All must die. When my grandfather died, in the fall of last year, at the age of ninety-four, I realized for the first time just how much he shaped my understanding of America, and even more so of California—with its promise of sunshine, beautiful people, dashed origins and rebirth from their ashes. My grandfather was as much a product of the state he hailed from, Louisiana, as he was the state where he found refuge, California.

He was born during a flood. He learned carpentry as a young boy, because how else could his family live way out there in the woods as three generations of free black people unless they knew how to build their own homes? From his people he learned to avoid snakes, dark water, and empty roads. As a young man, he watched two of his uncles ride off into the woods, never to be seen again. And when it seemed like it was his time to go the way of the ghost—as so many black boys do, despite having been told to say yes, sir, and keep their dignity so low to the ground and small that almost nobody can see it—my grandfather fought back. He refused to obey the man who told him to jump from that bridge into the bayou, or else. He couldn’t swim, so my grandfather kicked that man’s ass and invented a third option: Los Angeles.

They used to say that the little LA (Louisiana) had a direct line to the big LA (Los Angeles). That sooner or later, if you wanted to dream big, live free, and watch the stars, you went west and left everything behind. So that is what he did: he left. He left his blind mother, his fiddle-playing father, his eleven siblings and their small island in the swamps, and went west. When my grandmother joined him in California and didn’t think she could raise their child out there, he let her leave, too. My grandfather wanted to be a man more than anything. To him, California was the only place where he could do that.

LA was a black Shangri-La—all Marcel waves, the art deco lights of the boulevards, Okeh race records, and limber legs kicking up from pretty dancers in the nightclubs along Rosecrans. In California, my grandfather encountered and experienced things he couldn’t have imagined. On a whim, one day he walked into a store and purchased his first suit. Years later, he purchased a nice car—a cream-colored Oldsmobile convertible. These were things that he had never done before, and in Louisiana they would have required a great deal of planning, if not subterfuge. If the South was about bondage, here we...