Tayari's Blog: D.C. Diaries: U-Street

You see, Jati is a photographer and his business is documentation. “I shot all of this the way it used to be,” he told me waving at a block of condos priced at over a million dollars. “U Street used to be all black. I got to know the last black family that lived on this block. They were from Guyana.”

For a person like me, more tourist than resident, U Street is “right now.” But on the city register it is a historic district. U Street has undergone many transformations over the last hundred years or so. Around thet urn of the last century, the population which was predominantly middle class and white because the hub of the black middle and upper class, Famous residents included Duke Ellington and Lillian Evans, the first internationally acclaimed African American opera diva. Around the sixties, the neighborhood started changing again and the area fell into decay and disrepair, but still there were hard working families which called this area home. And now, at the turn of the millennium it has changed its face again.

A person like Jati, however, is capable of living in several time dimensions at once. Walking beside him, I wasn’t talking much, trying to listen and see what wasn’t there to be seen anymore. He walked at a brisk pace, sometimes changing his mind in mid-block. To keep up, I remembered what I learned last year in ballroom dancing, something that was hard for me: how to let myself be lead. But I did my best, and zig-zagged across the city with my guide. “Hey,” I said smiling. “I’m Dante, you’re my Virgil.” He laughed back. “No, I’m Morris Day and you’re Prince.”

At the edge of the U-street corridor is a weekend flea market that, according to Jati, forms the line between the gentrified and un-gentrified. When there are new developments, the flea market moves down a couple of blocks. “See,” he pointed, “The flea market used to be over there.” I look “over there” and see a new drugstore.

At the flea market, he’s friendly with the vendors who mostly carry low-ticket items: random cell phone chargers, small toys, and knit hats and gloves. Several vendors know him and compliment him on taking photographs at recent King Day celebrations. He accepts their good wishes and then says to me, “I used to shoot this area all the time. But now I am so busy with administration work during the day.”

Indeed he has been busy. Jati’s work has appeared in Essence, The Washington Post, and many other magazines, newspapers, and other periodicals. If you find yourself in Amsterdam and feel homesick for urban American, go see his exhibit there. If you’re a Washingtonian, he’ll soon be showing his U Street pictures at the Mocha Hut. If you’re lucky, you’ll run into the artist. When you do, buy him a cup of herbal tea and tell him I sent you.)

Just as we were leaving to go back home, Jati said “I’m going to come back out here tomorrow and shoot.” I didn’t answer because I didn’t think that he was talking to me. Instead he seemed to be having a conversation within himself. And if I wasn’t so afraid of interrupting, maybe I would have said, “I hope you do.”