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.
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