Jesus stood up from behind the boat and smiled. He’d taken his single sail out every day for three months before the riots. I made him stay home while the curfew was on, though. He took the time to fix any damage the craft had suffered.
“Hey, Dad,” he said in a voice made strong by the sea. “Bonnie’s home.”
He wasn’t very tall, five six in his deck shoes. His skin was the color of brown eggshell. His eyes were dark and almond shaped and he was fluent in English, Spanish, and French. The latter he picked up from Bonnie as easily as some people acquire an accent by moving to a different part of the country.
When Jesus came to live with me he was five and had never spoken a word. He didn’t speak for many years because of abuse that he was exposed to at a very early age. And even after he did start talking, it was seldom and soft.
But then he decided to drop out of high school and build himself a boat. I allowed him to do it, even though everyone told me it was a mistake. Jesus had promise in school. His grades were just average, but he excelled as a long-distance runner. UCLA had been talking to the track coach about Jesus, but then I let him drop out to build his boat and take reading lessons with me at night.
The sea made him stand taller and speak out loud. He was the master of his own fate when he no longer had to deal with anyone he didn’t want to, like all of the teachers who didn’t believe that little Mexican kids were worth the seats they sat in.
“How’s it goin’, boy?” I asked.
“Daddy!” Feather yelled. She came running out of the front door with her thick blond-brown hair bouncing behind her. She’d shot up in the few months that Jesus was sailing. In just a few years she’d be taller than the brother of her heart. She was light skinned, even lighter than Jesus, but definitely American Negro—that’s black mixed in with something else. Her mother was a white stripper who died and her father was someone like me. She came to live in my home before she was eight months old. I was the only father she knew.
She ran right into me and hugged me as hard as she could.
“Are you all right?” she asked, whining.
“Sure I am, baby girl. Were you worried?”
“Juice said that you were going down to your office. Where the black people are shooting up everybody they see.”
“Juice didn’t say that part about the black people, did he, honey?”
“No. Graham did.”
“That little boy with the green eyes?”
Feather was still holding me. She looked up and nodded.
I kissed her forehead and carried her to the short stack of concrete stairs that led to our front door. When I sat down she twisted so that she was sitting in my lap. It was a dance step we’d developed over the nine years she’d been my girl.
She’d left the front door open. Her little yellow dog, Frenchie, came to the door and bared his sharp teeth. He hated me, dreamt every night, I was sure, about ripping out my throat. But we both loved Feather and so kept an uneasy truce.
“I don’t care what they say around here or over at Carthay Circle, honey, but black people aren’t running around crazy, shooting at people.”
“That’s what they say on the news,” she said.
“I know they do. But they don’t talk about why people are mad. They don’t talk about all the bad things that have happened to our people. You see, sometimes people get so mad that they just have to do something. Later on they might wish that they didn’t but by then it’s too late.”
“Is that why you were crying, Daddy?”
“When was I crying?”
“The other night when you were looking at the news and I was supposed to be in bed.”
“Oh.” I remembered. It was late and Bonnie had been stranded in Europe because of a series of thunderstorms around Paris. I was watching images of the rioters on the late news with the volume turned off, witnessing those poor souls out in the street fighting against an enemy that I recognized just as well as they. I had read the newspapers and heard the commentaries from the white newscasters. But my point of view was never aired. I didn’t want the violence but I was tired of policemen stopping me just for walking down the street. I hated the destruction of property and life, but what good was law and order if it meant I was supposed to ignore the fact that our children were treated like little hoodlums and whores? My patience was as thin as a Liberty dime, but still I stayed in my house to protect my makeshift family. That’s what brought me to tears. But how could I say all of that to a ten-year-old girl?
“I was sad because the people didn’t understand each other,” I said. “That’s why people fight.”
“Why?” Feather asked. She leaned her head against my jaw and all the pain released.
“Because they don’t know what it’s like to be in the other man’s skin,” I said.
“I’m hungry, Daddy,” Feather said, and I knew I had found the right words.
“Hi, baby,” Bonnie Shay said.
I leaned back and looked up, like a child, and saw her upside- down image. She looked down on us with eyes that took me away from America to a place where music was part of talking and walking and even breath.
Her skin was as dark as mine and her smile knew a happiness I craved. She squatted down and put her arms around Feather and me. Bonnie was the only woman I had known in my adulthood who could make me feel like a child in the presence of maternal love. I leaned back against her and closed my eyes. I’m a big man, weighing one ninety, but her work as a stewardess had prepared her to deal with heavy objects.
Feather sighed and Jesus came over to beam down on us like the sun on his own ancient homeland. For a moment there I almost forgot about the smoldering slums and Nola Payne’s cold body laid up in a white room under lock and key.
BONNIE AND I had a deal that I’d always make dinner on the day she returned from a transatlantic flight. I made glazed oxtails and collard greens with cornbread and tapioca pudding. It took fifty-seven minutes for me to do it all from scratch. That’s how you can tell who’s a good cook: by his speed and timing. There are a lot of men, both white and black, who call themselves gourmet cooks. They only work once a month or so and then they make only one dish. Those men have no idea what the real art of cooking is.
A real cook comes home not knowing what’s in the icebox because he doesn’t know who has eaten what since the last time he looked. You have to be fast on your feet making a balanced meal that has got to be on the table no more than five minutes after your brood gets hungry. And everything should be ready at the same time. I’d like to see these weekend gourmets come up with something new and tasty five days a week on a budget that some housewives get.
I didn’t get any complaints at the dinner table. It was nice to have everybody there. Bonnie was gone at least one week out of four on her European and African routes with Air France. Jesus spent all day every day either working at the Captain’s Reef supermarket in Venice or sailing along the coast. Most nights he spent with friends on the shore. To have all four of us there together felt like a blessing, even though I am not a religious man.
“Dad?” Jesus said.
“Uh-huh.”
“What is Vietnam?”
“It’s a country.”
“But who’s fighting them?”
“They’re having an internal disagreement,” I said. “People in the north want to have it one way and the people in the south want it another.”
“Which one is right?”
When Jesus dropped out of school I made him promise to read every day and then to talk to me about what he’d read. That carried over into us discussing newspaper articles almost every morning. We had skipped that morning because I left for the office early, so he kept his discussion for the dinner table.
“Johnson says it’s the south that’s right. I really couldn’t say.”
“Does Juice have to go over there and fight the Veemanams, Daddy?” Feather asked.
“I hope not, honey. I really do hope not.”
8
Jesus and Feather were both in bed by eight. She because it was her bedtime and he because he worked so hard. Bonnie and I stretched out on the couch in front of the TV and got reacquainted.
“It sounds so terrible,” she was saying. She had her back against the arm of the sofa and her bare feet in my lap.
“What?”
“The fighting and the violence,” she said.
“I guess.”
“What do you mean, you guess?”
“It’s hot and people are mad,” I said. “They’ve been mad since they were babies.”
“But it’s stupid to attack just anybody because of their skin.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It sure is.”
“Then why don’t you think it’s terrible? I was so frightened for you and the children when I was away.”
I began to massage the joint under her big toe. She always relaxed when I did that.
But Bonnie pulled the foot away.
“Talk to me, Easy. I want to know what you mean.”
“I missed you every night,” I said. “I wanted you in the bed with me. I kept thinkin’ that if you were there, then things would be better.”
“I wanted to be. You know that.”
“Yeah.”
Some months earlier Bonnie had met an African prince and spent a holiday with him on the isle of Madagascar. After I found out she told me that they hadn’t made love, but there were questions we both had afterwards—questions we didn’t have before.
“Pain has a memory of its own,” I said, thinking of Joguye Cham, the African prince, and Nola Payne.
“What do you mean, honey?” Bonnie asked.
“If I was to hit you right now,” I said. “Haul off with my fist and crack you upside your head it would be on your mind for the rest of your life.”
I balled my fist as I spoke. Bonnie leaned down and kissed the big knuckle, then licked it.
“Every day,” I continued, “you’d wonder why I did it and when I might do it again. You’d wonder if you’d done something wrong. You’d hate me but you’d be angry at yourself too.”
“Why would I be angry at myself if you attacked me?”
“If you hit me back, you’d worry that it wasn’t enough or maybe too much. You’d worry that maybe I had a reason to hit you and you just didn’t know what it was. If you didn’t hit me back, you’d feel like a coward or a fool. The pain of that one blow would worm around in your gut and change everything you did from that moment on.”
Bonnie had had her own share of pain in life, I knew that. I didn’t want to bring it up but I felt compelled to explain myself.
“But even if something happens to me,” she said, feeling the hurt as she spoke, “does that make anything I do right? Shouldn’t we decide at some time to let it go and move on?”
“You can’t ever leave something like that behind. You go to sleep with it and you wake up with it too.” I was looking her in the eye then. She wanted to turn away but would not.
“But it’s worse than that,” I said. “For most people the pain they experience is just inside them. I hit you in the head but that’s you and me. You could leave, find another man. You could go to work and none of the other women got a big knot on their heads. But if you come from down in Watts or Fifth Ward or Harlem, every soul you come upon has been threatened and beaten and jailed. If you have kids they will be beaten. And no matter how far back you remember, there’s a beatin’ there waiting for you. And so when you see some man stopped by the cops and some poor mother cryin’ for his release it speaks to you. You don’t know that woman, you don’t know if the man bein’ arrested has done something wrong. But it doesn’t matter. Because you been there before. And everybody around you has been there before. And it’s hot, and you’re broke, and people have been doin’ this to you because of your skin for more years than your mother’s mother can remember.”
There were tears in my voice if not in my eyes and Bonnie was crying too. She put her hands on my forearms letting her heat sink into my skin. We didn’t talk for a long time after that.
“THE POLICE CAME to see me down at the office today,” I said.
We were both undressing for bed.
“What did they want?”
“They want to hire me.”
“No. Why?”
I told her everything from Theodore Steinman’s story to Nola Payne to the cops stopping me and the watchmaker asking for my business.
“Are you going back down there?” she asked when I was through.
“What else can I do? Nobody else can do it.”
“It might be dangerous. You have children.”
I leaned over and kissed her right nipple. She made a sound that told me that she hadn’t realized how much her nipple missed that kiss.
We didn’t talk any more about the LAPD or Nola Payne. Our only words were sweet promises about a world made up of two.
9
I was up before five. After donning my day’s costume I shook Bonnie out of bed. She wrapped herself in a housecoat without complaint. She didn’t even stop to make a cup of coffee, just staggered out to her pink Rambler and turned over the engine.
Neither Feather nor Jesus would be up before seven. By then Bonnie would be back in her bed.
On the ride to my office Bonnie and I said very little. She was slow to wake up the first day after coming back from Europe. But she wouldn’t let me take a taxi.
The sun was rising but not risen. The streets were fairly empty until we crossed Florence. After that we came across the occasional army Jeep. Two trucks full of armed soldiers sped past us at one point. There were groups of soldiers on a few major corners. But the main thing we saw was the wreckage left by the riots.
Bonnie gasped and sighed with every new ruin we passed.
On Avalon and Central and Hooper the burned buildings outnumbered the ones still intact. There was at least one torched car hunkered down at the curb on almost every block. Debris was strewn along the sidewalks and streets. Smoke still rose here and there from the wreckage. Furtive shadows could be seen sifting through the debris, searching for anything of value that had been overlooked.
City buses were running and the police made their presence felt. They were still riding four to a car, some wearing riot helmets or holding shotguns upright in their laps. They were still jumpy from days and nights when the Negro population rose up and fought back.
Bonnie let me off in front of my building. She kissed me and told me to be careful and then she kissed me again.
“Call if you’re going to be late, honey,” she said. “You know Feather will be worried.”
I kissed her and then walked off to my car.
TRINI’S CREOLE CAFé on 105th and Central was just an open-air coffee stand with a fancy name. All Trini had were a counter and six stools under a dirty yellow awning.
“You opened the minute they called the curfew off, huh, Trini?” I said to the open-air restaurateur.
“I been open every day, Mr. Rawlins,” Trini replied.
“With all this riotin’ and snipin’ goin’ on?” I asked.
“Dollar don’t make itself, brother.”
He had straight black hair from his Mexican father and the chocolate brown face and flat nose of his mother, who worked in the kitchen.
“Didn’t they give you any trouble?” I asked after enjoying the first real laugh I’d had in a week.
“Most of your serious riotin’ was done at nighttime. I’m mainly a breakfast place. I had looters, rioters, even cops and soldiers buyin’ coffee and jelly doughnuts.”
“Cops and looters at the same counter?”
“Oh yeah. You know the cops come six and eight at a time, and so it wasn’t too much to worry about. But mostly it was just neighborhood peoples comin’ out for to see what had been burnt down and tryin’ to feel a little normal.”
“Weren’t you supposed to be closed?” I asked.
“Oh yeah. They come by
and told me to shut down a time or two but what was they gonna do, book me with the bombs goin’ off around their heads?”
I laughed again. Trini was about my age. He held himself like an elder, though. Wisdom was his crutch. He never worried about anything because he could explain it all away with a few sage words.
“So I guess you know all the dirt, huh?” I asked.
“So much I got to wash my hands every ten minutes.”
I smiled. “Lemme have another one’a those lemon-filled doughnuts, will ya?”
The sun was up and the streets were halfway normal. While Trini got my doughnut, I turned over a question in my mind.
The stock-and-trade of wise men was to educate. That meant they always had to feel they knew something you didn’t know. So when asking a question of a wise man it was always best to ask it in the wrong way.
Trini brought my doughnut on a thick tan plate.
“You hear about some white dude got dragged outta his car and killed down on Grape Street?” I asked when he set the plate down.
“You ain’t got that one quite right, Easy,” he replied.
“No? Why not?”
“There was a boy drivin’ ’round lookin’ at the play when a couple’a the brothers saw him and drug him out for a dustin’.”
“They didn’t kill him?”
“Nope. Just a citizen that some’a our boys beat on. They say he run off so quick that nobody could catch him. Nobody said nuthin’ about no body.”
“I ain’t read about that at all.”
“That’s street talk, brother. You know what it’s like.”
“So you sayin’ a white boy come down here in his car and gets dragged out and beaten and the papers don’t even cover it?” I shook my head as if to say that that just couldn’t be true.
“Oh yeah, Easy. Yes sir. Bobby Grant told me himself and he live right around the corner from there.”
I sucked the lemon custard out of its pastry pocket. I liked Trini’s mother’s lemon filling because she didn’t add so much sugar that the lemon lost its tang.
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