One Coyote

Between 1985 and 1990, 61,773 Black Angelenos left Los Angeles County. Most resettled in the Inland Empire.

My family moved to a quiet cul-de-sac in the newly forming suburb East Highland. Our previous residence, in Rialto, had been transitional, nice in some ways, not in others. My father was from West Side Chicago, while my mother had worked her way up from a hard childhood in the sticks of the Central Valley, so this real-deal Southern California suburb studded with palm trees in the shadow of snowcapped mountains, East Highland, was heaven without qualification. The two other Black families whose homes sat next to ours had similar success stories. The Johnson family was headed by husband-and-wife postal workers, while the Smith family was led by a mother who ran care homes for the mentally disabled and a father who cut heads. It was 1990 when we got there, and I was nine, a year younger than Pat and Royal, the sons of the Johnson and Smith families, respectively. (Note: Characters’ names in this essay are pseudonyms to protect their privacy.)

The three of us cliqued up quickly, became basketball buddies and fast friends, even if I, small and slender and shy, was more of a younger brother and a follower to Pat and Royal than their full-fledged peer. I remember the July day that Pat went wandering in the desert beyond the housing tract, where packs of coyotes called out to one another at night. There, by daylight, he found