Vol 5, Num 18 :: 2006.10.06 — 2006.10.20
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Thursday October 28, 2004
In the L-shaped alley that begins on 45th Street, then turns parallel to Kenilworth Avenue and empties into Quarles Street, on a wall of a deserted laundry area where the poles have no more laundry lines, there in the courtyard of the back-alley drug dealers, someone has painted a gun mural. Two stick figures, a gun, and three bullets on a red-painted brick wall. The side wall of someone’s house. The end of someone’s life.
I had noticed this little bit of graffiti art several weeks earlier, and it pissed me off. As if these children are not surrounded enough by thuggishness and the threat of violence, I thought, as if they do not already have enough incentives to consider normal all sorts of behavior that is outside of the norm. I resolved to change the mural.
Beat a weapon into a ploughshare. Turn a gun into flowers. Change hate to love.
It was a sacred trip, that journey to the store to buy the paint and brushes. I rode my bike and sang as I went.
Now I have my paints and brushes with me. I turn down into the court from Kenilworth Avenue, nodding to the gentlemen that make their living leaning against the fence there. I walk back toward the alley, site where two men, Javon Benson and Kareem McDowell, have been shot and killed in the last year and a half.
The mural makes no idle threat.
A few people hang out in the alley. A woman standing next to a small line of mangy, parked cars talks to a man in a wheelchair. I feel somewhat surreptitious, fugitive, a suspect about to do a sneaky deed. After all, I am a white man painting on the wall of a black housing project. I don’t fit in. Technically, I am doing something illegal. Anything could happen.
I put down my bags and take out my paints. I line them up on the steps of a concrete stoop that leads into an electrical service room. Electrical boxes pattern the red wall above the mural. I select my colors and begin to paint.
First, I use red. I paint out the gun in the hand of the one stick figure, and paint out the three bullets that are zooming toward the other, frozen in time on their journey toward the second stick person’s head.
Then I take out the black paint. With these I draw smiles on the faces of each stick person, give them a mouth so they can talk and express emotion. I give them eyes so they can see. I make them more than an empty person with a gun and an empty person about to die. Then, I paint three flower stalks in the hand where once the gun had been.
After this I take out my colors: blue, green. I make a simple, scalloped flower head on top of each stalk.
I am almost done, but not quite. With gray paint I put up a fragment, “gave her the flowers and said, ‘I love you.’” Then I put the lids back on my cans of paint and wrap up my brushes to clean at home. And I walk home.
This was no idle repainting. This is serious business.
Kenilworth Courts is a government-sponsored, low-income housing complex in Northeast Washington, DC. It is the kind of place that might be variously called "the projects" or "the hood" or "the ghetto." While many who live there would be offended by the negative connotations of such labels, others would welcome them as an apt description of not only their neighborhood, but their lives as well.
As has become habit in such neighborhoods, drug dealers claim small spots of sidewalk and alley as their place of business. This illegal enterprise, combined with the isolation and despair that festers where large populations of people are marginalized by race and lack of riches, breeds an underground culture of crime and violence, particularly among young black men.
My Mennonite heritage had taught me to value peace and nonviolence, and growing up in Kenilworth I saw my father (a pastor) and other church workers modeling a loving pacifism in their work with the community. I decided I couldn't let this horrific mural stay. Biking to a local hardware store, I bought paints and, covering over the gun and the just-fired bullets suspended in midair, made a new scene.
This is, to me, what peace-makers are to be about—changing violent situations into life-affirming ones. This is perhaps my most practical piece of art, and the one of which I am most proud.
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