Some people come from greatness and mistake it for something else. If you are a baby boy named Henry Edward Huntington, born in Oneonta, for instance, a mere village in Otsego County, in Central New York, in the year 1850, you are unaware that your people come from what some people called good stock. When America was revolutionizing, your people were there. After America put its foot down, drew a line in the sand, demanded its freedom, your people were there, at Yale, in courthouses overseeing justice, at Harvard, your people were there. Two of your people were there, in the Continental Congress. Benjamin Huntington at first. And then another. Samuel Huntington. Chief justice of the Supreme Court of Connecticut. Governor of Connecticut. But before that, another Huntington. Waiting for that attention hog, John Hancock, to hurry up and sign his name, waiting for the ink to dry on that overcompensating, shout-my-name-in-the-streets signature, in 1776, so he, Samuel Huntington, could sign his name so modestly you can hardly see it, it’s so camouflaged, surrounded by the sweeping tails and curlicues and figure-eight flourishes of alphabets that spell the name of men who mean to say for those who don’t know: We were here. We. Were. Here. This is our declaration.

But Samuel. You have to look very hard to see him, he who signed his name Sam, not even Samuel, but Sam, just a regular Joe you would think an okay guy who’s not too big for his britches, no, not him or that other Sam, Sam Adams. They’re just two Sams, the kind of guys who might pour you an ale or two.

Sam Huntington, he did all that in his sixty-five years, and then he was gone. No college education, even. But who needs an education when the promise of life, for you, a Huntington, for you, a Hancock, for you, an Adams, is like standing in front of a gate, the chains cut and the obstructions thrown open to see infinity?

If you are Henry Edwards Huntington, staring through those gates thrown wide open, it’s scary, all that modesty, humility, and power. How to figure out his life? What a tough road ahead.

In the meantime, he loves stories. Imagination. He has one, undervalued as they are. He loves stories so much that he collects books that tell stories in the form of history and fiction and poetry. He loves books and art and botanicals so much that one day he will collect them and give them to his city, his savior, Los Angeles. Countless books, so much art. He will acquire major pieces of art. One big coup is “The Blue Boy,” which pissed off the British. The London Daily Mirror egged him on. Who did he think he was? In 1916, some gossip columnist wrote, “I hear that Mr. H. E. Huntington, famous American millionaire, has the finest collection of the English School of pictures in the world.” The columnist continued, winding up her middle finger, “He has not got the Duke of Westminster’s great Gainsborough, “The Blue Boy,” though the Duke has refused an offer of eighty thousand pounds. I hope,” the columnist said, sticking out her tongue, “that picture will never leave England.”

Yeah. Well. Guess who was broke in 1921? The Duke took Huntington’s six hundred thousand dollars like a man counting cash at the racetrack trying to make it to payday. He even threw in another Gainsborough and a Reynolds to sweeten the deal. England was so over Huntington, the greedy American. The National Gallery in London showed the painting for weeks before it was to be absconded with by a mogul. “Good-Bye to the Blue Boy” the papers said. “The Lost Masterpiece,” they cried, and they blew kisses to their boy, who was going to be in some library in what one paper called “the land of freaks and freedom.” This is what Huntington gives to the city. Stories and art. He changes Southern California, expands it, brings big business, opens it up, so Angelinos can get to entirely other worlds in their own city and state. Just pick a train track. Still, in 1921, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner understood the big deal about a story. The material benefits are cool, the paper says, and trains. We wouldn’t be anywhere without trains, but compared to a library? Not even close. The paper called the Huntington Library a “mass of books.” The paper said that, “from its mass of books will be created new thoughts, new knowledge, and thought as the one imperishable, ever productive effort of mankind.”

One thing about libraries, though, is that even they can’t contain all the stories, and Huntington, himself, only collected books “of interest to him.”

The man who loved stories is usually the story of Los Angeles. Those Mulhollands, those Chandlers, those Dohenys. They are always the story.

But before this, before he is Huntington Beach, Huntington Library, Mr. Pacific Electric, overseeing the tracks being laid into the ground like steel veins that will pump the people in and around and throughout the city, he was lost. What to do with his life? What to do? He was, what we call now, a screwup, the way his uncle Collis saw it. A more generous way of putting it is that it took him a few tries and help from his father Solon and his uncle Collis, who supplied the dough, gave him jobs, even handed him a logging business to oversee, which he screwed up. He tried. He really did, and sometimes he succeeded. In West Virginia, he bragged about his successes in a letter home to Mom, blowing on his fingernails and buffing them on his lapels. “We had a flood on the Coal River,” he wrote. “I had most excellent luck with my timber, as I had six or seven thousand dollars worth of timber in the river, and did not lose a single log!”

He did what so many before and after him did: make himself, his name, his story, way out West, in California.

But sometimes, guys like that, they think they hit a triple when they were born on third base. When Uncle Collis takes the training wheels off and gives him half an interest in the company and the other half is bought by Collis’s chief resident lobbyist in Washington for his kid, another third-baser named Franchot, boy did they make a mess. These kids didn’t know what they were doing. Huntington kept hitting Collis up for loans, until Collis finally held up his palm and shook his head with finality. That other rich kid, Franchot, who liked a sip now and then, was embarrassed that he had to sell his Wells Fargo stock so they could stay afloat. Well, the elder Franchot and Collis had had enough. Pulled the plug. Franchot, Civil War General Franchot, before he was a Washington lobbyist with money floating out of his pockets as he walked down the street, told Collis he was through with the young knuckleheads. “All of this is mortifying to me and annoys me,” he said. “I think it is a piece of boys play. Nonsensical and simply shows that they are not equal to the business. I am disgusted with such damned foolishness. I think they should both be spanked into manly habits.”

But to be fair, a lot of this is on General Franchot and Uncle Collis. Years before this, Huntington wanted to take a job—any job—and his uncle told him to wait. “But I found a job,” Huntington said, anxious to get started with his life. He was a porter, moving heavy stuff all around the place, doing hard labor like somebody who had no choice. Uncle Collis was not amused. Huntington was proud of his three bucks a week and thought he could get even more “on account of having the good will of Uncle Collis.” But Uncle Collis, one of the four big men who they say built the Southern Pacific Railroad, had an idea about what the Huntingtons were worth. Those three dollars a week? Those three dollars weren’t worth the paper they were printed on. “It would be better,” Collis said, “to accept no salary at all than to take three dollars a week.” To have a Huntington work for free was to make a point. The point of working for free was a declaration: We don’t have to work. Three dollars is beneath us. If we own everything, can be anything, can do anything, that three dollars? It’s already yours. Don’t be a dummy. Think like a tycoon.

So, how is it Huntington’s fault that he and the Franchot kid didn’t know what they were doing?

But he’s got a cushion. That cushion buys time. He learns. He makes his own money, gets the hang of things, Huntington. But California calls him, makes him truly the man his uncle always thought he could be. He had to leave New York and come west. Of course. He did what so many before and after him did: make himself, his name, his story, way out West, in California. Los Angeles, California, she opened her arms wide, rebirthed him, pulled him to her breast, and nourished him. He nestled against her and admitted to the world, after all was said and done, that he would be nothing without her.

In California, he is far from the boy in Oneonta, asking for a bit to tide him over. He’s the dude. In Santa Cruz, the newspaper is giddy about him. He’s got swag, they say, he’s got “that force and breadth of character we are pleased to designate, to be an invaluable acquisition to our commonwealth.” He’s an executive, a big man, working alongside his uncle, and later, in 1898, in what they called friendly competition with Uncle Collis’s Southern Pacific Railroad, Huntington lays it down and gives the city Red Cars on Sixth and Main Streets, coming out of a building he built, the largest building west of Chicago in 1905, the Huntington, it’s called at first, and later the Pacific Electric Building, Red Cars spilling out to take Los Angelinos all over the city, 24/7, outside the city to suburbs, to places like a beach by the name of Huntington, already. It was a wrap. California gave birth to Huntington, the stories go, and he, the stories go, gave birth to California. Sometimes the stories say he built the city, the railroads, and oftentimes the stories state, curiously and with strange passivity, facts like “train tracks were laid.” The rest, they tell us, again and again until we believe it, is history.

But when they say that he built buildings, we know that he didn’t roll up his sleeves and lay bricks right there, his trousers dusted up and ruined by concrete. So much of the story is missing. Who laid the tracks with their hands? Who built the buildings with their hands? Look to the newspapers, then, carrying on about the Chinese immigration, labor unions blaming them for taking jobs and lowering wages. That’s one of the oldest stories. A fairytale that gets told a lot. It’s an oldie but a goodie. Huntington said it though, somewhere, if you look for it. “I couldn’t have built my railroad without them.”

Wait a minute. The newspapers were for news and all, but not that kind of news. There were facts that were more interesting. They loved Huntington for all he did for the state and the city, and for certain antics, like when Huntington takes his swag and friendly competition to the next level and marries Uncle Collis’s widow, his own aunt. The papers usually love the guy, but they mess with him about this, as if to say, We know this is California and all, where the rules are fast and loose, but come on. The papers say:

MARRIAGE MIXES UP RELATIONSHIP OF HUNTINGTON
He Becomes:
His Own Uncle.
Nephew of His Wife.
Brother-in-Law of His Mother-in-Law.
Great Uncle of His Own Children.

It’s a good laugh, the scandal of it all, but these papers seem to not know the half. American lineage is way more complicated than that. A nephew marrying his aunt? Amateur hour.

Here’s another story, a good one for a man like Huntington, who loved them so much, depending. Before tracks “were laid,” before Huntington was born, in 1848, Biddy Mason walked 1,700 miles west behind a 300-wagon caravan, all the way from Mississippi, stopping in Utah for three years or so, before finally setting foot in San Bernardino with her master and 150 wagons. Two years before Huntington was born, seventy-two years after his relative put his timid or humble signature on a document that declared it self-evident that all men were created equal, well, of course, the devil was in the details. All those important men in the room, with their signatures on paper, so much brilliance and vision—and blindness. Men. Biddy didn’t know it as she walked behind oxen, avoiding the piles they dropped, because for now, they were only on their way to Utah, but in California that one word, men, would open the gate that confused young Huntington, it was so gaping and yawning wide. Biddy, though, she would know exactly what to do once she came upon the unfathomable thing called choice.

First, though, she walked. She took her first step behind the wagon caravan, thinking about all the things she would have to do along the way. She would have to deliver all the babies that would be born, across the plains, in the desert. She would have to herd the oxen and cook the meals, set up and break down camp. Plus, she had her own little ones, all daughters, ten and four, and the new one, who had only been in the world for months and would not remember what it was like to be a slave. She would have to take care of them, but not as well as she would take care of all the others in the caravan. Master Smith had placed his hand on her shoulder, and it had felt too warm, as the sun was already a blaze in the dewy morning. He told her all the things she knew already. “You ready for this journey, Biddy? It will be a long one. See to it that you care for Mistress Smith above all.” Because he was called by God, because he believed in the Mormon Church, they were going west.

She took one step, and then another. Another, another. One thousand and seven hundred miles to go. Biddy kept walking because no such a thing as stopping existed. The creamy red soil of Mississippi coated the bottom of her shoes—when she wore them—and also covered the pads of her feet, when her shoes pained her enough to take them off and she just wanted to feel the ground beneath her. Stopping. The man who owned her wouldn’t allow it. So she walked and walked. In Arkansas, she brought life into the world, delivering one baby boy, the son of another new Mormon convert, a young woman of sixteen, who nearly died. When she wasn’t walking, and cooking, and herding oxen, she nursed that baby, her milk infusing his tiny body with proteins, fats, and vitamins that would be the beginning of him growing hard bones and muscle and heart, growing up to be a tall, strong man. But for now, newly born, his blue blind eyes looked into the face of Biddy, into something he would never be able to see for all of his life on earth. Biddy could not remember the last time that her own child, with pale skin and loose sandy curls like her sisters, the sisters that the slaves all thought were the picture of Master Smith, had drank her mother’s milk.

There was dying. She could lie down and die, die in the golden field of South Dakota, her fading brown eyes staring up at the sky, her substitute ocean for the one she had never seen, not the one her heart and memory told her about. That one, somehow, she had seen. Somewhere in the lives before her own she saw that ocean. And so she put one foot in front of the other, then the other, and another, for minutes and hours and days and weeks and months and years, until there was the very first step onto, and into, California.

The soil in California was not the same as the soil in Mississippi. In Mississippi, the soil stuck to Biddy and left its rusty hue on her skin even when she brushed it off. Clay. The soil was clay, and it clung to her toes as if it was trying to reshape the bones in her feet. But California’s soil was different. The dry soil in San Bernardino dusted Biddy’s skin lightly, like talcum powder. When she brushed if off, the soil left a hint of itself, but when she rubbed it into her arm, it disappeared, and Biddy could not tell whether she was looking at the earth or at her skin.

The caravan had disembarked. The settlers were getting out of their wagons and stretching their legs, their arms, their backs. The sun and wind had weathered the canvas cover of Master Smith’s wagon, and Biddy saw that she would have to patch it once they got settled. It had been a long, long journey. “We have made it, Biddy,” her Master Smith said. He took off his hat and wiped his brow with his wrist and smoothed his black hair back before putting his hat on again. He climbed down from the wagon and helped his wife down, scooping her up when she leaned her slight body out of the wagon. He placed her onto California gently, the first time her feet had ever touched the state.

Biddy said nothing. She stood, favoring her left foot, as her right foot had blisters on top of blisters, and something else wrong that Biddy could not figure. This right foot would not be able to hold her weight for the rest of her life. Her daughters stood on either side of her, the oldest holding the hand of her baby sister, who was prattling on and on telling them all a story about the future. That sister would have a daughter, who would have a daughter who would have a son who looked like his father. He and his family would be Los Angelinos, would call themselves white and be lost to their original mother forever. Now, though, Biddy shaded her eyes with her hands. The sun was insisting that it was much more spectacular than the ground on which they stood. She pointed to the San Gabriel Mountains with the other hand, watercolors of lavender and yellow and red. “Look,” Biddy said to her children. “Look at that. Ain’t that a picture.”

Those mountains were a sign. Walking through Oklahoma, Biddy had met two free black people, Charles and Elizabeth, and they told her: In California, nobody owns nobody. “When you get there?” Elizabeth had said, rubbing the nose of a caravan ox dripping with sweat, “be sure to find you somebody that knows what all he’s doing.” She had strange green eyes that sat in the dark brown velvet of her face like jewels on display in a case. And Elizabeth’s husband, Charles, had locked eyes with Biddy. “Listen what she telling you. There’s going to be some peoples that are going to know how to do what you need done.” He had pulled on his long beard and walked away with Elizabeth, never to be seen by Biddy again.

Brigham Young had warned Smith. In doing the Lord’s work, one had to be careful. “Do not take your slaves to California,” he had said. “Establish our Mormon community, but do it elsewhere.” Smith didn’t listen. Biddy was his property. She had been a gift. A wedding gift to Smith and his wife. How could California have any say in those facts?

Therefore, Biddy worked for free, for five more years, the only way she had ever worked for thirty-seven years.

Biddy’s daughter was in love, in 1856. A boy by the name of Owens was the man she wanted. That was the beginning of choices. He was free. His parents were free, and they were the kind of people who would tell the seventeen-year-old and her mother how to do what they needed done. These free black people in California, they were not afraid to walk into a courtroom and remind judges and courts and government of all things self-evident. When Biddy tried to explain to Smith that she would like to be free, was in fact already free, and that he was breaking the law, he packed up his three wagons and demanded that Biddy, her daughters, and all of his slaves get behind them. They would leave for Texas, where things made sense to him and where God would be waiting to deliver redemption to all Mormons.

So Biddy got behind the wagons. They got as far as Cajon Pass before a posse enforced the law. Because Biddy’s daughter was in love with a man who was free, he alerted the Sheriff of Los Angeles County, this strange place where black people could get white people into trouble. These cowboys and vaqueros who made up the posse were not the same as the overseers in Mississippi. They seemed to put ideas about a place above ideas about people. This was West, and whatever went on in some other place, in some other time, before Smith and his slaves got here, was over. In three days Judge Benjamin Hayes, sweating under a heavy black robe because of the desert heat, said it was so. One need only look at the constitution—California’s constitution—and one would not find the devil hiding and shifting shape behind, and in between, the black ink of the letters.

What does one do when one is a wedding gift in one lifetime, and in that lifetime never could have fathomed a life beyond that binding bridal ribbon? After thirty-seven years, Biddy knew as she walked out of the courthouse. She would work, and get paid to work, and every coin, every piece of paper that counted as money, she would save. She worked as a nurse. She worked as a midwife, her hands on hundreds of babies all over Los Angeles, catching them as they slid out of their mothers or pulling them out gently when they were undecided about this world. She got paid to deliver the babies, and she did not have to feed them with the milk of her body. She got paid, and no amount of money was too little. The money that she touched with her calloused hands was hard to let go of and so she didn’t spend it, because she had everything she wanted. Her body.

She got paid, and the money that passed through her fingers, money marked with the oil of her body and the traces of skin from the babies she delivered and the people she nursed and stroked on their way to the hereafter, that money went into Los Angeles. It took her ten years to save $250. With $250, she bought land, the woman who was once a wedding present, right in the middle of Downtown Los Angeles, on Spring Street. She became a businesswoman, an entrepreneur, gave to charities, built schools, fed and housed the people in her city. She visited prisoners, telling them that they were in prison, yes, but one fine day, they could find a way to be free. She founded an elementary school for black children and helped found a travelers-aid center for people who were traveling, those women and children who might get stranded, be taken advantage of, exploited. Most travelers-aid societies worried about white slavery, but Biddy had a feeling of being stranded in Mississippi, all the way to California, every step of those 1,700 miles.

In years and years, California will be so dry that people all over the country will know about it, shake their heads, and be glad they don’t live there. But then, when Biddy lived in Los Angeles, there were floods every spring, floods that destroyed dozens and dozens of people’s homes. What could a person do? They called what she did a word that Biddy didn’t know. They called it philanthropy. But back home, in Mississippi, Biddy and the other slaves called it taking care of your people.

She knew this: Some people in Los Angeles didn’t have homes. And they were hungry. One rainy day, boots caked with mud, the bottom of her skirt heavy with water, Biddy walks into a grocery on Fourth and Spring to do the only thing there is to do: She pays the man who owns the store to feed all the folks who need it.

She looks around the store, smells the sharp tangy cheese wrapped in cloth, stares at the cans neatly arranged on the shelf behind the storekeeper, tomatoes and corn and string beans and loganberries wrapped in brilliant colors like prizes.

“I don’t expect you to give away food,” Biddy says. The storekeeper, O’Malley, nods, just once, in punctuated agreement, and twists the red handlebar of his moustache. Everybody knows that Biddy is fair, but everybody also knows that saying no to Auntie Mason or Grandma Mason, as the people call her, is a powerfully difficult thing.

She would work, and get paid to work, and every coin, every piece of paper that counted as money, she would save.

On a balmy evening in 1872, Biddy dines with Pío de Jesús Pico, eighteen years her senior. He is first-generation Californio, a descendant of Los Pobladores, two of forty-four people who, in 1781, came to California and created El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula. Twenty-six of Los Pobladores have African ancestors, and Pío is the son of people who have Africa in their blood. Pío and Biddy, they have marveled at this in the past, the fact that they share the same mother, Africa, and that they could find themselves, so far from home, in the only other place that could possibly be their home. They dine at his lavish thirty-three-room hotel, Casa de Pico, on lamb and corn and rice with beans. They talk business under gaslit chandeliers, Biddy lounging comfortably on Pío’s carved rosewood furniture. Sometimes they speak in English and sometimes in Spanish, which Biddy has learned to speak fluently. This is what people will do, speak both, until El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula becomes Los Angeles, until Calle Principal becomes Main Street, until one day people won’t be able to understand the mockery of a bumptious idea called “English Only.”

Pío and Biddy, they discuss the news of the day, according to the newspaper, La Estrella de Los Angeles, which reports all things in Spanish and English, two pages for each. There are terrible things that the newspaper reports, such as every hanging and whipping of men who are lawless, and there is good news for Pío, which is that whiskey is fifty cents a quart, a manageable price to keep his hotel stocked and his guests pleased. Before this, he was governor of Mexican California, before it became the thirty-first state, when it was a mere territory and then a sovereignty. He will be a rich man, for a time, and then lose it all. But for now, he takes care not to drop a single morsel on his suit and tie.

“I hear, Biddy, that you are thinking of a church,” he says. The medals and decorations pinned to his suit jingle lightly as he cuts his lamb. He points his fork at her and winks, and Biddy is amazed, once again, how very small Los Angeles is. It is easy to know just about everything about everybody.

“Sí,” Biddy says. “Quiero comenzar una iglesia para la gente negra. Para la gente negra, pero cada uno será la bienvenida.” She wants the church badly, a church for black people, but wants to make sure that no one will stand at the threshold, afraid to put one foot in front of the other and walk in. She has made a fortune in California, not working for free, and now she is worth three hundred thousand dollars. But a church. With all the things she has done with her life, this is the thing she wants most now.

“Bien entonces,” Pío says. “Usted debería tener su iglesia. I’ll come,” he says. “I will be one of the first.” And both he and Biddy laugh, because Pío’s expensive tastes and extravagant life are not all he is known for. Pío likes his gambling, the people of Los Angeles say.

Biddy did not tell Pío that evening why she must erect a church. Someday, she decided, she would tell him, the whole story from beginning to end. It was difficult to say, though, in English or in Spanish, how she felt, living in Los Angeles. It came to her in flashes, the thing that was difficult to say. It came to her on her way to Pío’s. Walking down Main Street that gray day in 1871, the ground was soft from a light rain earlier, and her boots left her tracks in the road. A boy she had delivered ran right into her, nearly knocked the cake she was taking to Pío out of her arms. “Where you going, son?” she had said, holding onto his shoulder tight with her one free hand. He had stood up straight and still. “I’m sorry, Grandma Mason. I’m sorry, ma’am.”

“In such a hurry. Only me and you out here on the street, and you running into folks like somebody done got after you. Where you going, son?”

“Nowhere, ma’am,” the boy said, pulling on the collar of his shirt. “I just like to run.” She had delivered this boy not eight years ago. He almost didn’t make it. He was one of those babies that didn’t care if he was coming or going, either way. He was half in and half out of this world, and Biddy had to bribe him with the gentle touch of her hands, had to massage his chest. That was when he opened his mouth wide and told everybody he was there to stay.

“All right then,” Biddy said. She held his face in her hand. He was looking just like his father’s picture, Oscar De la Court, those same gold eyes and tight curls framing his face like lace. She let him go and watched him pick up where he left off, sprinting down Calle Principal for no reason except to do it.

This had made her think of church, to put words to the story she could not exactly tell. Something about a miracle. How was it possible that she was walking down the street, her own person, in her own place, with money enough, with the hands to bring a dying boy into the world, when just yesterday she was endlessly walking behind oxen? She didn’t know how to say what she felt, except what she felt was church. Some called it luck, some called it hard work, some called it greatness, but Biddy called it God. There is no way, she often thought, no way I did all of this by myself. The only explanation was God, so Biddy gave Los Angeles its First African Methodist Episcopal church in 1872, where she worshipped and talked about miracles until 1890, until she was gone.

For a very long time, people mourned the death of Biddy Mason. They missed her. They loved her. They did not know how Los Angeles could function without her. And all the people she touched in some way, her invisible handprint on their lives, they died or they lived and gave life to others, and years went by, inevitably, years and years, so the story of Biddy Mason and the people who knew it vanished, became invisible, like the air we breathe.

Times changed. El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula became Los Angeles, and then Los Angeles became L.A., when even Los Angeles was too much for some mouths. Los Pobladores started it all, and then other men got credit for making the city what it is, which is always hard to say, since Los Angeles is many things to many people. Huntington, his trains made Downtown Los Angeles a destination and, also, a place you can get away from, thank God. Go to the beach or someplace far away. But the cars. The cars come in, and nobody loves a car like a Los Angelino. Don’t touch their steering wheels. Out of their cold dead hands! So Huntington’s red train cars vanish. You can’t even see where the tracks used to be. It’s all covered up and gone. Downtown, being conquered and left behind like a pretty dame in a Raymond Chandler novel who gave it up too easily, becomes a ghost town, deserted, newspapers rolling and twisting down the street like the tumbleweeds that passed Biddy Mason as she walked through California.

And then, times change, once more. Downtown is revitalized. The early pioneers, they were broke like the early, early pioneers, who came to California in their wagons out of desperation or some kind of calling. Those early Downtowners were too broke for the Westside, and were even too broke for Silver Lake or Echo Park. Or maybe they weren’t broke. Maybe they were just that weird kind of people who like sidewalks and brick and skyline. But those second-wave pioneers. They gentrified with a vengeance, entitlement blazing like guns, driving their shiny BMWs with enough horse power to get them anywhere they want to go fast, wasted as that power is, since being stuck on the 110 or the 101, trying to get home during rush hour, that horsepower will only get them about a mile every half hour.

Your friend is one of them. She calls you and asks you to come down from Riverside. Hang out. Get out of the Inland Empire. “Get out of the I.E.,” she says. “Come hang.”

But you don’t know. “Driving into Downtown on a Friday night? From Riverside? It’s kind of a schlep. It’ll take forever if I don’t leave, like, hours before I need to. And the parking. Unbelievable.”

“You haven’t heard of the miracle of rapid transportation?” your friend says. “The train. Take the train.”

The sky, turning purple, fading to blue and then black, is lit like a carnival.

And so you do, you take the train all the way from Riverside, and then, when you get to Union Station, you take the Red Line to Downtown, to Pershing Square, which, to your untrained eye, is a straight-up freak show. When you emerge from the cave of the platform, the escalator taking you up and up into the shadowy daylight, the people make you nervous. Some are arguing with the air around them. Some are arguing with the sky. Some are slipping drugs into each other’s hands. A man with no teeth and no shirt and no shoes screams at you, “Just a quarter! Goddamn!” You have your earbuds in, so you pretend not to hear. You look around, for anybody that seems, well, not homeless. You walk as fast as you can to Pacific Electric Lofts and call your friend, tell her to hurry the hell up and meet you in the lobby, where you look at the black-and-white photos of the Red Cars, which you look at every time you come.

Your friend wants to take you to the latest place to eat. It’s so good, she says, you have to stand around and wait for a table. You roll your eyes, because you are not the kind of person who thinks that’s the litmus test for food worth eating. Food should not be something that anybody has to wait for. But you’re a visitor. She knows better than you.

It’s an Italian place, Maccheroni Republic, it’s called, on Spring, between Third and Fourth. After she hands you a bottle of water, one for her and one for you (How can it be 105 degrees in October?), the two of you start down Main Street, which you will never be able to imagine as a wide dirt road, near deserted, horses tied up on their posts. There’s just way too much going on for that. It’s rush hour, so the cars fill every lane in the one-way street, honking and idling with loud rumbles. And you have to be careful crossing the street on Sixth—if you don’t look over your left shoulder after the light turns green, some asshole will run you down. The pedestrian never, ever has the right of way, no matter what anybody says. Sure, the pedestrian can be right—dead right. “Not too long ago,” your friend says, “somebody got ran over on the corner of Olympic and Ninth.”

And you say, “I don’t know why you chose to live here.”

This time, you cross without a near-death experience. No guarantees about the next. Your friend has almost gotten hit, like, ten times, she says. Just walking, crossing on a green light. “They don’t even see me,” she says. “I’ve just been lucky, I swear.”

Walking down Main, it’s hard for you to tell potential danger from good-natured people having fun. Brothers on the corner in front of Hotel Leonide, in front of the Sanborn Hotel, play their music, some O’Jays, and say, “Right, right, how you all doin’ this evening?” “Hey, my lovely sistas!” another man shouts, the beer in his hand held high in the sky. But the next minute, somebody is being blessed out like it’s a sport. “Motherfucker, I know you better pay me, your damn ass. Not tonight, not tomorrow, but right now.” You take your cues from your friend, like a passenger on a plane watching a flight attendant during turbulence. If something’s about to pop off, she’ll let you know.

But the more you walk, the more you relax. The sun is going down, and in the distance you can see mountains, mountains that seem to end right on the corner of Main and Cesar Chavez, just past where Biddy and Pío had dinner one humid evening in 1871. You don’t know that. You are just taken with the picture in front of you. When you look down the street, the buildings on either side seem to form a long passageway, a corridor that leads you to sierra that looks as though it can be rolled away once the sun goes down, put away on the back lot of a movie set, and brought back to be spectacular, again, tomorrow. The sky, turning purple, fading to blue and then black, is lit like a carnival. The neon of the Rosslyn Lofts does that, red and yellow and blue and green lights shout ROSSLYN HOTEL, not looking classy, like it must have, back in 1914, but calling to mind, instead, a working girl wearing yellow shoes and blue eye shadow and a red dress with green sequins on top because she doesn’t know any better. The roof of the annex across the street would like to shout NEW MILLION DOLLAR HOTEL ROSSLYN, but that neon has not been lit for years. In 1914, a million dollars built the Rosslyn, the largest hotel on the Pacific Coast, and boy was it grand, beaux-art grand. There’s a neon heart, too, because the Heart brothers built it—had the money to build it—but you and your friend, you don’t really know about that. You just think it’s pretty damn cool to look at. As much as you’ll take Riverside over Downtown any day of the week, you have never even tried to pretend that that building, burned-out neon and all, was not the bomb. Pío would have agreed. He would die a poor man in 1894, would never live to see its 1914 opening, its 1,100 rooms, but he would have thought the building, in its day, most grand, a worthy competitor to his own Pico House. Biddy, a woman who was not show-offy, would have thought, perhaps, that the neon gilded the lily, but she would have approved that Los Angeles had tried, in some small way, to take care of its people by renting some of those rooms to folks with empty pockets.

You get to the corner of Main and Fifth. On your right is a place that used to be called Pete’s but is now called Ledlow and will be called something else five or ten or a hundred years from now. Your friend, she misses the old Pete’s. “It had style,” she says. “History. This new place, I’m sure it’s all right, but look at it.” She gestures and shakes her head, as if pointing to a scene of an accident. “It’s all white. White walls, white floors, white lights. I can’t go in there,” she says. “I just can’t. I’ll feel like I’m going to the gynecologist for a Pap smear.” To you, though, why even fight change? Nobody can do anything about it. Nothing stays the same. On some street, somewhere, is a building looking at its future, looking across the street at a parking lot, the ghost of a structure that was there for a hundred years before it was torn down.

On Spring, you make a left at a courtyard, Broadway Spring Center, a shortcut to the restaurant. You pass a Wells Fargo and a dry cleaner’s. You pass a concrete wall, some kind of art installation or something. Your friend pauses, but you say, “I’m starving. I am literally starving. Let’s go.” You blow past some other kind of sculpture, poles and what looks like pistons that are supposed to have water flowing out of them, but most of them are dry, look like they have been dry for years, and a few of them just have trickles of water halfheartedly crawling to the ground. You’re so hungry, but there’s a line, more like a crowd, at Maccheroni Republic. Half an hour wait, at least.

“Now what?” you say. Your friend shrugs. “Let’s go look at that wall.”

So you do. You walk back to it, stand in front of it, reading it silently. The wall tells you a story, going right to left, but you are reading it out of order. The wall tells you all kinds of things that nobody has ever told you. Stories you didn’t even know existed, stories like the pueblo of Los Angeles was established in 1781, that the first settlers, from Mexico, had African ancestors, that someone named Biddy Mason delivered hundreds of babies, that Biddy saved $250 and bought land, one of the first blacks to be able to, that she was a slave and then she wasn’t, that she walked all the way to California from Mississippi.

“No way,” you say. “That’s bogus that she walked here all the way from Mississippi. Who does that?”

“Nobody—now,” your friend says, “but she was a slave. I bet you walking from Mississippi was the least of it.”

“No way,” you say, shaking your head.

Your friend touches the wall, a piece of marble that replicates Biddy Mason’s court-ordered freedom. “What then? She caught a cab? Flew? Took a train? Even I know they didn’t start the railroad until 1863.”

“But that’s only because you live in that building you live in, that you know about trains. Nobody else knows that kind of crap.”

Your friend agrees with you, because she says nothing. You just stare at the wall, trying to read pictures of documents carved into stone.

There are fifteen more minutes before your names will be called. Your names. Who is going to know them? A man hobbles up to you dragging a big bag full of plastic. He holds out his dark brown hand, silent. He doesn’t even have to ask. Money. You both shake your head, but you give him your empty plastic bottles, since he’s collecting them.

Later, at the restaurant, you pull out your phones and pull up all kinds of facts, now that you know they are out there. Of course they have always been out there, these facts, these stories. You have just never quite thought about them. The artist is named on Wikipedia; somebody named Sheila Levrant de Bretteville has blown your mind. You and your friend, you read each other facts about Biddy, about Los Pobladores, and you will never think of Los Angeles in the same way again.

On the train back to Riverside, you will even think about the man with the bag full of plastic, for some reason. All the people like him on the streets. Why don’t they do something? But that question is too big. So you ask yourself another question. The question is this: Who is he, the man with a bag full of plastic? You wonder. Where did he come from? How do you get to be a man dragging a bag of plastic around? Some stories you will never be able to find in all the libraries of the world put together. This man’s story, it’s just not going to be there. He doesn’t have the money to put his name on a building or a stretch of beach.

But it’s no less a miracle, what nobody knows about him, what you will never know, and it’s no less true: He is the son of the son of the son of the son of a man who knew Biddy Mason. It’s true. He is the son of the son of the son of son of a man who worked for free, just like Biddy. For free, that original son built America with his bare hands and with his knees in the dirt so other men could have money to build buildings and hire other people to lay train tracks. Biddy stood right where that man with the plastic bag was standing when you and your friend left him. She was wearing white gloves, and her dress was fine, and she was on her way home to take that finery off.

She had been called, yet again, to deliver you into your future.