Loretta Carter Hanes moves gracefully, gingerly around the stacks and stacks of boxes that crowd her cramped apartment on upper 16th Street NW, reaching for a specific envelope, a specific piece of history, lodged beneath her ever-growing mountains of papers.

"This is what he's reading," she says, pulling out a copy of an official proclamation from the D.C. Mayor's office. "He" is Mayor Anthony Williams, and the proclamation is one declaring yesterday, April 16, 2002, "Emancipation Day" in the District of Columbia.

Hanes knew they were down there, right at that very moment, on Pennsylvania Avenue, her long-awaited parade snaking past the National Archives, past the Justice Department, past the place where slaves used to be shackled at night while their owners visited Washington, past the site of slave auctions. Williams in his convertible, heading to the festivities at Freedom Plaza. Alfred J. Austin -- great-grandson of one of the original parade organizers -- was grand marshal. Friends who have heard Hanes speak of this moment for more than a decade.

And there she was, in her apartment, her 75-year-old body tired and ailing, as always. Too weak to attend. Too ill to stand in the unseasonably hot sun. And her face? The face that has suffered through bouts of paralysis, moments when she could barely move her mouth? It is a picture of joy.

"This is a day to rejoice!" she says, words pouring out. "I'm so excited. This is the culmination. The parade is what we've wanted since the beginning, since we first started in 1991."

It has not been an easy decade for Hanes, or her family -- husband Wesley, grown children Peter and Cindy. Once, there was a nice house on Fifth Street NW. A house filled with mementos of her family history. Furniture and dishes from her ancestors, who trace back to slaves at George Washington's Mount Vernon. Hanes -- the president of the D.C. chapter of Reading Is Fundamental, and one of the local parents who helped found that organization -- happily doled out books to school programs across the city and researched slave history on the side. She had diabetes, a little high blood pressure. But she was okay.

Then she started to get sicker. And her husband started to get sick. And her son Peter started to get sick. It was the flu, it was an infection, it was pneumonia. No one knew exactly. One night, in 1996, she woke up almost completely paralyzed. Her nervous system was a mess. There were days -- stretches of them -- when she was bedridden. Others when she had to crawl up and down the staircase.

Eventually, a toxicologist told the Hanes family that the house contained dangerous levels of DDT and chlordane and that it would take $50,000 to decontaminate. They didn't have the money.

So they moved into this apartment in the Carleton House, with its tiny balcony that looks out over Rock Creek Park. There is a bike in one corner. Plastic Easter eggs stuck into an old vase, Christmas decorations behind the glass doors of a curio cabinet. Cases of bottled water stacked on the other side of the room.

And the boxes. Old fruit boxes. Shoe boxes. Mostly, white cardboard office boxes, stuffed with papers and notebooks and fliers and reports. Stuffed with her history. This city's history.

Loretta Carter was born in her family home at 328 Bryant St. NW in 1926 to Joseph Washington Carter and Hattie Louise Thompson, both cooks. Her father, she says, became the first black baker in the District, and once made a cake for the White House. Her mother was a private cook for Sen. John Henderson and his wife Mary, at the famed Henderson Castle at 16th Street and Florida Avenue.

From a young age, she remembers sitting on the floor at the retirement home where her mother sometimes cooked, listening to the advice of the "inmates," as they were called. One, called Brother John, was a former slave.

"He used to talk to me about what to do with my life," she says. "He told me, 'You've got to bring people across the bridge of life.' I didn't know it then, but my life was cut out for me then, at age 5, by a former slave."

She went to Miner Teachers College, and graduated in 1949, but only spent one year as a teacher before having her children -- five in all, though only two survived. While doing volunteer reading at local schools she met Margaret Craig McNamara, wife of defense secretary Robert S. McNamara, who was doing the same thing. When McNamara formed RIF, Hanes was an essential part of the process. Her life has been dedicated to RIF ever since. To RIF, and to history.

"These are my babies right now," she says, pointing to her boxes. Already, she has sent about 200 boxes of her research to the Historical Society of Washington, which is eager to have her papers.

For more than a decade, she has done the research. She went everywhere: to the National Archives, to the Martin Luther King Library, to the Smithsonian. She knocked on doors, made phone calls. When she got too sick to go out -- these days, she goes out only with her husband for hospital visits, other trips are rare -- she worked at home, had documents sent to her by friends she had accrued along the way.

So this is personal -- this day, this parade, this moment in D.C. history. How could it not be? For years, people told Hanes to keep quiet when she wanted to talk about slavery, its history, its place in building this city. "It's too painful," they said to her. "Too bitter. Leave it alone." The one-time schoolteacher ignored them. She had traced her own history, all the way back to the ancestors who were slaves at Mount Vernon. Freedom, she told them, came with knowledge. Healing came from knowing.

"If we don't talk about it," she says, "our history will die."

And Hanes knows the history. She knows all about April 16, 1862, the day Abraham Lincoln signed a proclamation emancipating the slaves in the District of Columbia, 8 1/2 months before his famous Emancipation Proclamation of Jan. 1, 1863, abolished slavery in the Confederate states. She's the one who taught Rep. Donald A. Manzullo (R-Ill.) -- who is a Lincoln scholar -- about April 16. He paid her back by arranging for the bells in the Old Post Office to ring in tribute in 1993. He also took her to the Library of Congress and let her hold a draft of the Emancipation written in Lincoln's own hand.

"She almost passed out. She just gasped. It was so overwhelming for her," Manzullo says.

Hanes also has copies of the Treasury Department records showing what the government paid slave owners for the 3,100 slaves freed. John Joseph Shorter: 175.20, Mary Tersa: 525.60, Lucy Cross: 21.90. Eliza Noble: no value. It is the only time the government made compensation for emancipated slaves. Hanes takes great pride in that fact.

She also knows about the way that date used to be celebrated in the District -- with celebrations and speeches and men and women in dress-up clothes. And with a parade. Jubilee Day, they called it. That ended more than a century ago, in 1901, as a result of infighting by event organizers.

The celebration came back yesterday. On Pennsylvania Avenue. At Freedom Plaza. D.C. Council member Vincent B. Orange Sr. sponsored the legislation that made April 16 a legal private holiday and put together the parade, but Hanes and her family are the heart of the effort. Every year since 1991, Hanes has helped organize some kind of event to memorialize the date. Church celebrations, speeches, and every year a ceremony at Lincoln Park, where a wreath would be laid at the Emancipation Monument. In 1998 there was a tribute at the Capitol that has become an annual event. In 1999, the wreath-laying was delayed until June because Hanes couldn't raise the $50 to buy the wreath. Always, though, there was something.

"When you find out the passion of Loretta Hanes -- she's kept it going, to get us to this point," Orange says. Barbara Franco, head of the Historical Society of Washington, calls Hanes "keeper of Emancipation Day."

But the "keeper" only shrugs good-naturedly at the thought of missing the parade, being absent from her long-awaited moment.

"I'm just a fieldworker," she says, "and I don't mind."

"If we don't talk about it, our history will die," Hanes says of the commemoration of the day Lincoln freed the District's slaves. Though unable to attend Emancipation Day festivities, Loretta Carter Hanes remains one of the driving forces keeping the memory of the event alive in the District.

Washington Post staff writer Debbi Wilgoren contributed to this report.

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