CITY SMART: How to thrive in the urban environment of Southern California. : Gallery Houses Spirits of Ancestors

We were attracted by what turned out to be a formidable test of wills. Brian Breye and his West African opponent take each other on with sarcasm, hyperbole, passionate appeals, ridicule.

The West African, a college student from Mali, had come to Breye’s Museum in Black on Degnan Boulevard with a station wagon laden with finely crafted African masks and other sculpture.

Breye, a combination salesman, showman and cultural historian, appeared to be distracted by an attractive passing woman. She became a prop in his performance: “Excuse me, sweetheart, but do you have any food stamps you might let me have? I haven’t eaten in three days.”

The West African student shows a gaping hole in the sole of his shoe.

Breye turns his pockets inside out, asking, “What can I get for this lint?” The student left and didn’t return for several hours when he and Breye struck a deal.

“They come from a bartering culture,” Breye explains, recalling the exchange. “You have to know what a piece is, what to pay for it.”

Breye has stopped telling his age, admitting only to being closer to 60 than 50. He has spent much of his adult life learning about African art and what to pay for it.

I and thousands like me have been seduced by his dazzling array of African masks, sculpture, jewelry, kente cloth, cowrie shells, costumes.

I once took writer Iyanla Vanzant there, and she left shuddering, saying it is filled with powerful “spirits of the ancestors.”

And much of their pain. Two glass cases hold a sobering collection of rusting slave shackles.

His shop is a gathering place, a village square in Leimert Park where I have met visitors from all over the country who come to explore the galleries and gift shops, listen to jazz, peruse vintage records.

His passion for collecting Africana and African American memorabilia are legendary, and I can’t count the hours I’ve spent in his back room with its collection of historic and contemporary black books, stunning photos of lynchings, Jim Crow signs and old containers for products such as “Niggerhead” tobacco and “Pickaninny Freeze” ice cream.

Breye has survived good times and bad on Degnan for nine years. The jazz continues on Degnan at the World Stage and 5th Street Dick’s, but the California economy has put a big dent in business.

Says Breye: “People don’t have to eat art.”