The Warmth of Other Suns (Week 4)

            After seeing the prairies of the Midwest, the rolling fields of tobacco and cotton in the South, the skyscrapers of New York City, and the imposing silhouettes of the Rocky Mountains in Wyoming and Colorado, I was ready to make my way back to California. I couldn’t quite face San Francisco yet. The fog, the neighborhoods I had grown up in, the people who would undoubtedly ask where I’d been and what I’d been up to and what’d I’d been doing hitchhiking around the whole godforsaken continent. Because I damn well wanted to, that’s why.

            I knew that I wanted to get back to California, though. The state just pulled me to it like no other. Some people loved New York. Some people loved the South. Hell, some people even loved the Dakotas. But I loved California. The West. The sweet smell of the Pacific that I could almost like off my chapped lips. The way the sun drifted in a large, luminous ball behind the hills. This was my home. Even if I had never spent more than a few days in Los Angeles here and there, I would make it my home.

            I came to L.A. with nothing so I got a room in this woman’s apartment. I lived in a space that didn’t feel much bigger than a cardboard box, and shared it with two other women. They were nice enough, but everyone wondered what a white woman was doing in the black area of town. I saw the way that people looked at me on the street. The way they wondered what someone with my color skin was doing in their neighborhood. At first, their stares confused me. I thought that once I got away from the South, things would be different. But now I was seeing color everywhere. Color in places where I hadn’t seen color before. Color where I didn’t think color should matter.

            I finally found a job at another diner, similar to the one I worked at up in San Francisco. It was in the white part of town, and my co-workers looked at me funny when I said where I lived. I went out with them sometimes, but mostly kept to myself. I tried to mute my ears to what people said, but pouring coffee and setting stacks of pancakes in front of customers often opened my ears to their thoughts. Thoughts I didn’t want to hear. Thoughts about black people living in the white area of town.

            I thought things wouldn’t be like this here. I thought geography separated the U.S. more. That once I crossed a border I wouldn’t see the “colored” and “white” signs. I guess it turns out that those signs were still here, they were just invisible.