The Sweetest Words You Ever Wrote

Every week, Washington D.C.'s young, gifted and black wordsmiths gather at Busboys and Poets on 14th and V streets for "Sunday Kind of Love," a themed open-mic event held in the afternoon. On a wet Sunday in March, we drove past the popular meeting place and I couldn't help but think of the film that sparked a spoken word renaissance when it opened in 1997: Love Jones. Suddenly poetry and verse had moved beyond the literati, New York's Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and underground slams, and every would-be Saul Williams and Sonia Sanchez seemed to have a composition notebook buried somewhere.

In the Chicago-set romance, Nina Mosley is an aspiring photographer who has her eye on a gig at VIBE magazine, and Darius Lovehall (aka "Brother to the Night") is a struggling writer whose classic meet-cute with the lenswoman begins at a words-and-blues lounge. He freestyles his "Blues for Nina," and I imagine attendance at these events, at the time, swelled right along with the box office take. Moreover, the soundtrack was unforgettable.

Which brings me back to the Chocolate City: In the age of Obama, himself a Chicago transplant, one hopes this metropolis of alphabet streets and abandoned avenues can fully salute its inheritance. The soaring, renovated townhouses and brownstones of Eastern Market on Capitol Hill, of Columbia Heights, washed in red and pale blue paints, were a sight to behold even as they competed for space with the darker corners.