The Old Kinship

Hodges, Garrison and Thompson met in the mid-1960s, when Washington was flush with the kinds of union and "good government" jobs that acted as a beacon to economically dispossessed young blacks in the South. Each drove buses, and later Metro trains, with the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority. After work, they'd meet up with dozens of other black men on V Street in Northeast Washington, across from the Bladensburg garage. They would unwind after a swing shift of driving the city, making change, taking tokens, passing out transfers. They formed friendships from common history. From their code and their shorthand and the perch they shared, looking out on the world.

How you doin', brother?

Aw, man, you know how it is.

Some would drop by quickly on their way home to families, and some would linger as the hour grew late. "We was always together, because that's all we had was us," Hodges said. It was a bond forged by men who needed one another at a time when Washington was controlled by whites who rarely acknowledged the black men right in front of their faces.

They all retired in the early 2000s and started bowling in earnest, in multiple leagues. In 2003, the three friends joined a Wednesday morning league in Marlow Heights. They met Mitchell, a retired driver for UPS, at the Parkland bowling alley in Forestville. This year, the four of them started bowling together in TriNitely, which feels like an extension of small Southern towns, and the deep exhale after work, in places where black men would get together to be seen.

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The Pins and Patter

On Friday mornings at the Crofton Bowling Centre, nearly 150 bowlers, all men and mostly black, fill the lanes and cast the subtleties of the sport in black folkways and sayings. "That boy done got warm, now!" Garrison booms about an opponent. "Ain't nothin' you can do with him. He done got warm." Deep laughter mixes with the flow of conversation and the crack of balls sending pins into reverb and high whine.

It is a place filled with the black men seldom rendered in popular culture: steady Eddies, average Joes, working stiffs. They are Everymen, eclipsed by the black men who make videos or touchdowns or nightly newscasts but fully recognizable to one another. They high-five and pat each other on the back.

The 36-team Printcrafters TriNitely bowling league, so named by the union printers who started it nearly 30 years ago, was mostly white for almost a decade. As more blacks got union jobs, many in the federal government or with various municipal services, it turned majority-black. By that time, union prestige and numbers, which had included nearly a third of all U.S. workers in the mid-1950s, had long been in decline.

Etiquette requires that bowlers wait until the man next to them steps off the lane, and bowlers on deck tap hands after each turn. "It's a gentleman's game," said Thompson -- for all the "gentlemen" whose shift starts at 7 a.m. and ends around 3:30. Thompson always preferred a swing shift. He was a superintendent in charge of 300 people before retiring in 2002.

Thompson and his brother, Myron, a federal court judge in Montgomery, Ala., grew up in Tuskegee. Life centered on the historically black college, the Tuskegee Institute. His parents, who divorced when he was 12, worked on campus. "You could find everything you wanted right there in the community," Thompson said. Tuskegee was 36 miles from Montgomery, and mass meetings were held at churches during the civil rights movement. After meetings, organizers often headed to the drugstore where Thompson, nicknamed Bootsie, was a soda jerk, and Martin Luther King Jr. would say, "Bootsie, it's time for my float before I get back."

Thompson was studying to be a veterinarian at Tuskegee in the early 1960s but dropped out to get married when his college sweetheart got pregnant. "We had a child on the way. It was one of those things where I had to take care of my obligations," he said matter-of-factly.