in the summer of 1969, my mother decided we were moving to Los Angeles. Her friend Luther, an older Black gentleman and fellow devotee of the church established by Paramahansa Yogananda, the Self-Realization Fellowship (SRF), had moved there the year before and sent her letters extolling the city’s virtues. It didn’t take much convincing. My mother regaled us with Luther’s stories, adorning the walls of our tiny New York tenement apartment on 157th and Amsterdam with clippings from Sunset Magazine and Better Homes and Gardens-images of palm-lined streets, beaches, the Hollywood Hills, gorgeous rooms flooded with sunlight. She imagined herself meditating at SRF’s beautiful Lake Shrine property in Pacific Palisades just blocks from the ocean. “The flowers and the weather,” she told me recently, “reminded me of growing up in Jamaica.” LA would fulfill her dream of having a house, good schools for her children, freedom from violence, and spiritual peace.
But in 1969, all that was only a dream. A single mother with three kids, she survived on low-wage jobs and occasional public assistance. It would take two years for her to board a plane bound for LAX with nothing but a suitcase and a couple hundred dollars. She made the journey alone that summer of 1971, while my siblings and I were with my father in Seattle.
My mother spent her first weeks in Hollywood with Luther before moving into an empty apartment above her aunt’s on Ninety- Fourth and South Figueroa Streets. South LA did not at all resemble the pictures that had fed her dreams. Instead of rolling hills and pretty rooms, she found a vast concrete landscape framed on the east by the Harbor Freeway and crowded throughout with dilapidated homes, liquor stores, fast food joints, churches, a smattering of tall palm trees, and Black people everywhere. And cops-lots of cops. She recalls counting fourteen patrol cars lined up on her block one evening.