A Wealth of Ideas
Being a native of Los Angeles (Angeleno always sounded a bit too grandiose to my ears, especially in a movie town), I must say that, all things considered, I've been rich my whole life. Not in the way of money or things, because I never had much of either and still don’t. I mean rich in the way of what I didn’t have. I didn’t grow up with the cruelest aspects of winter. My brothers and sisters and I lived in a house my parents owned rather than in apartments or rentals. I was always able to see the sky, even in the thick of downtown high-rises. And thanks to the fact that my family moved to L.A. from New Orleans many years before I was born, I was spared the indignity of growing up in the South and being inculcated with its limitations of black life that were so deep and pervasive, blacks had to leave just to find some different air. The air here was not entirely different, not by a long shot, but it was different enough. L.A. turned out to be that rare thing, a big city with a lot of open space; between the hard rules of who did what and who could live where, there were gaps and cracks that went unnoticed by rule-makers and were big enough to fill with something new. So my uncle who was denied a future as a pharmacist because there were so few slots for blacks (especially during the Depression) became a successful car salesman on Crenshaw Boulevard when it was still populated by whites. My father, an intellectual and idealist who would have been ill-suited to the workaday life of most black men in New Orleans, was brought west early—1942—and found his calling as an activist and community builder in the roiling 1960s. For them, L.A. lived up to its hype as the last and greatest American mecca of reinvention, though the reinvention was more circumstantial than inspired. And it was a long way from redemption.
But I was a brand new breed. I planted my flag here, and only here. L.A. is my primary place (which is a good thing, because post-Katrina New Orleans is a city that literally doesn’t really exist for my family anymore, even the hardcore natives). But that image doesn’t come naturally, even to me, even now. What is an L.A. native? What should I have gained that I still don’t have? What am I responsible for? What post-South legacy have I started or stumbled into? Or is legacy entirely beside the point?
I’m sure I’m not the only Angeleno—okay, I’ll use it if you do—who wrestles with such questions. Though I don’t really wrestle, I ponder. Alright, I consider. And I do that at my own convenience, on my own time, between dance class and going to the dog park and worrying that I don’t live in a neighborhood quite prosperous enough to have a dance studio or a dog park of its own. If this is progress, somebody, please, tell me. I’m open to interpretations.
