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The Eastside Boys August 1996 My father’s trumpet came out on Saturday at dusk after he finished the lawn work—along with the wooden music stand holding finger-­ worn sheets of Bach, Mozart, and Miles Davis’s “Sketches of Spain.” He always bowed his head and ruffled the keys before playing. Sometimes his music sounded tired, like he got some days, but mostly it was golden: “The Shadow of Your Smile” and Bach’s “Ode to Joy” phrased in low, guttural notes that he seemed to be playing only for himself. I stood away from the music, behind the wrought-­ iron porch railing in silent admiration of my father’s faith. Larry Aubry’s life work was built on the notion that things would change for the better. But it appeared to me, even at the age of six, that the battle for true social equality, as much as it shaped my own view of the world, might ultimately be lost. So what, I wondered, sustained his faith? What were his songs made of? My father, who is now retired, has been a jazz musician, a postal worker, a county probation officer, and a human-­ relations consultant. But he was, and still is, an Eastside Boy. Not a formal organization, though fully deserving of its uppercase spelling, the Eastside Boys are a loose contingency of men who were part of the first critical mass of black people to integrate metropolitan L.A. They grew up in the ’30s and ’40s in the five-­ square-­ mile area bounded roughly by Main Street on the west, Long Beach Avenue on the east, Slauson Avenue on the south, and Washington Boulevard on the north. Hemmed in by de facto segregation, with Slauson as the Mason-­ Dixon line, few blacks lived west of Main. Everybody left the Eastside when they could, as soon as they could, starting in the early ’50s; it was an outward flow that in retrospect was a hemorrhage, an exodus by black people from a place that both built them and bound them. It’s an old story to all of us now: the sudden fury of flight and the broken economy left in its wake, like debris scattered in the aftermath of a storm. The Eastside Boys 153 Still, out in the new territory of the Westside and South Bay, of Crenshaw and Ladera Heights and Baldwin Hills, a lot of promise was realized in the form of college educations and fruitful careers—more opportunities for the Boys and their children. The Boys gave to one another, and there was nothing especially noble or self-­ sacrificing about it. But they now find themselves where they never expected to be, in the role of heroes and gatekeepers, living connections to the last era of bountiful times for black people. They are the flash points of a social upheaval that cast off segregation and laid a new course. They are not entirely sure they have traveled it well, but they continue their work at scholarship foundations and law offices and high schools, and they continue to meet with the easy regularity of their youth. In these and a thousand other ways, they keep alive their traditions of togetherness, which institutionalized racism made both ordinary and imperative—and which, ironically, post–civil rights Los Angeles has made nearly impossible to maintain. I wonder what traditions I can create, whether theirs have passed me by. Recently I have been consumed with my own past. I flash on happier moments in high school, when I was incurably optimistic. There was nothing to me that couldn’t be perfectly placed in the magnanimous geography of the future, which seemed to be forging itself out of days that oozed along with typical Southern California languor. Promise was as close as I ever got to religion, this private, heady faith in things unseen. But the business of believing, of going forward, has proven to be a peculiar process, often no process at all. Belief has thinned over time, worn clean through in spots. It’s illusory; some days, hope that was once as sturdy as a tree trunk has shrunk into a reed, thin enough to encircle with one hand. In the worst moments, my despair—that my achievements won’t match the depth of my parents’, that my generation’s sense of purpose will never cohere, that I will always flounder in isolation—feels like a permanent condition of being black, of being always behind...

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