Even as a native, I understood early, it serves as an incomplete response. Los Angeles-with its shifting landscape and quick-change acts-is never enough of an answer. It’s often, in my experience, a “Southern thing”: “Oakland by way of Beaumont” “San Bernardino by way of Knoxville.” But as time passes, and our favorite uncles and our first cousins become ancestors, I wonder how much longer we’ll be asking, and what it might mean to come from an ancestral elsewhere.įrom left to right: Souvenir bookmark luggage tag from the author’s mother’s train case memory souvenir book. It’s a way of locating and understanding something essential about who we are, who we’re connected to as Americans-and who we were and what that means in a far-flung place-out of context. Where it might seem a logical inquiry within a train station-a busy hub between here and there, I’ve had it happen in other locales-markets or car washes, the dry cleaners. I’m often asked versions of this same question by strangers, always other African Americans of a certain age. But as I slide into my seat on the Metro, the exchange cycles through again and again, like always, leaving me wondering how I’m marked and how it shows.
Yes, of course.” He says nothing more, moves on so that I may do the same. Without a beat, he lobs back: “Where’s your mama from?” I land on the latter: “Los Angeles,” I say.
I hold him in my gaze just long enough to assess the question: Rap? Ploy? Curiosity? In a broad-brimmed Panama hat, cream-colored slacks and shoes to match, he’s a vision of not just another place, but another era. Suddenly, out of the edges of my vision, a man crosses in front of me, planting himself directly in my path. Zigzagging through the crush of rush-hour commuters at L.A.’s Union Station, I’m hoping to make up for lost time.
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