The Slow Death of a Chocolate City

I DON’T GET BACK to the old neighborhood very often, but I still remember the jacaranda trees on Buckingham, Ruth’s Hamburgers on Jefferson, the five-and-ten-cent store on Jefferson, the absurd abundance of the Holiday Bowl with grits and sushi under one roof, the deep hangouts on my porch in the avenues, when gunshots were far off in the distance and my girlfriend’s skinny, brown legs looked beautiful as she stretched out on the green St. Augustine lawn. Of seeing black faces at school and not noticing their blackness, of hearing accents from all over the place, New Orleans to Mississippi, and marveling at the differences. What happened to black Los Angeles wasn’t just the guns and the drug epidemics, the bad schools and the insane policing; it just cost too much . . . financially, spiritually and socially. So much goes wrong in Los Angeles that the things that go right don’t balance the scales for very many of us. Latinos have replaced African-Americans in these neighborhoods and schools, and I wish them luck. I hope that Los Angeles is kinder to them than to the black folks I knew in the Los Angeles I loved.