California Dreaming

            The greatest generation, that’s what they were called. Called from the ashes of economic ruin into the trenches of the second great war. Europe, somewhere only the elite could dream of going, somehow come true. But in true form, it was not a dream that was realized but a nightmare; a nightmare with tinges of a dream. For home was a nightmare as well. The South, 75 years after freedom, still a hard day’s work without penitence. Leaving a nightmare for a dream that had become a nightmare; only to return to that initial nightmare with a dream of a new dream. The life we lead.

            If I was to write a novel based on family lore I think the journey of my great great grandparents from Louisiana to California during WWII would be a really interesting novel to tell. First, I think that it would touch on one of the most basic of human faculties, our capacity for hope and to dream. The promise of jobs and escape from the Jim Crow south would an interesting exploration of human sentiment. What were the black sharecropping communities like at the onset of America’s involvement in WWII. What was their take on one of the truly defining moments of the 20^th century and a transformative moment in America’s history.

            Second, the journey. I’ve always found stories that take place on the road, an adventure, as particularly exciting. Maybe because they provide a definitive arch from the beginning. You have to leave where you are to get to where you want to go. Thus, you have your departure, your arrival, and the adventure in between. In a way its like Homer’s Odyssey, the same essential elements adopted to a more setting, with modern concerns, and modern characters.

            Finally, I think that it would provide a good historical snap shop of a period and place that have not been overdone. Oakland, California during WWII was really transformed and was a transformative place. You had an influx of vast numbers of migrants from the poor and rural South. Not only blacks, but whites, and Latinos as well. Thus you had an interesting interplay between the past formalized instances of Jim Crow to a new place without such institutions and the way in which the characters adopt and their lives play out in this setting.