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