Whitney Dotson was 5 years old when he moved into the brand-new house his father bought on Jenkins Way in Parchester Village. It was the early 1950s, and the planned 420-house development was Richmond's first subdivision in which an African American could buy a home.
Nestled into a wide cove of San Francisco Bay, Parchester offered a welcome mix of open space, isolation and community, even though it was plopped down in an industrial landscape.
All the backyards on Jenkins Way--a long street with small, densely packed, flat-roofed homes--butt up against a 15-foot berm. On top of the berm, Southern Pacific freight cars hurl through space and shake the houses. Whitney's mother, Mary Lee, who at 83 still lives in the neighborhood, kept her young kids away from the trains because everyone knew that a man named Jackson was killed on the tracks in Seaport, the community where they lived before coming to Parchester.
For three years, Whitney didn't know what was on the other side of that berm. But at age 8, he and his brother Richard and a group of their friends got up the gumption to set out and explore.
"That's when the Davy Crockett thing was happening," recalls Whitney, who was one of many American boys to sport the raccoon-skin cap.
"They had to have the hat now," says Mary Lee. "They'd be hollering, 'Davy, Davy Crockett,' marching up and down the street with them hats a-swingin."
Their wilderness was no different from Davy's--or so they imagined. They trekked north to explore the fringes of Giant Powder Co., the first corporation in America to produce dynamite.
They hiked east to Tank Farm Hill, where about 50 gas and oil tanks dominated the open grasslands like forts. They built a raft and, in ponds filled with shattered glass created by foundry waste, bravely fought off Indian pirates. And nothing could keep them from going across the tracks. But first, like Crockett, they put an ear to the rail to see if a locomotive was coming. A vibration against their ears meant "TRAIN!"
On the other side, Whitney and his friends discovered an expanse of richly textured marsh, green and lush in summer. Tidal sloughs snaked their cool, clear way out to the bay. Sea gulls, ospreys and avocets banked sharply in the marine air, and the pickleweed underfoot smelled awful. They didn't know the names of the birds, nor did they have environmental classes to teach them why the water in the channels rose and fell.
