THE JUNGLE OF A LIFE

* * *

The sister of the hanged man is sitting at a dining room table in Anacostia, in her son Kirk's home. Edna Wilson, who is 83, lives next door, but she does not want to disturb her guard dog. She is the sole survivor of the five Perry siblings.

She recalls her youthful brother Herman as being "happy-go-lucky, always asking about the girls."

She has pictures of him: wooing a pretty girl at Meridian Hill Park, in his Army uniform with a cigarette in his hand; posing in a suit with a smooth smile on his face.

She says she could tell her brother was disappointed with his treatment in the military. "It was tough for him all along. Going overseas in the bottom of that ship like that. The colored soldiers were treated like a bunch of animals."

The hanged man's sister worked a lifetime at St. Elizabeths Hospital. She was a psychiatric nurse's assistant. She worked around those who had gone mad, among them the poet Ezra Pound, confined to St. Elizabeths for making anti-American statements during World War II. "I'd see him sitting out on the grass," she says of the poet.

She is holding a sheaf of materials that were gathered by Hank Johnson before he died. Some documents, letters, military pictures.

When news of Perry's death reached her family back in 1945, she says they were all perplexed. They knew nothing of her brother's precarious emotional state or his ineffective legal counsel. "I felt helpless," she says. "There was nobody to turn to to help you do anything."

She says, "We know it's a horrible thing that happened. We know that."

She says, "He was just a kid. And to go from the city to the jungle like that . . . " Her voice trails off.

She says, "He didn't have nobody on his side."

For many, many years, Perry's family did not even know where his body was buried. "We thought someplace over there in the jungle," Wilson says.

Cullum told them of Perry's resting place in a military cemetery in Hawaii. Wilson asked Koerner if he could help them bring Herman back.

So Wilson, living on a fixed income, scrounged up a thousand dollars to have her brother's body dug up and cremated. Just seven months ago, there was a knock at her door. The mailman had delivered a box holding her brother's ashes.

"He's home now," she says of the Jungle King, who used to glide up and down U Street.

Wilson purchased a silvery urn with Oriental designs. She added a small necklace with a tiny black name tag.

The only writing on Herman Perry's headstone in Hawaii had been his name and date of death. No date of birth. As if he had been born just to die -- with the things in between unremembered.