Homing: “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons”

“In those days, before the community was obliterated, a warm Myrtle Street Saturday morning filled both sidewalks and the narrow street itself with playing children oblivious to everything but their own merriment” (8).

In “The Girl Who Raised Pigeons,” a girl and her father deal with the changing face of their neighborhood and the home they share. The story starts in the late 1950s with Robert, a young man, raising his young daughter Betsy Ann after the death of his wife during childbirth. At age 8, Betsy Ann persuades him to let her raise homing pigeons in their backyard. Unfortunately, after several years, all of the pigeons get killed by rats except for two. The remaining two fly away as well, leaving the girl devastated. The lives and deaths of the pigeons give the story a stark, life-and-death narrative of home and homing that allow the subtler disruptions of human homes to emerge alongside them.

“For several weeks,” the narrator relates, “the pigeons took to the air and returned to Miles” (9). Just as the pigeons took a few weeks to adjust to life with Betsy Ann, it has taken Robert a while to establish a “nest” for him and his daughter. He was nineteen and freshly widowed, and raising a child seemed to him to be a responsibility he could not take on. But unlike the pigeons who could always find their way home, Robert realized that “if he decided to walk away forever […] there was not a damn thing in the world she could do about it” (8). As he pushes her baby carriage around the neighborhood for the first time, he realizes that his new neighbors are helping him take care of her. He makes his nest: “The nest was the first solid indication that the pigeons would stay forever, would go but would always return” (12).

In time, the pigeons join Robert in making Myrtle Street their permanent home. Robert grows to become a good father to his daughter, who “never stopped rising each morning before Betsy Ann and going out to the coop to see what pigeons might have died in the night” as an attempt to try to save her the pain of watching them die (21). As Betsy Ann grows up, she joins her pigeons in “homing”: she gains more independence and is able to go out into the world, with the implicit assumption that she will always return. After she tries to shoplift, however, her father takes that privilege away from her. Instead, she is forced to join her father’s version of “homing”: driving around the city in his cab, which he tries to make “seem as if it were a good way to see the city” (20). Despite her protestations, he is right: “she came to know the city so well that had she been blindfolded and taken to practically any place in Washington, […] she could have taken off the blindfold and walked home without a moment’s trouble” (24). In time, she also regains her father’s (tentative) trust, and thus her independence, and now truly embodies the homing instinct of the pigeons she had loved so much.

But most of the pigeons are killed, and the story presents their death as symbolic: “The scattered feathers, more than the wrecked bodies, spoke to him of helplessness” (22). After those pigeons die, the two remaining fly off, never to be seen again. This broken homing instinct is not limited to her pigeons, as “little by little […] Myrtle Street emptied of people, of families who had known no other place in their lives” (21). These losses hurt both Betsy Ann and her father, and there is a looming sense that their home is probably next: their landlord Miss Jenny “did not plant her garden that year, and that small patch of ground, with alien growth tall as a man, reverted to the wild” (12). This neighborhood is no longer theirs: “When the colored people and their homes were gone, the wall and the tracks remained, and so did the high school, with the same boys being taught by the same priests” (12).

As the story of Robert and Betsy Ann unfolds, their neighborhood begins to deteriorate, with more and more families moving out every day. Their home is located on Myrtle Street (which no longer exists), with K Street to the north, I street to the south, North Capitol Street NW to the west, and First Street NE to the east. Past First Street are the railroad tracks, coming north from Union Station. To the west is Gonzaga High School, a wealthy Catholic prep school for boys, which was segregated at the time of the story.

Through all of these disruptions, Robert tries to give his daughter as stable a life as possible and to spare her the pain of seeing any of her pigeons get killed; his efforts are his own attempt at “homing” for himself and Betsy Ann. He checks up on the birds every morning so that he can remove any dead ones before his daughter can see. The latter attempt turns out futile, however, as the climax of the story shows Betsy Ann walking outside to see her father crying as he tries to put his daughter’s half-dead pigeons out of their misery. However, his larger goal succeeds, to a point: Betsy Ann does learn to return home, like her pigeons, making the ultimate destruction of her home—and the later gentrification of her neighborhood—all the more personal and devastating.

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“When the colored people and their homes were gone, the wall and the tracks remained, and so did the high school, with the same boys being taught by the same priests” (12).

The neighborhood where these characters live has since been branded as NoMa, or North of Massachusetts Avenue. The once-vibrant Black neighborhood continued to empty through the mid-60s, and tensions continued to build. Only a mile and a half away from the National Mall, the neighborhood endured damaging riots after the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King.  The neighborhood became more industrial and lower class, and the Myrtle Street block was turned into a mostly non-residential area. It stayed that way until a new metro station brought new businesses and residents at the turn of the century. Since then, the neighborhood has been in a different state of decline: gentrification, and the (continued) death of a community that comes with it. The area has become increasingly white, and housing prices have skyrocketed: between 2000 and 2013, the average cost to buy a home nearly doubled.

This is what the block looks like now:

The block is now “home” to IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Headquarters, and a nice big parking lot. Within a three-block radius, one can also find Google’s DC office, NPR’s national headquarters, and three different Starbucks. Nearby, one can also find a U-Haul center and the Union Station — sad and ironic conveniences for the families who can’t afford to live there anymore. The U-Haul center and train station evoke departures, temporary and permanent: the flying away and broken homing that Jones’s story brings to life.

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“He caught an upwind that took him nearly as high as the tops of the empty K Street houses He flew farther into the Northeast, into the colors and sounds of the city’s morning. She did nothing, aside from following him, with her eyes, with her heart, as far as she could” (25).

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Works Cited

Geological Survey (U.S.). “Washington and Vicinity, District of Columbia-Maryland-Virginia.” U.S. Library of Congress, digdc.dclibrary.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p16808coll15/id/282.

“The Girl Who Raised Pigeons.” Lost in the City: Stories, by Edward P. Jones, Amistad, 2012.

Google Maps, Google, maps.google.com/

Iweala, Uzodinma. “The Gentrification of Washington DC: How My City Changed Its Colours.” The Guardian, Guardian News and Media, 12 Sept. 2016.

Jan, Tracy. “How Foreign Investors Are Transforming a Long-Forgotten D.C.

Neighborhood.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 22 Nov. 2017.

McCartney, Robert. “Perspective | ‘Black Branding’ – How a D.C. Neighborhood Was Marketed to White Millennials.” The Washington Post, WP Company, 3 May 2017.

“Washington DC: Our Changing City.” Urban Institute, https://www.urban.org/features/our-changing-city-collection.