I truly believe that in losing the black community, San Francisco is losing its spirit, heart and soul. Spirit, heart and soul—do those qualities matter or count for anything anymore? In today’s city, those words seem to be analog relics to be collected in cold storage and looked at or revisited at the next theme party. It was the city’s black community that inspired and fused—through music, art, folk wisdom and struggle—a distinct San Francisco culture that was an attitude of resistance and respect—and we all became part of the black way of seeing and hearing and breathing—that black way of feeling that reaches into the most insensate parts of our being, until settling into the marrow of our bones and song of our spirits.
Perhaps that was the all of it, the black feeling that was in the air that became a part of us, through our pores and in the words we couldn’t say—words stuck down in the deepest parts of us that told the story of our people. And in the feeling of the black community and its music and heart and mama’s and daddies and aunts and uncles and extended aunts and uncles and in the recalling of stories of down home bellies filled with sadness and joy came the words of my uncle, the poet Al Robles who wrote of that feeling:
Sometimes my heart is black
And sometimes my heart is Filipino
And sometimes my heart is
Black and Filipino at the same time
The black feeling of the down home, the community, is what is dying in our city. One by one the down home places are getting pushed out; another elder evicted—another death of the spirit that reverberates through the bones of the people who still feel, whose senses haven’t been dulled in the digital, virtual, or just plain mindlessness.
And the feeling that was once here is being drained from the city like blood drained from a body that once held life. And all around us are those ready to converge on the bones and pick them clean until nothing is left. And the new places crop up whose air is sterile, whose fixtures and tables and windows contain no layer of dirt, grease, fingerprints—history. And on their walls you might see the faces of our people in black and white—jazz artists—Louie Armstrong, Miles Davis, Billie Holiday, various blues singers; and cultural icons like Che and Frida etc. Or you might see reproductions of our faces, and our children’s faces on murals on walls that are now barriers, symbols of gentrification. Our faces are reproduced in photographs and walls but not in skin.
And in the eyes of those images of us there is the feeling as the walls and spaces in our community become smaller. Those black and brown faces on the walls are now safe shadows in the backdrop of a new coffee shop advertising a new blend while people stare into their computers.
© 2014 Tony Robles