A Song Flung Up to Heaven (4 page)

Eight

There is about Los Angeles an air of expectation. Not on the surface, where the atmosphere is lazy, even somnolent, but below the city’s sleepy skin, there is a suggestion that something quite delightful might happen and happen soon.

This quiet hope might be the detritus of so many dreams entertained by so many hopefuls as they struggled and pinched and dieted and preened for Hollywood cameras. Possibly those aspirations never really die but linger in the air long after the dreamers have ceased dreaming.

The days in Los Angeles were beautiful. The soft, wavering sunlight gave a filtered golden tint to the streets.

The inhabitants of the working-class neighborhood were obviously house-proud. Little bungalows were cradled confidently on patches of carefully tended lawn, and wind chimes seemed to wait for the breeze on every porch.

I longed for one of those tidy and certain houses. If I could live in a house like that, its absolute rightness of place would spill over and the ragged edges of my life would become neat to match the house.

Frances Williams was the very person I needed. I had known her a decade earlier, and she knew everyone else very well. She was active in Actors’ Equity and had connections in both black and white churches.

Fran, as she was called, counseled on the mystery of the theater, on its power and beauty, and gave good advice to anyone smart enough to listen.

She was a large woman with a lusty voice not unlike a cello, and she had a great love of the theater. She and her brother, Bill, lived in a large house at the rear of a corner lot. The house and all the grounds were often pressed into service when Fran directed experimental theater. She had acted in forty movies and had worked as an extra in over a hundred more. When I looked her up, she had exactly what I needed: a place to live and the possibility of a job.

There were two vacant apartments. Each had one room that served as living room, bedroom and study, and each had a large, commodious kitchen. I took one apartment, and Fran told me that the actress Beah Richards took the other.

The apartment was small and dark and humid, so I bought gallons of white latex paint and a stack of rollers and brushes. I painted every inch of visible wall and the entire floor bone-white. I went over the floor with a few coats of adobe enamel. In the lean years before Guy encountered puberty, he and I learned by trial and error how to antique furniture from Salvation Army stores and even how to repair the odd chair or sofa that seemed destined for a junkyard.

I had become such a regular in all Salvation Army and Goodwill stores that salespeople saved certain choice pieces for me. “Maya, how are you? Have I got a fabulous nightstand for you.” “Have I got a great dresser for you.”

In Los Angeles I bought orange, rust and brown burlap and draped the material casually at windows. I made huge colorful floor pillows and piled them on the floor. Van Gogh and Matisse posters enlivened the walls.

I stacked painted wood planks on bricks to form bookcases and burned cheap candles in Chianti and Mateus wine bottles. When the melted wax nearly covered the bottles, I put fresh candles in them and placed them around the room for light and esoteric effect.

At little expense, and out of a crying need, I had a house; now I needed a job. The money I brought from Hawaii was sifting through my fingers like fine sand.

Again Fran had the answer. Having lived in Los Angeles since the 1950s, she knew every corner where black people lived. Having worked on their campaigns, she called every elected official by his or her first name.

“This job is called Random Research. You won’t be paid much, but you are on an honor system. No one will be going behind you to check on your honesty. You will be given a questionnaire and a district. You will go to every fourth house and ask the housewife the questions on your form.”

“What questions?”

“What cereal does your family prefer? What soap powder do you use? What peanut butter do you buy? Like that.”

The salary was pitifully low, but the job was blissfully simple. I had started working on my stage play. Random Research would allow me time to develop my characters and plot. I would ask questions of the housewives, but between houses and women and questions and answers, I would let my characters play out plot possibilities. They would find their own voices and design their own personalities.

Watts was my assigned locale, and I was disappointed to find it had lost its air of studied grace. I had known the area when it had a kind of staid decorum, a sort of church-ladies-display-at-a-Sunday-afternoon-tea feeling. The houses were all of the proper size, none so large as to cause envy, none so small as to elicit pity.

Years earlier, the lawns were immaculate, grass was trimmed to an evenness and flowers were carefully placed and lovingly tended. There had not been many people on the street. A drive through residential Watts was like driving through a small town in a 1940s Hollywood movie. There were always the odd teenagers pumping themselves up on Schwinns, but they could have been extras in the film, save that these bikers were black, as were the women who called them home for supper: “Henry, Henry...”

The Watts I visited in 1965 was very different. The houses were still uniform and similarly painted, and the lawns still precise, but there were people everywhere.

On my visit to Watts to orient myself for the new job, I passed groups of men in T-shirts or undershirts, lounging on front porches and steps. Their talk was just a little louder than usual, and they didn’t stop their conversation or lower their voices when I came into view.

Although I was never pretty, my youth, a good figure and well-chosen clothes would usually earn a clearing of the throat, or at least a veiled sound of approval. But the men in this Watts didn’t respond to my presence.

“Good morning, I am working for a company that wants to improve the quality of the goods you buy. I’d like to ask you a few questions. Your answers will ensure that you will find better foods in your supermarket and probably at a reduced price.”

The person who wrote those lines, for interviewers to use with black women, knew nothing of black women. If I had dared utter such claptrap, at best I would have been laughed off the porch or at worst told to get the hell away from the woman’s door.

Black females, for the most part, know by the time they are ten years old that the world is not much concerned with the quality of their lives or even their lives at all. When politicians and salespeople start being kind to black women, seeking them out, offering them largesse, the women accept the soft voices, the simpering statements, the often idle promises, because those are likely to be the only flattering behavior directed to them that day. Behind the women’s eyes, however, there is a wisdom that does not pretend to be unaware; nor does it permit gullibility.

Martin Luther King, Jr., once related a story that demonstrated just how accurate the black woman was at assessing her location in the scheme of things and knowing how to handle herself wherever she was.

He told us about an older black woman who had worked for a white woman in Alabama, first as her laundress, then as her maid, then as her cook and finally as her housekeeper. After forty years, the black woman retired, but she would go to visit her former employer occasionally.

On one visit, her employer had friends over for lunch. When the employer was told that Lillian Taylor was in the kitchen, she sent for her. Lillian went into the living room and greeted all the women, some of whom she had known since their childhoods.

The white woman said, “Lillian, I know you’ve heard of the bus boycott.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’ve heard of it.”

“Well, I want to know, what do you think of it? Are you supporting it?”

“No, ma’am. Not one bit. Not one little iota. And I won’t let none of mine support it, either.”

“I knew you’d be sensible, Lillian, I just knew it in my bones.”

“Yes, ma’am, I won’t touch that bus boycott. You know my son took me to live with him and his family (he won’t let me even lift a finger), and he works for the power company way ’cross town from our house. I told him, ‘Charles, don’t you have anything to do with that bus boycott. You walk to work. Stay all the way out of that bus boycott.’ And my grandchildren, they go to school way over on the east side, I told them the same thing: ‘Don’t have anything to do with that boycott. You walk to school.’ And even today, when I wanted to come over and visit you, I got a lady from my church to bring me. I wasn’t going to touch that boycott. Sure wasn’t.”

The room had become quiet, and Lillian Taylor said, “I know you have plenty help now, but do you want me to bring you all more coffee?”

She went to the kitchen and was followed by the white woman’s daughter.

“Lillian, why do you treat my mother like that? Why not just come out and say you support the boycott?”

Lillian said, “Honey, when you have your head in a lion’s mouth, you don’t snatch it out. You reach up and tickle him behind his ears and you draw your head out gradually. Every black woman in this country has her head in a lion’s mouth.”

I knew that a straight back and straight talk would get the black woman’s attention every time.

“Good morning. I have a job asking questions.”

At first there would be wariness. “What questions? Why me?”

“There are some companies that want to know which products are popular in the black community and which are not.”

“Why do they care?”

“They care because if you don’t like what they are selling, you won’t buy, and they want to fix it so you will.”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Come on in.”

I was never turned away, although most times the women were abstracted. Few gave me their total attention. Some complained that their husbands were around all day.

“I work nights, and usually I come home and sleep a few hours, then get up and have time to fix up my house. But with him not working, he’s home all day, bringing his friends in and all that.”

Or they complained that the men weren’t around.

“I don’t know where he’s spending his time. He’s not working, he’s not at the job and he’s not at home...makes me a little suspicious.”

Listening to the women brought me more squarely back to the U.S.A. The lilt of the language was so beautiful, and I was heartened that being away from the melody for a few years had not made one note foreign to me.

The women ranged from college graduates to those who would find it challenging to read the daily newspaper, yet the burdens of their conversations were the same.

Those who worked or needed medical attention or collected supplemental food stamps were dependent on private cars. Public transportation was so poor that if a woman had to use it in order to be at work by eight-thirty
A.M.
, she would have to leave home at five
A.M.

Those who worked as housekeepers, maids and cooks shopped on their way home from their jobs in the stores used by their employers. The goods were fresher, of better quality and remarkably cheaper.

I had gone to Watts to fulfill the demands of my job and had gotten so much more. The women opened their doors and minds to me. Even as I asked about dishwashing Dove and Bold and Crisco and Morton salt, I found hardworking women and hard-thinking women. Indirectly, I met their men, whose jobs had disappeared and who found they were unable to be breadwinners in their own homes.

Some men, embarrassed at their powerlessness, became belligerent, and their wives’ bodies showed the extent of their anger. Some, feeling futile, useless, left home, left the places where they read disappointment in every face and heard shame in every voice. Some drank alcohol until they reached the stage of stupor where they could not see or hear and certainly not think.

On the surface, Watts still appeared a pretty American dream, wide thoroughfares, neat lawns, nice bungalows. Those factors were facts, but there is always a truth deeper than what is visible.

Without work and steady salaries, the people could not envision tomorrows. Women and men, furious with themselves and each other, began to abandon the children. They didn’t leave them in baskets on doorsteps, they abandoned them in the home. Dinners together became fewer because the father was seldom there and the mother was busy reviewing where she went wrong, or prettying up to set out her lures again.

The bootless children, with discipline removed, without the steadying hand of a present parent who cared, began to run like young tigers in the streets. First their need drove them to others like themselves, with whom they could make a family. Then their rage made the newly formed families dangerous. Gangs of abandoned children bullied their way up and down the sidewalks of Watts, growing bolder and angrier every day.

They left the schools in record numbers. What could school offer them that could be of use? Education, so they could get jobs? But their parents had had jobs that were taken away. Their parents had believed in the system, and see them now? Empty uncaring husks of the people they once were. No. School promised nothing, nothing save a chance to lose the families they had just made and needed so desperately.

Nine

The uproar in Watts taught me something I had not known. Odor travels faster and farther than sound. We smelled the conflagration before we heard it, or even heard about it. The odor that drifted like a shadow over my neighborhood was complex because it was layered. Burning wood was the first odor that reached my nose, but it was soon followed by the smell of scorched food, then the stench of smoldering rubber. We had one hour of wondering what was burning before the television news reporters arrived breathlessly.

There had been no cameras to catch the ignition of the fire. A number of buildings were burning wildly before anyone could film them. Newscasters began to relay the pictures and sounds of the tumult.

“There is full-blown riot in Watts. Watts is an area in southeast Los Angeles. Its residents are predominately Negroes.” Pictures were interspersed with the gasps of the newscasters.

That description was for the millions of whites who lived in Los Angeles but who had no idea that Watts existed and certainly no awareness that it was a parcel of the city and only a short ride from their own communities.

Policemen and politicians, all white, came on the television screens to calm down the citizenry in the unscathed regions.

“You have nothing to fear. The police have been deployed to Watts, and in a few hours we will have everything under control.”

Those of us who watched the action live on television over the next few days knew that the officials were talking out of their hats.

The rioters had abandoned all concern for themselves, for their safety and freedom. Some threw rocks, stones, cans of beer and soda at police in cars and police on foot. Heavily burdened people staggered out the doors of supermarkets, followed by billows of smoke. Men and women carried electrical appliances in their arms, and some pushed washers and dryers down the middle of the street.

However, nothing—not the voices trained to relay excitement nor the images of unidentifiable looters entering and leaving unlighted shops—could capture the terrifying threat of a riot like the stench of scorched wood and burning rubber.

Radios blared, “Watts is on fire.” Television cameras filmed a group of men turning over a car and a young woman throwing a bottle at a superstore window. The glass seemed to break in slow motion. In fact, throughout the duration of the explosion, every incident shown on television seemed acted out at a pace slower than real time.

Sirens screamed through the night, and television screens showed gangs of young men refusing to allow fire trucks a chance to put out fires.

“Burn, baby, burn.” The instruction came clear over the radios: “Burn, baby, burn.” Certain political analysts observed that the people were burning their own neighborhood. Though few houses were set afire, the rioters considered the stores, including supermarkets, property of the colonialists who had come into the neighborhood to exploit them and take their hard-earned money.

Two days passed and I could wait no longer. I drove to Watts and parked as near the center of the uprising as possible, then I walked. The smell had turned putrid as plastic furniture and supermarket meat departments smoldered. When I reached a main street, I stopped and watched as people pushed piled-high store carts out of burning buildings. Police seemed to be everywhere and nowhere, watching from inside their cars.

A young boy, his arms laden, his face knotted in concentration, suddenly saw me.

“You want a radio?”

I was amazed that there was no guilt in his voice. I said, “No, not yet. Thanks anyway.”

Ordinarily I would have read in the boy’s face, or felt, an “Uh-huh, this woman knows I’ve been stealing.” There would have been at least an ounce of shame. But his approach had been conspiratorial, as if to say, “We’re in this together. I know you not only know what I am doing, you approve of it and would do it yourself if you could.”

Smoke and screams carried in the air. Someone behind me was cursing long, keen streaks of profanity. It became hard to discern if the figures brushing past me were male or female, young or old.

The farther I walked, the more difficult it was to breathe. I had turned and started back to my car when a sound cut the air. The loud whine of police sirens was so close it stabbed into my ears. Policemen in gas masks emerged out of the smoke, figures from a nightmare. Alarm flooded me, and in a second I was dislocated. It seemed that the sirens were in my nose, and smoke packed my ears like cotton. Two policemen grabbed a person in front of me. They dragged the man away as he screamed, “Take your hands off me, you bastards! Let me go!”

I ran, but I couldn’t see the pavement, so it was nearly impossible to keep my footing. I ran anyway. Someone grabbed for me, but I shrugged off the hand and continued running. My lungs were going to burst, and my calves were cramping. I pushed myself along. I was still running when I realized I was breathing clean air. I read the street signs and saw that I was almost a mile away from my car, but at least I wasn’t in jail. Because I had run in the opposite direction from where I had parked, I would have to circle Watts to find my car, but at least I wasn’t in Watts.

When I returned home, the television coverage was mesmerizing. The National Guard was shown arriving in Watts. They were young men who showed daring on their faces but fear in their hearts. They were uncomfortable with new, heavy responsibilities and new, heavy guns.

After three days the jails began to fill. The media covered hundreds of looters being arrested. Frances Williams said that the rumor in the neighborhood beauty salons and barbershops was that the police were arresting anyone black and those suspected of being black.

Watts was all anyone could think of. The fact of it, the explosion of anger, surprised and befuddled some: “I’ve driven through Watts many times. It’s very nice.” Some people were furious: “The police should have the right to shoot at will. If a few of those looters were shot, the rest would get the message soon enough.” Watts went on burning. It had not had enough, and I hadn’t had enough.

Curiosity had often lured me to the edge of ruin. For years, I had known that there is nothing idle about curiosity, despite the fact that the two words are often used in tandem. Curiosity fidgets, is hard to satisfy, looks for answers even before forming questions. Curiosity wants to behold, to comprehend, maybe even to become.

Two days after my tentative foray into the war zone, I had to go again, but this time I wouldn’t allow fear any control over me. This time I would not run.

The combustion had spread, so my previous parking space was now only a block from the riot. I parked there anyway and walked directly into the din.

Burglar alarms continued to ring in the stores that had no front doors or windows. Armed civilians stood in front of ravaged businesses, guarding against further looting. They were heckled.

“Hey brother, you guarding Charlie’s thing. You must be a fool.”

“I sure wouldn’t risk my life for somebody else’s stuff. If they care that much for it, they ought to come down here and look after it themselves.”

“Ain’t that much money in the world make me lose my life...”

The National Guard was heckled, too, but not as pointedly.

“Hey, man, you drew some lame duty.”

“Don’t you feel like a fool standing in front of a supermarket?”

I heard this in front of a pawnshop: “Hey, man, don’t you feel stupid keeping people from stealing something that was already stole in the first place?”

The soldiers worked at keeping straight faces.

The devastation was so much broader. On the second day of the riot, and my first day visiting Watts, there was a corridor of burned-out buildings and cars, but on the fourth day, the corridor had widened substantially.

That night I sat down at my kitchen table and wrote on a yellow pad my description of the events I had seen in Watts and the uprising as it was reported on television.

Our

YOUR FRIEND CHARLIE
pawnshop

was a glorious blaze

I heard the flames lick

then eat the trays

of zircons

mounted in red-gold alloys

Easter clothes and stolen furs

burned in the attic

radios and TVs

crackled with static

plugged in

only to a racial outlet

Hospitality, southern-style

cornpone grits and you-all smile

whole blocks novae

brand-new stars

policemen caught in their

brand-new cars

Chugga chugga chigga

git me one nigga

lootin’ n burnin’

he won’t git far

Lighting: a hundred Watts

Detroit, Newark and New York

Screeching nerves, exploding minds

lives tied to

a policeman’s whistle

a welfare worker’s doorbell

finger

Spirit walked with me on my second visit to the exploding section of Watts. I became invisible in the black community. I had to stop and stand still when I realized that no one seemed to see me. When I had visited Watts on the first day of my new job, no one spoke to me or commented on my presence, but I was seen. This time I could have been in a white neighborhood. When a black person appears in a white part of town, there is a moment of alarm, but if the black doesn’t appear threatening, he is erased from the white mind immediately.

In the black community, a black person is always given her humanity.

On this visit to Watts, the responses were different. Neither the looters, the police, the spectators nor the National Guard took notice of me. A group of young men was bouncing a car filled with white passengers whose faces looked like Halloween masks through the car windows. Terror bulged from their eyes, and if the windows had been open, I would have heard the screams pouring out of their wide, gaping mouths.

A phalanx of police slipped by me and were upon the rioters quickly and quietly. The officers began handcuffing the offenders, and I turned my attention to the now settled car. Its inhabitants were exchanging smiles that I didn’t read as smiles of relief, but rather of satisfaction. They had come to Watts to get a thrill, and hadn’t they done just that?

The newly arrested men were marched close enough for me to touch them, but neither they nor the police regarded me.

I came upon some people who were sauntering down the main street, casually taking in the sights. They were so at ease in that uneasy time and place that it was obvious they lived in the neighborhood. Their concentration was on the stores and the burned-out shells of buildings, so they didn’t see me.

The havoc now had areas of calm, and either I brought serenity with me or it found me wherever I was. I watched as people sifted through debris. Each whole cup or unbroken plate was treated as a treasure. A woman smiled with pleasure when she found a matched pair of shoes. A man passed me carrying a pair of well-worn pants and grinning.

On the first day of insurgency, people of all ages allowed their rage to drive them to the streets. But on the fourth day, the anger of the older citizens was spent. I read sadness and even futility on their faces. But I saw no one attempt to dissuade the younger rioters from their hurly- burly behavior.

People in front of and behind me were taken to jail, and I was ignored. Admittedly, I didn’t curse or shout at the law enforcers, nor did I carry anything that even faintly resembled loot, but that had not influenced the police earlier. People on their way to or from work had been apprehended.

The night before, I had remembered one of my mother’s statements: “Nothing’s wrong with going to jail for something you believe in. Remember, jail was made for people. Not horses.” That is when I had decided I would return to Watts ready to be arrested.

Three police vans were filled and driven away as I stood on the corner of 125th and Vermont. I headed back to my car with an equal mixture of disappointment and relief.

The upheaval continued in volume and drama for five days, and although the violence waned, the frustration was as pervasive as ever. Politicians and community representatives met and held press conferences. Viewers were told that a plan for Watts was being hammered out.

The ash had not yet settled on every car and windowsill before the streets were filled with tourists who came to look at Watts. Journalists from France, England and the Soviet Union were shown on television interviewing people in Watts. They asked any question that came to mind: “Why did Watts burn?” “Why did you burn your own neighborhood?” “Isn’t America supposed to be the melting pot?” “Were you trying to get the heat up to melting temperature?”

The people answered with anything that came to their minds.

“It burned down before I noticed.”

“I didn’t have a job, so I burned down Watts.”

“I didn’t have anything else to do, so I burned a store.”

The journalists were being treated with the old-as-slavery response: “If a white man asks where you’re going, you tell him where you’ve been.”

A white man asks, “Where are you going, boy?” Your response should be, with much head scratching and some shuffling, “You know, boss, I was down that street over there by that big old tree, you know, and I saw something ’twas hard to look upon...”

“I didn’t ask where you were, I asked where are you going.”

“Yes sir, that’s what I’m trying to tell you. If you had seen what I’ve seen...I don’t...if they’re...couldn’t have been a half a mile away. I had to get out of there, or I don’t know what would have happened.”

The white man would usually respond, “Oh, you’re a fool. I’m not going to waste any more time on you.” The white man walks away, and the black man is pleased that no secrets were revealed or any lies told.

But talking drums of the black community carried the message loud and clear. The rebellion reached some important ears, and things were going to change. Community spokespersons said what was needed most was a medical clinic so that sick people didn’t have to travel two or three hours just to see a doctor.

The unemployed wanted jobs, the underemployed wanted better jobs.