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182 Stomping Grounds cerned citizens who stand their ground geographically, metaphorically, who set agendas and can permanently tip neighborhoods from questionable to livable . But this is hard to do when the tipping is strenuous work and when there are other, easier options. It’s even harder if you’re black and, like everyone else, conditioned to believe that a critical mass of blacks—certainly if they’re young and unoccupied, but even if they water lawns and walk dogs—will run down neighborhoods rather than raise them up. Shelton and his wife are gone. A single Latino man bought their place, with its cheery yellow paint and emerald lawn and wind chimes hanging on the front porch. I still walk the dog daily, but have glimpsed the man only once. His shoes sit on the welcome mat. The lawn has not stayed as green over the months, but I can see it’s taken care of, watched over enough. By October, paper Halloween decorations appear on the door. I’m encouraged even though the house remains silent, disengaged , not Shelton. I’m glad somebody is wearing the shirt. Lost Soul A L a m e n t f o r B l ac k Lo s An g e l e s December 1998 Los Angeles is wonderful. Nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed, nor the average efficiency and intelligence in the colored population so high . . . Out here in this matchless Southern California there would seem to be no limit to your opportunities, your possibilities. —w.e.b. du bois, 1913 [Black neighborhoods] are a kind of forgotten archipelago in the garish basin of the region. —robert kirsch, 1965 Lost Soul 183 As a kid growing up in the west end of what would come to be known as South-­ Central Los Angeles, my world was limned in black. The prevalence of black people in my neighborhood was not, as it tends to be today, a cause for alarm or a sign of inevitable social decay. Blackness simply encompassed everything—best friends, spring carnivals at the local Catholic school, the butcher at the meat counter, the summer playground director with watchful eyes and a whistle slung around her neck. I was raised in the very justified belief that blacks were as self-­ sustaining as anyone, that whatever could not be had within a three-­ mile radius of my house was some extravagance probably not worth too much thought anyway. My world was ordered and comfortable , though varied enough in its self-­ containment never to make me feel contained : I played jacks on the sidewalk, shot basketball in the backyard, went to the playground when I was bored, spent long afternoons in one of several neighborhood libraries. I think the perspective of my neighborhood started changing with the proliferation of indoor malls in the mid-­ ’70s, when I was in junior high school. Malls were located in almost exclusively suburban areas that were almost exclusively populated by whites, and my friends and I had to plan daylong bus trips to get to them. I liked going out to Del Amo or Fox Hills, but was vaguely resentful that I had to invest so much time and cover so much ground just to acquire a hot dog on a stick. But everybody in the neighborhood talked rapturously about the malls, about the things that could be had there, and I swiftly came to understand that these things could not be had here, that they might never be had here, and what was once a world of plenty seemed more and more like a place of deprivation—still home and the locus of family, but a point that would stay fixed and musty as the world around it changed with abandon. As it turns out, if black neighborhoods in L.A. had simply remained the same, it would have been a vast improvement over what actually did happen: a steady decline that left areas like my old neighborhood pockmarked with empty lots and façades where sturdy businesses used to be. The neighborhood feels not lived in, but lived out. When I drive through the commercial districts there and elsewhere in Central L.A., everything feels impermanent, poised for flight, like a diner sitting at a restaurant eating a meal but strategically positioned near the back door, ready to beat it at the first sign of trouble. Yet the greatest loss has not been that of...

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