Home, where a dream survives

Alvin Dunn lives in a bright yellow house on East 112th Street and he sits on the front porch when the weather is fine. His lawn is neat and green, and there are two lines of rosebushes along the walk leading up to his front steps. Some of these have been here as long as he has, which is close to 60 years, and came from the same place he did, which is New Orleans. When they bloom, he says, those old roses are something to see.

Alvin Dunn is 92. He learned how to play the piano just six years ago, started taking Spanish classes around then too and was driving his 1986 Nissan up until last year when a cyst on his foot, which is just beginning to heal, laid him up. He lost his wife 14 years ago but his family still lives in the area. He has three grown sons, five grandchildren, four great-grandchildren and one great-great-grandson, but don’t press him on all the names of the grands and the greats, he says, because sometimes, why, they blur just a little.

He came to California because he had heard there was no segregation and much opportunity. “Now that is one thing that was told to me that was not true,” he says now. “But you know, life has a way of working itself out.”

He married the one girl he ever loved -- fell for her hard and sudden at a dance in New Orleans even though he had known her for years. He spent 37 years working as a chef-cook on the South Pacific Railroad, accident-free, according to a plaque on one dining room wall, although there was that time a scalding pot slopped over into his shoes and burned him pretty bad.

He was the first black man to buy a house on this stretch of 112th Street and, as the neighborhood grows increasingly Latino, he may well be the last to stay.

Nowadays, most people speak of South-Central Los Angeles with fear and anger, frustration and resignation. As if it is what it is and can never change. But Alvin Dunn has seen it change, once, twice, four times over. He has lived through two riots and many nights of gunfire, seen the blocks of his street go from all white to black to its current Latino majority, has watched Los Angeles grow from a downtown that didn’t impress a young man from New Orleans all that much to the second-largest city in the nation.

Over the years, Dunn’s three sons, who left the neighborhood years ago, have tried to get him to move in with them or at least nearer to them. “Every day,” Dunn says, clasping his hands together. His hands are long and graceful, the skin of the fingers worn soft and almost printless. “Every day they come in here and say, ‘Dad, you got to get out of here.’ ”

Sitting with Dunn, listening to his stories, you can peer through windows of words into certain places, certain years. It is a perilous pastime -- look up and the sun has slanted completely away and four hours are gone. Los Angeles is still explained best by the stories we tell one another, so it is a revelation to find someone with so many rooted in one place.

Alvin Dunn has done nothing more profound than live a fine and peaceable life in a society that went out of its way to make that difficult. But as you listen to him talk, many things become clear. His stories help explain why so many of us are here, in this particular city, how we came and why we stay, and why more people arrive every day.

“I look back on my life and I can’t believe the wonderful things that have happened to me,” he says and his wide-open smile makes it clear that this is true. He has a voice worth listening to, deep and glimmering like the sound of a cello, and an easy way of talking.

Dunn’s mother was a seamstress, one of the best in town, he says. She did work for everyone, from rich ladies to -- Dunn searches for a polite term -- “good-time houses.” Dunn tells stories the way a good seamstress sews, quick and steady, the voice like the needle moving with a plan of its own, the colors working themselves together until, like magic, the thing is done. “Now, sister,” he says, in answer to what seems a simple question, “that is a story for you.”

Gary, Dunn’s youngest son, laughs ruefully when told his father is a good talker. “I’ve been listening to those stories for 50 years now,” he says. Gary is a mechanical engineer and lives in Carson; he sees his dad several times a week, every week. “The thing is, I’ve never met a person who didn’t like my father. All my life my friends have adopted him. He’s never got a frown or a downturn attitude. People just like to be around him. Listening to him talk. “

In 1937, there was really no good reason for Alvin Dunn to leave his hometown of New Orleans and head out to Los Angeles, a city he had never even visited. Certainly, his mother did not think so; she wept at the train station, even as she handed him the lunch she hoped would get him partway through the two-day train ride. Weeping right along with her was Eugenia Knox, the young woman Dunn had been courting for almost four years. In a way, she was the reason the 21-year-old was leaving. He had known her for years, seen her at Mass every Sunday, but one night at a party a mutual friend “introduced” them and they began to dance.

“I had never felt that way about a girl before, you know,” Dunn says. “And so I knew I wanted to see her. I put on my best clothes and I went to see her daddy, and he told me she was too young to be seeing just one boy but if I was respectful and mindful of my elders, why, I could come visit. Pretty soon, I was over there every Sunday. Now, some boys could come by during the week, at night you know, but if you could visit on Sunday, that was saying something.”

His hands clasp and his eyes are triumphant, full of joy, as if it were just last year that this happened. In his face is the explanation for every love sonnet ever written, every romantic movie ever made. Seventy years gone and that young woman, that falling all in one night, is still a miracle to him.

After a few years, he and Eugenia knew they wanted to get married, but Dunn did not think he made enough money to keep a wife. He had quit school when he was 14 to help support his family; nothing, he says, gave him so much pain before or since. He kept going to night school, but he also got a job sweeping floors and running for lunches in a dentist’s office and over the years had learned to be a dental technician. Now, he didn’t know what to do. His parents were Creole, proud, close-knit, and New Orleans still clung to the old ways, a rigid system of race and class virtually inexplicable to the outsider. Dunn’s father was a carpenter, although he had worked at other things as well; his son did not see how he could rise much further than he already had.

So Alvin Dunn, a devout Catholic, began to pray.

“I would go to church every day and pray to the blessed mother,” he says. “And then one day I was sitting on this fireplug at the end of my lunch hour, just watching the people go by, you know, and a voice said, ‘You got to leave New Orleans.’ Just like that. Never mind that I’d never been anywhere else, just up to Baton Rouge.”

He had heard some folks talk about California once, about how there were jobs there and not so much prejudice. He decided he would go to Los Angeles, get a job with a dentist there, maybe become a dentist himself. He told no one of his plans; it took him awhile just to save enough money to buy a suitcase. When he brought it home, his mother took one look at him and asked, “Now, where do you think you’re going?”

Only his father, Dunn says, understood why he had to leave.

But on the train to L.A., he began to doubt his resolve. The other men in the colored car, the porters and cooks, all shook their heads at him; they asked if he knew anyone in California. He said no, he had the name of one black dentist and $7.50 in his pocket. That was all.

“I thought, ‘What have I done?’ ” he says. “I thought, ‘This is just crazy.’ ”

Then, on the second day, the train passed into El Paso, and when it pulled out, Dunn says, there was cheering and all the people around him stood up. The train had crossed the segregation line and now everyone could sit wherever they wanted.

After that, he says, he felt a little bit better.

It didn’t last long. Downtown L.A. was nothing like New Orleans, and the dentist he connected with told him point-blank that he would have to be licensed to work as a dental assistant. “So I called USC to find out what courses I would need,” he says, “and they told me how much it would cost and that was it. I knew that was it.”

He got a job as a handyman, which led to a job cooking in a boardinghouse, which led to running a kitchen in a hotel. His mother, he said, had taught all her children how to cook Creole-style. But he had always wanted to work on the railroad -- his father had been a Pullman porter for a time and that sounded like a good life to him. A friend set him up with a job on the South Pacific and he began making runs to Chicago, San Francisco, even New Orleans.

He married Eugenia and brought her out; she was soon pregnant and went back home to have their first son, Alvin Jr. After a few months, he brought her out again, and they found friends and began a life in California. It wasn’t always easy -- when he was working steady he was gone for days at a time. And for all its promise of greater freedom than the old South, Los Angeles was just as segregated as New Orleans. More so in some respects.

“At least in New Orleans people of all types lived near each other, worked with each other,” Dunn says. It was a white man who first showed him how to open a bank account, another white man who taught him dentistry, encouraged him to become a technician. L.A. in the 1940s and ‘50s, Dunn says, was much more divided by color. The new rules took some getting used to. But there was no money for visits to New Orleans or to bring family out to visit them.

When asked if he ever thought about leaving L.A. when he realized it wasn’t all he hoped, when it became clear that life was going to be hard here too, Dunn seems surprised.

“No,” he says. “I guess once I got here, any place else would have felt like backtracking.”

Which seems as good an explanation for Los Angeles as any.

Five years after Alvin Jr. was born, Everett came along. Two years after that, Gary. After six or seven years, the apartment they were living in was sold and they had 30 days to find another place. Dunn went to Watts to see if he could buy a house. The one he was looking at was already sold, but the agent said he had heard of another house over on 112th. “It wasn’t much to look at,” Dunn says. “But I needed a house.”

The owners, like everyone else on the street, were white and wouldn’t sell it to him. This was 1947; it would be another year before the U.S. Supreme Court would invalidate restrictive covenants. “But this real estate man, he said he’d buy it and sell it to me. Only I didn’t have a check on me. So this man wrote a check for the house, without even knowing me, really, and bought it. Then we went to the bank and I gave him the money, but what a thing for a man to do, you know?”

The neighbors were less kind. “Oh, they called us niggers and other names and made my wife so embarrassed,” Dunn says. “Though there were a few that were all right when they realized we were decent people. But as soon as we moved in, people started moving out.”

Within two years, he says, there wasn’t a white family on the street. But it was 1949, a time when the city’s black population was tripling, when African American servicemen with new savings accounts and new hope were coming to L.A. looking to buy homes. The neighborhood Gary remembers from his childhood and teen years was a nice blue-collar enclave in which most families had two parents, at least one of whom was working.

Dunn’s job was hard on the family. “He was gone a lot,” Gary says. “And it didn’t matter if it was Christmas or your birthday, the schedule ruled. That hurt a lot, I have to say. But, you know, this was the way my father fulfilled his responsibility to his family. Back then, if you had a good-paying job, you didn’t think about changing. You just kept on doing what you were doing.”

By the late 1950s, Dunn and his family watched their neighborhood begin to slide, into poverty, into violence. Low-income housing projects, especially the nearby Nickerson Gardens, brought in “a good supply of people who can give you trouble,” Gary says. Those families that could afford to left, went to Inglewood or Carson. Houses on Dunn’s street were empty or occupied by drug dealers, gang members. “Oh, it used to be terrible, terrible,” Dunn says. By 1965, unemployment in South-Central had risen to 10%, twice that of the rest of the city. Then came the Watts riots, and during the years that followed, things often seemed hopeless.

In one year, Dunn remembers, 21 people were shot on his street, two of them right in front of his house. “This neighborhood was just beat to death,” he says. “We had about 10 good years and then things got really bad. I put bars on the windows. My wife wanted to move. I would have liked to move, but we couldn’t afford to.”

For a few minutes, the smile leaves his face and his voice grows less certain. His hands clutch his arms as if he were cradling something and he shakes his head. “Yeah, I would have liked to have left then.” But after a moment or two his smile kicks in and he raises his head. “But things are better now. Why, why, they’re as good as they’ve ever been now. And it seems this is where we were supposed to be,” he says. “Really, growing up, I never thought I would even own a house, much less in California. In California,” he says and his voice rises, becomes for a moment young and full of imagining. “I still can’t believe it.”

Inside, Dunn’s house is a bit over-warm and arranged by need rather than aesthetics, as the homes of the very old and the very young often are. Books, many of them religious, are stacked on shelves and the dining room table. TV trays, burdened by medical supplies, prayer cards and pamphlets and more books, stand beside the two comfortable chairs in the living room.

An upright piano against one wall is covered with religious statues and framed photos of Dunn’s family, with honors awarded by Dunn’s local parish and the St. Vincent de Paul Society, a group dedicated to helping the poor. In the kitchen and the adjacent laundry room are shelves filled with bowls and pots and pans, speckled black by use; beside the stove are at least three kinds of hot sauce and all manner of spices. “The man can still cook,” Gary says, and Dunn’s middle son, Everett, comes by most nights to fix supper with his dad.

Now, Dunn says, there are good people living in the houses on his block, people who take care of their yards and lead quiet, peaceful lives, much as the neighbors did in the years after he and his family first moved in. Up and down the street, there are bars on every window and graffiti on many walls, but there are nice lawns and flower beds too. The daytime sounds are those of many neighborhoods -- the music-box song of an ice cream truck, children laughing in a backyard somewhere, even a rooster crowing. This city still makes promises it doesn’t always keep and it still doesn’t seem to matter. People come and they stay, one way or another.

Dunn says he has no intention of leaving this house. He has everything he needs right here and many reasons for staying. The one he gives first is plain and strong enough to stand on its own.

“This is the house I bought for my wife,” he says. “I built this house up myself, and it may not be a beautiful house, but it is my home.”