Southland (11 page)
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.
F
RANK 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?”
“I don’t want to go.”
“Nani? Do shite?”
“Because we go every Sunday and you’re there every day during the week. I want a day off. I want to stay around here today.”
His father pressed his lips together and pointed out the door at the car. His fingers were nicked and stained crimson and blue, the marks of harvesting, and handling bleeding berries. “You come,” he said. “You come Little Tokyo.”
“No.”
His father let go of the door and approached him. He was wearing the only jacket Frank had ever seen him in and a collapsing black hat. His face was dark brown, wrinkled from years in the fields, like the dry cracked earth from which he’d tried to coax life. Frank swallowed and almost gave in. Although Kazuo was almost sixty now, he was still wire-tough, unbreakable. When his ship arrived in San Francisco in 1903, a gang of white thugs were at the docks to greet it. And as Kazuo and the other men walked down the plank and took their first steps on American soil, the white thugs had surrounded them, yelling “Japs!” and “Yellow perverts!” and “Turn around and go on home!” Two of them picked horse dung off the street and flung it at the new arrivals; one of the fresh, mossy dung cakes struck Kazuo in the jaw. But instead of averting his eyes and scurrying as the other men had done, he bent over, picked up a dung cake, and threw it right back. It hit one of the thugs in the temple and he was so stunned that it took him a moment to start after Kazuo. But Kazuo was ready for him and used the throws and deflections of judo he’d pass on to his son, and soon four of the thugs were lying flat on the ground, holding precious parts of themselves. The rest of them took off running. Frank knew that a man who’d scared off a gang of whites within five minutes of arriving in America would never be intimidated by his own son, regardless of the boy’s half-foot advantage. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to hold his ground. His father stopped right in front of him and looked up into his eyes. “What the hell wrong with you? You come, you be respect.”
Just then, Frank’s mother came into the room, with his sister Kumiko trailing behind her. She’d heard what had passed between them, and now she approached, laying a hand on her husband’s tense and ready arm. “Papa. Papa. Let him stay,” she said. Then, in Japanese, “He works hard all week, let him play with his friends.”
His father glared at him, still frowning. “You home when we get back. You don’t go play the football.” Then he, Masako, and Kumiko walked out and shut the door. A few minutes later, Frank heard them drive away.
His plan was exactly that, of course—to go play the football. He was on the junior varsity at Dorsey High, and on Sunday mornings, after church, his friends would gather at the high school field to play. As soon as the chugging of the car had faded and he could hear the
ribbits
of frogs again, he changed into a T-shirt, work pants, and a pair of old sneakers, and skipped down out of the house.
Frank loved his neighborhood. He loved the space of it, the greenery, the view of the mountains, the huge expanse of clear blue sky. There was a scattering of houses, but they were set wide apart, with strawberry fields and walnut groves and marshy lots between them. Just a few blocks away was the swamp where he’d met Victor Conway years before; where the two of them, equipped with Mr. Conway’s shotguns, hunted for ducks, and wild pigs if they were lucky. The Sakais’ apartment in Little Tokyo had been tiny, dirty, dark, but they lived in a bungalow now, with tan stucco and green trim, and they had their own sprawling back yard. Frank knew his mother loved it in Angeles Mesa, too, despite their rocky entrance. Six months after they’d moved in, part of their roof had collapsed in the quake of ’33. And the cold looks and harsh words from neighbors the first few years had not made for an easy adjustment. There was the flooding, too, in the rainy season, water running down from the hills, so much the year before that the milkman had delivered his milk by boat. But all of this was a small price to pay for the space they now had, the lives they led. Masako kept a flower garden in back, with dahlias, sweet peas, snapdragons, sunflowers; she and the children grew most of the vegetables they ate. It was Frank’s father who missed the city, the dirt and noise and people, the restaurants and stores stacked side-to-side. His mother, Frank suspected, could live without these Sunday trips; she’d made several friends in the neighborhood.
Frank walked over to Crenshaw, up to Rodeo, then a few blocks west to the high school, which had opened two years before, the same year streetlights were installed on the boulevard. His friends were already there—Victor, David Hara, Steve Yamamoto, Don Styles, Barry Hughes. There were a few other boys he knew less well, including a white boy, Andy Riley, who lived in the hills at the end of Vernon where the Olympic Village used to be, the hills where sometimes Frank would go fishing. All the boys were j.v. players, and the nine Negro and Japanese boys who met that Sunday were the only black and Asian players on the team—a small sprinkling within a slightly larger sprinkling of black and Asian kids who were allowed to do extracurriculars; of black and Asian students in the school; of black and Asian families in the neighborhood. As Frank approached the field, Victor spotted him. He yelled out a surprised and exhilarated “Hey!” and heaved the football in Frank’s direction. Frank grinned as the ball spiraled toward him, and he took a few steps up to meet it.
“We’re just picking teams,” Don informed him. “You make it an even ten.”
Steve came over, clapped him on the shoulder. “Your mom and dad let you off the hook today, huh?”
Frank nodded. “Kind of. I think I’m going to pay for it later.”
Steve fiddled with the reed he was chewing. “I hate Li’l Tokyo. I haven’t been in five years. I’m surprised you’ve put up with going there as long as you have.”
Frank didn’t reply, thinking his own impatience with Little Tokyo, with his parents and their friends, was very different from Steve’s, who did badly in school, who was drinking already, who was proud not to know Japanese. He turned away from him and listened as Victor and David Hara, the two best players, picked teams. Victor was tall, oak-brown, and handsome—like a movie star, Frank thought, if only movie stars came in his color. He always had girls trailing after him, but restricted himself to one—Janie—who he’d been dating since junior high school. Now Victor chose Frank, and David chose Barry, and all the boys fell in with their teammates. Then the two teams ran to separate ends of the field, and David’s team received. Barry, who was a minister’s son, returned the kick all the way for a touchdown, without anyone laying a hand on him.
They played for two hours. Frank’s T-shirt and work pants got covered with grass stains and sweat but he didn’t worry about how he’d explain them, knowing his mother would stuff his clothes into the bottom of the laundry and never mention what she knew to his father. Even then, in July, there was a cool breeze coming off of the ocean and they could hear the palm trees rustle after a particularly strong gust of wind. The score was something like 73-60, and just as the boys were discussing whether or not the game was finished, three rabbits hopped onto the grass. They were light brown, with sharp black eyes and white bouncing tails. “Too many men on the field,” Steve announced, and all the boys laughed, taking the rabbits as a sign that they were through. Frank was happy. The laughter, the game, the camaraderie—but even more than that, the breeze, the grass, the palm trees, the rabbits—were why he’d stayed home that day. Nevermind that his old friends in Little Tokyo called him a country boy now; Angeles Mesa was where he belonged.
The boys parted ways, except for Victor, Frank, and Barry. As they walked to Victor’s house on Chesapeake, Victor asked his two friends what they were doing that afternoon.
“Nothing,” Frank replied.
“Going home,” Barry said. “Got some chores I gotta do.” He spat out “chores” like it was a piece of tough gristle.
“No, you’re not,” Victor informed him.
“Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. You’re going to the beach.”
“What? The beach? Shut up,” Frank said. “How the hell are we supposed to get there?”
Victor grinned, reached into his pocket, pulled out a set of keys, and jangled them in front of his friend’s nose. “Got my license yesterday. And my daddy said I could take the car today.”
Frank stopped and put his fists on his hips. Barry threw his head back and whooped. And the three of them walked down the sidewalk, jostling and colliding, throwing feet out sideways to trip one another, smacking each other open-palmed on the sides of their close-cropped heads. Victor, at first, managed to avoid his friends’ jutting legs and flashing hands. Barry was short but powerful, and when he finally caught up with Victor, he shoved him, like a blocking bag, all the way across the street. Then the two of them came back and picked up Frank, Victor taking his shoulders, Barry his kicking legs, and threw him into a row of bushes. They laughed at, struck, and insulted each other, and the old men who were sitting outside on their stoops thought of friends they hadn’t seen in forty years. The young women who were watching, on the street or through the windows, saw the boys’ smooth faces, bright teeth, and tight hard muscles, and their bodies relaxed and opened, mouths humming wordless tunes of desire.
The car was parked in the driveway. It was an old Model T that Victor’s parents had driven out from Arkansas in 1926, encountering not a single paved road until they reached the Cajon Pass in eastern California. Victor went around to the passenger side and opened the door with a flourish for his friends, ushering Barry into the backseat and Frank into the front. And they drove, grinning wide and feeling pleased with themselves, through blocks that got longer and longer, and then shorter again, past orange groves, more strawberry fields, and fields of cabbage and lettuce. They went west on Jefferson, up to Pico, then left all the way to Santa Monica. They knew that there’d soon be faster roads to get around on, wide, big roads called freeways; one was already being built between downtown and Pasadena. But the boys were happy to drive along slowly; to feel the sun and wind on their faces; to go someplace they wanted to, and under their own power.
They smelled the ocean before they saw it. Frank had only been there once, as a tiny child, and now, when it finally came into view, he couldn’t believe its blue-green color, its majestic rolling voice, the way it flowed and folded endlessly into the distance. The three boys whooped again and could hardly wait to get out of the car. Victor managed to park it, somewhat crookedly, in the crowded lot, and they all jumped out, walking quickly toward the beach. Victor was telling the other two how his feet were sensitive to heat so he couldn’t remove his shoes, and Barry was calling him a sissy. But then they stopped, abruptly, because they all saw the sign. It was a dark brown board, attached to a pole that was sunken into the edge of the sand, and it had two arrows painted on it, one pointing right, the other left. Above the left were painted the words, “Whites only.” Above the right were the words, “Colored only.” They all stared at it, unbelievingly. Then they noticed the fence, which started at the parking lot and extended all the way down to the water. Wordlessly, they scanned the beach and saw nothing but black bathers on the right side of the fence and white bathers on the left. Victor and Barry glanced at each other, and then looked at Frank.