Literary Lights 1400 block HARVARD STREET NW
The hous e a t 1 4 22 Har v ard was built in 1 893 for P.B.S. Pinchback, a Reconstruction era politi-cian and lawyer from Louisiana. Pinchback briefly served as Louisiana’s governor, the only African American governor in the country until Virginia elected Douglas Wilder in 1 99 0 . Pinchback also won seats in the U.S. House and Senate, but white politicians prevented him from claiming them. Here on Harvard Street, Pinchback raised his grandson, future author Jean Toomer. Toomer’s time here provided material for his 1 9 2 3 master- piece, Cane. “Dan Moore walks southward on Thirteenth Street,” Toomer wrote.“The low limbs of budding chestnut trees recede above his head.... The eyes of houses faintly touch him as he passes them. Soft girl-eyes, they set him singing.” Almost four decades later novelist Marita Golden also found a rich setting in Columbia Heights for her novel Long Distance Life. The great Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, son of a diplomat assigned to the Mexican Embassy on 16th Street, relished life here in the 1930s. Wash- ington had “one of the best public school systems in the world,” he recalled, “and I profited from it.” The Drum and Spear, Washington’s first Afrocentric bookstore, operated three blocks from here, at 1371 Fairmont Street, from 1969 until the mid 1970s. From 1917 until 1972 the Hines Funeral Home occupied the former private residences at 2901– 2907 14th Street, before the buildings became home to the Greater Washington Urban League.
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