October/November 2024 | maconmagazine.com 59
Dwayne Davis, Wayne Simmons, Pat Moore, Devin Davis, Third Avenue:
Dwayne: We've been here all our life. This is where I started at, right here. Went
to L.H. Williams School. Played at Mattie Hubbard Playground. Well, this was
always the pillar of this community. This is where everybody got together and
became together. This is where it all started at. We had some good people that
raised us. It used to be such a great neighborhood.
The unity that we had, it was more like a village. You could be four or ve blocks
from your house and still get a whooping [laughs]. You don't have that kind of
community no more.
Wayne: We have a lot of history, a lot of educators bought homes here. So when
we came up, we were surrounded by educators and we were surrounded by people
in the neighborhood, like he said, who would discipline us. If one of our neighbors
told our mother we did something? Oh, you on the hook for that all the way home.
We all learned how to play sports here. We played sports every day, all day. I live in
Atlanta now. This is for the people we grew up with, people who left, people who
stayed. It's for the comradery. We all just get together, and this is home. Home.
