Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash. David Boyle

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СКАЧАТЬ must be the most fearful about crime. And not surprisingly, because this is one of the cities vying for the title of ‘murder capital of the world’. When I reached the city in June 1996, 183 people had already been murdered in the year, compared to 161 for the same period the year before. Arrests had been made in only about a third of the incidents – what the Washington Post described excitedly as ‘slayings’. Police stations in the poverty-stricken neighbourhood of Anacostia are often lucky to get their patrol cars out on the road. One station visited by the New York Times had only one typewriter – a manual. ‘If you want to type your reports, you have to bring your own ribbon,’ said one police officer.

      Washingtonians may leave their front door keys in envelopes sticking out of letter boxes, but they are terrified of murder. Different cities, I find, worry about different types of crime. In London we are obsessed with burglary or having our cars stolen. In Washington, which is on the face of it a far more dangerous place, these things don’t seem to worry them – they even leave their cars unlocked. What worries the people of Washington isn’t that they will lose their cars while they are parked, but having them stolen at gunpoint while they are waiting at traffic lights. Next time you’re on an American plane, take a look at the executive toys for sale in the magazine. Some of them sell a blow-up ‘fella’, looking tough and determined, which you can put in your passenger seat. This isn’t to enhance your sex appeal, or even to prevent lonely feelings at night: it’s to discourage car-jackers.

      I wondered idly whether car-jacking was Washington’s alternative to public transport. The buses are scarce, and taxi drivers are liable to pick up other passengers while you’re hurrying along in their cab. They also tend to start the ride with the words: ‘And how are you today?’ – as if you have accidentally flagged down a psychologist.

      Parts of the city clearly are extremely dangerous, but even so the fear seems almost unnatural in its intensity – whole sections of the metro map are treated almost as no-go areas by the ‘respectable’ half of the city. The Yellow and Green lines seem to a visitor to be a transport version of Nightmare on Elm Street. Take many Washingtonians to areas in the east of the city and they will be entirely unfamiliar with the road layout.

      The only Washington person I met who seemed entirely unconcerned about these things was Edgar Cahn. He wanders around south-eastern Washington – the kind of place which gives Washington matrons nightmares by its mere existence – and comes to no harm, he told me. And he’s always done so. ‘I’m quite safe,’ he said, in a wonderful statement of American liberalism, reminiscent of what Arthur Miller says about his own behaviour in New York. ‘Because these people smell respect.’

      ‘Where are you going tomorrow?’ asked Irene the evening before, as I passed her sitting room. Emma Thompson was speaking in the background from a costume drama video of Carrington.

      ‘Oh,’ I said, trying to sound nonchalant. ‘Somewhere in the north-east, near Shaw-Howard.’

      ‘Well,’ said Irene severely. ‘That doesn’t sound like a good idea at all. Last year there was this British guy and his father came out of the back door of the National Gallery by mistake and walked just a couple of blocks, and he got jumped for his camera. Killed. So I always like to ask my guests where they are going.’

      I gulped. Shaw-Howard was more than a few blocks past the National Gallery. ‘It’s only a hundred yards or so from the metro. I’m sure I’ll be fine,’ I said. She pursed her lips disapprovingly. Later that evening, a British friend of mine – living in the much more salubrious district of Georgetown, with its restaurants and dinky fashion shops – said I was crazy to go by myself. ‘It’s not brave or anything,’ she said. ‘It’s just stupid.’

      So by the time I passed Gallery Place on the metro, I had begun to worry whether this trip had been entirely sensible. I changed on to the Green line, and wondered a little about my shorts, grey socks and black briefcase. Graffiti, torn posters, bits of old automobile bother me at the best of times, and especially when I looked like a refugee from the set of Jeeves and Wooster. I did feel a little silly, but if our forefathers had worried about wearing silly clothes, the empire would never have been won.

      Shaw-Howard metro station was almost empty. Even the advertising billboards in the station looked a little half-hearted – one of them was for Valujet, owners of the downmarket holiday plane which had just crashed into the Florida swamps. The first estate I walked into, with its sand-coloured bricks and desert appearance, was clearly the wrong one. A few men stared at me absent-mindedly. I wished I hadn’t brought my briefcase. ‘Where can I find Lincoln-Westmoreland?’ I asked one.

      ‘Huh?’ he said. It is a strange phenomenon that many Americans have not the slightest idea what Brits are trying to say. I moved hastily across the tree-lined street, hoping I looked like I knew where I was going, and there it was. I don’t know what I expected from a block of flats named after America’s second-greatest president and a Vietnam War general, but it was leafy with the faint whiff of oasis about it. The flats were beautifully kept and landscaped. Compared to the burnt-out shacks down the road, it was a model of imagination and pride. But there was no doubt that the neighbourhood was poor.

      But then Edgewood Management Corporation, which manages low-rent flats in twelve states, is known for its enlightened approach to housing. Lincoln-Westmoreland has 223 apartments in three blocks and one high-rise tower, and thanks to the Corporation, a concerted attempt is made to organize activities for the people who live in them. Since the average size of family is only three – there are only a handful of two-parent families, and the vast majority of offspring are looked after by single mothers or grandmothers – the focus is on activities for children.

      The ‘power house’ for these activities is in the tiny community centre, which I had been searching for. It looked like a doctor’s waiting room inside, with toys packed away – as if the patients would keep spreading them out over the floor – and a range of uplifting leaflets about body problems. One notice was headed ‘Caring and Sharing’. ‘As one of our great African-American leaders has said,’ it went on, ‘you don’t have to know Einstein’s theory to serve … you only need a heart full of grace.’ ‘No fighting or using profanity’, said another.

      And, at last, evidence that we were in the presence of a new kind of money; one notice was advertising a trip to Barnum and Bailey’s Circus which could be paid for in time dollars.

      Organizing the few children in the room was Tomeka Smith, a former biologist and nurse –’Hoping to start a family one day,’ she told me, and in the meantime looking after an alternative family: there were never fewer than twenty children in her office during the summer afternoons.

      She had worked for almost a year to get the time bank up and running, squaring the management and the residents’ council. The system had begun a year before I arrived, but after three months the project began to unravel. The volunteers floated away and the time dollars went unspent. So Tomeka stopped and thought it through again. When they re-launched it, six months later, she knew that every time a volunteer arrived, they had to find something for them to do quickly before they lost interest.

      Tomeka pump-primes the value of time dollars by donating places on their children’s six-week summer camp. Residents could buy places there with time dollars earned in about three months of regular work. They couldn’t afford to pay the price of the camp,’ Tomeka told me, sitting with her back to the gigantic toy cupboard. ‘And it was a time when we were very short-staffed in the office and we needed volunteers.’

      Here was an example of the way the real and time dollar economies interact. If Tomeka had failed to attract people to help her, she would have had to pay old-fashioned money for the extra help. As it was, by increasing the value of time dollars, she was able to attract people to help СКАЧАТЬ