The Chandlers

The Chandler that emerges from these letters is complex, simultaneously an inveterate snob and ”allergic to big shots of all types wherever found,“ a passionate Anglophile whose chosen literary tongue is the American vernacular, a political conservative sick with the knowledge that capitalism ”implies a fundamental cheat, a dishonest profit, a nonexistent value.“ Above all he is a writer, enamored with language and concerned with little else. Again and again he spends whole paragraphs tearing apart a single lazily spun sentence. A keen and sometimes cruel critic of his contemporaries (of James Cain he writes, ”faugh! Everything he writes smells like a billygoat“), he does not hesitate to operate on his own work with the same well-honed tools (of his The Little Sister, he writes: ”There is nothing in it but style and dialogue and characters. The plot creaks like a broken shutter in an October wind“). Many of his pronouncements -- his disgust with the ”slick magazines,“ with Hollywood’s cowardliness and the mediocrity of literary fashions -- have lost none of their force in the intervening years. Nor has his wit; discussing a long-ago pan of Hammett‘s Maltese Falcon, he swore, ”By God, if you can show me 20 books written approximately 20 years back that have as much guts and life now, I’ll eat them between slices of Edmund Wilson‘s head.“

The Los Angeles Times is not listed even once in the nearly 40-page index of Seeking El Dorado: African Americans in California, a new anthology of historical essays -- a sign perhaps that our local fish wrap has played as little role in the history of California’s black communities as those communities have played in its esteemed pages. Much of Western history, despite a few decades of revisionist efforts to the contrary, is still perceived as a white affair, all covered wagons and dusty saloons with a few brown-faced bandidos and stubborn Indians mixed in for color. African-Americans don‘t start appearing until they become entertaining (in the Central Avenue jazz scene) or frightening (starting with a bang in 1965) to history’s proper protagonists (white folks).

So it will come as a surprise to many that people of African descent have been in California as long as Europeans have. More than half of the first settlers of Los Angeles, way back in 1781, were of full or partial African blood. Seeking El Dorado -- so named to express the aspirations of generations of black migrants to find a promised land of opportunity -- goes a long way toward filling in the blanks. Its 13 essays (co-edited by Kevin Mulroy, director of the research center at the Autry Museum) stretch from the days when, under Spanish and later Mexican rule, race was a more fluid concept and African ancestry was not an obstacle to reaching the highest echelons of Californio society; to the turn of the century, when W.E.B. Du Bois was still able to write to the readers of his Crisis magazine that ”Out here in this matchless Southern California there would seem to be no limit to your opportunities, your possibilities“; to the population boom of the 1940s; to the Watts riots and the rise of black nationalism; to the success and ultimate failure of Tom Bradley‘s coalition politics; and to the suburbanization and unrest of the 1990s. If the quality of its essays is inconsistent (a couple are as dry as the others are engaging), Seeking El Dorado is a more-than-worthy effort, a balanced and thorough take on a too-long-neglected subject.