The Black Kids(54)

“What does that mean?” I asked, but before Grandma Opal could tell me what a keen nose was and what that had to do with anything, my mother shooed me into the next room. If you look closely at some of the films of the era, you can see Grandma Opal’s beautiful smile and long legs dancing across the background.

Meanwhile, according to Uncle Ronnie, my dad’s mother, Grandma Shirley, moved out here with her mother; her sister, Minnie; and two brothers, Gordon and Elijah, who would be lost during World War II. They crammed together into a house in what was then a working class but stable neighborhood that would eventually, after years of government neglect and discriminatory policies, become the hood. But before that, there were new trees and fresh lawns and neighbors who looked out for one another, the kind of neighbors who would stand next to you and tell you all their business and try to get into yours as you watered the lawn. All of them came to Los Angeles to be free from Jim Crow, to claim what they could of the orange groves and the ocean breeze and the sunshine. Even if they were a little disappointed, even if it wasn’t exactly as advertised, still it was better than.

Grandma Shirley started Shirley’s Vacuum Repair Spot a few blocks from that house sometime in the late fifties. Grandpa Charles ended up dying in the war, like her big brothers, and so she used her savings from working for years in factories plus what the country paid her for her husband’s sacrifice to open the store. With the earnings from the store, she eventually bought a home of her own. There’s a photo of my dad and Uncle Ronnie holding her hands at the store’s grand opening, all of them beaming. My dad looks like a nerd in huge Coke-bottle glasses and, somehow, a black-boy cowlick. Uncle Ronnie is clearly feeling himself in a leather jacket that looks like he loved it so much he probably wore it to bed. It’s the only photo of the three of them my dad has in the house.

This is how we came to be: Darla was my father’s college girlfriend, a hairdresser. He would sit next to her doing homework, or studying, or just staring at her while she did her clients’ hair. Darla wasn’t in college, but they’d grown up with each other and started dating during their senior year of high school. My father would go over to her house and stay for days at a time. “Her parents took in strays” is how my dad phrased it. He liked her place because, unlike his, there was enough space to sit and think and write and be. Darla was quiet and very kind, according to both my parents. My parents met when my mother came in to get her hair done, and there was my father, next to Darla, watching. My mother said she stole glances at him in the mirror, and he at her, the entire time Darla straightened and curled the length of my mother’s long hair.

“What are you studying?” my mother finally worked up the nerve to ask.

My father told her, and even though they weren’t studying the same thing—they weren’t even at the same school—my mother said, “We should study together sometime.”

Right in front of Darla, he said, “Okay.”

It wasn’t very smart of my mother to do that while Darla still had a hot curling iron in her hand. If you look closely, you can still see the exact dark moment kind Darla lost my father and found my mother’s right temple.

They never told me that story directly; I overheard it while they were hosting a dinner party and were feeling extra in love and extra social for a few months.

So you see, she wasn’t wrong, my sister. Jo and me, we’ve got the hood in us as much as the beach, as much as Downtown, and even as much as Hollywood itself; the length of Los Angeles stretched in our veins like the crisp lines of a vacuum across carpet.

I don’t know anything about before my grandparents got to California. I guess I never really thought to ask.





Home: 5:13 a.m. Today.


It’s still late when I hang up with Jo and walk downstairs to grab a glass of water. Or, I guess I should say, early. My dad is up watching the news coverage of the riots on television, although I don’t know how he can bear to keep the TV on anymore. He’s sprawled out on the couch in his pajamas, a pillow tucked under his head and one under his arm like a teddy bear.

“Are you worried about the store?” I say.

I visited the store a few times as a little kid, back when my dad would still occasionally stop by to see how Uncle Ronnie and the store were doing. Mostly what I remember is swiveling on stools, waiting for something to happen. A customer would come in with a vacuum, and Uncle Ronnie and my father would rush over, lean over the thing, and inspect it like their mother had done so many years before. Vacuums take away the dirt and the ugly and make things look like new. But the dirt goes somewhere.

“What are you doing up?” my father says.

“Can’t sleep.”

“Join the club,” he says.

When I was really little, right after Grandma Shirley died, my dad used to come into my room at night, lie down on the floor, and cry. I would pat him on the head and say, “Don’t cry, Daddy,” and sometimes he’d stop crying. I don’t really remember her, but I remember that. He did it for a full week until my mother walked in, caught him crying, and told him to stop it; he was scaring me. I wasn’t scared, though. I just wanted him to stop being sad. Sometimes when your grown-ups are sad, their sadness feels even heavier than your own.

Later, when I asked my mother how Grandma Shirley died, she froze and said, “Can you do Mommy a big favor, Ashley?”