Twilght

by Anna Deavere Smith

  because it happened before.

  That’s what I’m telling you.

  It happened before.

  There was just as much commitment,

  there was just as much passion

  and violence and hate.

  See, after the Watts riots there was something called the McClellan

  Commission.

  Fine.

  That was for two years

  and we forgot about Watts.

  So here we are again.

  We all have to make a commitment

  that this is never going to happen again

  to Los Angeles,

  and we have to meet

  on a regular basis,

  and we have to have the

  power

  in this group,

  quasi-public

  quasi-

  political group,

  that we can call the governor,

  that we can call the publisher of the LA Times,

  the President of the United States,

  and say,

  “hey,

  we gotta see you,

  we got something

  cookin here.”

  It’s gonna cost all kinds of money.

  (four counts of pause)

  I think businesses should give some,

  government should give some,

  and I think we’re gonna have to be taxed.

  Hit us all on

  sales tax

  or gasoline tax

  or something

  and take a cent or two from everybody

  and build up some kind of fund.

  You got to have money.

  And I realize what I’m gonna hear from people who want money for

  education and AIDS and

  health care. Those are very, very important.

  This is more important to me,

  ’cause if our cities deteriorate into jungle land, which they are now …

  A Deadeye

  Owen Smet Culver City Police Department, former range manager, Beverly Hills Gun Club

  (There are guns’ shooting sounds in the background. He is wearing tinted glasses and a black silk jacket.)

  After the riots our business went up forty percent, maybe as much as

  fifty percent.

  We have a membership here that shoots,

  riots or no riots,

  but because of the feeling of

  danger overall in the community …

  Long time ago you used to say there’s some areas of LA County

  where you couldn’t walk

  after dark,

  and it’s progressed to the point where you say, “Gee,

  there’s no place

  safe

  in LA County, daylight or dark.”

  People are looking for an opportunity to defend themselves.

  They just need something,

  and this is one of the places they come.

  Shooting is a skill just like anything else.

  A deadeye?

  Is a very good shot.

  Yes,

  I am a deadeye.

  I’m not a natural one.

  I spent

  couple years in Vietnam,

  and that will make you good if nothing else.

  You don’t want to get over there and hit your foot.

  (The shooting starts)

  Sure,

  a lot, of these are handguns.

  If you look at the top row, those are the smaller-caliber guns,

  twenty-twos,

  and then as you work your way on down to the bottom row,

  that’s the forty-fives.

  I guess you’d say the least powerful at the top

  to the most powerful at the bottom.

  Probably the most powerful here

  are the forty-fives.

  This is a forty-four

  Magnum gun,

  probably the most powerful handgun that we have here.

  I usually start people with a thirty-eight.

  One of the most popular for the drive-bys are the nine millimeters.

  But the gang members and some of the more organized groups out

  there are using everything,

  everything.

  There’s no question about it, they

  are probably better armed than we are.

  Ask Saddam Hussein

  Elaine Brown Former head of the Black Panther Party, author, A Taste of Power

  (A pretty black woman in her early fifties. She is in a town outside of Paris, France, on the phone. It is 5 P.M. France time. Spring.)

  I think people do have, uh,

  some other image

  of the Black Panther Party than the guns.

  The young men, of course, are attracted

  to the guns,

  but what I tell them is this:

  Did you know Jonathan Jackson?

  Because I did,

  and Jonathan Jackson was seventeen years old.

  He was probably one of the most brilliant young men

  that you could meet.

  He happened to be a science genius.

  He was not a gang member, by the way,

  but Jonathan Jackson

  went to a courtroom by himself

  and took over for that one glorious minute

  in the name of

  revolution and the freedom of his brother

  and other people who were in prison

  and died that day.

  My question to you,

  seventeen-year-old young brother with a gun in your hand,

  tough and strong and beautiful as you are:

  Do you think it would be better

  if Jonathan Jackson were alive today

  or that he died

  that day in Marin County?

  Me personally,

  I’d rather know Jonathan Jackson.

  That’s what I’d rather do,

  and I’d rather him be alive today,

  to be among the leadership that we do not have,

  than to be dead and in his grave at seventeen years old.

  I’m talking merely about strategy,

  not swashbuckling.

  I think that this idea of picking up the gun and going into the street

  without a

  plan and without

  any more rhyme or reason than rage

  is bizarre and so, uh …

  And it’s foolish

  because it will, uh …

  I think that

  all one has to do

  is ask, to ask the Vietnamese

  or Saddam Hussein

  about the power and weaponry

  and the arsenal of the United States government and its willingness to

  use it

  to get to understanding what this is about.

  You are not facing a,

  you know, some little Nicaraguan clique

  here.

  You are not in Havana in 1950 something.

  This is the United States of America.

  There isn’t another country,

  there isn’t another community

  that is more organized and armed.

  Uh,

  not only is it naive,

  it is foolish if one is talking

  about jumping out into the street

  and waving a gun,

  because you not that bad,

  you see what I’m saying?

  You just not that bad.

  You think you bad,

  but I say again,

  ask Saddam Hussein

  about who is bad

  and you’ll get the answer.

  So what I am saying is:

  Be conscious of what you are doing.

  If you just want to die

  and become a poster,

  go ahead and do that—

  we will all put you on the wall with all the rest of the people.

  But if you want to effect change for your peopler />
  and you are serious about it,

  that doesn’t mean throw down your gun.

  Matter of fact, I would def … definitely never tell anybody to do that,

  not black and in America.

  But if you want a gun,

  I hope you can shoot

  and I hope you know who to shoot

  and I hope you know how to not go to jail for having done that

  and then let that be the end of that.

  But if you are talking about a war

  against the United States government,

  then you better talk to Saddam Hussein

  and you better talk to the Vietnamese people

  and the Nicaraguans

  and El Salvadorans

  and people in South Africa

  and people in other countries in Southeast Asia

  and ask those motherfuckers

  what this country is capable of doing.

  So all I am saying is:

  I’m saying that

  if you are committed,

  if you seriously make a commitment,

  because …

  and that commitment

  must be based not on hate but on love.

  And that’s the other thing.

  My theme is

  that love of your people.

  Then you gonna have to realize that this may have to be a lifetime

  commitment

  and that the longer you live,

  the more you can do.

  So don’t get hung up

  on your own ego

  and your own image

  and pumping up your muscles

  and putting on a black beret

  or some kinda Malcolm X hat or whatever other

  regalia

  and symbolic vestment you can put on your body.

  Think in terms of what

  are you going to do

  for black people.

  I’m saying that these

  are the long haul,

  because then you might be talkin’ about

  bein’ in a better position for a so-called

  armed struggle.

  At this point you talkin’ about a piss-poor,

  ragtag, unorganized, poorly armed

  and poorly, poorly,

  uh-uhm,

  poorly led

  army

  and we will be twenty more years

  trying to figure out what happened to Martin, Malcolm,

  and the Black Panther Party.

  Twilight #1

  Homi Bhabha Literary critic/Writer/Scholar

  (Phone interview. He was in England. I was in L.A. He is part Persian, lived in India. Has a beautiful British accent.)

  This twilight moment

  is an in-between moment.

  It’s the moment of dusk.

  It’s the moment of ambivalence

  and ambiguity.

  The inclarity,

  the enigma,

  the ambivalences,

  in what happened in the L.A.

  uprisings

  are precisely what we want to get hold of.

  It’s exactly the moment

  when the L.A. uprisings could be something

  else

  than it was

  seen to be,

  or maybe something

  other than it was seen to be.

  I think when we look at it in twilight

  we learn

  to …

  we learn three things:

  one, we learn that the hard outlines of what we see in daylight

  that make it easy for us to order

  daylight

  disappear.

  So we begin to see its boundaries in a much more faded way.

  That fuzziness of twilight

  allows us to see the intersections

  of the event with a number of other things that daylight obscures for

  us,

  to use a paradox.

  We have to interpret more in

  twilight,

  we have to make ourselves

  part of the act,

  we have to interpret,

  we have to project more.

  But also the thing itself

  in twilight

  challenges us

  to

  be aware

  of how we are projecting onto the event itself.

  We are part of

  producing the event,

  whereas, to use the daylight

  metaphor,

  there we somehow think

  the event and its clarity

  as it is presented to us,

  and we have to just react to it.

  Not that we’re participating in its clarity:

  it’s more interpretive,

  it’s more creative.

  Magic #2

  Betye Saar Artist

  (Phone interview. She lives in Laurel Canyon.)

  It was, um,

  still light,

  because it didn’t last for a very long time.

  So it’s like this sort of in between day and night

  when the sky is sort of gray

  and we were walking back to the car

  and Tony, who was very political, was sort of adamant about

  there was gonna be trouble and so forth

  and we were making plans to go to dinner

  and when we got to go to dinner, the area

  we wanted, it was dark already

  and we were going to a place up toward the moun …

  up toward the Hollywood Hills

  and we couldn’t get by

  because of people in the streets

  and

  disturbances.

  Now, this is in West Hollywood,

  where there was not …

  where there is a predominantly

  gay and lesbian population

  and these were mostly gay men

  who were

  protesting the uprising by,

  uh, writing “guilty” on the pos …

  graffiti,

  they were actually doing graffiti work,

  and the street was actually blockaded,

  they were protesting the verdict,

  and we went to the restaurant and we heard

  more protesting on the radio.

  But to get back to the sky.

  That’s kind of what I remember about the sky,

  the kind of surreal time of day,

  because it’s between day and night,

  and I hadn’t

  heard anything else about the rest of the city

  until I got home.

  It’s sort of limbo time,

  and the same with dawn,

  because it’s not night or day,

  because it’s transition,

  and to me it implies a sort of limbo.

  It’s very surreal, I think,

  or maybe even magical.

  But magic is not always good,

  because it implies

  all sorts of things,

  like evil

  and control.

  I just use it like magical, like enchantment,

  that sort of mystical quality,

  and some people

  think that it’s the work of Satan and so forth.

  Justice

  Screw Through Your Chest

  Harland W. Braun counsel for defendant Theodore Briseno

  I didn’t want to take the case

  because I regard it as a racial beating

  and my son had had a racial incident.

  He is in Princeton.

  My son was going to

  Harvard boy’s school over here in Coldwater.

  He was driving over here

  in Westwood.

  He had a two-seater Mercedes

  and he was the passenger

  and his friend

  was driving the car

  and his friend’s mother is a partner

  a
t O’Melveney and Myers.

  They’re driving, I guess, a Tuesday or a Wednesday night

  and LAPD pulls them over.

  My son is sort of outspoken.

  I don’t know where he gets that from,

  but

  he

  jumps out of the car

  and says to the cop,

  “I know why you stopped us—

  because Bobby’s Black.”

  Which is obviously true.

  I mean, Westwood,

  Mercedes,

  a Black kid driving a Mercedes.

  They thought he was a dope dealer or something.

  They’re gonna pull him over.

  So the cop turns to my son and says,

  “You shut

  up or I’m gonna put a screw through your chest.”

  Well,

  I’ve,

  I’ve never heard that expression.

  I’ve been a DA since ’68 and a criminal lawyer since ’73.

  I’ve just never heard the expression “put a screw through your chest.”

  And you’re sort of

  ambivalent about it.

  On the one hand, you could kill the cop for this.

  On the other hand,

  you wish you could strangle your son

  because he put himself in danger.

  I mean, really, he was lucky he was in Westwood, in a public area

  where he was not likely to get hit or something like that,

  and it’s sort of a naiveté for a seventeen-year-old at that time

  to think that he’s gonna be able to not

  just watch out for himself.

  So I said no way am I gonna get involved in the Rodney King case,

  ’cause I regarded it as a racial beating.

  But what scares you—

  it gives you pause when you find out how wrong you can be,

  because you then

  learn about an entire

  historic event

  and realize

  that it’s been misperceived.

  Even Clinton,

  who I like,

  he got up on that morning and says, “Justice has finally been done.”

  How does he know?

  What does he mean by justice?

  Is he assuming that they’re guilty?

  Very strange, uh,

  and I probably would have said the same thing if I was in his

  position,

  and I know,

  I think I know what happened out there.

  I mean,

  I think,

  I was certainly glad that Ted,

  I was certainly glad that we escaped.

  If you ask it more blatantly:

  Is it better that two

  innocent men get convicted

  than that fifty innocent people die?

  What is the answer to that?

  I find the ambiguity …

  I recognize it for what it is

  and I’m willing to face it.

  I’ve never,