Southland Page 9

  “This area ain’t exactly hopping,” said Lanier. “But right up here, by Leimert Park, it’s nicer—this is what I wanted to show you. There’s a couple of art galleries, coffee shops, jazz clubs. And Magic’s new theaters are helping bring people to the mall. You should see this place on Sunday, when they shut Crenshaw down to traffic and the kids all come.”

  He walked over sometimes, just to watch the show. The young brothers in their souped-up cars, shiny old Pontiacs and Buicks that rattled and groaned like prehistoric beasts. The drug dealers in their Nissans and heavy gold chains. Young men with arms slung out windows, lifting their chins and calling out to the girls, who’d pretend they weren’t trying to be noticed. Stereos blasting, music jumping from every open window. The bass lines so solid you could walk on them. You didn’t need a ride as long as that bass kept thumping, carried you down to where you wanted to go. Ride this line and it felt so good you knew you were gonna live forever, come back the next Sunday just to keep the thrill going. Young men and young women all looking fine, dressed, and ready. Eyes feasting on each other. Appraising and making offers, rebuffing or rebuffed. Affiliations made and broken. Sex or a hit or even the big prize, love, if the music and the weather were right. Crenshaw on Sunday. Like Mardi Gras. The candy store. Every carnival and holiday packed up into one tight bundle and rolled on down the wide boulevard. The young brothers and sisters cruising Crenshaw on Sunday. Nothing—at least that one perfect night of the week—could ever get in their way.

  Jackie nodded as Lanier turned onto Degnan, noting that, indeed, this street was more lively. She saw the galleries and the stores that sold African goods. She saw several older men sitting in metal chairs, playing chess outside a coffee shop. Degnan was only a few blocks long, and soon they were right back on Crenshaw. “What did it look like around here thirty years ago?”

  “More open,” said Lanier. “The houses didn’t look much different—they were nice, and a lot of blocks are still real nice, as you’ll see. Although just about everyone has bars on their windows now. There weren’t gangs, not the way we have them today. And a lot of these here businesses,” he waved his hand in front of Jackie’s face, “were open. This was just a nice, solid, middle-class area, pretty mixed-race even way back then, with a lot of black and Japanese folks. During the ’65 uprising, the looting didn’t start up here until the third or fourth day. It was a lot less widespread than the mess in ’92. But then, things were a whole lot worse in ’92.”

  Jackie nodded, more in acknowledgment than agreement. She’d watched the ’92 riots unfold on TV. The rioters had made it to within a mile of her apartment, all the way up to Pico and Fairfax, extending into Hollywood just east of her, along La Brea and Western and Vermont. She’d been horrified and scared, though less certain than Lanier that this upheaval was somehow understandable. But now she remembered the TV newspeople talking about how “it” was coming closer to “us”; telling their viewers—as if they couldn’t see and smell for themselves—of the smoke that hovered over the city.

  Lanier turned right onto a side street, and then turned left at the second corner. He’d been right—the houses were nicer here, and Jackie was surprised by how middle-class they all looked. The lots were big, the lawns neat, the eucalyptus trees large and looming, the houses well-kept and substantial. The trees that lined the sidewalk reached across the street and tangled their fingers together, so that when they drove down the block, Jackie felt like a child running through a gauntlet of older children in a game of London Bridge. At the next corner they took a left, and then another. Something was different about this block, but Jackie couldn’t put her finger on what it was. “Where are we going?” she asked.

  Lanier slowed down and pulled over to the curb. He pointed out the window, saying, “Here.”

  Jackie saw a tan stucco house with a black-tiled, sloping roof. There was nothing remarkable about it. “What’s this?”

  “Your grandfather’s house.”

  Jackie nodded. She thought, of course. But other than that, she felt nothing—no recognition, no connection. The only thing that struck her was that this house was bigger than the one the family moved to in Gardena. “It’s nice,” she finally said. She looked a minute longer. And as she looked, certain things became clear to her, the way a stranger’s features, once you learn she’s related to someone you know, suddenly appear more familiar. Jackie noticed the black tiles, the shuttered windows, the perfectly manicured bushes and bonsai-style trees. “That stuff—the trees, the tiles—that’s all Japanese.”

  Lanier nodded. Jackie looked down the street and saw that all of the houses had the same bonsai-type bushes and trees. Many of the houses also had old Japanese-style doors, black strips of wood criss-crossing the white body of the door, like crust laid over a pie. A few places had window shutters modeled after screens in Japan, and stone lions placed on either side of the entrance. The roofs were black and tiled, some multi-layered and pagoda-style.

  “This looks like Gardena,” Jackie said.

  Lanier nodded. “There used to be a lot more houses like this, but most of them are gone now.”

  After a few more minutes, he pulled away from the curb, and Jackie realized that she’d seen a picture of this house, of Lois and Rose as little girls, sitting on the lawn with a kitten between them. She stared out the window, feeling like a tourist in her grandfather’s life, and when they turned again, she felt a twinge of loss. She didn’t pay much attention to where the car was going until Lanier stopped in front of a boarded-up old building. He nodded toward it. “Your grandfather’s store.”

  This time, Jackie reacted. She was afraid, she was curious, she wanted both to flee and to stop and look closer. She got out of the car and stood there for a moment. The store was free-standing— to the right was an alley and to the left, the back of the buildings on Crenshaw. It was bigger than she’d expected, not like one of the tiny bodegas she often passed on Washington or Pico. The building had obviously met with violence and fire—there were boards across the door and the plaster around each window was black and charred. The walls were covered with graffiti, black and indecipherable to Jackie. The faded black letters on the rusted white sign read, “Mesa Corner Market.” There were several crushed beer cans in the doorway, two or three broken bottles, and a scattering of glass vials with green plastic caps.

  “Jesus,” she said. “How long’s it been like this?”

  Lanier had gotten out of the car, and he came up and stood next to her, arms crossed. “Since the uprising.”

  “That long?”

  “The ’92 uprising. It was open a long time before then. Your grandfather shut it in ’65, but he sold it to someone else.”

  “Has that owner had the place the whole time?”

  Lanier shook his head. “No. He sold it again a few years ago to a Korean couple.” Lanier kicked at a can in front of him; it went skittering down the sidewalk. “I felt bad for them. The day after the store burned, the wife, Mrs. Choi, was standing out in front, looking at the mess and crying. A couple of the mothers brought back stuff their kids had taken from it—just little things, packages of cookies and cigarettes—and a few others helped sweep up the glass and the ashes. But they never reopened and I don’t know who owns it now. It’s been empty for the last two years.”

  Jackie nodded, only half-listening. As she walked forward, getting close enough so that the front of the store blocked out the sky, she was thinking that this place, this shell of a building, was where her grandfather had spent twenty years of his life. She went right up to the door, raised her arm, placed her fingertips on the wood. It was cool and rough, a little frayed. Slowly, so as not to get a splinter, she flattened her hands against the board and closed her eyes. On the other side of that wood, her grandfather had struggled and sweated and laughed. She could almost see him as he’d been then, as she’d seen him in pictures—tan work pants, white shirt that was always slightly too large, crisp white apron, neatly tied and blindingly
bright. Tan face, almost as brown as the skin of his field-laborer father, and shiny black hair, slicked back with Pomade. Her grandfather’s money had been made and lost here. Four teenage boys had died here. It seemed to Jackie that if she could just get inside, beyond the boards, the answers would all be available to her, scattered among the ashes. Or perhaps Frank himself would be there, sweeping, restocking the shelves, ringing up groceries for an afternoon customer.

  Lanier watched her, glad that he’d taken this foolish girl by the head and forced her to look at her past. She seemed nice enough, concerned enough about Frank to be here today, but her parents, clearly, had sent her into the world without the nourishment of her own family history. Her past was like this neighborhood—still there, intact, but she had never bothered to visit. Never driven through its streets, taken in the beauty of its trees and houses. Let it sit there unexplored just down the road from her.

  “Can we get in here?” she asked, not turning.

  “No. It’s all closed up. And there’s really nothing to see in there anyway. It was all pretty much burned out.”

  Jackie nodded. She took her hands off the wood and turned back toward Lanier, who was standing, a bit awkwardly, on the sidewalk. “Thanks,” she said. “I’m glad I saw this. It makes everything more real, somehow.”

  Three young boys careened around the corner on bicycles, rode between them, then turned again and darted down the alley. Lanier watched them go. He and Cory always biked over around this time to see what Curtis was up to. “You know, a lot of times at this time of day your grandfather would be sitting outside with his friend Mr. Conway to greet the kids when they were coming home from school.”

  “You think that’s how he met Curtis?”

  Lanier shrugged. “Probably. Curtis and Cory lived a couple blocks from here and they would’ve walked by on their way back and forth from school.”

  “What do you know about Curtis? Why did my grandfather like him so much?”

  “I don’t know why your grandfather liked him, but I know why I did. He was always there, man. Always. He was solid.” And he kicked me in the ass when I needed it, Lanier thought. He paid attention to me, and wasn’t embarrassed to have me and his brother hanging around with him. With him I felt big, like I mattered. And so much of what I do now is still about him.

  “What was his family like?”

  Lanier sighed. “Complicated. I’m not sure their parents liked each other much. Bruce—my uncle—was from L.A., but he met Curtis’s mom when they were working in Oakland. Actually, Curtis was born up there, and his mother went back up there after he died. Anyway, Bruce and Curtis used to fight something awful. I don’t know what the problem was—Curtis was a pretty good student and didn’t get into any trouble. But he did whatever he wanted and hung out with whoever he wanted, and I don’t think that sat very well with his dad.” Nothing ever did sit well with Bruce, he remembered. Jimmy’s own mother didn’t, which meant that neither did Jimmy. Uncle Bruce was more frightening than any version of Jimmy’s father, drunk or sober. He had a way of making you feel like you were being beaten, even though he never raised a hand.

  “Anyway,” Lanier continued, “Bruce and Alma, Curtis’s mom, used to fight a lot too. Usually about Curtis, I think.” But Alma, he remembered, could handle him. Fiercely loving but also aloof somehow, she was Jimmy’s first love. And Curtis’s. And everyone else’s.

  “What’d they do for a living?”

  “Bruce worked for Goodyear. When I was growing up, there were a bunch of factories and plants in the area. A lot of men walked to work—you could actually hear the five o’clock whistles. And Alma was a teacher. She ended up getting some important job with the Oakland School District after Cory graduated from high school, but back when I knew her, she was a teacher. Before that, she was a factory worker. And before that, she worked as a domestic.”

  “My grandmother was a teacher, too. And my great-grandmother was a domestic.”

  Lanier laughed. “My great-grandmother was a domestic, too. And my grandmother. And my mother. I guess that was the fate of most women of color back then.”

  Jackie didn’t answer. She was surprised and a bit uncomfortable that someone from her family could be lumped together with someone from Lanier’s family, and from the Martindales’. Even though she knew that her grandparents, and great-grandparents, had lived in this neighborhood, she didn’t really think of them as part of it. Their stay here—and her tour—was only an accident, a fluke. They’d been interlopers, visitors, and now they were gone.

  Jackie and Lanier walked back toward the car. Jackie noticed, across the street, more remnants of the earthquake—cardboard covering windows, broken glass sparkling on the lawns. But then, just as she was about to open her door, a string of small children, linked in pairs, came into view on the sidewalk on Crenshaw. There were a good twenty or twenty-five of them, and judging from their organized procession and from the four tired-looking women who walked beside them, they were a class from a local elementary school. The first children were halfway across Bryant Street when one of them yelled, “Look! It’s Mr. Lanier!”—and then suddenly children were breaking out of line, sprinting fullspeed down the sidewalk. About ten of them streamed toward him yelling “Mr. Lanier! Mr. Lanier!” and they all hit him more or less at once. “We saw a dead squirrel!” one of them announced. “Yeah,” said another, “and its head was all bloody!” “Mrs. Davis showed us all different kinds of trees!”

  “Whoa, whoa!” Lanier said, laughing. But he’d come back to the sidewalk and dropped to one knee, giving the kids more access to him, and he seemed somehow to be looking at all of them at once, enclosing them all in his arms. The other children were still in the middle of the street, their line depleted and confused, and the women quickly herded them onto the sidewalk, calling to the kids who’d surrounded Lanier: “Shaniqua! Todd! Angelique! Get back here!”

  But the children paid them no mind, even when Lanier instructed them to return to their class. They couldn’t take their eyes off of him. And as they kept telling him about what they’d seen and done that day, they all managed somehow to touch him—hand to his knee, arm on his shoulder, an elbow linked around his elbow.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” Lanier said to the middle-aged, long-suffering woman who came over to retrieve her charges. “They’re in my after-school program.”

  “I know who you are,” she replied. “They talk about you like you’re Disneyland.”

  Because the kids refused to go back on their own, Lanier had to take them. He stood up with one child hanging onto his shoulders, a child tucked under each arm, and the rest of the kids clutching his shirt or pants. Like a many-headed, many-limbed creature, they made their way to the corner where the rest of the class was waiting. After he’d disengaged the last child and safely returned her to her partner, he came back down the sidewalk toward Jackie.

  “They love you,” she said, smiling.

  Lanier looked a bit sheepish. “Yeah, well, you know.”

  But she didn’t; she hadn’t. The childrens’ obvious adoration of him, his tenderness with them, was a surprise, and a recommendation. By the time they reached the parking lot, Lanier’s usual face and voice and demeanor had already snapped back into place. But Jackie didn’t buy it anymore. She’d seen something that she wished to see more of.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  FRANK, 1939

  FRANK DIDN’T tell his father, but it was the rabbits and frogs that swayed him. Not that he was sick of going to Little Tokyo, although that was also true. Every weekday that summer he was working at Old Man Larabie’s store, and every Saturday he made his own trip to Li’l Tokyo with his sister and the Hiraoka brothers for three hours of practicing kanji and bowing stiffly at Japanese school. The last thing he wanted to do on his one day off was to go back again and follow his parents around as they shopped, as they called on their old-time friends. Especially since he’d just seen them all anyway at the big kenjinkai picnic in Griffith
Park, where all the Issei from Nagano-ken had gathered to feast, play, trade news of home, get red-cheeked and teary-eyed from sake and beer. Get intoxicated, too, on their memories of mountains and rice paddies and the plump, juicy apples that his father said made the American kind look like raisins. And he’d see them all again in another three weeks at the Nisei festival, which Frank didn’t mind as much because he liked the colorful parade, the red dancing lion with its swirling mane, the women in bright kimonos, the men with drums so large you couldn’t see their faces. And because he liked the sumo tournament, the powdered sweating bodies and slick tied hair and the small, t-shaped, diaper-like mawashis. And most of all, because he was performing in the judo exhibition in the new, still-stiff white uniform he’d paid for with his earnings from the store.

  But Sundays were too much. They didn’t live in Li’l Tokyo anymore—the Sakais had left when Frank was eight, moving into a small house off of Crenshaw Boulevard, a few miles southwest of downtown. His parents still made the trip by train every day, though, to get to their jobs—his father’s at the City Market in the Southwest Berry Exchange, his mother’s shaping and slicing fishcakes at the kamaboko factory. And his father stayed in town late two nights a week to gamble with his friends, a habit from his bachelor days that years of arguments and marriage had done nothing to change. Frank had worked with his father at the Berry Exchange for the last three summers, sorting the berries, picking out the rotten ones, arranging them in crates for all the grocers who came in from their stores. But he was fifteen now and he had his own job in his own neighborhood, working for Larabie, whom he’d known from his store—the Mesa Corner Market—but also saw downtown on the old man’s morning trips for fruit and produce. So as his father was stepping outside to warm up the car, Frank called out to him.

  “I don’t want to go,” he said.

  His father whirled around. “Eh?”