In our household, beauty wore different names. This was back in 1995, when we lived on 58th Place, in the upstairs unit of an ash-white triplex in Ladera Heights, many miles south of the glamour and stock beauty of Hollywood Boulevard. The beauty in our home didn’t announce itself like it did in the movies I worshiped during countless weekend family trips to the Marina del Rey theater. There was no pageantry or grand exposition behind its reason for being. In our household, beauty just was.
Lately, I’ve been trying to find my way back to beauty. On the precipice of turning 40, somewhere halfway through this marathon of a life, I want to exhume what I feel I’ve abandoned and lost. I want to recall what’s been washed away by the pull of adulthood, what age and responsibility demand that we compromise, that we let go of. I again want to remember what’s worth finding.
So I reach back as a way forward.
Beauty was the configuration of my mother’s deliberate care. It was love baked into grilled cheeses and currents of laughter that swept through the house during unexpected moments of long quiet. Beauty was also coyly positioned, always in view of my and my brother’s drifting curiosities, like the framed print of “Jammin’ at the Savoy” by Romare Bearden that she hung just outside the kitchen’s entrance that I loved so much, that I sometimes wanted to live inside of, debonair and irreducibly cool like Bearden’s jazz men.
Many years later, in graduate school, when I first read “Sonny’s Blues,” a short story originally published in 1957 by James Baldwin about family and addiction, I would think back to this painting, in this house, and how its beauty halted me in my tracks, how it dared me to pause and consider my place in the wide world. “For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new,” Baldwin wrote, “it always must be heard. There isn’t any other tale to tell, it’s the only light we’ve got in all this darkness.”
The narrator of Baldwin’s story watches from the audience as his brother, a pianist, plays onstage. He’s moved by what he sees, the beauty of it all. Baldwin understood, as I later would. In a country that has never given Black people very much, beauty was our right. Not physical beauty — though we also had a right to that — but made beauty. Beauty built from and for love.
Personalized. Tender. Yours.
More often than not, beauty appeared in one very specific form. At least once a month, my mother would pull birds of paradise from the downstairs bush, arrange them like so, place them in a vase and position the flowers as a centerpiece in the living room atop our mahogany coffee table. At the time, I was obsessed with Marvel comics and action flicks like “Mortal Kombat” and “Batman Forever.” I didn’t know anything about flowers really, but I knew this one was badass, with its sword-sharp silhouette and inferno-orange coloring. This was how the bird of paradise first made itself known to me.
In most Black homes, the living room is off-limits save for special occasions. Ours was no exception. Through my eyes, this gave the flower a unique significance. I secretly loved how the flower craned skyward, never quick to diminish its presence, what I considered its sharp elegance. It was something to be cherished. In our household, it wasn’t just beautiful, it also gave our beauty meaning.
Today, the bird of paradise is one of the predominant flora across the city. It also wears many names — the African desert banana, the crane lily — but formally, it is known as Strelitzia reginae and is one of five species of Strelitzia. “They were widely planted in the early days of Los Angeles,” Philip Rundel, a UCLA professor emeritus in the department of ecology and evolutionary biology, says of how the plant arrived in California.
Originating in the KwaZulu-Natal provinces of South Africa, on the Eastern Cape, the bird of paradise found its way to the Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino sometime before 1932, when the institution’s record-keeping began, explains Kathy Musial, senior curator of living collections. By the next decade, Japanese flower farmers were growing them across the Southland; the species was able to survive on little water and stretched up to five feet tall. In 1952, as L.A. celebrated it 171st year, the bird of paradise was designated the official city flower by Mayor Fletcher Bowron, a Republican with a nasty appreciation for internment camps who would lose a bid for reelection that same year. (While state flowers are common, many cities also appoint a specific flower as a local insignia.)
Often, in spite of its spoiled political terrain, L.A., like the bird of paradise, found a way to sprout. It grows “slowly but steadily,” Rundel tells me.
There it is — occupying manicured lawns in View Park, lining the boulevards of Historic Filipinotown and Little Armenia. At Mahalo Flowers in Culver City and Century Flowers in Inglewood, the multiuse plant is ceremoniously styled in floral arrangements bought by customers. As regional emblems go, only the palm tree seems to rival the bird of paradise in popularity.
“It’s a very charismatic flower. Its form and coloration are quite striking,” Musial says. I ask her what it best personifies about L.A. I want to know what makes it special despite it now being so commonplace. “It can adapt to a range of growing conditions,” she continues. “It is a good symbol for a cosmopolitan city that is home to lots of human transplants — from other parts of the U.S. and around the world.”
Rundel suggests another interpretation. “It’s a beautiful plant,” he says, “sturdy and hard to kill.”
Yes, I think. That’s it. Because isn’t that what beauty is, in all of its prismatic totality — hard to kill, always in bloom?
Everything I’ve learned since those years when we lived on 58th Place has stayed with me. What my mother had accomplished was simple but lasting. The beauty we make establishes a sense of order. It grounds us in who we are, gives our chaos body. At its most brilliant and spectral, beauty helps us hold on.
And because the world, and one’s continued engagement with it, is a repeated litany of small erosions, it is through the practice of beauty that we learn to survive, to soar even. It helps one find newer, better ways of being. Yes, failure will make itself known. It will attempt to convince you that it is your only option. But it is the order we find in the beauty we make, in ourselves and others, just as we do in the things around us, that sustains and comforts.
Like winged creatures of the sky it draws its nickname from, the bird of paradise seems always ready for takeoff, angling itself toward the light of better tomorrows, or at least the possibility of them. It’s what I remind myself of when life gets hard. Because though it was never guaranteed in our household, in those years following the rebellion, in those sometimes unsteady months as a new family of three in the haze of my parents divorce, we held on to the depth of that possibility no matter what came our way.
Now, well into adulthood and everything adulthood urges of the body and mind, I sometimes wonder, where can one find paradise?
It’s all around us, I’ve learned, but it is also inside of us. In the molecules of my memory, I hold on to the punctuated beauty of the flower because I believe in what it can accomplish, in what it returns, in what it allows room for. In the molecules of my memory, it sings, and what it sounds like is home.
It sounds like a kind of paradise.
Jason Parham is a senior writer at Wired and a regular contributor to Image.