What's good? I'm Gene Demby and you are listening to Code Switch, the show about race and identity from NPR.

And today on the show, we want to take you to Altadena, California.

Altadena, as you might remember from the recent news, is the site of one of the two major wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles County.

So much of Altadena was decimated by the Eaton fire.

More than 9,000 homes and businesses and schools.

In houses of worship, they were just all leveled by the flames and the winds.

The embers, they were pretty big, and anywhere they hit,

they would just start up because of the wind.

Every street to turn on, there was fire or there was a tree fell down.

And we want to zoom in on Altadena because it occupies this really code-switchy place in Los Angeles and in California more broadly.

Altadena is a mostly brown place with a large, long-tenured black population.

Back to the Civil Rights era, it was one of the few places in L.A LA County where black folks could buy home. So if you

were a black person in California and you wanted to get a piece of the American dream,

this is a place you could do it. Jackie Robinson has roots in Altadena. Rodney King grew up there.

Octavia Butler is buried there. And so a lot of the history of Black Los Angeles

is threaded through this place.

And for many of the families who settled there,

that loss of community is the hardest thing to come to grips with right now.

But the elders that worked hard to lead something for the next generation in the years to come,

that ain't fair to them at all.

What's devastating now about the fires is that there's always going to be a gap.

Even if you replace what you had,

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