If I Should Die in California
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After an Odysseyian journey I am back home in Southern California. I was gone nearly 22 years.
I had vowed to never return. I remember my cousin, Fletcher, being bewildered by my desire to leave and never come back.
“What about your people?” he asked.
“What about ‘em?”, I replied.
“Don’t you want to be buried with your people?”
“Fletcher, I’m trying to live. I ain’t worried about dying,” I chuckled. “When I’m dead I won’t know where I’m buried anyway.”
“Oh,” he said softly while nodding slowly and looking away.
I had been thinking about that conversation for a year or two before I returned. During my wanderings I lost my mother, a brother, an uncle, an aunt, two close cousins, and many others of my kith and kin. All buried now in California soil. I had been AWOL for all of it. When I got home I reminded Fletcher of what he told me. I could, at last, understand.
Me, Mr. Blood and Soil, Mr. Ancestry, had been chasing the shadows of ideals on far away ground when my blood and my home were expiring. I was not there to provide a shoulder for the weeping, or a voice for the singing, or a back for the work. After 22 years of away games, when everyone back home had gone gray or gone home to the Lord, I returned. I carry the weight of my betrayal and stupidity.
I have noticed that the Latinization of California is nearly complete. I had met dozens of black ex-Californians in my wanderings but I didn’t know that nearly all of us had left. Black neighborhoods where I would go to visit cousins were now carpeted with signs and billboards in Spanish, Korean, or Sanskrit. It was my Charlton Heston pounding the sand at the end of Planet of the Apes moment. I was home but in a foreign land.
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