The Black Kids(53)

“I’m on the cordless. I stepped outside. Harrison’s gotta be up for work in a few hours.”

A fire destroyed an electronics store on Pico and Fairfax, and a Vons nearby was looted. This is super close to Jo’s place.

I imagine Jo sitting on the steps in front of her house in this twilight, the two of us looking out at the sky at the same time, like little lost Fievel and his sister in An American Tail.

Years ago, when that wildfire burned down the hillside and Daddy refused to leave, Jo was the one who left first.

She was nine and had packed her own suitcase and mine with clothes and Handi-Snacks and Fruit Roll-Ups. Jo was a tiny kid, not much larger than me, even though we were years apart. The suitcases were as large as us both, and sometimes we would take turns hiding inside and zipping ourselves up so that all we could feel was dark; then we would roll each other along on the wheels and pretend to go to far-off places.

“We’re in Paris!” the sister pushing the suitcase would narrate to the sister inside.

“We’re in Istanbul!”

“Now we’re in Djibouti!” and then we would laugh, because booty.

Until eventually it got to be too much, and the suitcase sister would scream to be let out: “I can’t breathe!”

“We’re going,” Jo said to my dad.

She grabbed me by the hand, and we started walking down the hill. She’d brought her softball bat with her in case of coyotes, and she let it dangle from her small right hand like a warning. A family of squirrels ran past.

“Get back here,” my mother shouted.

“Now,” my father added.

My father and mother looked on incredulously as Jo and I kept walking.

Jo gripped my hand tighter still.

“I’m the parent; you do as I say,” Daddy shouted.

We were halfway down the road by then, past the emptied driveways of our neighbors who’d already fled. In a few more steps, we’d turn the corner and disappear.

“Girls!” Lucia yelled, “?Eschuchen a sus padres!”

I turned back to look at Lucia. Jo and I stood in the middle of the road. One of my hands held on to Jo’s, and the other to my blond Skipper doll with all the hair cut off. Our adults were starting to look small.

“Maybe we should go back,” I said.

“It’ll be alright,” Jo said.

That was all before.

“I don’t want to lie to Mom and Dad for you anymore, Jo…”

“Then don’t. Just don’t tell them. It’s not like they tell us anything about themselves. They’re so damned secretive, even about the stuff we should know. It’s like we materialized out of thin air, according to them.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ask Dad about Grandma Shirley.”

“What’s Grandma Shirley got to do with anything?”

I hear her inhale and exhale deeply again.

“Forget it.”

“The looters are fucking over people like Uncle Ronnie, too, you know? Not just bad people or corporations. You can’t treat people like collateral damage… Just come home. It’s safer here.… When are you gonna stop being mad?” I say.

A siren grows louder and louder in the background.

“Morgan’s here while Uncle Ronnie guards the shop. She shot out the Parkers’ tires with Daddy’s gun. You would’ve loved it.”

“Those assholes.” She laughs.

“I miss you,” I say.

“I miss you, too.”

“Come home.”

“This city is our home. All of it,” Jo says as the one siren becomes a chorus screaming somewhere out there.





Home: A Personal History


This is where we’re from, best as I can tell from the breadcrumbs that my parents and Grandma Opal and Uncle Ronnie have left that lead to the story of us. Our grandparents moved to Los Angeles from the South, all of them. They drove across the country carrying with them in their veins all that trauma and all that hope and used it to lay the bricks for lives brighter than the ones they left. Nobody’s actually from Los Angeles, except for those of us who are.

The canals and the pier in Venice were dreamed up by a developer and tobacco mogul named Abbot Kinney, who envisioned it as kind of a Coney Island West. At least Coney Island was built by black people fleeing the South. Even though they built it, black people couldn’t live near the boardwalk and canals, because racism, so instead they settled in Oakwood, which was a small community set aside for black folks. This is where my mother’s mother, Grandma Opal, settled when she eventually moved here with her brother Wallace. She was the first of my grandparents to make their way west. My mother’s father, Grandpa Moses, settled downtown in Little Tokyo, or, as it was known at the time, Bronzeville. Blacks were able to move in because the Japanese who’d previously lived there had been sent to internment camps. Grandpa Moses was an accountant, and my grandma was a trained actress and singer folks said would’ve been huge, if only she hadn’t had the misfortune of looking too black.

“I could’ve been bigger than Dorothy Dandridge, or even Hazel Scott! I was lighter than Hazel, you know? My nose was keener…,” Grandma Opal would say on occasion, whenever somebody brought it up.