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Man and Superwoman 231 tions sustained me as much as it did in the first class, with its increasingly rare complement of black students. I only felt pangs at times, ironically, because this group performed so well, not because they spelled any better but because they articulated dreams and wishes when I asked them to and demonstrated such willingness to try to make a leap when I requested it. They had a sense of duty to do right by dreams where their black counterparts, by and large, felt dreams had been wronged into a kind of irrelevance. The best I could assume was that any faith or optimism I encouraged would have a trickle-­ down effect, that everybody at Jeff would benefit from the improved outlooks of a few. History in these parts, of course, dictated otherwise. I learned later that April had been kicked out of Jeff, as she had been kicked out of other schools. She had literally run out of places to go. The Glamorous Life October 2010 Annette Starr Hudson was one of an increasing number of stories that by 1999 I didn’t want to do. Not because I didn’t think they were worthy, but because they wouldn’t matter. They wouldn’t lead to change. By the late ’90s it was evident that no new order was rising from the ashes of 1992, nothing like it, and I was getting exhausted by older people who had now lived through two major civil disturbances eager to tell me how coherent and up-­ and-­ up everything used to be, and how the riots twenty-­ seven years apart were a sure sign that the greatness and the sense of zooming possibility that had drawn everybody to L.A. in the beginning could never come again. The apocalypse was complete, and now everybody was rushing to get in their personal histories and postmortems before the world stopped listening altogether. Generational breakdown was a big, bitter theme. People supported the young folk in theory—they were the future, receptors of the past, etc. But beyond 232 Teach on That theory, sentiment about the young broke sharply in another direction. Much of it went something like this: if the troublemakers acculturated by hip-­ hop and gangsta rap could somehow disappear and leave the well-­ meaning among us alone, if we could strain the rogue element out of our neighborhoods like pulp, the rivers of community would run clear and we’d all become immediately visible to each other again. Everything would flow and we could get on with things. And it wouldn’t be a bad thing if the parents of the young disappeared too, because Lord knows they didn’t have home training, and it was their generation that had started messing things up in earnest after the ’60s, with their righteous self-­ absorption and no idea how to parent, no idea what to pass on but having kids anyway. These things weren’t said exactly, or in one sentence or one sitting. But as the twentieth century started folding up its tents and taking account, resentment and a bit of panic crowded the pitches I heard about the old glory, about the buildings that used to stand and the classy stores that were just as good, relatively, as the white folks had, the programs black folks used to work for that used to help so many. People insisted that if I wrote those things, the world could really know what had taken place in L.A., and maybe then they’d see the light and turn toward it, and we could all turn for home. I was very doubtful about that, but I was open to stories. I had been partial to stories since I was a little girl and devoured fables and Greek myths and picture books and fairy tales; the stories I wrote now for newspapers about ordinary people loomed as large to me as tales about gods and monsters, because they were characters trying in their modest ways to bend brutal cosmic forces to serve their own vision of goodness, or a vision of something else. I made heroes or antiheroes out of everyone, and every remembrance about the fallen kingdom of black glory was a clean page on which to write another chapter of a great, tragic-­ leaning narrative I thought of as a black American version of the Mahabharata. It was our history extending infinitely into space—how we came, and were...

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