally governed by overtly or

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The Invention of Community Who Are "the Chinese"? Though much less dramatically than the Latino refugees, a varied group of refugees from Southeast Asia has also complicated Elm Valley in recent years. All live in the Tower, the only building besides the Manor to escape conversion. They have built there a locally closed community that some white residents call "Vietnam Village/' While these new residents use the schools, shops, and churches of Elm Valley, they do not use the public spaces, occupying instead the lawn and sidewalks of their own building when they gather outside to socialize, mind children, and repair cars. Many of the older residents look upon them with some sympathy, in part because of their unobtrusive use of Elm Valley space. They nonetheless refer to these newest refugees as "the Chinese." This label is not particularly appropriate, because these residents' religious orientations, politics, and national and tribal origins vary enormously. The Tower includes people from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam, Buddhists and Catholics, very rural and tribal Hmong, and very urbane and sophisticated elite refugees from the South Vietnamese government and military. Many of the adults speak no English; they use an array of different languages, unintelligible to each other. Some, often more educated and oriented toward the West, came during the first, less chaotic wave of elite migration in 1975; others—poorer, sometimes illiterate, often alone, and generally more rural—came later. While it is hard to generalize about this diverse group of people, several trends characterize their links to Elm Valley.

tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past" (in Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983, p. 2).

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The Invention of Community Many are part of international social networks, shattered by the refugee experience, powerfully attached to kin and friends in other parts of the world. Many stay in close touch with these kin and would like to bring them to Elm Valley. In contrast to the inward vision of the older renters, these newer renters look toward the world. Like the newer owners, some also see connections to the metropolitan area, particularly toward kin and fellow nationals and toward shops and restaurants in Asian-American pockets in Washington suburbs. Many have serious financial problems, immediately obvious in the deteriorating building where they live. They work in hotels and restaurants as cooks or "utility boys" and hold cleaning jobs around the city. Often the women have an easier time finding work than the men. Underemployment for everyone, the unemployment of men, the tearing away of their families, and the dislocation of the elderly have all made Elm Valley a difficult place to live. For some being away from the land in a crowded, dreary, grimy building is hard; Beatrice Hackett writes that "they may long for a patch of land to farm, and find a tiny piece of soil to plant a little mint or eggplant" (1984, p. 3; see also Bai 1984; Chaleunrath 1984; Haines, Rutherford, and Thomas 1981, 1982). The Southeast Asian residents inhabit an anomalous place in Elm Valley, since they do not participate in the shallower but broader world of white owners or the densely inwardlooking public life of the longer-term black renters. Whereas Koren entrepreneurs have often adjusted to the traditions of those who shop in the neighborhood and at least nominally take part in local life, the Southeast Asians appear to be experiencing a more complicated reshaping of their ways of life there. These newest residents dramatize and exaggerate many of the problems other Elm Valley residents face as well: the conflict beween ancestral traditions and the current scene, [123]

The Invention of Community the problem of dealing with an urban area without losing one's identity, the difficulty of holding onto the past in a place where it is not visible or applauded, and the need to integrate people who seem mysterious and ill-defined to one another. These conflicts, coupled with the actual cultural variety of the residents and the stereotypes with which they were labeled, inspired a group of Elm Valley residents to try to invent a festival tradition that would celebrate the past and present Elm Valley as a lively, friendly, varied community that honors the diverse folk traditions of its residents. The Festival Committee brought together an odd combination of older black owners, newer white renters, and Latino and Southeast Asian refugees. Three Tower residents were active on the committee, including two from the Vietnamese elite—one who had been a lawyer as well as a general in the South Vietnamese army but who now works as a carpenter in Washington, and the other a sociologist and a leader in the Buddhist community. The third was a very lonely and homesick young woman from Laos, who saw the festival as a chance to make some friends.

The Politics of Culture For four years in the 1980s this group held community festivals. They began with modifications of the street festivals that are sweeping the cities of the United States today. They closed Main Street for a day and filled it with musical stages, booths for ethnic foods and crafts, lively and colorful sights, sounds, smells, and tastes. They also organized more novel activities that cut across ethnic boundaries and offered people the chance to participate actively. These included a children's area for crafts and games; an opening procession featuring a wide range of community groups singing and playing instruments; slide tape shows portraying Elm Val-

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ley's street men at work, the activities of churches and schools, and the life histories of some Latina residents; a workshop where people could learn and practice juggling; and a maps project where people could mark their homes in Elm Valley with the flags of their home nations or states. These festivals were inevitably invaded by a multitude of commercial vendors and by residents of the whole metropolitan area. Because they seemed headed for tawdry, overcrowded, frenzied commercialism, the group decided to vary the medium through folk-culture programs, which crosscut ethnic groups, highlighted expressive traditions grounded in •the life cycle, and offered those present the chance to try out other people's activities. One program featured children's play, ranging from international folk games such as Salvadoran top making and spinning through ethnic styles of jump rope and hand clapping, to traditional school games like "duck, duck, goose." Children talked about how they had learned the games and where and when they played them, and they tried to teach them to other children. The second program explored street dancing among black and Latino teenagers, who competed for prizes and also talked about how and why they honored excellent dancers, where the best dancing occurred, and what special feats distinguished Elm Valley's break-dancing teams. Presenters linked this talk to a larger understanding of processes by which teenagers bring meaning to city life and forge links with one another around an expressive form. The third program tried to bridge the separation between work and home that makes it hard for Elm Valley neighbors to appreciate each other's job skills. It focused on hairstyling as an expressive form with wide appeal balanced by an extraordinary variety of traditions—including hair weaving and braiding, straightforward barbering, Panamanian combs, post-punk, and the wings, arcades, and chignons of Southeast Asia.

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The final program featured food ways, including cooking, gardening, and healing. Organizers made Carolina foodways central, exploring gardening lore (such as taking a sweet potato from seed to pie), cooking pork dishes such as souse and barbecue, and medicinal traditions from the Carolinas, especially those involving sassafras and peppermint for teas. Complementing Carolina traditions were cooks from Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, Belize, and El Salvador and healers from Guatemala and Argentina. Organizers provided an illustrated program booklet, and the presenters framed each session with a discussion of folk culture. They hoped that visitors to the festival not only would appreciate the detail, texture, and process of folk traditions, but would come away with a larger sense of how such traditions tie people to a past, a place, and one another. These events had many laudable qualities. Organizers were scrupulous about drawing into the planning process members of all classes and cultural groups. They worked very hard at reaching out to Elm Valley's pockets—through visiting households, going to other people's meetings, distributing fliers in seven languages, frequenting large apartment buildings to collar residents individually, and making contacts on every block. The result was an enormously popular, broadly based, well-rooted series of events. Moreover, the programs tried to appeal at once to the passion for texture, the quest for authenticity, the local, metropolitan, and international visions of Elm Valley's varied residents. Festival organizers showed that it is possible to take what anthropologists have discovered about festivals in other parts of the world—the enormous power of metaphor, liminality, and bricolage—and enrich ceremonial life in American cities (Manning 1978; Turner 1974, 1982). In creating a liminal moment, framed as outside the difficult routine world, organizers used the power of festival to arrange elements of neighborhood life so as to say that the

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neighborhood was a rich, varied, welcoming place. They also learned that ordinary people can take for themselves the strategies that advertisers use so well—frame, metaphor, analogy, and the reclustering of attributes around objects— to attach and rearrange meanings and to remind participants of alternatives to consumption and commodities. The Festival Committee produced rich, dense, meaningful events that countered weightless cliches; they tried to say that variety can work for community, and in saying so they made that idea, at least for the moment, real. They constructed a community bathed in the warm glow of rich, deeply satisfying folk traditions that made participants feel better about themselves and their places in the city and in the past. Nonetheless, the festival process is riddled with contradictions. Anyone who intervenes so self-consciously in a cultural system may exercise inappropriate power in deciding what culture is. Participants may be fed back an overlegitimized, sometimes sanitized vision of their own culture, stripped of its true complexities and certainly of the political and economic difficulties they deal with in real life (Whisnant 1983). Among the few critics of the festival tradition were those who hinted at these problems. Two neighborhood leaders, on opposing sides of other controversies, questioned the cultural definitions being presented. One argued that the message of the festivals and workshops was that white people had no folk culture as the poor did, that whites were being represented to themselves as inauthentic. And the other argued that black life involved more complexity and variety than collard greens, cornrows, and break dancing. Organizers did try to meet the complaints of the first man by including white gardening and juggling traditions in their programs; the second man was dismissed as wrongly denying his own cultural heritage. Second, the interethnic cooperation and folk nostalgia celebrated in neighborhood festivals may offer a portrait of gen-

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trification. For those seeking a homey, varied neighborhood without the true difficulties of integration, the festivals offered a fine welcome. While there is certainly no proof that community festivals might speed displacement by making a neighborhood seem more attractive, several trends were alarming to organizers. One was the immediate popularity of the festivals with visitors from around the metropolitan area. Organizers tried hard to limit publicity and promote the event as local. Yet Elm Valley's festivals seemed so "authentic"—rich, intricate, and noncommercial—that word quickly spread that there one could find a real community festival. Third, as Gilmore (1975), Gonzales (1970), and Vogt (1955) have noted for festivals elsewhere, the communitas of the event is belied by the fact that participants from different class and ethnic groups experience festivals differently. Organizers tried to vary the appearance of those making introductions, conducting interviews, and offering analysis. Yet there was a distressing tug in every case toward segregated roles. Blacks and Latinos sold foods or demonstrated folk talents; whites acted mostly as consumers of the picturesque city scene. And in the more complicated street events, such programs as the slide tape shows drew highly segregated audiences. For example, one program portrayed six black men whose faces were prominent in public life. The producers juxtaposed slides of them on the street and on the job to their own narratives about the strange hours they worked, the skills and relationships they nurtured at work, and in some cases the cause of their unemployment. The goal was to make these men more complex and real to the newer owners who dismissed them as winos and feared them. They were surprised to see the audience for each showing fill with these men and their friends, who watched the display repeatedly, offered running commentary, and enjoyed it immeasurably. Only a sprinkling of white people watched it, though many did come for another program about neighbor-

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The Invention of Community hood architecture. Thus the festivals partly undermined but partly reinforced the strange segregation of integrated living. Festivals are deeply intertwined with the struggle for power. They reflect groups' competition for power, and they have political consequences (Cohen 1978; Kertzer 1974; Manning 1978). One man argued that the organizers should have spent their time efficiently organizing tenants around political goals rather than working more circuitously to create cross-cultural understanding. Others protested that the festivals should be blatantly political, treating such themes as D.C. statehood, social dislocation, the refugee experience, military policy in Central America and Southeast Asia, or the history of union drives rather than folk culture celebrating a cleaned-up present and past. Although Elm Valley's festivals tried to be unifying, those who worked hard and participated in them were all tenants, with the exception of two black couples who had owned houses in Elm Valley for many years. One man, in fact, had been born there. The festivals took on political meaning as those who came to know each other through them were fairly consistent about taking sides on other issues. For example, all the festival organizers appeared at the public meeting to oppose harassing the men on Main Street. They never, however, truly realized these political possibilities in organizing around larger issues, because inventing a nonindigenous festival tradition is exhausting. The group ran out of time to continue the tradition, and many came to share the widespread sense in Elm Valley that "it's over." The creation of a festival tradition thus hinted at the potential of mobilizing culture to struggle for power, but ultimately it failed to do so.

The Politics of the Past In Washington, neighborhood groups can apply to be designated historic districts. If they are successful in the long,

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The Invention of Community arduous application process and receive their historic designation, all new construction is closely supervised by a board composed of architects, historians, and public officials. Demolition of old buildings, construction of new ones, and additions to existing structures must be consistent with the neighborhood's historical ambience. To be named a historic district means that a neighborhood wins recognition as standing for a particular historical moment in a gracious and appropriate way. Contemporary developers who may want to build a fast-food restaurant or transform an ancient mansion into condominiums cannot do so, for the place has gained a kind of historical integrity limiting modern intrusions.2 In seeking historic preservation in Elm Valley, the History Committee had to research and reconstruct the neighborhood's past and then present that reconstruction to other residents, outside governing boards, and the popular media. Through a judicious and sophisticated blend of oral history, architectural slides, and old maps, they offered the argument that Elm Valley was a neighborhood in which one had a powerful sense of time and place, a feeling of inhabiting a modest, turn-of-the-century island in the city. They celebrated Elm Valley's heroic efforts to integrate its civic societies and the willingness of some white residents to stay in the wake of white flight. They hailed Elm Valley as a model of interracial cooperation and community spirit. Much of what was good about Elm Valley, argued members of this group, rested in the built environment and its consequences: the dramatic physical boundaries, lovely streetscapes, rhythmic rows, and intricate housing mix meant that in Elm Valley residents knew where, and who, they were. They were also making a statement about themselves that defied the yuppie-upscale consumer label. Elm Valley should be a 2. For a fascinating discussion of why we value property as a window to the past and to culture, see Handler (n.d.)-

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The Invention of Community place for inward-looking families who care about that time and place. Many of those who were active in this group worked very hard over about a dozen years to seek historic status. They felt strongly that theirs were efforts to take control of the neighborhood for the neighborhood, to resist outside developers with materialistic aspirations, to keep Elm Valley an oasis in the rapidly commercializing central city. "When they try to tear something down," said one woman, "you have something to say about it." However, opposition to their drive was ferocious. Some opponents argued that the new owners were trying to create an artificial and baseless community of memory out of a sanitized past. Without real roots in the neighborhood, why should they cling to an invented history in which they did not really share? Others argued that historic preservation gave gentrification—the movement in of comfortable homeowners—something like what Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983, p. 2) call "the sanction of precedent, social continuity, and natural law." Others felt that Elm Valley "is really not all that historic." Many residents saw no appeal in a reconstructed history or a sense of time and place. Many lodged their own histories in other places and among other people. Some longed for exactly the development that the History Committee opposed, because they felt that it would bring jobs and help keep money in the neighborhood. And many more felt that historic district status would mean faster, fiercer displacement of tenants.3 3. Very little research has been done on the connection between historic district status and displacement. The process itself, which favors owners as spokespeople for the neighborhood, does not require analysis or speculation about displacement: a case rests on the architectural, historic, or cultural importance of the neighborhood in question. When a neighborhood offers such amenities as recreation and shopping or convenient transportation, historic status may well become another amenity that will help to increase property values in a strong housing market. When property

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The contradictions of this controversy are stark. The History Committee certainly stood for an effort to take control of the community and resist the big developers who do pose problems to neighborhoods in transition. Just as chain stores and fast-food restaurants displace successful mom-and-pop stores, cute condominiums do take advantage of the gentrifying market for nostalgic architecture (Hightower 1975). The History Committee argued vehemently that they were trying to preserve the neighborhood for its residents; that displacement reflected "mortgage rates," not historic preservation. They pointed to neighborhoods that had experienced little or no displacement while preserving their sense of historic community. Their opponents, also looking for analogies, pointed to other neighborhoods that had been transformed into enclaves of the elite and noted real estate advertisements for houses in Elm Valley that stressed that it was "historic" or warned potential buyers with such phrases as, "This house has been tenant-occupied, so you'll have to use your imagination and give it lots of TLC." To promote a neighborhood as "historic" to prospective new buyers with no actual roots there seems paradoxical. To cave in to developers, however, would not seem to benefit either tenants or merchants, who opposed historic designation. But most telling is that the appeal of the past, and preserving the past in the built environment, is so narrowly limited by race and class. The conflict was so long and so harsh that leaders of this group also grew exhausted. They felt they had spent years of their lives fighting for the good of the neighborhood and that it was not their fault tenants faced values rise, newer residents tend to have more money, assessments rise, and so do rents. For rehabilitating multifamily buildings designated historic properties, the federal government offers investment tax credits of 25 percent, which do not have to be passed on to tenants as rent reductions. When Elm Valley won historic status in 1986, it seemed reasonable to assume that property values would rise.

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The Invention of Community displacement. By 1986 many had simply quit caring and become resigned to settling for a homogenized community as long as the buildings were safe, though still complaining abut the "antiwhite racism" of their opponents.

The Politics of Politics By 1986 interest rates in the United States had dropped. "Lender" guidelines for prospective house buyers became more stringent, and competition for Elm Valley's prized row housing was intense. New owners of houses and condominiums, as well as newer renters of the renovated apartment buildings, were overwhelmingly white, two-career couples with considerable resources. Moderate-income people found virtually nothing available to rent. Displacement took several forms: one elderly man who had roomed with a senile ninety-year-old woman had to leave when her niece and nephew decided to move in with her. Some moderate-income renters who were ready to buy had to buy in other neighborhoods. Older owners found it too hard to pay taxes and sold their houses to move to apartments elsewhere. Many residents of group houses found that their landlords wanted to sell in the booming market. Poorer tenants, especially, found they could not afford escalating rents. Many people wangled time, doubling up, taking on debts, squatting until they were forcibly removed. But clearly the anomalous years of stalled gentrification were over. There was a widespread sense in Elm Valley that "It's over," "Everybody's going," "It's cyclical anyhow," "I'm tired of fighting," even "Gentrification got us." All kinds of residents expressed the sense that change in Elm Valley reflected the almost mechanical working offerees beyond their control. Those who had gambled on houses in the early 1970s (when, as Robert said to me, "Y'all bought

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The Invention of Community everything up") felt mightily rewarded. A new generation of owners and renters began to move into the row houses and condominiums, with perhaps fewer of the conflicts of conscience but many of the same habits as the older new owners, who will probably be able to live with them in relative peace. While residents may be wrong in stressing the invisible, mechanical workings of mortgage rates in transforming their neighborhood, they are right in saying that to understand change there we must look outward. Global and national political, cultural, economic, and military forces have immeasurably complicated Elm Valley life. To preserve neighborhoods like this one, residents must challenge broad questions of who has power and wealth in American society. They must eventually fight for protected housing, a neighborhood investment bank, assistance from private foundations and public agencies, union wages and job security, better public schools, asylum and assistance for undocumented workers, a true social safety net, increased public input into television, an end to the racial job ceiling and the injustices of the secondary labor market, and more flexible work and child-care schedules. The problems of Elm Valley are inseparable from the problems of militaristic consumer capitalism, and the neighborhood gives those problems a multitude of human faces. At the same time Elm Valley's experiences make clear that it is fruitless to address these larger issues without rooting them in local public life. In telling the story of Elm Valley, I have stressed conflicts, because disagreements helped to illuminate neighbors' varied visions of the neighborhood. Nonetheless, I feel strongly that it can be better for almost everyone involved to live in an integrated place. For middle-class people life can be denser and saner. Children are safer in a neighborhood world where public life encourages knowing others well. As we battle with cliches and struggle to shape our own mean[134]

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ings, we are helped enormously by public discussion and interaction with others who are different; they keep us more in touch with the complexities of American life and with ourselves. We see the human face of political and economic problems and can find the chance to engage those problems. We remember that television definitions of the wealthy and the poor are too simple, that real urban dwellers are not produced on the set of "Hill Street Blues" or "Dynasty." The presence of the poor can even protect middle-class consumers from precious, trendy retail development, as we have seen in Elm Valley's fragile commercial mix of stores still oriented toward local shoppers of modest means. In Elm Valley integration occasionally even benefited poorer and longer-term residents. The Festival Committee brought money, jobs, and cultural reinforcement as organizers nurtured connections with funding agencies. Another group has raised thousands of dollars for a local library; yet another has insisted on attention to the community's ailing trees. Elm Valley's churches offer sanctuary to Central American refugees and dispense many free meals, bags of clothing and groceries, and services such as legal aid. Among the older new owners are one very helpful woman who hires only neighborhood people to do house and car repairs, cleaning, and baby-sitting and a man who has planned for several years to form a window-washing team composed of the teenagers on his block. Another woman has spent a great deal of time compiling a directory of neighborhood businesses, services, and groups. Two of her neighbors have mobilized their block, whose yards have no space, to cultivate a creative and integrated gardening network using tiny patches of soil and sharing seeds, plants, knowledge, tips, and tools. The two high-ranking city politicians who live there sometimes chat with the men on the street, who approach them fairly freely. When the police were rude to one of these men, one of the officials laughingly assured him, "I'll

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talk to the chief/' When middle-class people give energy, time, and contacts to the neighborhood, they can help to personalize a remote bureaucracy and mobilize outside resources. Most of those mentioned here, curiously, are white renters, but not all. The problem in Elm Valley was that newer residents lent time and resources too rarely and that they too often undertook efforts in their own interest without considering others' sentiments and needs. Middle-class people may have learned how to work the metropolitan area, but many of them did not really know how to root their connections and resources in local life. Despite their rhetoric, they did not really know how to live in an integrated neighborhood. I conclude with four suggestions for how we might better do so. The lessons about integration that emerge from Elm Valley's difficult experiences and missed possibilities may serve other neighborhoods in America as they also simultaneously "improve" and "deteriorate."

Meaning and Public Life

First, I believe that Elm Valley residents do need to invent community, democratically. Though renters must be protected from the consequences of celebrating a sanitized past and a nostalgic ethnic community, the neighborhood still needs a ritual life and possibly the restraint that historic designation might place on developers. The need to invent a community stems in part from neighbors' need to be introduced to one another in a celebratory frame and in part from the cultural processes that intrude relentlessly in neighborhood life, retailing authenticity, attaching arbitrary qualities to commodities, and reducing complicated people to cliches. Previous chapters have explored a labyrinth of cliches—in caricatures of Washington and its residents, in real estate ad-

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The Invention of Community vertising that remakes houses as "homes," in commercial promotion that labels foods and stores authentic, in television portraits of the rich, the poor, and urban life, and in cartoons that trivialize relationships, personal characteristics, and real emotions. I have argued that these symbols filter through Elm Valley life, offering frames for anomalous situations and metaphors for kinds of people. I have also argued that in Elm Valley folk traditions seem to provide a quasiculture of resistance for those who hang on and reattach meanings to their own worlds. Everyone in Elm Valley juggles folk and mass culture, most clearly the Carolina migrants who rebuild the South in the city and the children who engage the creatures from cartoons. Yet for most of the residents the quest for authenticity is contradictory and potentially self-defeating, for there is profit in our nostalgia for what is real (Belasco 1980, 1985, n.d.). The need to invent community is especially acute because so many of the older new owners are "baby boomers." American cultural processes over the past twenty years reveal that these people are part of a very dangerous generation. Many of their rebellious actions have been repackaged and resold, and so has gentrification. In Elm Valley the first to come often believed in cities and in integration. Some were political activists who were optimistic about the intersection of their personal lives and the national future. But change did not come as they had hoped. Many turned to different paths as they bought houses and became parents. Some became distracted and exhausted by the burdens of adulthood. Some grew less romantic. One man says of his work as a public defender: "I used to think my clients were victims of race and class oppression. But now it's hard not to think of them as just rapists, murderers, and the scum of the earth." In any case, this generation has paved the way for others who come in a less adventurous spirit. Reacting against romantic, "bleeding-heart liberalism," newer residents may be

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less reluctant to seek their own interest and to judge more harshly those who are different. As in so many other arenas of American cultural life, those who came of age in the 1960s paved the way in Elm Valley for people who wanted a tamer, more predictable place. In these circumstances, the construction of a ritual life to set down meanings and establish traditional definitions boosting variety becomes very important. The model for doing so stems from the reinvention of the Carolinas in the alley communities—a truly rooted but renegotiated set of alternative traditions in the city. Most important, it reaffirms that what we can offer up against the cliches of American culture are meanings we create ourselves and share. Carolina culture is not, however, primordial and timeless. Carolina traditions have been transformed, reinvented, and battered by the circumstances of living in Washington. Just looking at the differences in how Walter and Robert Harper live out their lives in Elm Valley dramatizes the continuing renegotiation of personal ties to the Carolinas. These traditions are at great risk as younger family members face job insecurity, dislocation, displacement, and the difficulty of building skills or rebuilding shared foodways in apartments or remote suburbs. In drawing on indigenous forms, community festivals do have the potential to help us create and pass on our own shared meanings. While my first suggestion applauds the goals of the Festival Committee, the second acknowledges its vigorously democratic means in offering a continuing forum for deliberating the invention of tradition. The committee's vigorous, exhausting outreach efforts communicated to many kinds of people that they were personally, enthusiastically welcomed as part of the event. This message was received very differently than are the more common printed fliers announcing other kinds of meetings, even when they are delivered to every door. But most important, the festivals varied the

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form in which people come together. The History Committee relied on a combination of public meetings and more intimate gatherings, in which all the residents of a particular block would receive an invitation to "Come to the home of your neighbor, , and see a slide presentation." This kind of outreach was appealing to some owners, but it never drew the attention of large, diverse crowds as the festivals did. Festivals are public and dense. They transform the difficult social order of the street into ritual disorder—or its disorder into order, depending on one's point of view. In Elm Valley they drew on the ways Main Street worked well to offer open-ended, textured interactions where people could meet one another on their own terms, build biographies and autobiographies, glide in and out of relationships, and escape when they needed to, to come back when they were ready. For ten years I have watched those displaced from Elm Valley return to visit the street. Although some people and stores have been fairly constant anchors there, for the most part those returning do not come to visit particular people and places. They come because Main Street offers a reliable net of nonalienating, dense relations, which are prized. The festivals' appeal lay in part in echoing this cultural system and in celebrating texture and detail. In addition to special moments of community, Elm Valley residents need to build a world of routine interactions. Residents should be able to feel safe, but many newer residents are trapped in a conflicting web of perceptions. The more they frequent Main Street, the safer they might feel. Yet it is not fair to argue that they should have to stand on street corners or to assume that most would really be welcome there. They can probably not be persuaded to shop in the variety stores. Four kinds of institutions, however, seem to have promise for mingling residents: churches, day-care centers, the farmers market, and the thrift shops. The third lesson [139]

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from Elm Valley illuminates the value of such neighborhood places. Several of Elm Valley's churches tried hard to stem white flight in the 1960s, to integrate their congregations, to look inward to the community by offering food and clothing as relief and outward to the world in supporting liberation movements in Central America and South Africa. Several have tried to offer ethnic groups in their congregations specialized services: separate masses, English classes, the exclusive use of the church on ritual occasions. A local priest says, "That's the reality of integration. One church, but separate congregations." The churches thus preserve a pluralistic model of integration, which seems to be one avenue for sharing limited resources though it does not completely resolve the need in Elm Valley to mix diverse residents. Day-care centers are good places to capture middle-class parents who want their children to have some exposure to integration before the need to "get serious" about their education. Middle-class parents can help support day-care centers through sliding-scale tuition and scholarship programs and by volunteering time and donations. They can also mingle there with other kinds of parents and even form longerlasting alliances with them. Day-care centers are thus oases of integration in Elm Valley, but their existence is fragile. Their funding is precarious, and staff salaries are abysmal; they can survive now only with the boost of middle-class resources. At the same time, according to one beleaguered day-care center director, a newer and less idealistic generation of parents seems increasingly unable to provide that boost. Elm Valley's day-care centers illustrate vividly both the possibilities and the limits of truly varied local mixing. Most recently, I have been struck by the potential of Elm Valley's new consignment shop and Saturday morning farmers markets to bring neighbors together, in part because they appeal to different classes, in part because of vigorous

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efforts by their managers to reach out and fit into the cultural system of the neighborhood. The farmers market relies on one of the infamous men on the street as a seller. The Virginia couple who operate the market take this man out to the farm with them to pick vegetables. As he sells, he testifies that he "picked the tomatoes with my own Carolina hands, and they're all natural." He also cuts many deals for his friends. This man draws in many residents and meets others while he works. The Virginia operators tolerate him even though he has some bad habits because they feel it would be rude and inappropriate to let him go. The thrift shop also draws in mixed customers, largely because the manager works very hard to make them feel welcome. She offers occasional child care in her back room, organizes special events, gets to know many of her customers by name, and introduces them to one another. She recently moved into Elm Valley as a tenant and enrolled her child in public school there. These four institutions show that it is possible to draw different kinds of people together in interactions where they can feel safe. The services and products with cross-class appeal may be limited, but sellers can act to make them more accessible. Finally, Washington offers those with middle-class resources many pathways for connecting themselves to the city. Sorting out why some newer residents have enriched Elm Valley's social system and others have undermined and attacked it has been difficult. Cultural and regional background, gender, wealth—even age and political inclinations—do not quite predict how new owners will react to Elm Valley's diverse assaults on their sensibilities. They face there a cultural world created by black Americans, rooted in black American culture, bolstered by the textured Carolina alleys, the dense circumstances of renting, and the tangled, repetitive interactions on Main Street. Newer owners do not have the local kin and friendship ties that make Elm Valley [141]

The Invention of Community work for longer-term residents. Many feel exhausted and stretched as they balance careers and sometimes children. I think that those who have managed to look inward, openly and sympathetically, and to build lives in Elm Valley have grasped two crucial features of this world: the value of density and an ethnographic eye. We have seen the value of density in Walter Harper's alley, where women and men socialize, build traditions, care for children, and do their work. We saw it in following Robert Harper through a day on Main Street, where he too blends child care, work, fun, and friendship. We saw it in the moments of festivity. Newer residents like Lynn Goodhew, who defies the fenced-in patio pattern with her open yard, public baby, and beautiful flowers, and Phyllis Brown, who runs the thirft shop, have also learned to dig in and build crosscutting systems in Elm Valley. Merchants today watch Phyllis Brown's son grow up on the sidewalks of Main Street, where he might run into the drugstore and ask the Latino cashier to make him a paper airplane, or interview a fellow shopper: "Do you come to my Mommy's store?" "Do you have two boys?" "How much do you weigh?" An ethnographic eye may naturally accompany the building of a densely overlapping life. Trying to see and appreciate what goes on in Elm Valley on local terms helps one dig in, and digging in helps one see it better. Details may overwhelm us with tedious and bewildering ambiguities. Yet details also place the ambiguities in a context unavailable to those who see urban life in terms of simple dichotomies and often value the pristine solution. There may not be a simple cause-and-effect relation between liquor stores and vagrancy; the coming of an unaesthetic fast-food chain may bring litter but also offer residents jobs. Robert Harper is one of the finest ethnographers in Elm Valley, but many others share his attention to detail. Mrs. Hanrohan remembers and revives many years of neighborhood life and keeps an extraor-

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The Invention of Community dinary record of events that occur each day. She lives in Elm Valley more richly and easily than do many people fifty years younger. Real people are so much more complex than we would like to believe that a passion for detail and texture may be the only comfortable and useful way to live in a varied neighborhood. When we believe in and look for texture we hedge our bets, because simple cliches do not work. Ultimately, many white middle-class people who want to reclaim a piece of the vibrant central city for themselves are going to have to change. They need to learn from the cultural world built by those who preceded them: they need to develop some of the same skills as they try to look inward. In the summer of 1986, after a long seclusion, I was confronted by one of the men on the street: "Where the hell have you been? You never come up here anymore; you don't even associate with the people in the neighborhood." Half joking, he was also chiding me about what was supposed to be almost a job. If we are to preserve variety in our cities, I believe that those of us who want to live in such areas have to take on that job, which is first of all the work of culture, and then we must try to link that cultural stand to broader, but also deeper, denser, more textured, repetitive, and rooted political action.

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References Shales, Tom. 1986. Stephen Bochco, a law unto himself. CBS' HoHum Hometown. August 22, Blf. Shields, Emma. 1972. The tobacco workers. In Black women in white America, ed. Gerda Lerner, pp. 252-55. New York: Vintage. Shimkin, Edith, Demitri Shimkin, and Dennis Frate. 1978. The black extended family. The Hague: Mouton. Smith, Sam. 1974. Captive capital. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Snead, James. 1984. Repetition as a figure in black culture. In Black literature and literary theory, ed. H. L. Gates, pp. 5980. New York: Methuen. Spicer, Dorothy. 1923. Folk festivals and the foreign community. New York: Woman's Press. 8212 1937. The book of festivals. New York: Woman's Press. Stack, Carol. 1974. All our kin. New York: Harper and Row. Stevens, William. 1986. Rising Korean community is leaving greengroceries behind. New York Times, February 23, p. 1:46. Suttles, Gerald. 1968. The social order of the slum. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Swartley, A. 1983. If this were any other job, I'd shove it. Mother Jones 8(4): 33-55. Thomas, Evan. 1986. The baby boomers turn forty. Time, 19 May, pp. 23-41. Toomer, Jean. 1927. Cane. New York: Lippincott. Turner, Victor. 1974. Dramas, fields, and metaphors. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. 8221 1982. Celebration: Studies in festivity and ritual. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press. Vogt, Evon Z. 1955. A study of the southwestern fiesta system as exemplified by the Laguan fiesta. American Anthropologist 57:820-39. Wheeler, Linda. 1986. Korean merchants find opportunity in D.C. Washington Post, 14 December, pp. Bl, B5. Whisnant, David. 1983. All that is native and fine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Williams, Brett. 1979. Migrants on the prairie: Untangling everyday life. In The Chicano experience, ed. J. Macklin and S. West, pp. 83-110. Boulder, Colo.: Westview. 8221 1980. The South in the city. Journal of Popular Culture 16(2): 30-41. [152]

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Index

Advertising: of foods, 3, 49-50 of houses, 69-70, 132 on television, 108, 116-119 Alley life, 3, 12, 26-38, 47, 51, 142 Apartment life, 4, 52, 55-68, 101-106, 122-124. See also Renting Architecture, 26, 89, 130, 132 Barbecue, 30, 41-42, 45, 48, 78, 126 Black American culture, 4, 47-48, 84, 91, 127, 141. See also Carolina traditions, Texture Businesses, 9, 10, 77-79, 83, 85-89, 92, 98-99, 139-142 Carolina economy, 2, 13-16, 22, 24, 43 Carolina traditions, 3, 25-26, 137-138, 141-142 involving foods, 36-43, 45-51, 82, 83, 126 Child-keeping, 38, 44, 56, 81-91 Children: and alley life, 30, 32-33, 35 and family life, 44, 58-59, 89-92 and public life, 89-92, 134 and television, 5, 114-120 Churches, 125, 135, 139-140 and integration, 27, 30, 92, 139-140 and local residents, 10, 27, 29-30, 125, 135 Class: cultures, 4, 50, 89, 97-98 and festival, 126, 128

and housing, 53-54, 63, 71, 73-75, 132

and public life, 4, 76, 89, 92, 97-98, 136, 140-141 resources, 4, 89, 95 stereotvpes, 57, 63, 71, 95, 100, 110-114, 135, 137 and television, 100, 107, 110-114, 119-120, 135 See also Poverty Cliches, 2, 127, 134, 136-137 about Washington, 7, 9, 51, 136 about Yuppies, 57, 130 Club life, 29-30, 80 Commercial life. See Businesses Commodities, 2, 75, 86, 119-120, 127, 136 Condominiums, 53-54, 130, 132-134 Crime, 82, 96-97, 113, 134 fears about, 9, 60, 96-97, 112-113 on television, 9, 108-112 "Dallas" and "Dynasty," 5, 84, 103-107, 113, 135 Daycare, 134 and integration, 91-92, 114, 139-141 workers, 20, 29, 31, 55, 65, 102 See also Child-keeping Density: and alley life, 34-35, 142 and apartment life, 48, 84, 102, 141 and Carolina culture, 47-48 and festival, 127, 139, 142 and political action, 143

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Index Density (cont.) and street life, 79, 84, 89, 97-99, 142 and television, 106-108 Developers, 26, 72, 130-131 Displacement: from Central America, 67 and festival, 128 and historic preservation, 72, 121, 131-132 from the south, 2, 11-12, 14-15, 24 from Southeast Asia, 122-123 in Washington, 1-5, 11, 51, 53, 74-75, 80 Domestic service, 12, 17, 29-30, 64 Elderlv, 25-38, 55, 62, 65, 94, 133 Farming, 13-15, 17, 19-20, 22, 24, 43AC 4D

Festivals, 6, 61, 121, 124-129, 139, 142 Fishing, 3, 39-40, 44, 46, 77 Foods, 3, 36-43, 47-50, 82, 88, 126 Gardening, 2-3, 36, 46-51, 126, 135 Gender: and class, 91-92 and ethnicity, 64-65 and family life, 15-16, 123 and foods, 39, 43, 49 and public life, 61-66, 79-80, 91-92, 96

and television, 103-106, 115-116 Gentrifying households: and alley life, 32-34 and politics, 56, 72-73, 93-94 and public life, 4, 53, 60, 76, 87-99, 135-143 and television, 5, 107-114, 121, 129133

Government: of D.C., 8, 25-26, 49-50, 61, 96-97, 130

employment by, 9, 12-13, 15, 17-19 federal, 8, 12, 'l4, 32, 96-97, 134 Hanrohan, Edna, 27, 30, 35-36, 38, 93, 142-143 Harper, Charles, Sr., 16-19 Harper, Charles, Jr., 19, 21-22, 39, 44-45 Harper, Joseph, 16, 19-20, 44, 46, 54 Harper, Lonnie (Parker), 16, 18, 22, 39, 43-44 Harper, Louise, 16-17, 22, 43-44, 54

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Harper, Lucy: and domestic life, 16, 20, 22, 54-56, 58-59, 73, 79 and public life, 55-56, 61, 73, 86-87 and television, 102-104 work of, 20, 55, 65, 73, 77-78, 102 Harper, Robert: and Carolina traditions, 42-43, 45, 138

ethnographic insights of, 61, 73, 98, 142

and extended family, 16, 18-22, 4243, 45, 54 marriage and children of, 20, 55-59, 90-91, 102, 114 and the street, 76-80, 83, 86-87, 9091

work of, 20-21, 54-55 Harper, Walter: and alley life, 27, 33-38, 142 and Carolina traditions, 25, 36-47 family life, 15-23, 33, 39-40, 43-44, 54,' 77 and public life, 87 work of, 17, 24-25 Hegemony, 48-51, 70-75 "Hill Street Blues," 9, 107-114, 135 Historic preservation, 5, 6, 56, 129— 133, 136 Housing market, 1, 53-54, 71-72, 131-134 Job ceiling, 15, 22, 25, 134

Kin: from Carolina, 3, 25, 29, 33, 39-47, 51

Harpers, 15-23, 138 Latino, 64-67, 73 Southeast Asian, 123-124 Television, 105-106 Koreans, 78, 85, 123 Latinos, 1 in business, 85-86, 88, 142 as refugees, 1, 64-67, 122, 129, 134 as renters, 4, 61, 64-67, 73 on the street, 9, 78, 97, 124-126 and television, 110-111, 119, 128129

See also Refugees Medicines, 3, 46, 82, 126 Metaphor, 4, 6, 8, 53, 71-75, 126-127, 137

Index Migration, 2, 12-25, 43, 52, 56-57. See also Latinos, Refugees, Regional economy, Southeast Asians, Work National culture, 1-3, 134 and foods, 49-51 and "homes," 53, 68-73 See also Advertising, Hegemony, Metaphor, Television Neighborhood history, 9-11, 26, 5253, 85, 94, 130 Nostalgia, 137 and festival, 127-128, 136 and foods, 3, 49-50 and gentrifiers, 57, 89, 131-132 Owning, 4, 24-26, 54-61, 70-73, 8799, 105, 121. See also Class, Gentrifying households Parks, 10, 91-92, 114 Police, 82, 97-98, 101, 107, 113 Politics of culture, 3, 6, 47-51, 124129, 137 Pooling, 55-56, 79-81, 90, 92 Porches, 10, 27, 32, 59-60, 65-66, 105 Poverty, 1 in the south, 13-14, 24 on television, 5, 112, 135, 137 in Washington, 49, 51, 67, 88 See also Class, Displacement, Refugees Privacy, 32, 59-61, 66-67, 70-71, 75, 105 Public life, 4, 34-35, 92, 128, 136-143. See also Street life Race, 1, 48-49, 100, 132 Racism, 14, 94, 96, 110, 134, 137 Refugees, 1, 5-6, 10, 12, 119, 129, 134. See also Displacement, Latinos, Poverty, Southeast Asians

Regional economy, 2-3, 11-22, 24, 4344

Renovation, 3-4, 53, 58 Renting, 4, 48, 53-68, 72, 76, 131, 133, 136. See also Apartment life, Class Repetition: in apartments, 48 and Carolina culture, 46-48 and gardening, 38 and political action, 143 and street life 48 79 84 86 89 98, 141 and television, 106 See also Black American culture, Density, Texture Schools, 21, 70, 89, 91-92, 122, 125, 134, 141. See also Daycare Shops and stores. See Businesses Southeast Asians, 1, 119, 122-126, 129. See also Displacement, Refugees Street life, 4, 9, 76-84, 90-99, 128, 143 and Carolina traditions, 25, 82-83 and the displaced, 74-75, 139 and renters, 57-58, 67, 79, 103 See also Public life Suburbs, 56, 65, 75, 80, 86-87, 90 Dispersed families in, 3, 19-20, 67, 123 •See also Displacement Television, 5, 9, 84, 100-120, 135 Texture: .in apartments, 48, 84, 102, 106 and Carolina culture, 47-48, 141 and festivals, 126, 139 and integration, 2, 95, 97-99, 143 on the street, 48, 76, 84, 91, 93 Work: in D.C., 12, 17-22, 24, 43, 80-81 of kinship, 80, 105-106 in North Carolina, 13-14, 17 of the street, 79-84

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The Anthropology of Contemporary Issues A SERIES EDITED BY ROGER SANJEK Chinatown No More: Taiwan Immigrants in Contemporary New York BY HSIANG-SHUI CHEN

^arm Work and Fieldwork: American Agriculture in Anthropological Perspective EDITED BY MlCHAEL CHIBNIK

rhe Varieties of Ethic Experience: Kinship, Class, and Gender among California Italian Americans BY MlCAELA DI LEONARDO

Lord, I'm Coming Home: Everyday Aesthetics in Tidewater North Carolina BY JOHN FORREST Chinese Working-Class Lives: Getting By in Taiwan BY HILL GATES Accommodation without Assimilation: Sikh Immigrants in an American High School BY MARGARET A. GIBSON Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town BY CAROL J. GREENHOUSE Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900-1985 BY KAREN HANSEN Rx: Spiritist as Needed: A Study of a Puerto Rican Community Mental Health Resource BY ALAN HARWOOD Dismantling Apartheid: A South African Town in Transition BY WALTON R. JOHNSON Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race BY PHILIP KASINITZ The Solitude of Collectivism: Romanian Villagers to the Revolution and Beyond BY DAVID A. KlDECKEL

Nuclear Summer: The Clash of Communities at the Seneca Women's Peace Encampment BY LOUISE KRASNIEWICZ Between Two Worlds: Ethnographic Essays on American Jewry EDITED BY JACK KUGELMASS

American Odyssey: Haitians in New York City BY MICHEL S. LAGUERRE Sunbelt Working Mothers: Reconciling Family and Factory BY LOUISE LAMPHERE, PATRICIA ZAVELLA, FELIPE GONZALES AND PETER B. EVAN: Creativity/Anthropology EDITIED BY SMADAR LAVIE, KlRIN NARAYAN AND RENATO ROSALDO

Cities, Classes, and the Social Order BY ANTHONY LEEDS, EDITED BY ROGER SANJEK Lesbian Mothers: Accounts of Gender in American Culture BY ELLEN LEWIN Civilized Women: Gender and Prestige in Southeastern Liberia BY MARY H. MORAN Blood, Sweat, and Mahjong: Family and Enterprise in an Overseas Chinese Communit BY ELLEN OXFELD The Magic City: Unemployment in a Working-Class Community BY GREGORY PAPPAS The Korean American Dream: Immigrants and Small Business in New Yor/c City BY KYEYOUNG PARK State and Family in Singapore: Restructuring an Industrial Society BY JANET W. SALAFF Uneasy Endings: Daily Life in an American Nursing Home BY RENEE ROSE SHIELD Children of Circumstances: Israeli Emigrants in New Yor/c BY MOSHE SHOKEID History and Power in the Study of Law: New Directions in Legal Anthropology EDITIED BY JUNE STARR AND JANE F. COLLIER

"Getting Paid": Youth Crime and Work in the Inner City BY MERCER L. SULLIVAN Breaking the Silence: Redress and Japanese American Ethnicity BY YASUKO I. TAKEZAWA Underground Harmonies: Music and Politics in the Subways of New York BY SUSIE J. TANENBAUM City of Green Benches: Growing Old in a New Downtown BY MARIA D. VESPERI Strawberry Fields: Politics, Class, and Work in California Agriculture BY MIRIAM J. WELLS Renunciation and Reformation: A Study of Conversion in an American Sect BY HARRIET WHITEHEAD Upscaling Downtown: Stalled Gentrification in Washington, D. C. BY BRETT WILLIAMS Women's Work and Chicano Families: Cannery Workers of the Santa Clara Valley BY PATRICIA ZAVELLA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Williams, Brett. Upscaling downtown: stalled gentrification in Washington, D.C. Brett Williams. p. cm. — (Anthropology of contemporary issues) Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-8014-2106-3 (alk. paper). ISBN 0-8014-9419-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Urban renewal—Washington (D.C.) 2. Central business districts—Washington (D.C.) 3. Community organization—Washington (D.C.) I. Title. II. Series. HT177.W3W55 1988 307.3'42'09753—dc!9 87-27350