A Place for Cutting and Connecting

One woman is reading a "Sesame Street" book to her daughter while her son gets his hair cut. A man reads a newspaper with his grandson propped on his knee. Two elementary-age kids thumb-wrestle. With the sound of electric razors in the background, some in the shop use the time to simply doze.

Reginald Agbebaku, 13, is wide-awake as he sits in Beckham's chair. A new ninth-grader at Archbishop Carroll High School in the District, the teenager wants to look sharp for the start of the school year.

"You want your neck boxed out or faded?" Beckham asks.

"Faded," Agbebaku replies.

And he wants thin sideburns. "Oh, okay, you want a teenager's cut," Beckham says. "You're not a kid anymore, huh?"

At Freeman's, the staff and clients often recognize or even celebrate milestones.

Elias Lartey, 13 months old, is about to mark a major one: getting his first haircut.

As he has done for so many little ones before Elias, Beckham places the boy on a cushion in the chair, takes a pick and pulls out the soft curls. Elias works on a lollipop, drools and squirms while Beckham gathers clumps of hair and cuts gently with long, silver-colored scissors.

Elias's father stands nearby to receive the curls for a baby book. After all the wriggling, Elias is handed a certificate that reads: "Elias Lartey has bravely met all the requirements of receiving his first haircut and has graduated from babyhood on the 20th of August, 2005."

Conversation and Community

At Freeman's, clients and barbers get to know each other, sharing details about their lives and their dreams.

There's Angela Norwood, the barber who also teaches English at Prince George's Community College. And Alex Deal, the barber who is studying at the University of Maryland, College Park for a degree in computer science.

The shop is a place where clients and their barbers can catch up on each other's family members and the latest news in the community. It's a place where they can pontificate about current events and chat about the hottest cars and the week's big game.

Freeman's and its people are so lively that every now and then, the barbers are featured on a weekly radio program called "The Barber Shop Show" on WOL 1450 AM. The show, featuring other barbershops in the D.C. area as well, tries to capture the mood and pulse of communities by talking to those who often are the ears of the neighborhood.

Brian White interrupts the cut he is giving a boy to make a point. "Can I bring something to your attention?" he says, as eyes turn toward him.

"That same 12 to 15 gallons of gas in your tank is burning faster than it did before, did you notice that?" says White, who is frustrated because he recently had to pay $45 to fill his vehicle. "They're charging us more for less."

He holds up his hands in resignation: "Who wants to start riding a bike?"

Nobody answers, but Beckham, a member of the Air Force Reserve, offers that jet fuel is less expensive than car fuel. Nobody believes him, so he abruptly stops cutting his client's hair to make a phone call. "How much is a gallon of jet fuel," Beckham asks the person at the other end of the line.

He puts the phone on speaker, and the person he called at Andrews Air Force Base confirms that jet fuel is indeed cheaper than car fuel.

"This is a little trivia you can throw out at a cookout," Beckham says.

And so goes the discussion until Norwood, tires of the meandering chitchat and calls for quiet time.

"Can't we have a moment of silence?" she asks. "Can't we put music on?"

Her co-workers shake their heads.

"Come on," White says. "It's a barbershop."

Staff writer Yawandale Birchett-Thompson contributed to this story.