Vine City

Vine City is the Atlanta neighborhood where Roger White spent part of his childhood and where Wesley Dobbs Jordan takes him back as an adult. The return brings the men’s shared past into contact with a changed landscape: Roger can identify the steps of his former home, but little else of the house remains. The neighborhood’s vacant lots, damaged streets, and scattered debris make the visit an encounter with both personal memory and urban loss.

Setting and Return

Wesley Dobbs Jordan proposes a drive through Vine City and English Avenue neighborhood, then tells Roger that he will take him past his old house. Roger recalls that their families left the area at roughly the same time, when the boys were around sixth grade. Wesley remembers their childhood wandering through the neighborhood, going up to The Bluff and down into ravines before returning home for lunch. The route therefore retraces a place they once knew through freedom of movement and familiar routines, now seen from a car and through adult recollection.

The Former Home

As they drive through Vine City, Roger initially struggles to orient himself. Houses seem smaller than he remembers, some are gone, and the altered surroundings make familiar bearings difficult to recover. After several blocks, Wesley asks the driver to stop and points out a short flight of wooden stairs. Roger does not recognize them at first; Wesley identifies them as the steps to the front door of Roger’s childhood home. The house itself has vanished, leaving the stairs and a few slabs of broken cinder-block foundation amid weeds and standing water.

The remains are surrounded by discarded objects in a stagnant pool: a pedal-driven sewing machine, a rusted medicine cabinet, an old fusebox, a wheel-less bicycle frame, a damaged refrigerator, tires, wire lathing, and a scorched quilt. A plastic bleach bottle floats on the water. Roger’s unease gathers around the surviving stairs, a recognizable fragment that points to the absent house without restoring it. The visit makes memory concrete, but only as a trace among debris.

Neighborhood Conditions and Significance

Further along, the power lines sag above houses that appear to be sinking under their own weight. Graffiti marks buildings and even obscures a street sign and stop sign; vacant lots, pools of collected water, weeds, tangled growth, and stripped cars recur along the route. The pavement has largely disappeared, the sidewalk is rubble, and the street itself has become a dump. These details establish the deterioration not as a single ruin but as a condition extending across the neighborhood.

At another stop, the men see a small two-story frame house protected by metal grilles over its ground-floor windows, front door, and an upper window. Beside it lie a vacant lot with standing water and a large mound of sludge; on the other side stands the charred shell of a house whose roof and window frames have burned. Against the boys’ remembered ability to roam freely through Vine City, the present-day drive reveals a place marked by loss, barriers, and damage. The surviving steps of Roger’s home condense that contrast: the neighborhood remains legible to him through fragments, even as the houses and landmarks that once made it familiar have disappeared.