Thirty-Eight #2
Clément and the cousins come home in the midafternoon with a boy named Desmond whom they just met today.
He lives on 110th Street, tells us how he’s been trying to get a steady job for the last two years but no one in the neighborhood will hire him, how the house his family rents has a hole in the roof that the landlord won’t fix.
“We’re the only major city in the United States without a poverty program,” Nathalie says.
“That’s right,” he says. “All we’re asking for is work.”
“You come on down to Compton when all of this is over,” Al says. “Come on down and see me about a job.”
Ginny dishes soup for everyone. They eat with gusto. I sew a tear in Desmond’s shirt. “Don’t take long,” Clément says. “We’re heading back out.”
“Does your mother know you’re all right?” I ask Desmond, and point him toward the phone. He dials and I hear exclamations of relief through the receiver.
I’m tying off the thread when there’s a commotion at the door.
A voice breaks through—“Now let me in, little man”—and I’m unable to believe it but it’s true. Here’s Lionel. Ginny whoops and charges him. He picks her up, arms tight around her waist. Sets her down and comes to me. Leans over for my embrace.
“You came back,” I say into his shoulder.
“Here I am. Feels like change is in the air.”
But minutes later, he’s turning away, heading out with the others, too soon. I keep checking to see if his bags are still resting inside the door. Evidence that he’s really here, in Los Angeles again. That I’m not just dreaming it.
In the early evening, the phone rings. Elise, saying, “When they showed a map of the unrest on the news I could barely believe it. I would have called earlier but I was on the phone with Sylvie. She’s hysterical, convinced that armed Negroes are going to storm the hills and hurl Molotov cocktails through her windows. ”
I think of Sylvie at that first dinner party at Elise’s, studying me from across the table. “That sounds like her,” I say.
“Ridiculous. But even still. You be careful. Not a good time for the people of Watts to mistake you for Italian.”
“You mean my people.” My voice harsher than I’d intended.
“Yes,” she says. “Of course.” We’re quiet on the line.
“The news is reporting all kinds of outrageous things. But Espen and I have been having long talks about it. It seems to me that when a community has been mistreated for so long, then it’s only natural that they’d take the matter into their own hands. Only right that they would.”
My hand loosens its grip. My friend, on the line.
She says, “You and Ginny are welcome to stay here with us if the violence gets too close. The kids, too, of course. Their friends. Whatever you need.”
“I have a full house here,” I say. “Eleven people if you can believe it. Lionel came back.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. It’s about time he did.” And then she laughs. “Eleven people in your little place.”
Night comes with booms and sirens, cheers and screams and shattering and shouting, poor Holiday sprinting and barking through the yard.
More fire in the sky, smoke thick in my mouth when I go outside.
It’s five in the morning by the time the kids get back.
They aren’t naive. They know why they were raised here instead of in New Orleans.
We watched Malcolm X’s speech together at Dooto’s last summer, broadcast to a group in the theater room.
Goose bumps on my arms when he said “by any means necessary.” The kids stayed late to talk about it with the others.
They were energized and conflicted, each of them thoughtful, each of them filling me with pride.
Now, they stream into the house with a buoyancy, an elation that’s at odds with the news reports, the broadcasters’ scolding tones, the footage of the shopping district burning.
They talk over one another—who they saw, who got arrested, men and women, old and young, filling truck beds with furniture and cases of liquor, the cop on 113th who drew his gun only to put it back in his holster when the crowd commanded him to.
Nothing theoretical about it anymore. Al and Lionel are here, too, and I stay by Lionel’s side, touch him every chance I get.
His shoulder through the cotton of his T-shirt.
His hand, calloused and familiar. Back again, with us.
“Did you hear that the planes had to be rerouted?” Clément asks.
“The gunshots and smoke made landing too dangerous.”
“We’re rerouting planes,” Rudy marvels. “That’s some South Vietnamese Liberation Army shit.”
“Check this out,” Desmond says, showing us a watch fastened around his wrist. “Now I’ll always know what time it is.
My cousin got himself a sofa. Before they set the place on fire do you know what they did?
Made sure to destroy all the credit records.
No one in the community owes them a cent anymore. ”
“Did you get anything, Clément?” Nathalie asks.
“Nah,” he says. “I have what I need.”
Ginny’s been standing in the doorway, listening. “Did anyone notice Gerard’s shoe shop?”
“Gerard’s a colored man, isn’t he?” Lionel asks.
“Yeah,” Ginny says.
“The Negro store owners are putting signs up and people are mostly leaving their places alone. We’re going after the businesses that sell rotten food, sell cheap goods marked up just because there’s no other option in the neighborhood. No one’s trying to hurt an old colored man’s livelihood.”
Just before daybreak, Al and Adele head down to sleep in my studio.
Nathalie and Elizabeth share the pullout bed.
The boys and Lionel carve out spaces in the living room, on the sofa and the floor.
When we wake in the late morning, Ginny and Adele and I make a triple batch of banana muffins, a pot of grits, pork links.
I stare at Lionel all through breakfast. He’s grown a mustache. Otherwise, he’s just as he used to be. Al and Adele flank him. Nathalie sits at his feet, uses his legs as a backrest. As soon as we finish eating, Clément leads him out to the coop.
I take inventory of my cupboards, the refrigerator. “We’re going to need more groceries,” I say as they come back in. “I should have thought of that sooner.”
“I saw a store that’s still open,” Clément says.
“I can go out and get them,” Lionel says. He studies me, a smile forming.
“What?”
“I’m just wondering. Does it make you feel any kind of way? That I can go out and you can’t?”
I smile back. “It sure does.” Adele and Ginny and I sit at the kitchen table and discuss what we’ll cook, make Lionel a list for the store, and as soon as he drops off the groceries we get started.
As we cook, through the window, I see Nathalie on the patio, Delphine’s letter in her hands.
I stop chopping greens when she comes back in, watch her in case she wants to talk.
She tucks the envelope back by the phone.
“Her handwriting,” she says. “It’s very elegant.” I wait. She bites her lip. Heads to her room and shuts the door.
Time loses meaning. All day, people come and go.
We’re watching TV or we’re sleeping or we’re fixing a meal at the stove or we’re talking with somebody about Selma or the best recipe for pie crusts or Coltrane or the repeal of the housing act or the Beatles.
Sometimes it’s just Nathalie and Adele and Ginny and me at home.
Sometimes the rooms are so full there’s nowhere to sit but the floor.
Smoke’s thick in my throat, in my hair. Ash covers the garden steps and the patio table and the windowsills.
I make coffee for the young people in my living room.
Crack a dozen eggs and whisk them in a bowl.
Ginny’s checking injuries. Rudy has a cut on his forehead and for a split second his face turns into Lionel’s, eighteen in the blue house, and I gasp and Rudy says, “Auntie O, it’s not so bad,” and he’s himself again, and it’s only a small cut, and I shake it off.
It becomes harder for Lionel and Al and the others to get in and out of the area.
Trenches are dug, police barricades erected.
The lieutenant governor and Chief Parker call in the National Guard.
Desmond and Clément see them riding in with their rifles and bayonets, rush to the house to tell us.
Rudy and Paul and Elizabeth reach for their shoes. Adele rises.