George Washington, Jubal Early & Nina Simone -- Christmas, 1963

Storming Confederate Meets Sultry Chanteuse

It was the winter of ‘63, and the advent of my freshman year’s Christmas break at George Washington. Just a month had passed since Kennedy was shot, and the pall cast by that November afternoon still hung over the campus. The campus itself was another affair, its Victorian and Colonial architecture lending it an air of academic quietude long gone from today's Foggy Bottom, which more closely resembles the tube chassis of a Philco Predicta. Sure, Corcoran and Calhoun halls were there, as were Government, the old library, Old South and several other university buildings. Thurston Hall was still a year away and we had a football team led by the great Garry Lyle (the first black quarterback in the Southern Conference, Lyle went on to play for the Chicago Bears), but the ancient Tin Tabernacle ate up a fifth of the quad, and what was referred to as the Student Union was little more than a nondescript afterthought shoehorned in next to the fire-station on G Street. I suppose it all might have had lent impetus to everyone’s wanting to beat it home for the break – but with a paper to write, I thought it would be a good idea for me to hang back for a day or two to get the thing out of the way.

My life until that point being what it was, I’d never known much about feeling lonely and abandoned. However, this was a time before the hippies had colorized culture, and even with all its neon you couldn’t get this buzzcut era to emerge from its newsreel cast. At GW's corner of this somber scene, the dorm and campus had taken on a dystopian emptiness that -- in the days before Christmas -- was reinforced by a driving rain. I felt like the sodden young Ebenezer Scrooge left behind in the old school while his friends and classmates were off to the warm embrace of their families. Somewhere – in my fevered and suddenly Victorian imagination -- they skated on frozen ponds, rode sleighs over snowbound fields, and, standing before glowing hearths, plunged hot pokers into mugs of buttered rum. As for me, I glumly turned away from watching the rain dance off the reflection of the People’s Drug Store sign on Pennsylvania Avenue and repaired to my desk and the work at hand. The paper I was to write was on Jubal Early's attempted invasion of Washington 99 years earlier. As my account of the general’s advance was accompanied by my playing Nina Simone's "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” over and over (and over) on the stereo, the resulting fusion of soulful chanteuse and storming Confederate must reside in my mind alone in all the world.

General Early never quite made it into town; but with my paper done and Christmas approaching, I was on my way out of it. So, late the following night, I took a cab to Union Station. In those days, no bus depot was less welcoming nor in greater disrepair. The station’s darkened main hall was filled with wooden benches that must've dated back to McKinley; and puddles from the preceding days’ rain had collected here and there on its marble floor -- grim reminders to all present of former glory. Of all present, I seemed to be the only one upright, awake and not homeless -- so looking for livelier company, I was drawn by the light of this cubby hole café where I knew you could get half-smokes and hot coffee served up by guys who looked like former Pullman porters – which, as it turned out – was what they were.

One of these gents understandably just wanted to close up and go home, while the other – named Julius – was good enough to produce what had to be the night’s last half-smoke. When I went to pay, he chuckled and held up his hand as if to say that it and the coffee were on the house. “What you doin’ sitting out wid all dem hoboes?” he asked with concern. “I dunno,” I shrugged with typical mean-teen surliness. “I had to write a term paper and stayed back in my dorm to do it.” “A toim paper?" Julius wanted to know, “‘Bout what?” “Jubal Early,” I said, warming to my new-found friend and circumstance. Back then, most everyone in D.C. still knew who Early was and what he'd done: “Didn’ he shoot at Lincoln?” asked Julius. “In a way,” I said, “Lincoln almost got shot while standing up to watch Early’s troops out at Fort Stevens."

Julius’s face compressed in thought. “Well,’ he said, “sometimes you just got to stand up no matter what.”

I don’t know if it was more of the hot meal, a stranger’s kindness or what he had just said – but I suddenly felt a lot better.