Perhaps I’ve never felt my Oaklandness more than when I went down to Watts for the first time. We were at a skating rink. I had gone down there with my football team to play an exhibition game against the LA Sheriffs pop warner team. We lost the game, but we still wanted to go roller skating. I was with my cousin who was also on the team. He was “playing too much.” He kept faking like he was going to steal money out of my pocket. He was already 12. I was still 11. It bothered me that he was so immature.
“Stop playing blood!” I demanded of him.
And the world stopped spinning. The music stopped playing. And some older boys of about 17 years of age started smirking. A woman who was there with her young child looked at us as if we were spirits. Incredulous. Afraid. Aghast.
“Are y’all bloods?”
“Naw.”
“Where y’all from?”
“We from Oakland.”
She shook her head.
“You can’t say that word around here.”
Her countenance was one of pure concern. Her voice shook. I can imagine she spoke to me in the same tone that Emmitt Till’s cousins used when they told him he can’t be whistling at no white ladies in Mississippi. I was only 11-years-old, but I remember being convinced that in the city of Los Angeles the idea of childhood must not exist for black boys. There seemed to be no age that was too young to not get seriously hurt for making an innocent mistake. The very concept of innocence felt painfully foreign in that moment. And before I could process my next move, the music started playing. People began skating again, and the 17-year-old boys went on about their business.
The next morning the bus drove us six hours north to Brookfield Recreational Center in East Oakland. I wouldn’t go back to L.A. for another 20 years.