Your Golden Sun Still Shines by Denise Sullivan

Author:Denise Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Manic D Press, Inc.

Gold Underneath the Street

Lynell George

For months now, I’ve been at the time-bending task of emptying out my family home, breaking down history as if it were a set.

It’s my childhood home, not the first, but the one we inhabited the longest. Moving through rooms, closets, and overstuffed drawers, I’ve unearthed all manner of lost treasures: pocket watches, maps, deeds to homes long razed. This house, I realize, became a nest–not just ours–but one made up of artifacts of generations of family members: Bibles and Sunday hats, old wallets still filled with gasoline “Charg-a-Plates” and oxidized pocket change, a cache of antique cameras still spooled with film, and a river of photographs documenting their journey west.

A few weeks back, making my way through the old kitchen, I put my hand in the dark recesses of a cabinet stacked with crystal water goblets, luncheon plates, and not one but two ornate turkey platters to find the most fragile porcelain teacup and saucer–once white with scalloped edges, a hand-painted small cluster of oranges at center. Beneath the fruit, in plainspoken yet fine brushstrokes, un-scroll the letters C-A-L-I-F-O-R-N-I-A. Whose tiny cup was this? My grandmother’s? My great aunt’s? My mother’s? Who purchased this souvenir? Who thought to save it? To protect it? I wondered. How had it survived so long, so dusty and delicate?

Loved ones brought home souvenirs like this almost translucent cup, to place on their shelves among their finest. To think that this memento perhaps made two journeys, from here to home and then here again. Was it a memento or a goal–or both?

Strange, it now seems in reflection, but my first understanding of California–the California of my mind–the one summoned most vividly in words, music, or visual artifacts–was the product of those who arrived from elsewhere. My African American forebears were pulled to this place by a myriad of desires–opportunity, weather, freedom, peace of mind. I lived in their myth. My maternal great aunt landed in Los Angeles to follow her Pullman Porter husband; her brother, my Uncle Harvey, also a Pullman man, headed north, to the Bay, dreaming of a quality of prosperity that eluded him in the South. My personal narrative of–and connection to–place begins with those circumstances that brought my family here; the inspiration–or kindling–was the California of their imagination.

I am a deeply-rooted Angeleno but I was pulled to San Francisco by my first glimpses. Those early impressionistic snapshots of the Bay came from visits to relatives’ homes or our family-foursome’s up-the-coast road trips. They also came from TV and books. Again, often an outsider’s perspective–either a Quinn Martin police procedural of the ’70s (The Streets of San Francisco) and, of course, much later the Beat Generation’s rhapsodizing. The voices of Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gregory Corso spun around my head–these bards of the new California, all transplants, too.

I was very late to Kerouac. By high school, I’d meandered through On the Road and stalled... twice. But I’d been swept up by The Subterraneans (for

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