Today I walked around the monument to President Washington. It's a half-finished thing, an odd white thumb coming up out of dirt and a few blades of grass, a stump of a thing, blasting through the dome of a cracked-in-two shell of sky.
The light in this city is so different from the light at the farm in Georgia, from the light in Charleston. The sky here is colored the blue of a robin's egg if the shell had been heated up with yolk-colored, straight-from-heaven sunrays. Always about me now is the sense of having died and gone to heaven.
Or died and gone to hell. Died for sure. There is a thickness to the Washington air. It's heavy with water and mosquitoes. I wear this air like a coat that keeps me from the cold I know is coming. And there's a thickness to the river. You can't see very deep into it for all that it carries, and it's wide. The Potomac seems to roll in here from someplace and curve slowly through the city like it's a good place to stay.
When I sailed to Europe I did not remember my fear of water until I was upon it for some days. Or was it Mammy's fear I remembered? Or Mammy's Mammy's fear? Where does fear go to become fascination? Is it where rivers go to become sea? More than anything I saw of Venice (gondolas, masks), of London (pints, a palace), of Paris (sewer rats, stained glass) after so much land, I saw all the rivers. The Potomac brings back to me a remembrance of rivers. A remembrance of rivers and river cities.
Walking along the streets I hear different languages. And the people dress differently not just because they are rich or poor but because the people of Atlanta dress differently from the people of Boston, who dress differently from the Philadelphians and there is a good bit of everybody roving 'round here.
In a way Washington, the Capital City, feels like an island. It belongs to nothing. I wonder what will be here in a hundred years? I wonder if anything will be here at all. The city is like a big pregnant woman lying on her side while everybody fans her and wonders when she's going to give birth. Or will the baby blast the life out of her, trying to press its way into life? We hear stories about the French L'Enfant and the black man, Banneker, who was his assistant, and how they were tossed out of their own vision, out of this town of their creation, for dreaming too wildly. Are there tame dreams? I wonder if this city with its strange circles, somehow designed to make one cannon do the work of six, but not generally sensible, I wonder if this city won't always be a kind of haint, struggling to wake to the everyday needs of a struggling rural people, struggling to fall back into L'Enfant's grand dream of a city of Senators and Ambassadors? Did he not understand our Congressmen were not so long ago farmers and slaves? He didn't know that. I don't believe the European ever fully understands the American. But this city is built for tomorrow, and tomorrow I go the Douglasses' for tea.