Lit From the Chocolate City: Ten Washington D.C Books That Aren’t About Politicians

Imagine a story—a novel or a movie—set in Washington, D.C. Do you see marble hallways or embassy ballrooms, dark hotel bars and men in suits, the Capitol Building somehow in the background of every shot? Or maybe you see the cherry blossoms circling the Tidal Basin, or the looming brutalist buildings of the federal agencies that line the National Mall.

All of these settings belong to Washington, the nation’s capital and the backdrop against which Americans from anywhere but the District stage their story of American democracy.

But Washington isn’t the same place as D.C., the city where 700,000 people live, work, walk, and sleep. Readers rarely encounter this version of the city. Stories that depict D.C., a plurality-Black city with scores of peopled suburbs and thousands of acres of wild forests, are overshadowed by the presence of the federal government and its own political fictions.

When I moved to D.C. in 2016, and later, when I began work on my own D.C. book, Potomac Fever: Reflections on the Nation’s River, I scoured “Best Books About Washington, D.C.” reading lists. I was looking for works set in neighborhoods north of K Street and east of the Capitol. What I found were political thrillers by the dozen and hordes of memoirs by politicians and hangers-on alike.

Where were the stories of everyday Washingtonians? I wanted to read about rowhomes and fried whiting, go-go and punk, and the menagerie of wild animals and rare plants with whom we share the city. I wanted someone to tell the truth about how race, power, and government work to keep the residents of this city disenfranchised and segregated. In these works, I found some of what I was looking for.

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Edward P. Jones, Lost in the City

Edward P. Jones’ Lost in the City is the wellspring of D.C.’s literary landscape, capturing the lives of Black Washingtonians with exacting empathy and geographical precision. In fourteen loosely linked stories, Jones’ characters—largely Black working-class women and children—traverse the city grid, becoming so rooted within D.C. that their lives become maps.

Across Shaw and Columbia Heights, Anacostia and H Street, each story unfolds into the next to form an atlas of a changing D.C., one where white folks now live east of 14th Street. Inspired by James Joyce’s Dubliners, Jones describes his version of D.C., as the capital of “the ‘unfree world,’ [where] black human beings lived full and valued lives, lives that had all the messiness and grandness of white life in small, nowhere towns.”

Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

The New York Times Book Review heralded Dinaw Mengestu’s debut as “a great African novel, a great Washington novel, and a great American novel.” Nearly twenty years after its publication, it’s fair to say that The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears and Mengestu’s more recent novel Someone Like Us (2024) are two of the century’s greatest D.C. novels.

Set primarily in Logan Circle in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the novel captures the gentrification of the neighborhood alongside the personal dislocation of Sepha Stephanos, an Ethiopian shopkeeper haunted by exile and yearning for connection.

The book is at its most poignant in its descriptions of a city whitening under the shadow of the federal government. In one particularly melancholy scene, reminiscent of Jones’ compass-like sense of the city, Stephanos leaves his store, walking west to the corner of 16th and P Streets. From here, he remarks, “You can see the White House…the street unfurls from its gate like a massive concrete carpet….I used to think that there was some great metaphor in this.”

Morowa Yejidé, Creatures of Passage

Morowa Yejidé’s Creatures of Passage is a haunting and lyrical addition to Washington, D.C.’s literary terrain, weaving mythology and magical realism into the expanse of the city. Set primarily east of the Anacostia River, the novel tells the story of Nephthys, a cab driver ferrying troubled passengers while mourning her twin brother’s murder. As she maneuvers her 1967 Plymouth Belvedere up and down the hilly heights of Wards 7 and 8, Nephthys is drawn back to the banks of the Anacostia by mystical means and familial responsibility.

Every October, tourists crowd downtown Washington for ghost tours, hoping to catch a glimpse of a phantasmic Abraham Lincoln, assassinated at Ford’s Theater on 10th Street. Yejidé’s characters aren’t ignorant of these kinds of absurd spectacles that might take place across the river; they just live in their own city of ghosts.

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers’ The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is a sweeping, multi-generational epic that firmly situates D.C. within a vast topography of Black American history. Much of the novel explores the protagonist Ailey Pearl Garfield’s ancestral roots in Georgia, though D.C.—referred to only obliquely as “the city”—serves as a crucial space of intellectual growth, political awareness, and personal reckoning.

Ailey’s experiences in the city, from her family’s connections to a fictionalized Howard University to her own academic journey, highlight D.C.’s role as a center not only of Black American life but as the epicenter and centrifuge of American history more broadly.

Jean Toomer, Cane

One the first formative texts to come out of what only later became known as the Harlem Renaissance, Jean Toomer’s Cane braids poetry, prose, and drama to explore Black life in the rural South and the urban North. Like Love Songs, most of Cane is set amongst the red-clay landscapes of Georgia, though other sections set in D.C. plumb most profoundly the work’s central theme: the acute pain of being in-between in a country and in a city that forces you to live out the fate of your race.

Toomer’s language is sensuous and mesmeric, a legacy, I’d like to think, of a childhood spent largely in D.C. There is an electric tension that vibrates off the page in his descriptions of what southern migrants found in D.C. when they arrived at the beginning of the Great Migration: “There is no such thing as happiness. Life bends joy and pain, beauty and ugliness, in such a way that no one may isolate them.”

 Louis J. Halle, Spring in Washington

In the late winter of 1945, civil servant Louis Halle decided he was done being just another “worker in the hive of our civilization.” Each morning before reporting to his job at the State Department, Halle began cycling the city, monitoring the slow arrival of spring. From the forests of Theodore Roosevelt Island to the wetlands of Dyke Marsh and ravines along the Potomac, Halle documented the city’s most enchanting season with the precision you might expect from a self-described government functionary.

Though Halle chronicled changes in plants and the weather, his true passion was for birds. For today’s D.C. reader, it can be a pleasurable experiment to travel to one of Halle’s bird-watching sites—Rock Creek Park or Roaches Run—on the date he biked there, and look for the same bird species he saw and loved. I promise that to hear a wood thrush sing in May in D.C. is to believe, like Halle, that “the discovery of spring each year, after the winter’s hibernation, is like a rediscovery of the universe.”

Chris Myers Asch, George Derek Musgrove, Chocolate City: A History of Race and Democracy in the Nation’s Capital

Before Asch and Musgrove, then professors at the University of the District of Columbia, wrote Chocolate City, every history of the District was either determined by the history of the federal government or focused on a particular neighborhood. Spanning from the city’s founding through the 21st century, Chocolate City is a comprehensive history that illuminates the central role Black residents have played in shaping D.C.’s identity—politically, culturally, and socially. Asch and Musgrove explore how D.C. became known as “Chocolate City” in the 1970s, while tracing the persistent struggles for racial justice, civil rights, and self-governance. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the movement for statehood for Washington, D.C.

Natalie Hopkinson, Go-Go Live: The Musical Life and Death of a Chocolate City

There was a time when go-go, a D.C.-born mix of funk, blues, church music, and thumping percussion, could be heard around the city every night of the week. On college campuses, in city parks, in nightclubs, and in alleyways, Black Washingtonians danced and grooved to go-go, still the city’s most powerful homegrown musical creation.

Natalie Hopkinson’s Go-Go Live is an essential work of D.C. history, documenting the rise, resilience, and cultural significance of go-go music. More than a history of the genre, the book examines how go-go shaped Black identity, community, and resistance in D.C., even as gentrification threatened its survival.

Hopkinson’s history is part documentary, ode, and eulogy; the days of “Chocolate City,” when D.C. was majority-Black, are largely over, though as Hopkinson’s book attests, its legacy is not so easily erased.

Brandi Thompson Summers, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City

“There’s a lot of chocolate cities around,” George Clinton of the funk band Parliament announced in a recording of 1975. “But you’re the capital, C.C.!” A year or so after I moved to D.C., I went to a party where most of the guests were white, as am I, and this song played. I thought about that moment often while reading Brandi Thompson Summers’ Black in Place, which offers a nuanced examination of race, space, and aesthetics in a gentrified D.C.

Focusing primarily on the transformation of H Street NE, Summers reveals how the aesthetics of “cool,” “authentic,” and “gritty” neighborhoods commodify Black culture while simultaneously displacing Black residents. Summers’ work offers a critical lens on the erasure of D.C.’s “Chocolate City” identity, revealing the connections between urban development, cultural appropriation, and federal power.

Krista Schyler, River of Redemption: Almanac of Life on the Anacostia

Krista Schlyer’s River of Redemption is a lyrical and urgent work that reclaims the Anacostia River as a vital part of Washington, D.C.’s natural and cultural history. Blending photography, personal reflection, and environmental reporting, Schlyer reveals the Anacostia as more than D.C.’s “forgotten river,” second to the Potomac River—it is home to a diverse and endangered ecosystem, intertwined with the city’s past of pollution and violence.

She centers the river’s significance to D.C.’s Black and Latino communities east of the river, while tracing the effects of environmental degradation and urban development. Inspired by Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac, Schyler traces a year along the river, expanding our understanding of the city’s relationship to nature and justice.

“River of Redemption is a love story for our river,” Schyler writes, “and a plea to remember this hallowed river.” Schyler’s obvious passion for the Anacostia and balance between social and natural history inspired my own writing on the Potomac River at almost every turn.

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Potomac Fever: Reflections on the Nation’s River by Charlotte Taylor Fryar is available via Bellevue Literary Press.