by Jill Leovy
Bryant had abilities, just not academic ones. He loved animals. He cared for all kinds of pets, never losing interest in them. He maintained a tank full of exotic fish.
He was good with his hands. Wally Jr. marveled at how he seemed able to build anything. When Bryant’s bicycle was stolen, he got interested in lowrider trikes. He restored an antique one, built a speaker box and battery cage for it, and wired the whole thing together. He designed and made clothes. He won his school’s chili cook-off. He could reupholster car seats. He poured himself into what his older brother considered quirky, endearing little hobbies for a biracial kid from South Central L.A.
To be sure, as Bryant got older his interests widened to rap music, nice clothes, and all that. But rather than leave behind his world of childish interests, he simply developed them as he grew. He turned his cooking into a profitable enterprise, making brownies and cookies at home and selling them to classmates. He collaborated with his mother on a movie-set-quality Cat in the Hat costume for a party, designing and constructing its cylindrical felt hat himself. He took to raising his own chickens, producing what his father had to admit were “beautiful roosters” even though the crowing was keeping the family up and driving the neighbors nuts. Taking his mother’s complaints about his music tastes to heart, he surprised her with homemade CDs containing elaborate mixes of “oldies” he knew she would like. And like his father he was organized—much more so than his older brother, whom Yadira had to chide to clean his room.
But school remained such drudgery—for Bryant, and for his parents. DeeDee and Wally Jr. were college-bound. DeeDee had such a crisp intellect for numbers that she became an accountant. Wally Jr. possessed a flair for the written word; he spent a semester in England studying British literature. But Bryant? Wally and Yadira were just hoping they could get him through high school. And even that modest goal sometimes seemed lofty. Despite the danger of ongoing combat in Afghanistan and Iraq, Wally Tennelle was secretly thinking that Bryant might find a career in the military.
Academics aside, Bryant was such “a good boy,” as his father always said. He was relaxed, despite his need for constant movement. He was good-natured. He held no grudges. His parents would be angry with him one moment and completely disarmed by him the next: their youngest boy, so affectionate and responsive, tripping along behind wherever they went, wanting to help his mother in the kitchen or his father in the yard, always wanting to be friends.
What affected his father most was how Bryant tried and tried, never giving up, never letting constant failure embitter him. All those frustrating years of trying to succeed at school, something he was so ill-suited for—years of squirming before math problems that bewildered him and gazing into textbooks that seemed incomprehensible. Year after year, he tried and tried, with the same dismal results, scraping by in school, burning through his parents’ money for remedial help, falling behind, staying behind, and yet “he never once complained,” his father marveled. “He wanted to make us happy.”
In his years of teaching, Brother Jim Reiter of St. Bernard High School in Westchester had discovered it was not necessarily students’ academic prowess that won over their teachers. It was character—some combination of earnest effort, curiosity, and intrinsic goodness. Bryant Tennelle had it, despite his scholastic failings. “He was the type of student—you would do whatever you could to help him,” said Reiter, who, besides his teaching duties, also volunteered as an on-call chaplain for the police department.
When Reiter encountered Bryant in high school, he saw how hard it was for him to focus. He was no longer, by that time, a behavior problem. He struck Reiter as introspective and aware of how much effort his parents had put into him. As frustrating as he found the schoolwork, “he wouldn’t lash out,” Reiter said. “He was bound and determined to make his parents proud of him.”
Reiter, first as his teacher, then as his academic counselor, encouraged him. At last, after years of denying him a chance to participate in sports because of his studies, Wally and Yadira had given in to Bryant’s pleas to play football. In his junior year he turned out for the team. He also did drama, dance—he was one of the only boys in the high school’s large dance program—and extracurricular activities. Reiter secretly knew Bryant sold brownies and cookies at school for cash in defiance of the rules, and turned his back.
There had to be some way for Bryant to succeed in a world that had become so inhospitable to people whose strengths lay in manual arts. Bryant was so genuine—and so well liked. His teachers at St. Bernard, like his parents and DeeDee, were always on the lookout for the right path for him. Reiter and some others had talked about guiding him toward culinary school.
By then, Bryant had grown slim and taller than Wally Jr. With his honey-brown skin and shiny hair, he was a hit with girls, and his humor and inborn desire to please assured him close friends among boys as well. He was not mature for his age, Wally Jr. thought. Bryant still loved Star Wars and his Lego battleships. He still had stuffed animals all over his room. His favorite was a stuffed chicken, like those he raised. His father was still thinking about the Marines. But Bryant was not of this mind. He talked to his grandmother of his love for clothing, and to his mother of his love for mechanics. He took an adult course at Crenshaw High School repairing car interiors and thrived in it. He had reached the age to drive.
Driving gave Bryant the freedom to pursue hourly jobs. Wally Tennelle soon recognized in his youngest son his own proclivity toward constant work. Bryant got a job at a Togo’s sandwich shop, and then Petco and Jamba Juice. Soon he was doubling up on jobs, shifting to better ones as they came along: Quiznos, Marie Callender’s, Big Five. He was still just a high school kid. But at these hourly jobs, where academic skill was not at a premium—only energy, industriousness, and a drive to earn money—Bryant was in his element. Seeing him work so enthusiastically gratified his parents, who still wanted him to graduate but were pleased to see him finally excel. “He wanted to be like me,” Wally Tennelle said. “Always out. Always working.”
Senior year, Bryant flunked economics. It was a class required for graduation, and it meant his parents’ dream of seeing him earn his diploma was thwarted. Reiter stepped in; Yadira and Wally were willing to try anything. They enrolled Bryant in an El Camino College class to make up the credits. But the class was too hard for him and required too much reading.
Privately, Wally Tennelle was worried. Those in the LAPD who suspected Tennelle was naïve for living in the Seventy-seventh were wrong. Tennelle knew the statistics; he knew the dynamics of gangs in his neighborhood, and understood the risks to his son better than most cops. It was always on his mind. But he also knew what many people don’t—that risk for young black men remains high even when they leave Los Angeles. San Bernardino County, for example, was a popular destination for black families seeking to protect their sons from crime. But while in the first five years of the 2000s the homicide death rate for San Bernardino’s young black men was indeed lower than for those in Los Angeles, it was still at least twenty times the national rate for Americans generally, and teenage rates there were rising fast. Tennelle’s information was anecdotal, but he comprehended the bigger picture. “How many times have I heard, I moved my son to San Bernardino and he got killed?” he said. “Why not stand my ground here?”
Tennelle had lectured both his sons—told them how easy it was to be mistaken for someone else and caught by a gang shooting. “Where you from?” were the last words heard by many a murder victim in L.A. Wally Tennelle knew if you were fifteen to twenty-five years old and black or Hispanic, there was no right answer. He chided his sons for slipping, he instructed them in how to be careful. But Bryant, unlike his older brother, had a fearless temperament. Tennelle never connected the trait to his own personality. But like his father, Bryant refused to live with any trepidation. He did what he wanted, went where he wanted, and was friendly and guileless with everyone he met. It left his father cold with fear. He would check up on Brya
nt while working in his sedan.
He once came upon him walking at night at Seventy-ninth and Halldale. “Bryant, I want you home in an hour,” he told him. Bryant was home at the appointed time. He was always like that—so good and willing, but still giving cause for worry.
Wally was not the only one worried. Wally Jr. was old enough to have experienced South Central at the end of the Big Years as only young black men did. The area wasn’t as bad as its reputation. But when he was about seven years old, he was playing outside and saw a shooting down the block. He saw the shooter’s Hawaiian shirt as he jumped out of the car, and he watched him shoot up a house. Another time, there was a party up the street—lots of Crips with blue bandanas walking up and down the street. Wally Jr. had been “where-you-fromed” several times. By high school he had developed a strategy: “I’m from nowhere. I don’t bang.” And keep walking. Sometimes the same gangster would hit him up two days in a row. Don’t you remember you just asked me? Wally Jr. would silently fume. But it was not his daily reality. Sure, the boulevards around his neighborhood could be dangerous. And there was that apartment on the corner. But the Tennelles’ neighborhood was also full of hardworking, friendly homeowners, families like theirs, and it was easy to keep a distance from the blue bandanas.
Much later, Wally Jr. would think about the great crime drop in Los Angeles, and the effect on his brother. Wally Jr. was only five years older than Bryant. But those five years were enough to have placed him in a different zone of fear. Wally Jr. and his friends had grown up in that brief span when South Central’s gang members actually did wear colors openly—their blue, red, and orange bandanas spilling from back pockets—something that would later become uncommon. He and his friends knew the rules. They had felt the vulnerability. They had learned the codes. They instinctively watched their backs, studied cars as they passed, always aware if one doubled back or passed twice. They knew what streets to avoid and what clothes not to wear.
But Bryant was a child of a safer L.A. and was not schooled in the streets. He was much less cautious.
Wally Jr. saw this as an extension of his childish innocence. He sometimes tried to talk to Bryant about what colors to wear. He noticed how carefree his brother was, riding his bike while listening to his music. But Bryant didn’t see the point of the rules. He even went to the Slauson Swap Meet on his bike, assuring his father it was all just fine. The Slauson Swap Meet. Every Seventy-seventh officer had answered calls there. Their father was angry—and concerned. He thought he saw a bruise on Bryant and wondered if he had gotten into a fight.
Bryant had been so sheltered and closely monitored by his parents that he knew only a few other kids in his neighborhood. But that, too, began to change as he grew older.
Joshua Henry had gone to Crenshaw High. He first met Bryant when he rolled by on his bike on one of his business ventures, selling homemade T-shirts and brownies. He shared Bryant’s taste for dancing, music, and building bikes. They worked on the bicycles together and rode them around.
Josh adored Bryant for his humor and good nature and shook his head at what he considered his elite and eccentric ways—the private school education, the pet duck that Bryant kept into his late teens. Josh was not a gang member. But he knew the streets much better than did Bryant. As thirteen-year-old students at Audubon Middle School, Josh and his friends one day cut through an alley and found themselves facing men with guns. They ran as gunfire erupted and boarded a passing bus. On the bus Josh looked down and noticed the hole in his shirt. A bullet had gone right through without touching him. He felt sick, breathless with fear.
Another time, he was older, stopped in a car with a friend on Van Ness. A group of men surrounded them, trying to open the car doors. As they sped away, a bullet hit the car and Josh got that same sick feeling again. It was funny how in movies, shootings seemed exciting, he thought. In life, they weren’t.
Josh considered Bryant “soft as a diaper” and thought he was crazy to go around the neighborhood so fearlessly. He, too, tried to teach Bryant the unwritten rules. Stay off Western, he’d say. “And watch yourself—no matter where you at.” When Bryant didn’t seem to get it, Josh tried to teach him lessons. He would see Bryant walking on the street—“walking with his head down!” he marveled later—and roll up on him in a bike or car. “See?” he’d say. “You just got caught slippin’!” Josh couldn’t believe how naïve Bryant was. “He wasn’t used to that environment,” he said. “His parents raised him well.”
Bryant, however, sampled some share of the black man’s lot. He and Josh had a run-in with the LAPD while riding their bikes in the Kingdom Day Parade in celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s birthday. Josh got mouthy. But Bryant told the officer his father was a detective and tried to reason with him, standing straight and talking quietly. Josh, watching, was impressed with his friend’s self-control in a situation that left him fuming. It was a side of Bryant he hadn’t seen before. The cop was not moved. Josh ended up with a ticket for blocking an alleyway that became a six-hundred-dollar fine.
Bryant Tennelle had entered that period of late adolescence when parents find their power reduced to suggestion and hope. Every parent goes through it; not every parent faces the lethal threat that bore down on young men in South Los Angeles.
That fall, Bryant turned eighteen. Legally, he was an adult. One day, he came home with an earring in one ear. “Why did you do that?” Yadira demanded. She knew her husband would be furious. Bryant kept his head turned so Wally couldn’t see at first. But eventually Wally cried out: “What is that doing in your ear!” Soon Bryant had earrings in both ears.
Girls were coming around now. The family didn’t like all of them. DeeDee, eight years older, took it upon herself to scold Bryant. “Pull your pants up!” she snapped. Bryant wore them looser than Wally Jr. had. He had developed a little hip-hop style, and it worried her.
Near the new year, Bryant got pulled over for speeding. It had happened before. This speeding ticket was the clincher: his driver’s license was suspended. Bryant was effectively grounded. He still went to school. On his own initiative, he had appealed to Reiter to help him again after failing at El Camino, and was now trying to graduate through a public school program for adult students. He still worked, taking buses or getting rides from his mother. But now, Bryant found himself sitting at home, too old to be under his parents’ thumb, without social options except those in the neighborhood.
Bryant had never mixed with many of the young people in his neighborhood before. His parents had carefully controlled his activities. It is one of the astonishing details of Bryant’s story that despite having lived, as his father wanted, in the same house all his life, he was a stranger to kids living on the same block. Wally and Yadira had limited him to private school friends and the children of families they trusted. Bryant was extraordinarily sheltered.
But now he was on foot or on his bike around the neighborhood, and made his first acquaintance with some of the young people nearby. A short walk from his house was a shabby rental home where a family with gang ties lived. Older family members were more involved, a younger one, Christopher Wilson, less so, though compelled by his relations into some fellowship with the 8-Trey Gangster Crips. Walter Lee Bridges was a friend of Wilson’s. With Josh Henry and some other young men, they formed a loose clique of what Josh would later call “affiliated” kids. Young men in South Central borrowed cop’s jargon as readily as cops expropriated theirs: “affiliated” referred to youths who weren’t necessarily criminal or violent but were inclined or obliged to be on friendly terms with the gang. None of Josh’s friends were “hard-core” gang members. But they had all been in fights from time to time, and some had been shot at. They knew friends who had been murdered. They had an unwritten code of having each other’s backs if need be.
Mostly, they just hung out together, fixed up their bicycles, smoked pot, and tried to figure out how to be cool and meet girls. Many white suburban teenage boys spent their time
in much the same way. Asked later why Bryant had taken to wearing a baseball cap with the insignia of the Houston Astros on it—the covert symbol of the nearby 8-Trey Hoover Criminals—Josh reacted as if the answer were self-evident. For the same reason they all wore such attire, he said: “To get girls!”
That spring, Bryant, Chris, Walter, and Josh began hanging out regularly. Their circle eventually expanded to Chris’s girlfriend and her pretty cousin Arielle Walker from down the street. Arielle was black-eyed with a hint of ruddy cinnamon in her complexion. Her father was in prison for murder.
To the group, it was as if Bryant Tennelle were a visitor from some exotic shore. He was astoundingly naïve. He had never drunk alcohol, didn’t fight, and knew nothing about gangs. He didn’t even know how to kiss a girl. He had this nice home and proper family and an intimidating cop for a dad who puttered in the driveway with his cigars. And not only did Bryant work, he was punctual, something none of the rest of them were. Bryant would hang out, then cut it short to start his shifts. The others liked him and called him by his last name. But they didn’t know what to make of him, with his beloved pet ducks and chickens and his gentle, sensitive ways. He wasn’t aggressive. He wasn’t loud. He sought to downplay conflicts. He wanted everyone to get along.
The last part was most novel of all. Lawless violence burdens black men as no one else. Walking with a bopping limp that suggests you have survived your share of street fights, yelling a lot, wheeling your eyes around angrily—these were learned behaviors among ghettoside men, affectations they adopted as preemptive defense against attack. Appearing weak was dangerous. Many men described having been robbed and threatened from childhood, relieved of their lunch money on the way to school, beaten up for backpacks and shoes, constantly called out to fight. Undersized boys were tormented, tall ones tested. It was frustrating and draining. Many black men were left with a version of the sickening sensation most males probably feel at some point in childhood, knowing a bully awaits them after school, wanting to fight. But the difference for these men was that the feeling was sharpened by fear of death and pervaded their adult lives. The stress wrought deep unhappiness. In the streets of the Seventy-seventh, men talked of suicide. Others were fatalistic and resigned. Lots of men, deep down, didn’t want to fight. They tried to avoid it, acting tough to discourage challengers. They conveyed, with every mannerism and gesture, a message that said “Don’t mess with me.” It was an exhausting act to keep up. But it was worth it to feel safer.
