Some people have others who will tend and fund and sometimes confine them all their lives, some people are gradually weaned, some of us are cut off abruptly and fend for ourselves, some always did. Still, out on your own, you’re a new immigrant to the nation of adults, and the customs are strange: you’re learning to hold together all the pieces of a life, figure out what that life is going to be and who is going to be part of it, and what you will do with your self-determination.
You are in your youth walking down a long road that will branch and branch again, and your life is full of choices with huge and unpredictable consequences, and you rarely get to come back to choose the other route. You are making something, a life, a self, and it is an intensely creative task as well as one at which it is more than possible to fail, a little, a lot, miserably, fatally. Youth is a high-risk business. Once, around the time I moved into Mr. Young’s building, I was approached as I walked across a plaza near city hall by members of a cult. In the early 1980s, the cults that had done so much damage through the 1970s had yet to fade away. They seemed to be the consequence of turning loose into the anarchic freedoms of the era people raised to obey authority. As a seemingly radical way to return to the conservatism of blind obedience and harsh hierarchy, they were a crevasse between two modes of being into which many people fell.
Sometimes birds return to their cages when the door is open, sometimes people free to make their own choices choose to abandon that power. For a flickering moment in the plaza, I felt vividly, viscerally, what they were offering and why it was alluring to people my age: the possibility of handing back all the weight of responsibility that comes with adulthood, of not having to make decisions every day or deal with the consequences of those decisions, the possibility of returning to something like childhood and arriving at a semblance of certainty that was not hard-won but handed over. I could feel the freedom from agency buried in that surrender of freedom, but I loved my independence and privacy and agency and even some of my deep solitude, and there was never a chance that I was going to give them up.
I’ve met people who came from happy families who seemed to have little work to do as adults: they would carry on as they had been taught; they were the acorns that didn’t fall far from the tree; they were on a road that didn’t fork or they had no journey at all ahead, because they had arrived before they set out. When I was young, I envied them the comfort of their certainties. When I was older, I felt the opposite way about lives not requiring so much self-invention and inquiry. There was real freedom to being on my own and a certain kind of peace to being accountable to no one.
I meet young people now who seem clear about their needs and selves, their emotions and others’ feelings, in ways that seem astonishingly advanced to me. I too was a wayfaring stranger in that country of inner life, and my attempts to orient myself and find a language to describe what was going on within would be slow, stumbling, and painful. If I had luck in all this, it was the luck of being able to continue to evolve, of being someone gradually, imperceptibly changing, sometimes by intention, sometimes by increments and impulses invisible to me. Of being an acorn that kept rolling. In that little apartment I found a home in which to metamorphose, a place to stay while I changed and made a place in the world beyond. I accrued skills and knowledge and eventually friends and a sense of belonging. Or rather I grew to find that the margins could be the richest place, the perch between realms you could enter and exit.
It’s not just that you’re an adolescent at the end of your teens, but that adulthood, a category into which we put everyone who is not a child, is a constantly changing condition; it’s as though we didn’t note that the long shadows at sunrise and the dew of morning are different than the flat, clear light of noon when we call it all daytime. You change, if you’re lucky, strengthen yourself and your purpose over time; at best you are gaining orientation and clarity, in which something that might be ripeness and calm is filling in where the naïveté and urgency of youth are seeping away. As I get older now, even people in their twenties seem like children to me, not in ignorance, but in a kind of newness, a quality of discovering many things for the first time, and of having most of their life ahead of them, and most of all of being engaged in the heroic task of becoming.
Sometimes now I envy those people who are at the beginning of the long road of the lives they’ll make, who still have so many decisions ahead as the road forks and forks again. Imagining their trajectories, I picture a real road, branching and branching, and I can feel it, shadowy, forested, full of the anxiety and the excitement of choosing, of starting off without quite knowing where you will end up.
I have no regrets about the roads I took, but a little nostalgia for that period when most of the route is ahead, for that stage in which you might become many things that is so much the promise of youth, now that I have chosen and chosen again and again and am far down one road and far past many others. Possibility means that you might be many things that you are not yet, and it is intoxicating when it’s not terrifying. Most of the forks in the road I’d confront rose up before me when I lived in that luminous home that Mr. Young made possible for me.
Foghorn and Gospel
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The New Strangers Home Baptist Church was two blocks east of my apartment, in a three-story Victorian building with two cross-topped turrets like grain silos on either side of the building and a rare thing in that neighborhood of buildings that came right up to the sidewalk: a small lawn out front, and in the middle of the lawn along with some struggling roses a wooden sign announcing its name. Year after year I passed it contemplating what a new stranger might be. The Solid Rock Baptist Church, up where Lyon Street got steep, was one of several places of worship I’d sometimes pause outside to listen to the gospel music being sung inside. I was an outsider in that neighborhood, a new stranger, even if it was because it was a neighborhood of outsiders to the white society within which I was free to travel and belong.
It was a little neighborhood, five blocks wide, six blocks long, defined by broad boulevards to the east and west, the verdant panhandle of Golden Gate Park to the south, and a steep hill that functioned as a kind of wall to the north. My new home was on the south corner of a block on whose north side was the dim, low-slung Pentecostal church that was also my polling place. Next to it was the liquor store owned by the African immigrant family whose teenage son’s funeral I went to many years later, after he was gunned down in a drive-by shooting. The funeral was at the Emanuel Church of God in Christ on Hayes, three blocks away from the family store, less than that from the laundromat in front of which the boy was murdered.
The church was in a pretty building that had once in a paler era been a Mormon church, and the funeral service was rousing, musical, some of the finest oratory I’ve ever heard. The neat, angular little stucco church painted in pastels always looked like it had fallen out of one of the quattrocento paintings of the lives of the saints. Across from it was the little storefront church I once, in my first years there, attended; the crucifix above the altar was made of egg cartons, bumpy side out. There were several more black churches in that small area. You were never very far from devotion.
A beautiful mansion painted pure white hosted the Brahma Kumaris Meditation Center, and when AIDS became a worldwide scourge later in the decade, Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity opened an AIDS hospice in a big wooden Victorian house across the street from my home, and the nuns in thin white cotton saris with blue borders became a regular sight in the neighborhood. Mother Teresa made a few appearances herself, and the nuns once showed me a photograph of her with our Arab-owned, black-run liquor store behind her. There was an Islamic center to the east, a Jesuit university to the west, Catholic and Episcopalian churches on the northern edge, and, to the southeast, just beyond the neighborhood’s boundaries, on Divisadero Street, the St. John Coltrane African Orthodox Church with its jazz masses, food programs, and big Russian Orthodox–style pain
tings of black archangels.
Which is to say that it was a deeply, densely spiritual neighborhood, a small place shouting to the heavens and to various versions of God. In those first years, the people who attended those little churches walked to them, clad in splendor, the men and boys in suits of many colors, the girls and women in dresses, the older women often in hats in satin, tulle, and velvet that had been folded, clustered, tilted, piled, veiled, decorated with fabric flowers or feathers or jewels. The neighborhood was alive in a way that made the suburban places I’d grown up in seem dead and bereft, those subdivisions that were by design and ethos about withdrawal from public space and human contact, where the adults drove and people kept to themselves, and the fences between houses were taller than our heads.
Sometimes I would look down from my bay windows at churchgoers strolling in various directions, sometimes I would stroll through the throngs of people greeting one another before and after service. It was a vitally alive place in those days when the congregations moved through each other toward their places of worship and dispersed back into their homes on foot. The churches owned their buildings and stayed put, but their members were mostly renters and gradually more and more of them lived somewhere else, and the streets were no longer so lively. Instead of celebratory bustle on the sidewalks, there were lines of double-parked cars near each of them. Then, slowly, the houses of worship also began to vanish, but that was long after those days I was first getting to know the place and its people.
The older residents had been part of the great migration of black people from the South, and their way of living in the neighborhood seemed to have as much to do with the South and small towns and rural life as with inner city vitalities. Hearing their stories I felt the ghosts of these other places present as origins and memories and templates in this place. San Francisco’s black population had increased almost tenfold in the 1940s, and the newcomers had concentrated in this neighborhood close to the city’s geographical center, and in Hunter’s Point, in the far southeast of the city, where the shipyard jobs were.
These elders were not in a hurry; they were country people. They kept an eye on passersby, greeting the people they knew, sometimes calling out to a child who seemed out of line to them. It was they who taught me that a conversation even between strangers could be a gift and a sport of sorts, a chance for warmth, banter, blessings, humor, that spoken words could be a little fire at which you warmed yourself. Many years later when I spent time in New Orleans and other parts of the South, they felt oddly like home to me, and I realized that this bit of the West Coast had been an outpost of the black South in those days.
2
Mr. Young himself had grown up in rural Oklahoma, and Mr. Ernest P. Teal, who lived across the street but kept a long, luxurious 1970s car in one of the garages in our building, had come from Texas. Mr. Teal was always dressed elegantly, in some variation on a sport coat and a fedora, often with tweed and texture. He was a stylish man who told me stories about the Fillmore District’s jazzy heyday, but also a devout man of great and radiant kindness and graciousness, living proof that cool and warmth could emanate from the same source.
Around the corner was Mrs. Veobie Moss, who had inherited the house from her sister, who had bought it with savings made by working as a domestic. When she grew old and forgetful she often sat on her wooden front steps facing south, and when I’d stop to chat, she’d tell me about growing up on a fruit farm in Georgia and how beautiful the fruit trees were. It was as though on those steps she was sitting in two times and places, as though in each conversation she summoned her lost world until we were both in the shade of her beloved orchards. Sometimes I imagined all these old people asleep in the homes around me dreaming of the places they came from, imagined the phantoms of those fields and orchards, dirt roads and flat horizons, shimmering in our middle-of-the-night streets.
Mr. Young was a World War II veteran, and it was the war that had plucked him out of the countryside and brought him here. His military records say he was an unmarried farmworker when he was drafted in Choctaw County, Oklahoma, at age twenty-two. He had stayed in the military, served long enough to get a pension. He told me he had been one of the black soldiers on whom poisonous gas was tested. He described a warehouse or hangar full of gas and men without gas masks running across it. Some of them died, he said.
He drove a big brown pickup truck with a camper shell and kept it parked in the garage just to the left of the building’s entryway. He often stood in the garage doorway, leaning against the jamb or the truck, greeting passersby, carrying on conversations, throwing out a word to keep a kid in line; in summer he often hauled a load of melons from Vallejo to sell. Sometimes I caught a glimpse of a pistol tucked into the side of the overalls. He smoked a pipe filled with sweet tobacco whose smell sometimes came upstairs through the vents in my kitchen, which was just above his bedroom. I always stopped to have a conversation when I ran into him, or at least an exchange of pleasantries, and sometimes when I was in a rush I dreaded meeting him in the hall, because anything under five minutes of conversation seemed to be regarded as rude.
He told me stories about growing up in southeastern Oklahoma, the son of sharecroppers. The one I remembered best was about when he was a youth just entering his teens and the Barrow Gang—Bonnie and Clyde and their associates—were in the house when he and his parents came back from the fields. The gang of bank robbers was there because in a segregated society the last place you would look for white outlaws was among black people. The gang reportedly did this with at least one other black sharecropper family in Oklahoma, and I later heard that another legendary gangster, Pretty Boy Floyd, also hid out among black homes in that time when the bank robbers were folk heroes of a sort. On that visit to the Youngs’ family home, they left a ten-dollar gold piece on the table or the dresser. His mother didn’t want to take stolen money, but his father said, “The children need shoes for winter.” There were two visits. That time or another time they came home from the fields and the gang was at their table, helping themselves to food.
So many years after I heard the story, I still see the picture that formed as I listened, of a wooden house somewhere in the country, a table, a sideboard, maybe a porch, maybe surrounded by cornfields. Maybe one of the powerful cars the Barrow gang stole pulled up alongside it, white people in a black family’s space. Which is what I was in that building he’d invited me into, in that neighborhood to which many black residents had moved as they were evicted by the gutting of the Fillmore District in the name of urban renewal, nicknamed Negro removal back then, the same families who had come to escape the South pushed out again, pushed to the western margin of a vast area known as the Western Addition.
There are so many ways people are forced to disappear, uprooted, erased, told that this is not their story and not their place. They pile up in layers like geological strata; Ohlone people had resided for millennia on the San Francisco peninsula before the Spanish came crashing in, and Spain claimed the whole coast and then it became a sparsely inhabited outer edge of an independent Mexico. After California and the Southwest were taken by the United States, the Mexicans resident there were fleeced of their vast ranchos and treated as an underclass, as intruders, or both, though their names stayed on many places, the names of saints and ranchers.
Just north and west of our neighborhood lay the immense nineteenth-century cemetery district from which the dead were evicted by the tens of thousands in the early to mid-twentieth century, so that the land could be put to more profitable use. Their skeletons were piled up in mass graves a few cities to the south, their tombstones used as building material and landfill, and a park just south of us had gutters lined with shattered tombstones, some with inscriptions still legible. A short walk east was Japantown, a community from which, during the war, nearly everyone of Japanese descent was forced into internment camps, their vacated homes soon occupied by the black workers and families migrating to w
here the shipyard and other wartime jobs were. All of that lay in the neighborhood’s past when I arrived, though knowledge of it lay far ahead of me.
I had first visited the building and met Mr. Young five days after Ronald Reagan’s inauguration. The nation, having reached its maximum of economic equality, had voted in someone who was going to reverse direction, stop black progress, reconcentrate wealth in the hands of the few, dismantle the programs that had helped so many rise, create mass homelessness. Crack was soon to come to the city and other cities, and to our neighborhood and our block. My own experiences around that time with the sense of potency and grand destiny cocaine produced made me wonder whether it was seductive specifically as a counter to the despair and desolation this reversal brought, the drug you took when you hit the wall built to keep you out. There were other walls, prison walls behind which some of the men in the neighborhood would go, and graves for yet others. The Western Addition was black, but realtors and others carved out spaces in part by renaming them, chipping away at the place’s identity, as the black community was pushed out of an increasingly expensive, elite city. (Later on I’d come to understand gentrification and the role that I likely played as a pale face making the neighborhood more palatable to other pale faces with more resources, but I had no sense at the start that things would change and how that worked.)
The beautiful wooden houses had been built in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries with all the era’s lavish ornamentation: bay windows, pillars, lathed railings, ornamental moldings, often with botanical motifs, fish-scale shingles, porches framed in arches, turrets, even the occasional onion dome. They were full of biomorphic curves and eccentric intricacies that made them seem organic, as though they had grown rather than been built. A Muir Woods park ranger once remarked to me that she saw in these structures the great redwood forests that had been cut down to build them, and so those tall groves up and down the coast were another ghostly presence.
Recollections of My Nonexistence Page 2