After slavery was banned in the district in 1862, a huge population of formerly enslaved Black people remained in Georgetown. By 1890, an estimated five thousand Black people lived in the neighborhood, giving rise to the era known as Black Georgetown. But as segregation was implemented and then the Great Depression hit, many Black residents lost their jobs to white workers; and with President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, more and more white federal employees moved into the district, pushing Black families out of Georgetown and into more hardship.II
I. Chris Myers Asch and George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
II. Kathleen Menzie Lesko, Valerie Babb, and Carroll R. Gibbs, Black Georgetown Remembered: A History of Its Black Community from the Founding of “The Town of George” in 1751 to the Present Day(Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2016).
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
When Anthony Tell, a twenty-three-year-old Black male, was arraigned and remanded without bail, the Banks murders splashed across national news outlets. Anthony’s round face was plastered on television screens in restaurants, bars, airports, and living rooms for approximately two days before the news cycle moved on. That same week, the federal court “coincidentally” ruled the contents of the docket would be sealed.
It isn’t uncommon for news in Washington to be buried within minutes, particularly if an administration is riddled with scandal. Once the family television is turned off, residents of the Washington power structure configure themselves back into financial appointments, country club happy hours, church, family dinners, and lacrosse games.
Meredith grunts on her hands and knees, pulling weeds and dead roots under the tulip poplar. She knows why she’s doing it, tugging weak limbs from the ground in some kind of transcendental meditation, a pile strewn next to the infected tree like picked-off scabs. Her refusal to confront the spiritual crisis hanging over her: the meaning of her mother’s death, the Banks murders, the lawsuits facing the family business, which she’s just become privy to. Chuck has left her to meet with lawyers in Appalachia; do not answer their calls, he told her in an effort to keep her from worrying. Meredith decided to unplug the landline to hide everything from Bunny: that they’re being sued for millions upon millions, that their family company has been illegally dumping chemicals into small towns rife with poverty.
Meredith tugs harder as she thinks about what could happen to her family, the possibility of losing everything that has been passed down to them, to her. Maybe the murder of the Banks family (and she feels a little guilty for thinking it) was divine intervention. After all, they had been a leading competitor to the Bartholomews in their expanded business, and Meredith didn’t particularly approve of the way Genevieve Banks was displaying their family wealth, which wasn’t self-made. Meredith would never say this out loud to anyone, of course. The idea of not living the only lifestyle Meredith has ever known is unfathomable to her. When she married Chuck, she’d moved a mere three blocks from her mother, had never lived anywhere other than Washington—other than Georgetown, just like her mother and her mother’s mother and her mother’s mother’s mother. She wasn’t about to be the dead end of the gene pool. She yanks harder, a rip in the ground, and falls over, her bum smacking the dirt, holding the root in her hand, examining its long tentacles. She looks down and sees a brown worm squirming back and forth trying to rebury itself.
Bunny wakes to the sound of her mother’s grunts. She stretches her arm to the floor, pulling her MacBook Air into bed with her. A copy of Tiffany’s Table Manners for Teenagers, which she threw off her nightstand before bed, is sprawled out like a tepee. Little paragraphs inside of it read like the sound of her late grandmother’s voice: You have to learn to tell a fish knife from a meat knife and a fish fork from a meat fork. If there is no fish knife and fork, use the smaller knife and fork for the dish. If you make a mistake, just continue eating. Don’t put the silver back on the table. Be nonchalant. It was the second time since the murders the housekeeper had picked up the book and placed it back on Bunny’s nightstand. She’s beginning to wonder if it’s a message of sorts, a constant reminder of who she is supposed to be and who she might become. Bunny reaches down, grabs it, and chucks it under her bed, then pulls her D. Porthault floral bedspread over her head as she opens her laptop. Bunny hates herself for knowing the names of patterned linens and things—toile, argyle—as if they mean anything, which, to most in her world, they do.
Washington’s Fox 5 News link lights up the fort she’s created with her knees. For the last several weeks, Bunny’s been compulsively googling “Banks Family Murders” each morning. Nothing new pops up, just the same written Fox 5 News article proclaiming racial and economic vengeance, declaring Anthony Tell, who had been fired from one of Audrey’s father’s companies, just another disgruntled employee. She can’t find any other network covering it. But Bunny’s obsession with the case intensified after she saw his photograph everywhere, his young face, only a few years older than her. Did he do it because they deserved it? Is he innocent? This is what we do to Black and brown people. We lock them up and murder them.… It enraged Bunny that each time she brought it up, her mother dismissed her curiosity: “It’s done, Bunny, it’s done. Justice will be served.” But Bunny didn’t see it as done or just at all. She wanted
