I was not a bit happy about the prospect of a future in California.
That first afternoon we drove through Oakland was sunny – too sunny for my liking. A heat of light burned the sidewalk. There was no imposing residential monument of history to interest me and no orderly strips of red brick houses with dark-green hedges to match. In fact, brick must have been at a premium, because every house and building seemed to be made of stucco.
I’d only been out of the North once, when the Bivins family took me on a weekend jaunt to visit some of their relatives in North Carolina. The flat dullness of the small nameless Southern towns we drove through left me with the same depressed feeling that I had when I looked at Oakland for the first time.
There wasn’t one lawn or ranch-style house to be seen as we drove down Grove Street. It looked like an architectural free-for-all. No building seemed planted in the sidewalk with solid old East Coast permanence. Instead the ticky-tacky greyish boxes with storm windows looked as if they’d been thrown on the pavement and designed with less imagination than my first Lego attempts.
More sky than I’d ever noticed before hung down. It was barely the palest blue and was dipped in dry heat. The air seemed no cleaner than the sidewalk.
I wanted to cry and probably would have if I’d thought that it would do any good. But the truth was that I was there to stay. I knew my grandmother had had the right idea when she ground her heels in and refused to join us for the move west. I longed to be back there with her, lounging around in big-city civilization.
I also felt Ikey’s disappointment and could see it registering in the dull glaze of her eyes as she stared from the car window listening to her brother explain how she, Thelma, Pam and I could temporarily cope with a one-bedroom apartment above some shops at the corner of 55th and Grove. He wasn’t quite right. It wasn’t so temporary.
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