Southland Read online

  More critical praise for Southland:

  “Fascinating and heartbreaking…an essential part of L.A. history.”

  —L.A. WEEKLY

  “Compelling…never lacking in vivid detail and authentic atmosphere, the novel cements Revoyr’s reputation as one of the freshest young chroniclers of life in L.A.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “The plot line of Southland is the stuff of a James Ellroy or a Walter Mosley novel…But the climax fairly glows with the good-heartedness that Revoyr displays from the very first page.”

  —LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK REVIEW

  “If Oprah still had her book club, this novel likely would be at the top of her list…With prose that is beautiful, precise, but never pretentious…”

  —BOOKLIST (starred review)

  “Subtle, effective…[with] a satisfyingly unpredictable climax.”

  —WASHINGTON POST

  “An engaging, thoughtful book that even East Coasters can enjoy.”

  —NEW YORK PRESS

  “Southland is a simmering stew of individual dreams, family struggles, cultural relations, social changes, and race relations. It is a compelling, challenging, and rewarding novel.”

  —CHICAGO FREE PRESS

  “What makes a book like Southland resonate is that it merges elements of literature and social history with the propulsive drive of a mystery, while evoking Southern California as a character, a key player in the tale. Such aesthetics have motivated other Southland writers, most notably Walter Mosley.”

  —LOS ANGELES TIMES

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2003 Nina Revoyr

  Design and layout by Sohrab Habibion

  Cover photo ©2003 John Dohrmann, all rights reserved

  Author photo by Leslie Barton

  ePUB ISBN-13: 978-1-936-07048-0

  ISBN: 1-888451-41-6

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2002116775

  All rights reserved

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My heartfelt thanks to Dan McCall, Maureen McCoy, Lamar Herrin, and Kyoko Uchida for their insightful comments and suggestions about this book. Thanks also to Stephanie Vaughn for her unbending support; Alison Lurie for providing an office and refuge; Morna Pixton for her lucky table; Patsy Cox for always believing; Johnny Temple and the folks at Akashic for their enthusiasm and commitment; and Jennifer Gilmore for raising the bar.

  I’m grateful to my agent, Tim Seldes, as well as to the Saltonstall Foundation and the Astraea Foundation. I am also indebted to several historical works and their authors: Keith E. Collins, Black Los Angeles: The Maturing of the Ghetto, 1940-1950; Carolyn Kozo Cole and Kathy Kobayashi (eds.), Shades of L.A.: Pictures from Ethnic Family Albums; Warren S. Rogers, Mesa to Metropolis: The Crenshaw Area, Los Angeles; John Tateishi (ed.), And Justice For All: An Oral History of the Japanese-American Detention Camps; and Arthur C. Verge, Paradise Transformed: Los Angeles During the Second World War.

  Finally, I want to express my deep gratitude to Lauren Sanders. Had she not shown up on my doorstep in L.A., needing a place to crash, this novel might never have found a home.

  In memory of my grandparents

  and Janine Werner

  Contents

  TITLE PAGE

  COPYRIGHT PAGE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE: 1994

  CHAPTER TWO: LOIS—1994, 1963

  CHAPTER THREE: 1994

  CHAPTER FOUR: MARY, 1947

  CHAPTER FIVE: 1994

  CHAPTER SIX: JIMMY, 1962

  CHAPTER SEVEN: 1994

  CHAPTER EIGHT: FRANK, 1939

  CHAPTER NINE: 1994

  CHAPTER TEN: FRANK, 1942–1948

  CHAPTER ELEVEN: CURTIS AND ALMA, 1961

  CHAPTER TWELVE: 1994

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN: FRANK AND CURTIS, 1963

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN: 1994

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN: KENJI, 1955

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN: 1994

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: CURTIS AND ANGELA—1962, 1963

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN: 1994

  CHAPTER NINETEEN: FRANK, 1976

  CHAPTER TWENTY: 1994

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE: JIMMY, 1963

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO: LOIS, 1965

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE: 1994

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR: CURTIS—1963, 1965

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: 1994

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: 1963

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: VICTOR, 1942–1955

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: 1994

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE: 1945

  CHAPTER THIRTY: 1994

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: FRANK, 1985

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: 1965, 1994

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: 1965

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR: 1994

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE: JULY, 1946

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX: 1994

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN: 1965

  PROLOGUE

  NOW, THE old neighborhood is feared and avoided, even by the people who live there. Although stores wait for customers right down on the Boulevard, people drive to the South Bay, or even over to the Westside, to see a movie or to do their weekly shopping. The local places sell third-rate furniture and last year’s clothes, and despite the promises of city leaders in the months after the riots, no bigger businesses, or schools, are on their way. A few traces of that other time remain—a time when people not only lived in the neighborhood, but never chose to leave it. And if some outsider looked closely, some driver who’d taken a wrong turn and ended up on the run-down streets, if that driver looked past the weather-worn lettering and cracked or broken windows, he’d have a sense of what the neighborhood once was. The grand old library’s still there, and the first public school, with a fireplace in each of the classrooms. The Holiday Bowl’s still open—although it closes now at dusk—where men came in from factory swing shifts and bowled until dawn. There are places where old train tracks still lie hidden beneath the weeds, and if the visitor knelt and pressed his ear against the dulled metal, he might hear the slow rumble of the train that used to run from downtown all the way to the ocean.

  Now, the children feel trapped in that part of the city, and because they’ve learned, from watching their parents’ lives, the limits of their futures, they smash whatever they can, which is usually each other. But then, in that different time—the neighborhood even had a different name—Angeles Mesa was a children’s paradise. It was table land, flat and fertile, and the fields of wheat and barley made perfect places for young children to hide. The older children borrowed their fathers’ guns and hunted rabbits and squirrels, because the Mesa was part of the growing city only in name; everybody knew it was country.

  The children’s parents loved the neighborhood, too. The ones who grew up in cities—either there in California, or in the dark, damp states of the Midwest and East—loved the space of the Mesa, and the fresh air that carried the scent of jasmine in spring and oleanders in the summer. The ones from the South couldn’t believe they’d found a place with the ease and openness of home, but only a train ride away from their downtown jobs. It was a train that had brought them in the first place. The Chamber of Commerce sent an exhibit train to tour around the country, passing out oranges and pictures of palm trees to anyone who’d take them. Hopeful newlyweds, coughing factory workers, old sharecroppers with hands hardened by years of labor, all bit into the sweet juicy oranges and thought they tasted heaven
. And the oranges were magical, because instead of quenching people’s appetites, they fed them. That yearning and anticipation started out in their taste buds, and worked down into their hearts and stomachs until they grew teary-eyed with want. In Ohio, Mississippi, in Delaware and Georgia, you could see people trailing “California on Wheels,” stumbling down the track after the slow-moving train as if they’d follow it all the way across the country. And they did. Maybe not that day, not that season, not that year, but they did. Packed up their things and arranged for someone else to send them on. Gathered the family and headed out to California.

  Some of them went to Long Beach, seeking work in the bustling shipyards, or to Ventura, to draw their livings from the sea. Some went to San Fernando to be closer to the oranges that first seduced them, and some to the Central Valley to pick lettuce or grapes. And a few of them, after living someplace else for a year or several, after starting out in Little Tokyo or South Central or following the crops around the state, bought a plot of land in Angeles Mesa. The price was good, and what you got for it!—rich land nestled by wild hills. And if their neighbors spoke a different language, wore a different color skin, here—and only here—it didn’t matter. Whatever feelings or apprehensions people had when they came, they learned to put them aside. Because their children played together, sat beside each other at the 52nd Street School. Because it was impossible to walk through the neighborhood without seeing someone different from you.

  Now, even the All Are Welcome Church has steel bars over its windows, and half the storefronts stand empty and deserted. The strawberry fields and orchards are all buried under concrete, and lifelong residents won’t leave their houses after dark. Those with the money but not the heart to leave the neighborhood completely cross the Boulevard and move into the hills. They never come down now, never stop at Mama’s Chicken and Waffles or Otis’s Barber Shop, which is closing, in its fortieth year, for lack of business. But then, in that other time, which wasn’t really so long ago, the corner market could not keep its shelves stocked, or the Kyoto Grill cook enough food, or the Love Lifted Me Church on Crenshaw (which is actually on Stocker) make enough space to accommodate the faithful. And even as the area changed and grew—even as the Boulevard burst with commerce and people— the flavor of the Mesa didn’t change. It was always country-in-the-city, but with a central place to gather. And since the Mesa had everything—food, bowling, church, and friends; not to mention trees, game, and a backdrop of hills—there was never any reason to leave. If a visitor had come through in 1958, he might have closed his eyes, and, listening to the voices around him, thought he’d taken a wrong turn and ended up in Texas. He might have walked into Harry’s Noodle Shop and mistaken the town for Little Tokyo. He might see a group of men just released from the Goodyear plant, crowded around a radio and listening to a ball game. They’d be sitting on milk crates in front of a market owned by a young Japanese man, a veteran, who’d worked there since he was a teenager; who hired local boys himself; and who’d heard so many of his customers’ stories he could almost forget his own.

  The people who lived there, the people who laughed and drank and listened to the Dodgers, didn’t know they were unusual. They didn’t know that their disregard for rules observed outside the Mesa made them exceptions, and their example did not stand.

  Now, if that lost driver went through certain parts of the neighborhood, he would still see a few of the elderly residents— Japanese and black—in a place the rest of the city dismisses as ghetto. But their children and grandchildren, and their friends’ children, too, have moved elsewhere to build their own lives. In the city where history is useless and the future reinvented every day, no one has any need for game you hunted and cooked yourself; for berries stolen off the vine; for neighbors in pairs and threesomes sitting on stoops with cups of coffee, faces lifted to accept the morning sun. No one thinks about the neighborhood, its little corner market. No one, including the children of the people who lived there.

  CHAPTER ONE

  1994

  TEN DAYS after her grandfather died, Jackie Ishida pulled into the entrance of the Tara Estates, the apartment complex where he’d lived with her aunt and uncle. It was eleven a.m. on a Saturday, February, 1994. Normally at this time she’d be studying already—she was in her third year of law school at UCLA—but Lois had called the night before, voice rough with cigarettes and tears, and asked her to come over this morning. And since her aunt Lois was, hands down, her favorite person in the family, she’d decided that the library could wait. It was a beautiful day, she noticed, but Los Angeles always looked best in winter—free of smog, crisp and green, cradled by the mountains. She stared out the window at the snow-capped peaks and waited for the security guard to write her a guest pass, wondering, as always, why she had to complete this particular formality. The two shootings and numerous hold-ups that had scared the residents lately had all occurred within the Estates, not outside of them, so she didn’t see why the guards were so concerned with visitors. Jackie, who’d grown up on the quiet, tree-lined streets of Torrance, could never get used to this haphazard clump of dingy, tan, threatening buildings. Some clever developer had named the complex after Scarlett O’Hara’s plantation—which was, it turned out, not in Georgia at all, but instead had been built right there in Culver City, on the old RKO Studios lot just a mile away.

  The security guard was a bulky young Latino man, and as he leaned down out of his parking hut, he stared at the pass he’d just filled out himself as if seeing for the first time what was written there.

  “You’re visiting Miss Sakai?” he asked, sitting back up in his chair. “Lois Sakai in 3B—Frank’s daughter?”

  “Yes,” Jackie answered, holding her arm out the window. “I’m actually her niece. And his granddaughter.”

  “Aw, man,” the guard said, clutching the pass. “Mr. Frank…It’s just…See…Aw, man.”

  And as she watched him, her hand still extended to receive the blue pass, she saw that he was struggling not to cry. His name tag read “Tony,” and he was about twenty-five—Jackie’s age—but suddenly he looked like a child. “Hey,” she said. “Hey, are you all right?”

  He nodded, and then pulled himself together, finally giving Jackie her pass. “I’m sorry. I mean, you’re family. And Miss Sakai, too. I guess I have no right. But it was just a surprise is all, and Frank…” He trailed off.

  “It’s OK,” she reassured him again. “He had a good long life, you know? And we were all really lucky to have him.”

  Her words sounded empty and false to her, but they seemed to work for Tony. He nodded resolutely, gave his condolences, and then raised the gate so she could drive into the complex. And Jackie thought, not for the first time, that her ability to comfort people revealed a deficiency on her part, not a virtue. It is only those who aren’t totally shattered by a loss who can comfort the others, who are. Lois, who’d stopped a mugging the previous fall by telling the three young would-be thieves that they were shaming their families; who’d once pulled a dying child out from under the wheel of a bus and held him while his mother fainted, had completely fallen apart at the death of her father. She’d collapsed in on herself—she wouldn’t eat, would hardly talk, and she shivered no matter how warm it was. For the first time in her life, someone else—mostly Ted—had to watch after her and make sure she ate. All of this while Jackie made continual check-up phone calls, and while her mother Rose, Lois’s sister, took care of all the funeral logistics.

  Tony was right—her grandfather’s death had been completely unexpected. At seventy-one, he’d still been in seemingly perfect health—he walked every day, ate lightly and well, and did repair jobs all over the neighborhood. With his tight, lean body, handsome grin, and just-graying hair, he’d looked twenty years younger than he was. The day he died, he walked a mile to an old widow’s house to cut her overgrown front lawn. It was she who placed the call to 911 an hour later when she found him, laid flat out behind the idling mower.

/>   Jackie parked her Accord in a visitor’s spot, and then, sighing heavily, she walked up to her aunt’s apartment, the last place she’d seen her grandfather alive. They had been close once, when she was much younger and had needed watching because her parents were so busy—her father practicing medicine and teaching at Cedars-Sinai; her mother going to medical school and then vanishing completely into her internship and residency. He’d lived in Gardena then, with her grandmother and sometimes Lois too, and Jackie had spent whole weeks with them when her parents were especially swamped. But then Jackie had gotten older, and her softspoken grandfather had been no competition for the excitements of the social world at school. He’d tried to stay involved in her life, right up until the end—he’d sent her clippings about women lawyers; he’d called her twice a month and pretended not to notice how she rushed him off the phone; he’d even sent her frequent e-mails on the computer her parents had bought him. But more often than not, Jackie hadn’t answered, hadn’t thanked him, hadn’t noticed him much at all. By the time of his death she hardly knew him, and so her sense of loss now seemed shallow and unearned.

  When Lois answered the door, she had the phone tucked between her shoulder and ear, and she was shaking out a section of the newspaper. She beckoned for Jackie to enter, which Jackie did, taking a seat on the couch. Lois held the paper in one hand now, and gestured as if whomever she was speaking to were standing right in front of her.

  “You’re being silly, Cal,” she said. “If someone tells you she’s prepared to spend a whole lot of money, it’s not in your best interest to try and stop her.” She paced silently for a moment, listening. Then, “Listen, don’t mess with me. My dad just died, my cat has hyper-thyroid, and one of my students just got arrested for robbing a bank. If one more bad thing happens, I’m likely to snap. I’m a woman with nothing to lose.”