The Old Kinship

That's why Hodges started putting up his signs.

* * *

A Megaphone

The day after Election Day, Hodges was the most gleeful bowler at Marlow Heights. He slapped hands with other bowlers, and they joked about the big Democratic win. A good thing for black people, they thought. A personal triumph for Hodges.

"Aw, man, you should have seen me out there last night," he said. His eyes were shining.

For Hodges, Election Day had been a culmination. For nearly two months, he'd done solo anti-Michael Steele for Senate campaigning. He'd put up anti-Steele signs. He blasted a recorded anti-Steele, anti-Prince George's County Council members who supported Steele, anti-Republican Party message from loudspeakers on top of his pickup at Prince George's Metro stations -- including the Greenbelt Station, where he'd retired as a rail supervisor in 2000.

Hodges, a Democrat, said he wasn't so much for Democratic candidate Benjamin L. Cardin as he was against Steele. "It ain't personal," he explained of his efforts, "except personal about how I feel about a black person who wants to take the whole race down" for personal gain. He believes that Republicans don't represent the interests of African Americans and that as a black Republican, Steele represents the kind of race betrayal he'd seen before.

Growing up in Fremont, N.C., Hodges, his parents, a brother and four sisters were sharecroppers. They raised chickens, pigs and cows. They grew tobacco, corn, cotton and tomatoes on 40 acres "for halves."

"We were 8, 9, 10 years old, and we had to get out in the field and crop tobacco," he said. Each fall, they gave the farm's white owner half of everything they sold. After that, there "wasn't nothin' too much left to spend," Hodges said. His words were tinged with the hardness of poverty. Sometimes he'd take watermelon or corn from the farm owners' patch, and the blacks who drove or ran errands for the owner would tell on Hodges. "I know I did wrong by taking things," Hodges said, "but then my own race would tell on you." His voice went distant with old pain. "It was like you're on a different side," he said softly.

Metro gave Hodges a better life than his daddy's. He credits the civil rights movement for making that possible. "The generation before me stepped up," they marched and died, he said. Hodges wants to make things better for the generations coming after him. He wants to stand up for something . He's not scared. They can't take his benefits. He's a 65-year-old man who has found his voice. Now he just can't be still any longer.

At Marlow Heights, in the third frame of his third game, Hodges bowled a strike. " Yeah, baby. It's a good day for me today," Hodges said to the lanes. "Must be because of what I did yesterday."

"Hot damn, the people have spoke," Thompson said.

The bowlers' laughter mixed with the sounds of pins falling.

* * *

Beginning Behind

Week 10 of the 32-week TriNitely season should have been easy for Team 33. In sixth place for three weeks, the men were bowling against a team in 32nd place -- guys whose combined averages hovered in the 150s. Team 33 averaged near 200 but often scored much higher.

Garrison had almost bowled a 300 a couple of days before. He had gotten to the last ball in the 10th frame, and bowlers across four lanes on either side of him stood still to watch.

Usually, Garrison's deep baritone carries through the alley. "Even a hog'll find an acorn every now and then," he'll say when he makes an unlikely strike. And when he misses one he should have made, he'll throw down his towel and yell, "That 10-pin don't have no business bein' there!" He holds onto a bad frame like a grudge, which always prompts an exasperated Thompson to ask: "What's our motto, huh? That one's gone! You got to let it go."

But that day, Garrison had grown quiet. He rolled his last ball and, when it was done, he'd left three pins standing.

In Week 10, leadoff man Hodges called out to his team beat your man, but it didn't do any good. Bowling scratch, the high-scoring bowlers on Team 33 actually won three games and knocked down more total pins. But in the standings, they lost all four games. TriNitely is a handicap league, and the other team was 127 pins ahead before the first ball was shot. "It's like another whole player," Hodges said.

That's how the handicap beats you. You take your measure. You think you're good enough, smart enough, strong. But in reality you're 100 sticks behind before the game even starts, and for some bowlers, it's just too much to overcome.

It feels like something the men on Team 33 have always known. The most trenchant point in a black man's narrative, they say, a forever truth that extends beyond the lanes.

If the game is handicapped, you have to be twice as much man to win.

* * *

The Good Fight

Team 33 was behind by nine sticks when Garrison stepped to the line.

Mitchell, who had bowled a clutch spare in the eighth to keep them in the game, whispered, "Let's see if he can find that acorn."

Garrison lifted his ball high and let it slide fast from his fingers. Seven, eight, nine pins fell. The 10th pin wobbled, then dropped.

"Yeah, baby!" Hodges yelled, pumping his fist.

It wasn't the first time Garrison stepped to the line when there was a lot at stake. When his Southeast Washington neighborhood started turning bad, the families on his block vowed to stay and fight. They met with ward leaders and Mayor Marion Barry. They lobbied for money to fix up a playground and basketball court near Ferebee-Hope Elementary School and the basketball court and pool near the Barry Farm housing project.

Garrison would take neighborhood boys to McDonald's, or they'd hang out at his house playing with his sons. The community had boys clubs, and kids had to have a B average to join. Then the boys clubs closed, Garrison said. Neighborhood kids started walking away when they saw him coming. "They got idle minds, and it was hard to reach them," he said.

Drugs spread, and violence worsened. Garrison put a sign in his window: "This house is covered by a double-barrel shotgun four days a week. It's up to you to figure out which days."

When his second son was in middle school, kids tried to make him join a gang. Garrison told them that if his boy was harmed, "I'm going to plant you somewhere where everybody can visit you. Tell your mama and your daddy. Tell them where I live."

Finally, Garrison got tired. His wife was always calling the police because of gunfire or loud parties, and he wanted a better school for his 13-year-old daughter, Angelicia. Most of the other families who'd vowed to fight were long gone. He moved to Fort Washington, 10 minutes from Thompson, and now he says his block is cemetery quiet. Still, Angelicia says, "He won't let me walk around the neighborhood, he won't let me talk to no boys, he won't let me walk to school." She poked her daddy in the side.

"Sometimes I wish she would have had the opportunity to grow up like I did," Garrison said. No locks on the door. "The neighborhood was like another mama and daddy."

The neighborhood protected you.

Garrison's oldest son pastors at a church he founded in Forestville. His middle son does maintenance for Metro buses, and, as far as he knows, his youngest son is a security guard at a government building. "He real quiet about what he do," Garrison said. "He not real into family, like the rest of us."

The bowlers on Team 33, who left segregated Southern towns for all the promise of farther north, have lived to see the old ways die.

"We was raised right," Mitchell said. "But it was our generation that lost the kids."

"If we could just get back the closeness," Hodges said.

It is a lamentation for a gathering of older men.

The bowlers say Magic Johnson and Ray Lewis are talking about building a 100-lane alley in Largo. That could help. Maybe.

"Yeah, but we still couldn't reach every black man," Thompson said. "Just the ones that could get to the bowling alley."

Staff researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.