Clinging to Dream’s Frayed Edges

When Brinson and Rose Kelly headed west from Mississippi in the 1970s, Los Angeles offered a poor black man a decent wage making cars, airplanes and steel. The Kellys settled, like so many thousands before them, in the streets around Central Avenue.

Some 15 years later, they bought a three-bedroom home on 112th Street in a quiet enclave between Imperial Highway and the Union Pacific railroad tracks. Brinson Kelly, who as a boy picked cotton for $2 a day, owned a demolition and hauling business that was taking off. And while he never learned much reading and writing in Mississippi, in Los Angeles he sent three of his four children to college.

The Kellys were a confirmation of the American dream.

Until they realized one day that the dream had packed up and gone elsewhere.

The neighborhood got worse, not better. Frustrated at the discarded furniture, the potholes and the police searchlights, the Kellys last year moved a few miles east and south, across the Orange County line, to a ranch home on a cul-de-sac in Buena Park.

“I never had a problem living in South-Central. It’s just the city doesn’t take care of the streets like they’re supposed to,” said Rose Kelly, 48. “If I call somebody out here [in Buena Park] about something, all I have to do is call them one time, and they’re going to come out and see about it.”

Their eldest daughter, DeShawn Kelly-Smith, 31, went farther. After looking for an affordable home in all the places where the middle class used to move, she and her husband, Danny Smith, who together make about $80,000 a year, wound up in Riverside.

California, which for decades was a top attractor of blacks from the South, is now one of the top sending states of a reverse migration -- back to the South and to cities like Las Vegas.

The black exodus from the state as a whole has been well documented. Less observed, however, has been the shift within Southern California as blacks from the city flee to the fringes in an effort to hang onto the gains their parents earned.

Los Angeles County’s black population declined about 6% from 1990 to 2000, while the black population rose by 53% in Riverside County, and by 34% in San Bernardino County, according to census figures.

The bulk of Los Angeles’ exodus came from Compton, where the black population dropped 24%; Pasadena, with a 20% decline; and the city of Los Angeles, with a 13% decline. On the northern edge of Los Angeles County, meanwhile, Palmdale’s black population more than tripled while the black population in Lancaster more than doubled.

Many of those moving out of the city may be as pleased to flee to the suburbs as were many white city dwellers in past decades. But Kelly-Smith is not one of them.

“I would have taken a house in the ‘hood, without a question, because I feel like it never did anything to me,” she said. “If anything, it made me a stronger person.”

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The map of Kelly-Smith’s search for a home looks like a page torn from an outdated atlas of Southern California’s blue-collar geography: “Torrance, Norwalk, Downey, Bellflower, Lakewood -- it was difficult,” she said.

We looked at La Puente, Pomona every day, three or four houses, and just nothing panning out.”

Where three decades ago a family earning less than the median income could afford a median-priced house, in neighborhood after neighborhood Kelly-Smith and her husband were unable to find a suitable quarter-million-dollar house.

“The middle class,” Kelly-Smith said with a sigh, “is disappearing every day. I think it’s getting to the point where you are going to be rich or you’re going to be poor. Either-or.”

The move away from the central city brings more affordable housing and safer streets, but imposes costs of its own. Kelly-Smith, who works in the Inglewood school district, and Smith, a security officer for Boeing in El Segundo, spend more time in their cars every day than with each other.

This summer, Kelly-Smith attended evening classes on Tuesdays and Thursdays at Cal State Dominguez Hills as she worked to earn a teaching credential and a master’s degree in mathematics.

There’s no time to drive back to Riverside after work, so she naps in her SUV until classes begin. She gets home about 10 p.m.

“I set my clock for 5, but I don’t usually get out of bed until 5:45,” she said. “And it’s brush your teeth, comb your hair and out the door. Six o’clock, no later than 6:15, or I can hang it up.”

Unable to afford part-time day care, Kelly-Smith left her 9-year-old daughter, Rose, with the elder Rose Kelly in Buena Park for most of the summer school break. Rose attends school in Inglewood, where her mother works.

“My mom is still not pleased with that,” Kelly-Smith said. “I tell her, households these days, they need two incomes.”

When Inglewood schools are in session, Rose dozes in the passenger seat as her mother negotiates the Pomona Freeway to the San Gabriel River Freeway to the Century Freeway into Inglewood, dropping her at school. Barring incidents, the trip takes about an hour and a half.

Kelly-Smith leaves the telephone in bed with her 11-year-old son, Isaiah, who attends school in Riverside. At 7 a.m., she calls to wake him for school. “That’s what I have to do,” she said.

“Stress keeps me and Danny bickering,” Kelly-Smith said. “If I can live in the inner city, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

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The inner city of Kelly-Smith’s childhood was never very prosperous. But it seemed to her it had more endurance, like the names two generations of Kellys scratched in a patch of concrete on the driveway: Brinson. Rose. DeShawn. Ola. Mac. Tracy.

And the old neighborhood remains the center for much of the family’s life. Two of Brinson and Rose Kelly’s children hang on in the childhood home on 112th Street, raising their own families, wondering when, how and if they will be able to afford a place of their own.

A few blocks away, the Family of Prayer and Praise church on Main Street still meets in an old storefront near an auto-parts store and still prays for a new building on a street where every building has had a former life.

Full-throated gospel pours out its doors, mingling with the Mexican tunes from the El Pariente seafood stand a block away.

The Kellys reunite at the church every week. Rose Kelly leaps up to jog joyfully around the room with other parishioners. Kelly-Smith clutches the younger Rose while Isaiah visits with grandparents and aunt and cousins.

Parishioners sob and collapse on the floor, casting off a week of troubles. It is a small slice of Southern Pentecostal tradition repeated block by block in South Los Angeles.

Suburban life, by contrast, withers Kelly-Smith.

Just home from her job as a science assistant in the Inglewood school district, she hurries from cupboard to counter in her kitchen, snatching king-sized spice and condiment jars to mix up a two-day supply of baked beans, potatoes au gratin, peach cobbler and barbecued beef. The recipes come from Mississippi, handed down through her mother. So does the discipline Kelly-Smith enforces on her son.

“Isaiah, where are you? What are you supposed to be doing? Get a broom and sweep in here, like you’re supposed to.

“Isaiah, honey, I hope you’re folding those clothes. And I’m sure the clothes in the washer are done. Can you go put them in the dryer?”

Smith cares for Isaiah when his schedule permits, but the couple must rely on a neighborhood sitter a few hours a week.

Don’t get her wrong. Kelly-Smith is glad to have gotten this far. Brinson Kelly, 49, picked cotton most of his youth. His grandfather would read the sky in the morning and, if it didn’t look like cotton weather, Brinson would go to school. Otherwise, it was the fields, where he got $2 per 100 pounds picked, or $2 a day, whichever came first. Brinson couldn’t pick 100 pounds a day until he was 13.

On average, it rains about 55 inches a year around Jackson, Miss. That’s three times what Los Angeles gets, but not enough for Brinson Kelly to have learned to read and write. He was through with school by the sixth grade.

Kelly-Smith keeps the lights off when they’re not being used, as if she can still hear her father’s admonishments about thrift.

Tall, with world-weary eyes and a soft voice, Kelly-Smith shows the scars of the streets. On her left arm, a tattoo proclaims, “In Memory of Adan.”

Adan Rios, her high school sweetheart and father of both her children, was gunned down by gang members in a South Los Angeles restaurant in 1996.

“They wanted to know why he was hanging out with black guys, and his answer wasn’t good enough,” she said. “They actually left and just came back and shot him. Shot the whole place up. They got him in his aorta. And that was his last breath.”

Violence had touched the Kelly family before. A generation earlier, Rose Kelly was 13 years old, fresh from Mississippi, when armed robbers burst into the family home on 116th Street in Los Angeles. They shot her father. She could hear them shouting at him to get up after two shots. He was a big man, and it took five shots to kill him. Her sister panicked and ran and the robbers fled. The murder chased everyone -- aunts, uncles, cousins -- back to Mississippi.

When Rose was 15, a second cousin was lynched in the Mississippi woods for dating a white woman, Rose said. Later, an uncle, taunted by a white man, got into a fight and had to sneak away in the night.

Rose married Brinson 10 days shy of her 16th birthday. She still refers to him as “Mr. Kelly.”

The Kellys had always reminded their children that poverty was a close companion. But Kelly-Smith was not ready for the hard times that came her way. Still reeling from the murder of Adan, she was diagnosed with Graves’ disease, a thyroid condition that left her continually exhausted. She had to quit work, quit school, swallow her pride and go on welfare.

“I could have gone back home, but I just felt like, I’m grown. Why should I be in my mom and dad’s place unless I really, really need something?” she said. “My mom raised us to be solid people and not be an extra burden on her.”

At the lowest point, Kelly-Smith and her two children shared a tiny two-room apartment.

When Kelly-Smith went back to work, she couldn’t afford day care. She took a long bus and train ride to drop her children at her parents’ home before retracing her steps to work. “But I made it,” she said.

After thyroid surgery, Kelly-Smith returned to college, finished her undergraduate degree and got a job at the Inglewood school district.

When she met and married Smith, who is white, he balked at settling in Watts or Compton but was willing to move anywhere else.

“We looked at fixer-uppers where they still wanted $265 [thousand],” Kelly-Smith said. “One that we looked at in Long Beach, it was gorgeous. It was at $240. We bid $250 and it sold for $310. How can you win in that market?”

That’s when they found Beverly Washington, a real estate agent in Rosewood who has become a specialist of sorts for the black middle-class exodus from Los Angeles.

Washington, 48, greets clients with a warm embrace and follows it with an equally personal pitch. Don’t even consider the Inland Empire unless you think about getting a job closer to your new home, she counsels.

Many, like Kelly-Smith, are too house-hungry to heed the advice. The couple had been looking for a year when they settled on a four-bedroom house in the Magnolia district of the city of Riverside. They closed on it this spring. It cost $270,000.

The Magnolia district has been a real discovery for Washington. Homes there are more spacious than anything the inner city of Los Angeles has to offer at the price.

“I have two or three more couples who want that same Thomas Guide grid,” Washington said.

“It’s like when the whites were moving out and going to Orange County in the 1970s. Now the blacks can’t find the houses they really need,” Washington said. “Most of the old generation have gone on, and the children are selling the house and moving on.”

Brinson and Rose Kelly had resisted moving until last year. They bought their home on 112th Street in the late 1980s and, despite nagging from Kelly-Smith, had refused to consider Inglewood, the Crenshaw district, Ladera Heights or Baldwin Hills when houses there were affordable. Those neighborhoods remain bulwarks of the black middle class, particularly second-generation professionals.

“I used to bug my parents to move,” Kelly-Smith said. “They had the money to move. They said, ‘No, we’re not going to turn our backs on the neighborhood. This is where we made everything and this is where we’re going to stay.’ ”

Soon, they may move even farther from the old neighborhood. The Kellys have bought a house on three acres in their native Canton, Miss., 22 miles from the state capital of Jackson. Rose’s mother has moved into the house.

When Rose’s mother passes on, the Kellys plan to return to the place where Brinson once picked cotton. They hope to live on the equity they have built up in Los Angeles. The Mississippi property cost them $60,000.

Kelly-Smith has similar dreams. She sees the day when she’ll have to center her life around Riverside and forget about the place where she grew up and her parents earned their way into the middle class. Maybe she’ll find a job closer to home, teaching high school math.

As soon as possible, she said, she and Smith will invest in some land.

“It won’t be in California, that’s for sure,” she said.

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Black migration

African Americans in search of a middle-class life are leaving Los Angeles and migrating to the fringes of the county, as well as to Riverside and San Bernardino counties.

Percent of black population change 1990-2000

*--* Cities Palmdale 286% Lancaster 163% Fontana 92% Moreno Valley 76% Hawthorne 37% San Bernardino 15% Riverside 8% Inglewood -6% Los Angeles -13% Pasadena -20% Compton -24% Counties Riverside 53% San Bernardino 34% Los Angeles -6%

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Source: Census Bureau