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 where 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.