Origins

I’m walking from my car to a cafe called Semi-Tropic, hefting a canvas bag weighing about 50 lbs. I’m meeting Arianne for tea in my Silverlake neighborhood. It’s our first time hanging out one on one, even though we’ve known each other for years. In a few hours’ time, we will have discovered that we are essential to each others’ spiritual healing, personal evolution and careers. Every subsequent cocktail, luncheon, or work session will be a spiritual summit. But we don’t know that yet. 

What I do know is that I’m bringing way too much stuff. This bag full of documents, postcards, letters and photos — all given to by my maternal grandmother Isabelle. I try my best to enter the cafe breezily and walk gracefully upright, even though the bag handles are cutting into my shoulder. The decor in Semi-Tropic is post-colonial rundown chic. Its patrons are mostly white hipsters. Ari and I sit at a dark wooden table, two curly heads of hair leaning in towards each other, and discuss the hidden history of Los Angeles. That of its Black and Mestizo founders, and its thriving communities of Black artists, writers, real estate agents and socialites of the early 20th Century, forgotten at large in this rapidly gentrifying brunch paradise. 

Ari is from a multigenerational Black Angeleno family. She has ancestry research superpowers. I’m really excited to have her help me figure out more about my lineage. I don’t know what I’m expecting from her today. I have this idea that I will spread all these artifacts out in front of her and she will nod in approval at the documents and show me where the gaps are, and tell me where I can go for more information. I’m hoping that she will somehow have the answer to my biggest question: “What do I do?”

I start flipping through pages, proudly giving her a rundown of what I have. But Ari is not paying attention to me. She’s transfixed by a few photographs that my grandmother has tucked into the inner pocket of a binder.