Perhaps it’s because I generally get around on foot, but I tend to notice bikes locked up around Denver. This one was near the Convention Center.

Not all of them seem entirely practical. I took this picture from the sidewalk of a house on 6th Avenue.

And these bike rims from Curtis Park have outlasted their useful life and now serve as decoration.

After this week I’ll be moving on from Five Points, to the South Platte River Valley and then across I-25 to Highland. Of course I’ll be going back: I still have to sample the lunch specials Wednesday through Friday at the Welton Street Cafe. Here’s another picture for you. Mocha Motive, which I tried to visit yesterday, is in the back left, by the stairs.

I almost didn’t do my walkabout on Wednesday. The forecast was gloomy: 70 percent chance of rain. It wouldn’t be any use to go to downtown Denver in such weather, would it?

Such are the musings of a woman spoiled by Denver’s 300 days of sunshine a year. Luckily, I didn’t give in to the urge to stay inside all day: it was fun to walk around in the light rain on Wednesday, even if Robert didn’t agree.

Robert was manning the register at Gallegos Produce, which has been open since April at the corner of Broadway and Larimer. As I took a picture of the exterior, I heard him calling. Maybe he was lonely in there with the eggplant and potatoes from Colorado and the last of the Rocky Ford cantaloupe and the lemons from California. I paused to look for the source of the voice and ended up going inside.

In response to a query about the weather, I told Robert I liked walking in the rain, and he asked me if I had ever been homeless. “No,” I said. He had been homeless for 8 years and said that being outside in the rain was no fun. Snow he didn’t mind, but being wet all day was terrible.

I liked the way Robert delivered his lesson without making me feel stupid.

***

That conversation was my one and only of the day. I’d started my walkabout on Larimer around 20th Street, where you can find places like pizza joints and pawn shops and the Ginn Mill and Herb’s. At 22nd and Larimer each corner is occupied, by Altitude Peak Fitness and the Whiskey Bar and Colorado Rehearsal Studios and the Hi-Rise Bakery. A block farther is the original location of Snooze, undergoing renovation so as to provide even better brunches, and across Park Avenue is Catholic Charities. Go southeast on Park a ways and you’ll be in the area where homeless men gather at night to wait in line for the shelters at Samaritan House and Denver Rescue Mission.

In other words, once you hit Park Avenue, the neighborhood is “in transition.” (Gallegos Produce is a block or two beyond Park. Robert warned me not to walk around this neighborhood at night, and I wasn’t as irritated by that kind of warning as I usually am. In mid-afternoon, the streets were merely shiny with rain and deserted, but I can imagine them being a little intimidating at night.)

I’m not exactly sure where Five Points starts. I think it would be more accurate to use “Curtis Park” to refer to the area from 22nd and Larimer to 30th and Larimer. But the Gallegos sign mentioned LoDo (Lower Downtown Denver), and you could also make a case that this is the Ballpark neighborhood, since it’s right next to Coors Field. Confused? Go look to my links page, click on Denver Infill, and look at the maps. For now, I’m sticking with Five Points.

***

Sacred Heart Catholic Church sits between 27th and 28th. I tried the doors, but they were locked. There’s not much else nearby except empty storefronts, 1 bar, the Hot House (open for breakfast, the sign says), and Krav Maga at 29th. A sign on the Strategy Room said it would be opening October 2nd.

This area seems to be moving from industrial to urban residential, with lots of condos. But in the area around 30th and Lawrence, 130-year-old houses sit right next to apartments and condos. The Denver Enterprise Center takes up one corner, although no one seemed to be enterprising behind the fence on the other side of the building.

By the time I reached Mestizo-Curtis Park (the oldest official park in Denver), the rain had stopped.I walked up to 32nd, where I found the offices of the Women’s Bean Project in the old Denver Fire Station No. 10. On my way back down to 31st, I saw one man striding through the park and a woman playing with her dog. Otherwise the park and pool were quiet, waiting for the sun to bring people back.

I moseyed to the light rail station at 30th and Downing, and as I reached the parking lot noticed a stocky, brown-haired white man unscrewing a license plate from a white Tercel. The passenger door was open, and another man sat in the driver’s seat. When the unscrewer finished his job, he deposited the license plate in another vehicle, exchanged some money with the driver (a white man with a shaved head and black goatee). Then both of them drove off.

The things you see in Denver.

I walked down to Mocha Motive to get a drink, but it seems to have gone out of business since the summer.

***

Later that night, after attending Member-Only Night at the Botanic Gardens, I stopped by the Tattered Cover in downtown Denver to read magazines. On my way back to Market Street Station, I noticed at least 3 homeless people on the long benches. One was already stretched out, covered with a light-colored blanket. I thought of the lows the past couple of nights—in the high 30s—and wondered where Robert was spending the night.

Toward the intersection of Welton and Downing, there’s a small collection of shops and restaurants. Brother Jeff’s Cultural Center and Cafe is one of them, but I’ve never been inside. I took this photo at the Five Points Jazz Festival in May.

In the next block sits this sandwich joint, claiming to provide Denver’s best burritos:

The first time I went to Blackberries Ice Cream and Coffee Lounge, I’m not sure I knew that it was in Five Points. I’m not sure I even really knew what Five Points was. Lighthouse Writers was hosting a workshop there, so I showed up and really liked the place.

Located in The Point building, right where Welton, 27th, Washington, and East 26th Avenue form Five Points, Blackberries is pretty big as coffeehouses go. Tall windows in the front bathe the piano in light (the same piano played during the gig by Dr. Tone and the Notes at the Five Points Jazz Festival). The room is wide near the entrance and narrows along its length to the stage in back and the niche next to it.

Blackberries can accommodate a large crowd (and did during the Jazz Fest), but when I was there recently it was quiet. Two people were working the ice cream counter, a little girl was exploring while her mother had a meeting, and other patrons spoke softly to each other at their tables by the windows.

As is my wont, I began with dessert. Even though I asked for the smallest cone, I still got 2 hefty scoops of chocolate and sweet cream. The latter was nice enough, but the chocolate was truly rich. I also recommend the sweet potato pie ice cream.

The toddler came by and reached toward me. “No,” I said sternly, “this is MY ice cream.” But all she wanted was to hold hands.

I read my book for a while and then decided I should eat dinner at Blackberries rather than wait to eat at the Mercury Café (see my post about Transition Denver). I had my choice of breakfast (egg and cheese croissant or bagel, breakfast burritos), cold deli sandwiches, or hot paninis. I chose the Smokin’ Turkey, with provolone, red onion, tomato, avocado, and Cajun mustard. I enjoyed the crisp bread and spicy mayo on that first bite, which was really good, though farther into the sandwich I thought the turkey must have come out of a plastic package.

Blackberries also sells pastries from Bluepoint Bakery on East 58th Avenue in Denver.

Finally, I had to drag myself away to the Merc. I had hoped for time to walk the western boundary of Five Points (that is, Larimer), but that had to wait until another day.

This plaque featuring Billie Holiday graces the old Rossonian Hotel and harks back to the days when Five Points drew musicians from all over the country to perform. The Rossonian, which reminds me a bit of the Brown Palace, is a beautiful old building. The last few times I’ve been to Five Points, I’ve noticed the plastic on the inside of the windows, indicating that a remodel might be taking place. I’ve never seen any activity from the outside, though.

***

Head over to the Uptown neighborhood on Tuesday night (the vernal equinox) from 5 to 8:30 for the Uptown Sampler. There will be a bus to haul you from restaurant to restaurant for the samples. (It’s a pretty long walk from one end of Uptown to the other, so you’ll probably want the bus. To get to Uptown itself, take the 12 or the 20 from Market Street Station.)

It looks like D Bar Desserts is not participating, sadly, but their food isn’t very expensive. Go there after the sampler ends for one of their superb desserts (see the cake and shake below).

On Wednesday, the Fillmore is hosting Dish Westword Menu Affair, an event along the same lines as the Uptown Sampler and Tasty Colfax and LoDo Bites. There will be a chef cookoff, with Keegan Gerhard of D Bar Desserts providing commentary and the Informants providing “background” music. Dish, which runs from 7 to 10:30, benefits Food Bank of the Rockies. The Fillmore is located at Colfax and Clarkson; the 15 bus will get you there.

Advance tickets for both events are $20; more the day of the event.

***

For the first time this season, we turned on the heat. Fall is here.

Urban Spectrum, a monthly published in Five Points by Rosalind J. Harris and her staff, is “spreading the news about people of color.” Check out the website or pick up a copy in Denver.

***

Don’t miss Oktoberfest this weekend, held on Larimer between 20th and 22nd. It may be the last year for the festival. The festival runs September 25 to 27 as well.

When I ascended to the top floor of the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library in Five Points, I had the Western Legacies gallery all to myself, except for the voices (1) talking about the Black Seminoles in a video and (2) greeting customers entering a barbershop run by a black resident of Denver.

Despite the competing recordings, I lingered in the exhibit for the barbershop. The mirrors (not shown in the photograph) magnified the space, and there was something elegiac about the chair sitting there empty.

The exhibit honors Robert Smith, an early Denver barber who freed his family from slavery and brought them West. His son followed in his footsteps as a barber in Denver, one of the independent occupations open to black men in the first part of the twentieth century.

Next to that room is another, smaller room describing the career of James Presley Ball, “one of the earliest and most accomplished African American photographers of the 19th century.”

There is so much more than these two rooms I’ve described. I have to confess I spent so much time in that part of the museum that I didn’t have the energy to explore the rest in any detail. Here are a few things I learned while watching the video about the Black Seminoles:

• They were slaves who escaped to Seminole territory in Florida and lived among the Seminole Indians in separate villages.
• The Seminoles comprised members of such southeastern tribes as the Muscogee Creek, Miccosukee, and Apalachicola.
• Describing the status of Black Seminoles is complicated, because some of the Indians in Florida owned slaves, but their concept of slavery was generally less draconian than that practiced in the British colonies.
• The Seminoles were expelled from Florida in 1838 and embarked on the Trail of Tears, which led to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma). The Black Seminoles who survived were threatened with slavery once again. In the 1840s, a few Seminoles escaped to Mexico, where the government employed them as militia fighting, ironically enough, the Indians.
• In the 1870s, the US government employed Black Seminoles as army scouts in the Texas Indian wars. Many eventually settled in Brackettville, Texas.
• Recently, the Seminole Tribe of Oklahoma decided to exclude the Black Seminoles (called Seminole Freedmen) from membership, thus denying the Freedmen any share of the compensation the US government gave the tribe for its expulsion from Florida.
• Nowadays Black Seminoles live from Oklahoma to Texas to Mexico to Florida to Andros Island in the Bahamas.

You can find the Five Points Media Center at 29th and Welton, housing Channel 12 (KBDI), the local public TV station; KUVO, a jazz station; and Free Speech TV. Jazz stations are getting more rare these days, so check out KUVO sometime.

Here’s more of that mural:

And here’s another mural closer to downtown:

Note the Mini Market at the right side of the picture. There are several of those in Five Points. I don’t know where the nearest grocery store is. In fact, near Five Points itself (where the four streets meet), I don’t think there’s a good spot. Any full-service grocery store would have to be located nearer downtown, in a space that’s now a parking lot.

I found things I hadn’t expected on every floor of the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library in Denver’s Five Points neighborhood. So much so, I might just check out all the branches of the Denver Public Library to see how they differ.

First of all, two bronze and mosaic reliefs grace the front of the building at 25th and Welton (on light rail). They were designed by Thomas Jay Warren and cast at Fedde Bronze Works on 38th Avenue in the Park Hill neighborhood.

When I walked around the first floor, which the website calls a “full-service branch library,” I was struck by how small it seemed. Perhaps it’s unfair to compare a branch library to the Mamie Dowd Eisenhower Library in Broomfield, which serves a city and county and has more than 144,000 books. The library in Five Points has 32,000 items total in its main collection.

But the main floor was busy, with people checking out the magazines, DVDs, and CDs, many of which were in Spanish (e.g., Crónica del Holocausto), and using the computers. The fiction collection featured books with African American characters.

I searched for an urban fantasy series I read earlier this year, the Negotiator series by C. E. Murphy. It was a literary series featuring a lawyer in New York City who just happens to end up representing dragons, gargoyles, and vampires as they struggle to survive in the modern world. This character, Margrit Knight, also happens to be black, but I noticed the picture on the front cover makes her look more white than not. It reminded me of debates in the publishing world about how putting black people on the cover of a novel means it won’t sell.

I didn’t find the C. E. Murphy books on the shelves, but they might be in the catalog. I didn’t look.

The hallway that leads to the main collection holds several tall glass cases celebrating Barack Obama’s election to the presidency. As I checked out all the election swag, I wished I’d bought some of the T-shirts I saw during the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver. They would be conversation pieces in later years. There were dolls and comic books and buttons and newspapers from around the world, including USA Today: “America Makes History: Obama Wins.” Reading those papers still gives me a thrill and makes me sad at the same time: I’m happy that we have a black president, but I can’t wait for a woman president.

On the second floor, in the collection archives and research library, I found this book: Black Women for Beginners by S. Pearl Sharp. One thing among many I learned from the book: In the 1860s, Mary Ellen Pleasant sued San Francisco for removing her from a streetcar and won. Thereafter, streetcars were integrated.

I could probably spend the rest of my life going from libraries to coffeehouses to chocolatiers and back. My sixth-grade class prophesied I would rewrite the English lexicon, and although I didn’t quite get there, I did copyedit for local presses for more than a decade. That’s close enough to make me shiver.

What’s your favorite thing about your local library?

Welton Street Café is a light, spacious, casual restaurant, with lace curtains on the windows and art on the walls and tomatoes growing in the window box outside the Five Points Plaza side of the building. It is located right next to northbound light rail and specializes in southern and Caribbean cooking. When I stopped there for lunch a couple of weeks ago, after a visit to the Black American West Museum, three tables were full.

I sat down and read the menu and took pictures of it, which startled the staff a little, but they were nice about it after I explained I wanted to upload the menu to Urbanspoon’s Denver website.

I’ll bet the café fills up for lunch Wednesday through Friday for the lunch specials at the top of the menu: oxtails, ribs, brisket, curried chicken, shrimp Creole, smothered red steak, and liver and onions.

But I was there on Tuesday and decided to have a pate (described to me as a Caribbean pizza pocket) and a side of macaroni and cheese. (When the waitress brought it, she asked, “Are you going to take a picture of this too?” I said I was, and as you can see, I did.) The chicken pate was stuffed with sautéed chicken, broccoli, and cabbage. Although the pastry was a bit doughy on the inside, the pate was hot and the broccoli crisp all the way through. Toward the middle, I began to notice a little spice on the chicken pieces; the cabbage, which I think had been boiled or sautéed with onion beforehand, had a good firm texture.

But it was the macaroni and cheese I loved: it was blessedly simple. No mixture of strong cheeses here: as far as I could tell, it was a white sauce with cheddar, and maybe some Velveeta. (D Bar Desserts puts Velveeta in its mac, along with several other cheeses.)

There are 7 types of pate, from broccoli and cheese to beef and cheese to seafood. You can also order frybread for less than a dollar.

The sides include some southern staples such as fried okra and black-eyed peas and hush puppies, as well as black beans or red beans and rice, greens, onion rings, and coleslaw, all priced for less than $4. I was tempted by the peach cobbler, rum cake, and sweet potato pie (about $3 each), but they will have to wait until next time.

In 2010, Dearfield, Colorado, will be 100 years old. Nowadays, it’s a ghost town. Between May 5, 1910, when it was founded east of Greeley, and the Depression, its residents managed to survive, and even thrive, as dryland farmers. In its prime, it had 700 residents; in 1940, the census counted 12.

Dearfield was one of many black towns founded in the United States after the Civil War. When black people in the South realized that Colorado would allow them to homestead, they began moving west (see “The Exodusters,” a note from the BAWM). The problem was that, by the turn of the twentieth century, most of the productive land had been claimed. Oliver Toussaint Jackson, the founder of Dearfield, tried to buy land but was unable. After he got a job as messenger for the governor of Colorado, he sold the governor on his idea and established his town on government land that had recently opened up.

The homesteaders were poor, and their first winter was difficult. But by 1916, 53 families farming 5,000 acres brought in their first marketable crop, worth $50,000.

One of the remarkable stories I learned from the Dearfield documentary (shown at the Black American West Museum in Five Points) is that the local school was integrated—and that during a time when the KKK was gaining power in Colorado. White residents interviewed for the movie remembered that race didn’t matter at school, but black residents recalled feeling slighted at times. (And here we are today in the “postracial” era…)

Water usage, however, was not integrated. Dearfield residents had no rights to water flowing through the local ditch. Luckily, one homestead had lakes on it, and before the white residents could make good on their threat to pump that water for their own use, the owner took the train to Denver and filed a claim on the water in her lakes.

Today the Black American West Museum owns most of the lots in Dearfield and is exploring ways to preserve the site. In 2010, the museum plans to have a celebration in Dearfield to commemorate the 100-year anniversary of its founding.

“There’s no such thing as a black cowboy,” Paul W. Stewart was told as a boy. But years later, as an adult, he met a black cowboy, which inspired him to scour the American West for evidence of their existence. The artifacts he collected can be viewed at the Black American West Museum (BAWM), which he founded in 1971. In the 1980s, his collection came to rest in Justina Ford’s house. As in any other “house museum,” the exhibits have been squeezed into the space as best they can.

When I visited BAWM last week, I was given a brief tour by a docent and then encouraged to watch a 30-minute film about Dearfield, an all-black farming community founded in 1910 east of Greeley. I’ll write about that tomorrow.

Today I want to talk about what I learned at the museum, which is “dedicated to collecting, preserving and disseminating the contributions of Blacks in the Old West.”

One room upstairs is dedicated to African American military service, and in addition to the Buffalo Soldier exhibit, I noticed a plaque from the University of Denver’s Center for Judaic Studies to Lieutenant Colonel John Mosley, thanking him and all the 1 million African Americans who served in World War II for helping to fight Nazism.

I hadn’t realized that number was so high. It must have been quite a shock for those men and women to return to the United States after World War II—and to Jim Crow. No wonder the civil rights movement grew so strong in the decades following World War II.

Another corner holds household items, including an ivory-colored wedding shirtdress and the oddest item I saw: a mirror decorated with deer hooves. After that, the tools no longer used (grinding wheel), or the rodeo equipment unfamiliar to me (bosals), seemed positively commonplace.

The museum offers so much that I could not absorb it all, but here are a few other notes I jotted down:

• The Five Points neighborhood in Denver was one-half built out by 1890; the rest was finished by 1914. It was a white community until the 1920s.
• The Atlas Drug Store, at 27th and Welton, was the only one in Denver where African Americans could sit at the counter. I wonder if that is where Blackberries coffee shop sits now.
• From a picture upstairs: “Bill Pickett invented the art of bulldogging. Pickett would jump from the horse onto the steer’s neck, twist its neck and sink his teeth into its tender nose or lips, driving the steer to the ground.” That sounds mean, I think.
• J. H. P. Westbrook, a black man who passed for white, infiltrated the KKK in Denver in the early 1900s and informed the black community of their plans.
• Lloyd Hall filed 100 patents for food preservation and sterilization.
• Lonnie G. Johnson’s company invented the Supersoaker.
• The wrench was invented in 1922 by a black man named Jack Johnson. [See comment below for correction. The first wrench was invented in 1835; Johnson patented a new version.]
• Among the many pictures of historical figures and donors on the wall, I noticed a picture of CU Professor Charles Nilon. When I worked for Fiction Collective Two at CU-Boulder in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the press instituted the Charles N. and Mildred Nilon Award for Excellence in Minority Fiction (now defunct, as far as I can tell from the FC2 website). The first award went to Melvin Dixon for his novel Trouble the Water.

I like going to a new place and finding a connection to some bit of my past.

***

Note: The museum’s executive director, La Wanna Larson, allowed me to show some photographs on this blog, but in general, the museum does not allow cameras inside.

***

Check out the Earthworks Expo at the Merchandise Mart this weekend.

Museo de las Americas is holding its Spanish happy hour Friday from 5 to 8. This month it’s hosted by Rebecca Caro of the blog From Argentina with Love.

I’ve passed this house several times while in Five Points. The “World’s Best BBQ Grills” look handmade to me, and I love the signs and the orange stovepipes.

For years I’ve wanted to visit the Black American West Museum (BAWM). Last Tuesday, I finally set foot inside Dr. Justina Ford’s historic home, where the museum’s collection is now located.

Justina Ford was Denver’s first female doctor, as well as the city’s first female African-American doctor. She was the only female doctor in Denver from 1902 until at least 1930. She graduated from Chicago’s Hering Medical School in 1899, quite a feat for a woman in those days.

(Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American woman to earn a medical degree, graduated in 1849. According to encyclopedia.com, “In 1864 Rebecca Lee became the first black female to receive such a degree when she graduated from the New England Female Medical College [now Boston University School of Medicine].” There are several African-American men credited with various firsts in medicine: James Derham was the first to formally practice medicine in the United States, in the late 1700s, but he did not have a degree.).

After Ford’s house was threatened with demolition in the early 1980s and then preserved with the help of neighbors and the BAWM, it was moved from 2335 Arapahoe to its current location at 3091 California (near the Downing and 30th station on light rail). The downstairs room where I watched a movie about the black pioneer town of Dearfield, Colorado (more on that later this week) was her office, and she slept downstairs in order to hear patients ringing the doorbell in the middle of the night. Her husband slept upstairs.

Dr. Ford said she had delivered 7,000 babies during her years as a practicing physician. She treated patients at her home, and if they needed services she could not provide there, she sent them to Denver Health Medical Center. If they mentioned they had seen Ford, however, the hospital would not treat them (at least, in the early part of her career).Toward the end of her career, she was awarded hospital privileges, but until then, she cared for the underprivileged at her home.

***

In the next installment of this series, I’ll talk about found BAWM founder Paul Stewart’s search for memorabilia relating to black cowboys. Historically, about one-third of cowboys were black, one-third were Latino, and one-third were white. I’m not sure what percentage of cowboys and cowgirls were American Indian, but some Indian tribes, such as the Navajos, began running sheep and cattle on their lands soon after the Spanish introduced those animals to North America in the 1500s.

I’m unfamiliar with the history of Asian Americans in ranching, but the website of the Oregon Historical Society has this to say: “According to the 1890 census, there were 55 non-white stock raisers, herders, and drovers in Oregon. This number included African Americans as well as Chinese, Japanese, and Native Americans.”

What is going on in the photo from Juneteenth Denver 2009? The man in the blue shirt is telling the little girl to throw the wet sponge-ball right at that boy’s face. Looks like she got in a good throw. Naturally, the target doesn’t feel quite as happy about it.

And then there’s that clown in the background.

Here’s another picture of the Five Points building I displayed on Monday. When I was in Five Points on Tuesday, I noticed a man pulling weeds out of the sidewalk around the building. I was tempted to ask him about the building, but I walked on.

Denver Wines

When I visited the Civic Center Market on Tuesday, I tasted some cabernet from Verso Cellars. They have just set up a winery at 4640 Pecos, Unit G, and she said they are having an art opening tomorrow (Friday). Their website doesn’t have much information, but if you are interested, you can try calling 303-587-9740.

I enjoyed the cabernet, which is not usually my favorite grape. It was fruity and didn’t seem to be heavy on the tannins.

You can also find Verso Cellars wines at Metropolis Coffee in the Golden Triangle.

I”m heading to Five Points today to visit the Black American West Museum, which I’ll probably post about next week. For now I leave you with this photo of the Green Door Mini-Mall (maybe I’ll find out today what its story is).

I almost didn’t go to Juneteenth in Denver’s historic Five Points neighborhood, but I sure am glad I changed my mind. For example, I increased the presence of white people by 10 percent.** At one point a white man was standing next to me, and we were both photographing the dancers. Weird.

I enjoyed the feeling of being a white minority in a bunch of black people. Not an experience I often have in Colorado. In fact, I haven’t felt that way since I left DC 23 years ago.

The crowd was much less mixed than at the Five Points Jazz Festival. Why a jazz festival should attract more white people than a street festival featuring at least some hip-hop is beyond me. Is it the historic nature of the celebration? Cinco de Mayo also celebrates a slice of history from the 1860s; it also celebrates a blow for freedom that lifted spirits in the midst of a long struggle.

Maybe if Juneteenth had been held in Civic Center Park it would attract the same crowd as Cinco de Mayo…maybe if African Americans were 30 percent of Denver instead of 10 percent…

After I got off the free shuttle, I stopped to listen to two rappers and watch a group of men playing basketball with downtown Denver for a backdrop. I was photographing this wrecked car when a woman burst out that she worried that display might increase profiling. She told me about the day she was stopped because she had an air freshener hanging from her rearview mirror. The officer made her white passenger get out of the car while he grilled her.

I continued on to a table in front of the Denver Public Library, where I photographed slave chains and muskrat gloves. The man sitting there wore a jacket with all the Buffalo Soldier units’ patches; during our lengthy conversation, he said if I called him he could tell me where to get one. I think that jacket would be a conversation piece.

Most of the booths between 25th and 27th on Welton housed nonprofits; the food court was off-street in a parking lot. I wanted to get lunch from Smokey Jackson’s Boneyard, but I’d spent so much at the farmer’s market in Boulder that I had to content myself with chicken-on-a-stick.

While I was waiting in line for that charred wonder (and it was good), the woman standing in front of me asked me if it was my first year. I said yes and then found out that she was on the organizing committee of the festival this year. She said they started planning it last September, but work really picked up in January. She said Juneteenth shouldn’t be a “black festival” any more than Cinco de Mayo should be a “Latino festival.” “It’s all part of the fabric of Colorado,” she added.

As we got closer to the front of the line, I noticed one woman whip out a $100 bill to pay for her $4 meal.

Instead of eating at the tables under the awning, I sat down on the corner where I could watch the crowd better. People flowed around me. After I finished I strolled down to the next corner, in front of Blackberries, where an older man sang soulfully while a younger man rapped.

There’s something really cool about walking between the light rail tracks, so when I’d had my fill of “Ghost in the Closet” and other songs, I headed for 30th and Downing to look at the apartment building there. On the way back, one block off Welton toward Whittier, I stopped to write some notes in my book. I heard the voice of a loud, angry man approaching from the back, but I didn’t turn around until he was closer than common sense should have allowed. When I did, he let loose with the “bitch” stuff on his way to the liquor store, his pronunciation of the “i” in bitch a combination of rage and drunkenness.

I was both fascinated by his anger and tempted to run across the street and kick his ass. But all I did was shrug at another man walking by. He said sweetly, “Don’t pay him no mind, baby.”

*Juneteenth commemorates the day in 1865 that Texas slaves discovered they were free, two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was signed. It has been celebrated since 1866, though I believe the celebrations died down a bit during the civil rights movement.

**That is only a slight exaggeration.

“Cool, Crazy, Hot” advertised the brochure for Five Points Jazz Festival last Saturday. I guess standing in line for tamales for 20 minutes, only to be told I should come back in an hour, was kinda crazy. The air was cool but the sun was certainly hot, and it was too early in the season for me to have remembered to bring a hat or sunscreen.

The best term for the jazz fest would be “laid back.” It was a block party. People were hugging, chatting with the pairs of police officers who seemed to be everywhere, dancing in the streets, getting some soul food.

The only thing they didn’t want to do was sit in between the light rail lines, even though train service had been stopped to accommodate the festival. “Bad karma,” Todd said.

I was tempted to get ice cream at Blackberries and call it lunch, but instead I went to a booth for fried catfish, which was yummy. I stood close to the stage, taking pictures of the Janine Santana Latin Jazz Ensemble, until Todd said some of the drumming was bothering his left ear and causing his eyes to twitch (nystagmus). We moved back into the shade of one of the buildings along Welton to listen some more. I thought the band was pretty tight.

Meanwhile, the crowd kept circulating among the four stages, two inside and two outside (technically, the KUVO Studio was the fifth, but only one band played there). A blind couple went by with matching white canes, and children played with balloon swords. We saw two women in what looked like nuns’ habits, made of shiny purple fabric; Todd thought they might be Nation of Islam. This street performer, a Mr. Jentry McCombs, danced up to me as if to say, “I see you over there taking my picture.”

Blackberries kept calling, though, and it wasn’t just the badly mixed but catchy tunes from Dr. Tone and the Notes. It seemed to have called most of the people at the festival, judging from the line. I just had to try the sweet potato pie ice cream, so I got a suitably large cone for it and the chocolate. Big mistake: even with Todd’s help, a dessert defeated me.

Swallowed up by that line, I missed the twenty-car funeral procession. Todd said bystanders threw red roses on the hearse, and trumpeters played a dirge.

Todd left to take a nap in the nearest park, and I listened to Dr. Tone (What’s Your Voice Tone? said their T-shirts) and then to the Lamont School of Music Jazz Band in the newish Crossroads Theater, which won Westword’s Best New Theater award last year. Todd reappeared and pronounced them the best band he’d heard all day. Maybe he liked the way the young drummer bared his teeth as he played with marshmallow sticks.

I highly recommend attending festivals in Five Points. The next one is Juneteenth, which commemorates the day the slaves in Texas learned they were free. And in late August there should be another jazz fest that lasts a week. Last year it coincided with the Democratic National Convention and the birth of this blog.