I moved across town to the edge of Los Angeles County, to Altadena. Later, when Rodney King’s near lynching set Los Angeles on fire, many black folk moved back to where their families originally came from - New Orleans, Atlanta, Houston. That’s when I felt myself turning inward, away from my neighborhood and even my family, because I had started my own family and had a baby girl to protect. When I came back from college to teach high school, rock cocaine had exploded and the corruption it generated reached us all. And I never forgot him - I even wrote a novel about him - but I didn’t want to be him. The way he lived, recklessly getting into trouble with a massive sense of joie de vivre, was a cautionary tale for me. But one of my friends, a big-hearted, overweight loser with a wicked sense of humor, was always on the verge of disaster. I had close friends who were athletes and broad-minded readers who were easy to hang with. The mid-’70s, before I left for college, was a great time to be a black teenager. UCSB was very white, but soon I had black roommates, dated black women and eventually married a black woman who had been the president of Alpha Phi Alpha sorority. I didn’t know white people my age until I went to college at UC Santa Barbara.
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