PORTFOLIO ONE:
MOSSWOOD
Walking to the bus stop, Telegraph Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street, 2007.
Telegraph Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street
This neighborhood was pretty solidly Black. Lois and I grew up two blocks farther down. But we were up here all the time, we used to hit the plum trees up there. The hospitals were there, but they were much smaller. If you look at this neighborhood, it was a lot more prosperous commercially because there were houses in here under the freeway.
There were people here. . . . I would babysit for all the kids here, just as they would babysit for me. . . . Lois has her dad's complexion and looks, and her dad was a redcap—you know, the redcaps were the porters. I can never forget, Jack would be coming home from work with that uniform on, and I'd say I always wanted to [be like him]—and he'd say, “No, no, boy, you don't want to do this kind of work! This is the same kind of work your great uncle did.” My great uncle Frank was a Pullman porter, too, but he worked out of Chicago and LA for the SP [Southern Pacific]. Uncle Frank got a master's degree from the University of Chicago in 1921. Where the hell was he going to work? No one was going to hire him. But this was why you had this degree of progressivism among these Pullman porters, because so many of them were so much better educated than the people that were actually on the train.
What we saw on this block was not the kind of blight that you see now . . . but people going to work every day. Black men going to work every day.
