"Someone gave it to a guy who cleans up for me and told him to throw it in the trash. He said, 'Can you use it?' So I opened that Bible and put it in the window and that's where it's been since." That was four years ago. The Bible is turned to Psalm 34, where it fell open, feeding the soul:
"I will bless the Lord at all times; His praise shall continually be in my mouth. My soul shall make her boast in the Lord; The humble shall hear thereof, and be glad."
Mattie McLain, co-owner of Carrie's Foodmart and Deli, talks to Domingo Salazar, who has come to buy cigarettes. Miss Mattie is closing out, having rented the store to a woman from Central America.
(Juana Arias -- The Washington Post)
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The afternoon sun shines with ferocity, piercing the window and laying hands on the King James. But under all that heat, not one word is faded.
"The word of God don't fade away," Rivers says, leaning against his barber's chair. "You can't argue about the Bible. . . . I say, 'Don't try to rub your religion off on me and I won't rub mine off on you. We might be both right.' "
". . . many are the afflictions of the righteous, but the Lord delivereth him out of them all."
Rivers stands at the picture window that is his view on the world. "Gaines and Brown" is spelled backward from this perspective. Gaines died in 1990; Brown retired in 1995. The sign has been there since 1968, when they opened, a month after the riots. "I've seen from the guttermost to the uttermost," Rivers says.
He knows Gloria. Says she is new to the block, he sees the people going and coming, but he for one has never eaten a pupusa. "I bring my lunch from home," he says. "I'm not one to eat out. I eat at home and I eat at church."
In this barbershop, where a Philly Fade costs $14.50, the walls are pale green and lined with vinyl green chairs, the kind with the ashtray in the arm, from the time when customers filled the shop with smoke. "General Hospital" unfolds on a television, sitting on an old RCA Victor with two big dials "that was working until about 20 years ago when somebody tried to rip it off but couldn't get it out the door so took off with the cord."
"I've seen quite a bit of change. . . . They called it Chocolate City, then it went to Chocolate River, when the blacks started moving to the suburbs and the Hispanics began moving in. After the Hispanics settled in, the whites moved in. A lot of my customers moved."
Rivers knows time is coming to claim this shop, though he tries to adapt.
"In this type business, you have to do it all. I have to cut white, black, Latino, which is no problem for me. If they can explain to me what they want, I can do it. Sometimes the language barrier is the problem. They can't tell me what they want and I can't figure it out."
"The poor man cried and the Lord heard him and saved him out of all his troubles."
The Gentrifiers
From these windows, you rarely see the gentrifiers who they say are coming. You see signs of the gentrifiers, changing things. Their houses are the ones with the shiny new windows and the fancy doors. And the manicured squares of lawn, and stoops cemented with fragments of rock sticking up, better to keep loiterers off. The gentrifiers, you hear about them, and sometimes there are sightings. They are the ones with the bold strides crossing busy 14th Street in the painted crosswalks, with real expectation that cars will actually stop for them. You never see them walking in packs or hanging out at pay phones or frequenting the corner stores that don't sell much of anything "low-carb" or organic. If you do see them, they are walking their dogs and scooping the poop, or jogging near sunset as though they don't have a care in the world.
The Foodmart
Back at Carrie's Foodmart, Miss Mattie and Miss Carrie bustle behind the counter. Don't let the Georgia accents fool you: The people who know this block know these two gray-haired women are little "Rockefellers" who bought up property all over the neighborhood. Now they are sitting on a pretty penny.
Mattie, the entrepreneur, isn't sad about closing, having rented the store to a woman from Central America. She was there in '68 when someone threw a firebomb through the window. She picked it up "and threw it right back out. I said, 'Don't burn my building down. I got some more work to do.' "
Now, the corridor is "90 degrees better, but now my arm give out. And it's time for somebody else."
"What we got in here is what most blacks buy," says Miss Carrie. "You got to put what Latinos buy. You got to completely change everything in here. Well, the mayonnaise can stay."
On the counter today: Gold Bond foot powder, Borden's Evaporated Milk, Del Monte Sweet Peas, Queen Bergamont Hair and Scalp Conditioner.
Mattie came here from Georgia with her husband, but they broke up after two years and she went to beauty school. She started working in a beauty shop that Carrie, now 68, started.
A friend named Barbara, Barbara Thomas, came into the shop one day, and "she say, 'Mattie, come go with me -- my boyfriend's mother owns this store and she should just let you have it because she ain't doing nothing with it.' I went to talk to the lady and she let me have it. . . . That was 35 years ago. Nope, make that 38.
