Southland (26 page)
Rebecca nodded at Jackie. “Catch you later,” she said. Then, to Lanier, “It was a pleasure.”
When she was gone, Jackie didn’t know what to say. “Long night,” is what she came up with. “Too much to drink.”
She indicated that he should sit, and went to get him some coffee. She was definitely jumpy this morning. Lanier wasn’t helping matters, either. He was paying attention a little too closely, which made Jackie feel scrutinized. Now, when she came back to the living room, he was standing up again, looking at a picture of her and Laura at Laura’s birthday party the year before. They had their arms around each other and they looked happy. Lanier turned when he heard Jackie enter, and she could tell by the smile on his face, by the way he looked at her, that he understood. She expected him to ask about Laura, but instead he asked, “Is this your family?”
He was pointing at another birthday party picture, her father’s, from several years ago. Jackie said that it was. She pointed out her mother, her father, her paternal grandparents—Frank hadn’t gone to this party. She showed him another picture of Mary and Frank in front of their house in Gardena, and then another, of her college graduation. But Lanier was there to see other pictures, the ones in the box, so she retrieved it from her bedroom and carefully handed it over. They both sat down on the couch. Lanier gently lifted the lid off and picked up one of the velvet boxes. He opened it, and his eyes grew wide.
“Wow,” he said finally. “This is a Silver Star.” He opened the other one and whistled. “And this is a Purple Heart. Did he ever show these to you?”
She shook her head. “No. I never saw them before this week.”
Lanier put the medals down and started sifting through papers, smiling at an article about Jackie’s moot court victory at the law school the previous year. He held this up, along with several pictures of her. “This man loved you,” he said, and Jackie couldn’t tell if the odd, low tone in his voice was scolding. He shuffled through the news clippings, flipped over a couple of postcards. There were several envelopes, but Jackie had found nothing interesting in the letters, so Lanier just set them aside. He looked at the obituaries and then the letter from Curtis, and he seemed to age years right in front of her. He pressed his lips together and then shook his head slowly when he saw the pictures of Frank at the store. “This is him, that’s exactly what it looked like.” He held up the shot of Frank and Old Man Larabie, and then the second one, which he tilted to get better light. “And this is Derek Broadnax, you know.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
“They look exactly like I remember them. This couldn’t have been too long before Watts.” His voice was shaky and he was rocking a little. Instead of laying this last picture on the coffee table with everything else, he placed it next to him on the couch. “Is there a picture of Curtis?”
“I think so,” Jackie said, pointing into the box. “At the bottom. There’s a picture of a bunch of people at a bowling alley and I’m sure it’s the Holiday Bowl.”
Lanier looked into the box, pushed some papers aside, and fished the picture out of the bottom. He held the photograph up at eye level. Jackie watched him examine it, saw his mouth twist and his eyebrows furrow. “I don’t see Curtis here. I don’t recognize these boys at all.”
“Really?” said Jackie. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah,” Lanier replied, tilting the picture this way and that. He shook his head. “Curtis isn’t in this picture. I don’t know any of these—” He stopped. “Wait—holy Jesus.”
Jackie leaned forward. “What?”
He brought the picture in closer, and then lowered it and looked up at Jackie. “This is
Alma
.”
She stared at him, confused. “But she’s, those people…”
“Look here,” Lanier said. He held the picture out and tapped the image of the girl on the end. The girl was elegant and thin and straight-backed. She was wearing a simple white v-neck blouse and a long dark skirt; her hair was held back by a clip or a tie. She was smiling at the camera easily, and Jackie thought she was beautiful—deep brown skin, strong nose, generous mouth, and the expression on her face was confident, direct.
Jackie looked at Lanier, whose face was closer now, leaning over the picture. “Are you sure that it’s her?”
“Yes. No doubt.”
“How old do you think she was?”
Lanier shrugged. “I don’t know. A lot younger than when I knew her. Late teens, early twenties, maybe.”
“How do you think he got this picture?”
“I don’t know,” Lanier said. “Maybe he asked her for it.”
Jackie looked at it again and wondered if Alma had, in fact, given Frank a picture of herself. The questions flew at her from all directions, impossible to handle all at once. Why would Frank have had this photo, and what could it have meant? Exactly how well had Frank known Curtis’s mother? She met Lanier’s eyes, not saying a word, and they just sat there and stared at each other.
SIXTY-THREE was the year Curtis started to change. That was the year of police dogs and firehoses, the year a bomb killed four girls at a Birmingham church. Every night there was a story of violence or resistance in Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas. But despite his mother’s attempts to link the Movement with their lives, despite the lectures from Angela’s oldest brother, Gene, about white devils and separate existence, despite Akira Matsumoto’s denouncing of cops whenever he came into the store, all the politics and protest had seemed distant to Curtis—as far away as news of war in Europe. The day after Bull Conner let German shepherds loose on children, Curtis and Alma were watching a second night of television commentary. Curtis shook his head at one of the people talking, an organizer for the Ku Klux Klan. “Man, I’m glad we live in L.A. It’s messed up down there.”
His mother looked at him sideways. “Down there?” The way she said it made him know that she meant, “and it’s not messed up out here?”
“Well, the white people in California ain’t
that
bad,” Curtis said—except, he thought, for one.
“They worse,” said Bruce from the dining room table, where he sat polishing a pair of shoes. “Here, the white man smiles when he’s got murder in his heart. Down home, he don’t act like he likes you, so at least you always know where you stand.”
“You really think it’s that bad out here?”
Bruce put his shoes down on a newspaper. “Curtis, every day I got to answer to this skinny young white boy who never once in his life has got his hands dirty. He couldn’t run a machine if he had to, yet he pays me less than the white men who got easier jobs. A foreman’s no different than a master, far as I’m concerned. Ain’t no mistake people call this place the Southland.”
There was something about the hoses, his mother’s sad and bitter comment, his father’s description of the foreman, that made Curtis look around him. He started noticing things that were happening right there in L.A. The demonstrations down at City Hall because Negroes were locked out of city jobs. The protests over the white policeman, unpunished for shooting and killing the Negro minister. The college students integrating the lunch counter at Woolworth’s, right there in his new western city. And things closer to him, too, less definable or documented. His junior high buddies Jason and Ty, who were now doing sentences at detention camp. How much smaller his junior class was than his freshman class had been, as they lost kids to inertia, or jail, or pregnancy, or the lucrative trade on the street. His own incident with Lawson, which in the light of these other events, seemed less random, less a matter of chance.
“People dropping, just disappearing everywhere,” he said to Angela one day. Then he pointed to Cory and Jimmy, who were playing with a toy truck in the yard. “It’s getting worse. Don’t know what’s gonna happen when
they
come up.”
“They got you to look up to,” she replied. “And to keep ’em in line.”
He recognized the truth in what she said, but suddenly it wasn’t enough. There were so many other kids like Jimmy and Cory—needy and willing, their eyes not yet dulled by the knowledge of what the world had in store for them. Curtis wanted to help them all. He started tutoring at Audubon once a week, he and Angela both, on one of the days he wasn’t working in the store.
Alma was thrilled. Up until that point, despite her best efforts, her son had remained blissfully ignorant of what was happening around him, the stagnant quality of their acquaintances’ lives. But now, independent of her, he’d suddenly woken up; there was a new air of purpose about him.
“Mr. Sakai offered me a full-time job after I graduate,” he told her one night at dinner. It was just Alma and the boys—Bruce was still at work, and Curtis tried not to speak of the store when his father was around. “And if I work eight to four, I can go to night school at the City College.”
Alma looked up from her plate of red beans and rice. “You serious about wanting to run a store?”
“Yeah. It pays all right, and you can keep an eye on folks.” He didn’t add—although they were both aware of the debt that Curtis owed—that the man who ran the store had probably saved him.
Alma wasn’t pleased with the plan, but she didn’t try to discourage him. There wasn’t much she could say about his choice of school—she wanted him to go to a four-year college, but his ninth and tenth grade marks had been mediocre, his junior year marks, now, a little better, but still sufficient only for junior college. Besides, she and Bruce didn’t have much money stored up. His plan—full-time work and part-time school—made sense.
But then, March of his senior year. The big track invitational at El Segundo High, Dorsey and five other schools. The track itself was beautiful, sunken and green, surrounded by a neighborhood of small, neat houses. Five lily-white track teams, including the hosts, and then Dorsey with its mix of all the colors. Curtis placed second in the 200, and then won the 400 going away. He’d beaten two runners from El Segundo to do so, the top two boys in league. And he was so thrilled and surprised by his unexpected win that as he broke the tape, he turned to face the boys behind him—and, running backwards, punched his chest in triumph. They both looked daggers at him, but he didn’t care; there was no feeling better than what he felt, running as fast as he could through the warm spring air swept clean by the breeze off the ocean.
After he’d cooled down and put his sweatpants on, he climbed into the stands to watch Angela win her races. They sat together for the rest of the meet, cheering on their teammates. Then, as the sun was lowering and the meet drawing to a close, Curtis went to the boys’ locker room to use the restroom. When he walked in, he almost tripped over the feet of an El Segundo runner, one of the boys he had beaten.
“Well, look what we got here,” the boy said. Then he and another boy slipped between Curtis and the door. Curtis turned around and realized that he was cut off, then turned again and saw half a dozen more El Segundo boys, in various stages of undress.
“Isn’t that the nigger who taunted you, Kevin?” asked a shirtless boy who was sitting on a bench.
“That’s the one,” answered the boy he’d almost tripped over. He stepped closer to Curtis, and Curtis could feel the other boys rise and circle him. “You think you’re something else, don’t you, boy?”
Curtis gave a little laugh. “Come on, man. It’s just a race. Shit. You’ll probably kick my ass the next time.”
“What makes you think you can come in here and disrespect us like that?” said another voice.
Curtis looked toward the showers and saw the second boy from the race; he beat his chest now, just as Curtis had done.
“Aw, man, I’m sorry I celebrated on you. I was just excited, is all. It was stupid.”
“Stupid isn’t the word for it, you little black punk.”
A hand shot out from nowhere, striking the side of his head. Then another—a slap, open-fisted but hard, landing just below his right temple. Curtis reeled in one direction and then another. “Hey, come on!” he said. But the world seemed to be closing in on him and his guts curdled with sudden fear.
Kevin stepped forward and grabbed him by the front of his sweatshirt. “What are you gonna do about it, nigger?”
Something about this grab, the menace in Kevin’s voice, touched off a memory and a knee-jerk rage he didn’t know was in him. There was no way he was going to take another beating off a whiteman. Without thinking about the consequences, Curtis pulled out the knife he always carried and quickly opened the blade. Kevin stepped back, but Curtis moved toward him, flashing and slicing, not caring if he cut every boy in the room. But the whiteboys scattered like birds at the first shot of a hunter, scrambling all over each other in their effort to escape. One of them passed close by, and Curtis swung, sweeping sideways, aiming for the thick white neck. Fortunately for both of them, he missed, the tip of the blade just opening the front of the whiteboy’s jersey. They were gone in an instant. Curtis sat down on a bench and looked at the open blade, and then his hands shook so badly that he dropped it.
The next day, the coach from El Segundo filed a complaint. Curtis tried to tell their school’s officials, and his own principal, that he’d been acting in self-defense, but no one believed the word of a black boy who had once vandalized his school. When Alma told Curtis that he was being suspended and dropped from the team, he punched the kitchen door so hard he cracked the wood. Alma had never seen him react to anything with violence, and in another situation she would have scolded him, but she didn’t say anything now because she was so relieved he wasn’t hurt, and because she knew how he felt. If he weren’t there, she’d put a crack in the door herself.
A week after Curtis was allowed to return to school, he and Angela were sitting in the bleachers at Redondo Union High School after she’d completed her events. Curtis had been moody and irritable for days, and he sat in silence now, staring angrily out at the track he was no longer allowed to compete on, even though he still attended all the meets. Then he turned to Angela and said, “I’m gonna try and find a store.”
She looked at him. “What?”
“I’m thirsty. I want a soda. I’m gonna try and find a store.”
“Come on, Curtis. You know that ain’t what I mean.”
“You comin with me or what?”
It was crazy, what he was saying. Redondo Beach was wealthier than El Segundo, and equally as white. And they had never pressed this particular envelope; had never even thought about it, really. But Curtis was looking at Angela as if their entire relationship hinged on her decision. So she zipped up her bag and went with him.
As they walked out of the gate, she thought of Adam and Eve, taking their first steps out of the familiar confines of Eden and into the wider world. They went a couple of blocks in silence, and she felt naked, exposed. As they crossed an intersection, a man in a business suit leaned out of his car window. “How you doing?” he asked, but the tone of his voice, the curl of his lips, were nothing close to friendly. Angela fought the urge to grab Curtis’s hand. Further on, they found a market, smaller and not as nice as Mr. Sakai’s. Inside, it was brightly lit and cold. Curtis pulled two Cokes out of the cooler in front and set them up on the counter. The proprietor, a thin, balding man in his thirties, didn’t even look up from the back of the store, where he was sweeping.
“You got customers,” Curtis informed him, and the man continued to sweep.
“You got
customers,
” Curtis repeated, more loudly this time, and now the man stopped sweeping and looked past him.
“I’m busy,” the man said, slowly, as if Curtis didn’t understand. “You’ll have to wait until I’m through.” And he resumed his sweeping, straw bristles rearranging invisible dirt.
Curtis glared. The man ignored him. Angela pulled on Curtis’s arm. “Let’s go,” she urged. “Let’s try another store.”
He shook her hand off and crossed his arms, never taking his eyes off the man. Minutes passed, and Angela looked out the door, watched people walk by on the sidewalk. Finally, almost ten minutes later, the man set his broom against the wall and strolled slowly up to the front. Curtis handed the man a dollar and opened his palm for the change. The man slapped the coins on the counter. They stood frozen like that, Curtis with his hand extended, palm upward, the whiteman’s palm down against the counter. “Thank you,” Curtis spat.
“Any time,” the man replied.
They went out into the neighborhood of every school where the team competed. They drew glares, or curses, or refusals of service, from a bookstore in Torrance, from a hamburger joint in Venice, from a market in Beverly Hills. They did this so regularly, with such purpose and care, that the walks after the meets seemed more the point of these trips than the events of the meet itself. Angela wasn’t sure if Curtis was driven by anger or pain or recklessness; she herself was scared with every step they took. But a few of their teammates, noticing, began to come along. Her brother Derek was one of them, taking her left side, always, while Curtis walked along on her right.
They didn’t tell their parents what they were doing. And they didn’t discuss the walks amongst themselves, except to say,
Let’s try this place
, or,
That chicken stand ain’t open,
or,
The bus gonna leave in ten minutes.
They didn’t talk about the danger they were putting themselves into. They were foolish and brave and haphazard and young, not organized and huge in number like the students in the south. Curtis knew their actions were tiny, even pathetic, in the very different landscape of Southern California. And he didn’t like the idea of angering and maybe provoking so many ignorant whitepeople. He’d be relieved when track season was over, so these excursions could stop, but for now, for reasons he didn’t fully understand, he knew that they had to continue. Then one day when he and Angela were walking home, a squad car cut them off at an intersection. Two Negro officers got out, the younger one, whom they’d never seen before, hanging behind, the older coming up into Curtis’s face.
“I hear you been causing trouble,” he said, and his voice was low and threatening.
“Well, you heard wrong,” Angela shot back.
“What do you mean, officer?” Curtis asked. And he fought the urge to bolt, because he knew that this cop didn’t like him. It was this cop who’d towered over him in the principal’s office until Curtis finally admitted to the break-in. And it was this cop who glared in anger when the boys were let off with just a suspension; this cop who parked outside the store every few months to show Curtis that he knew who he was.
“You’ve been trying to go places,” Thomas said, “that you got no business showing your face in. My son runs track for University. You got the stores up that way all riled up.” He knew about this punk—the break-in back in junior high, his latest trouble now. Knew, and wouldn’t tolerate it.
Curtis tried to sound brave, for Angela. “Your boy can go in those places, but we can’t?”