70The Village at the Top of the Avenue

Two things share this corner and they are clearly meant to be read together. The first is a low stone monument with cut black letters: Welcome to Historic Elm Avenue. The second, three steps behind it, is the whole gable end of a small building painted as a village at sunset.

The sky goes cream to apricot with a pale sun sitting low. Behind it, deep green rounded hills with flat-topped acacias silhouetted along their crests. On the left, three white round huts with golden conical thatch and a cooking fire between them. And across the middle, walking together toward you, a group of robed figures — blues, ochres, a deep pink, one in white — painted flat and calm, without faces, the way a memory of a place is painted rather than a photograph of it.

It carries no title, no signature, no date and no plaque. What it carries is the position: it stands at the gateway of the historic Black business district of Waco, and the first thing that district chose to show you at its front door is where its people came from before any of this was here.