Tomlinson Hill

by Chris Tomlinson

  The first time I touched a ball, I ran a touchdown. I guess at that point it was destiny. I found my gift. My mother and my father, they nurtured that gift. They pushed me, never made me do anything, but they pushed me. Every year since, I have played football. I look forward to it, and I played with blacks, whites, and Hispanic kids.29

  LaDainian ended every practice wanting more. Loreane said he listened to his coaches’ every word, including their advice about always knowing where the ball is. LaDainian took that literally, carrying his ball with him everywhere and even sleeping with it.30

  LaDainian and LaVar traveled around the region, but while LaVar enjoyed playing, he didn’t feel the same way LaDainian did. LaVar enjoyed history and social studies and generally liked school, except for math.31 That was one of many differences between LaDainian and LaVar. LaDainian said he loved math and could perform calculations quickly in his head. He was a decent student, but for him school was what he did to play football.32

  O.T. was a good dad, when he was around. LaVar enjoyed visiting the Hill, where his father cooked him hamburgers and he could run around with his cousins without a care in the world. But LaDainian and LaVar said their father never talked about the Hill’s history.

  When LaVar was ten years old, he learned in Waco that when some people looked at him, they didn’t see a big country boy who liked to fish and play football; they saw a suspect:

  A cop pulled up right next to me, and he tells me to stop. He asked me where I’m going. I say I’m going home, and he starts talking about arresting me.

  It’s amazing that that kind of stuff still happens. Broad daylight. There’s nothing going on. Quiet neighborhood. I still remember the crew cut on this guy. I remember the look on his face. He could have been about thirtysomething.

  I never looked at another officer the same. Even black police officers, I question. “Are you really trying to do what our ancestors and our civil rights leaders fought for in equality, or are you trying to be one of these guys?” I’m in awe at a black man in a police uniform, to be honest with you, because I’m sure he’s experienced that.33

  O.T. lived on the Hill, but he also spent a lot of time on Wood Street, where he smoked marijuana and crack with his friends. He may have become an addict, but by all accounts he dressed well and functioned. Occasionally, he’d knock on Jewell’s door, looking for a place to sleep, or go to Terry’s house, asking for a ride back to the Hill, but he never became homeless or a street junkie.34 He would, however, sell his possessions, including gifts from his children, to get money for drugs.35

  O.T. told Londria, LaDainian, and LaVar that they were good kids who could rely on their mother. He said Ronald, Terry, and Fifi needed him more, a sentiment that hurt Londria, who said she needed her father.36 LaDainian said he tried to become a role model for LaVar, coaching him at sports, teaching him how to fight, even how to cook pancakes.37 But O.T.’s older kids were experiencing tough times.

  Terry’s wife was losing patience with his spending Monday through Friday working for the railroad while she raised their children alone.38 Fifi was mixing with the wrong crowd, using drugs, and breaking into homes.39 O.T.’s third son, Charles, then twenty-seven, was selling drugs in Waco,40 and in May 1988 a woman stabbed him to death.41

  The black Tomlinsons faced the same problems with unemployment, drugs, and crime that damaged many African-American families. Black unemployment was twice the rate of that of whites in Texas, creating widespread despair. Racism remained rampant. A 1995 study found that when African-Americans drove in white suburbs, they received double the number of traffic tickets that whites received. Between 1985 and 1991, the percentage of African-Americans in Texas prisons rose from 36 percent to 46 percent as lawmakers waged their war on drugs. Even though African-Americans constituted only 12 percent of the population, 29 percent of those executed were African-American.42 Almost every academic study of criminal justice in the early 1990s concluded that police disproportionately pursued and arrested African-Americans, and the courts handed down tougher sentences when the defendant was black.

  African-American Texans were dancing the Texas two-step, taking two steps forward and one step back. But while economic conditions were challenging, the political climate was improving. Major court decisions in the 1980s gave minority candidates better chances at winning elections. Single-member districts provided minorities greater influence, and schools and city officials began responding to their needs.43

  When a 1992 survey showed that banks rejected African-American loan applications in Texas five times more often than they did white applications, the legislature passed stricter laws against “redlining” minority neighborhoods. In response to violent crimes where blacks were attacked, lawmakers passed hate-crime laws in 1993, and the Texas Commission on Human Rights sued Klan groups for harassment in 1994.44

  POWER OF PERSISTENCE

  Loreane held her family together largely through her faith, and even during the hardest periods, she made the drive every Wednesday night and Sunday morning to her church in Marlin, where Lonnie Garrett was a pastor. Her kids rarely saw O.T. as his addiction worsened.45

  The Pop Warner coaches recognized LaDainian’s speed and made him a running back. Loreane tried to encourage him, but money remained tight and she often couldn’t give her children the things they wanted. She signed up for more shifts to pay for extras, such as when LaDainian wanted to attend a football camp put on by Jay Novacek, a tight end for the Dallas Cowboys. One day at the camp, LaDainian took a hand-off from one of his heroes, Emmitt Smith, a running back for the Cowboys. From that day on, LaDainian felt destined to play professional football.46

  Loreane met another single parent, a construction worker named Herman Chappell, at Lonnie Garrett’s church. The two began dating, and he steadily won the children’s trust. After eighteen months, Loreane and Herman married, and the children had a new man in their lives.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-TWO

  I hear you’re going to Rwanda for Alex. We need someone there, too. We pay ten cents a word …

  —Reid Miller

  I arrived in Johannesburg in late October 1992 and soon discovered that my friend Keith was not going to deliver on his promises to get me into the African National Congress. He said his comrades had gotten into trouble for corruption and that the ANC had kicked them out. I’m still not sure what I believe. Keith may never have had any high-level connections. But it was clear that South African revolutionaries didn’t need me, or any other white guys from Texas. Nelson Mandela was leading the ANC campaign to win the first democratic elections in the country’s history, and thousands of ANC cadre needed work. Giving up on becoming a revolutionary, I walked down to one of South Africa’s two Mexican restaurants and asked for a job.

  Bandito’s primary purpose was to qualify the pub upstairs for a liquor license, but I knew how to cook Tex-Mex, and the Afrikaner owners let me rewrite and tweak their recipes. Most of their customers came from an Afrikaner university located down the street. Two blacks who lived in the Soweto township worked in the kitchen, one a professionally trained chef and the other a helper. The chef did not like me in his kitchen, but he accepted the fact that I could teach him about dishes he’d never cooked before. I introduced the quesadilla to South Africa.

  One of the first things I noticed about my black coworkers were their scars. An inordinate number of black working-class men in South Africa had scars on their faces or arms, and probably in places I couldn’t see. They were part of a generation that had started the Soweto uprising in 1976 to protest apartheid.

  Black students frequently staged strikes to express their displeasure with school policies, but on April 30, 1976, junior high students marched out of their classrooms to protest a new policy that required some classes be taught in Afrikaans, a languge that had first been used by Dutch settlers. On the morning of June 16, somewhere between three thousand and ten thousand black students left their Soweto classrooms and marched
to the Orlando soccer stadium. Police set up barricades to block the students’ routes, forcing them toward Orlando High School. Police said that the children threw stones, so the police responded by firing their weapons into the air and releasing attack dogs. When the teens used stones to fight off the dogs, the police opened fire. Twenty-three people died.

  The news and images of white police opening fire on black high school students set off six months of protests and riots, and the security forces responded with ferocious violence. By the end of 1976, six hundred people had died and four thousand had suffered serious injuries. Students staged similar demonstrations in 1980, 1983, 1985, and 1986, clashing with police and ultimately South African soldiers. Many of the people I encountered wore their personal experiences fighting apartheid on their faces.

  One evening, the kitchen helper at Bandito’s made a mistake that led to some food spoiling. When one of the owners found out, he came into the kitchen and immediately began punching the kitchen helper in the face and body. The helper didn’t attempt to fight back; he dropped to the floor and curled into a ball, while the much larger white man continued to punch him and yell in Afrikaans. I looked to the chef for some kind of reaction, but he stood still, coolly watching the beat down. Before I could say anything, the beating ended and the owner saw the stunned look on my face. I could tell the kitchen assistant was not seriously hurt, but he was humiliated. I mumbled something like “That’s not acceptable,” and the owner and I walked out of the kitchen. I told him that as far as I was concerned, I’d just witnessed a crime, but the passivity of the helper and the chef bothered me as much as the owner’s violence. The owner said such beatings were routine, though he acknowledged that with apartheid ending, that would probably change. He promised it would never happen again.

  I returned to the kitchen, confused about what to do, and the chef also took me aside. He said the helper had screwed up and that he had realized he would suffer a beating for his mistake. More important, he explained that the helper’s family depended on this one job for their survival. If the helper lost it, and the Afrikaner’s reference, he might not find another one. I decided that I’d made my feelings clear, and that it was up to the helper and the chef to take any further action. After I finished teaching the chef my recipes, the owner fired me.

  Armed with my southern accent and knowledge of my culture’s food, I applied for a job at Fat Frank’s Cajun Restaurant in downtown Johannesburg. The high-end establishment was located next to a sister restaurant that served gourmet Afrikaner food, the Linger Longer. The neighborhood was going downhill fast, but rich whites from the suburbs still made the trek downtown for New Orleans cuisine lifted directly from Paul Prudhomme’s cookbooks. The manager hired me to wait tables, knowing that customers would enjoy talking to a real-life Southerner. The other waiters came from diverse backgrounds, including black college students who attended the University of the Witwatersrand and working-class whites, both English and Afrikaner. The team reminded me of my friends at Skyline, and we all got along and hung out together outside of work. But the tips we earned varied, depending on our backgrounds. The black staff made the least and the Texan faking a Cajun accent made the most, on average about eighty dollars a day, good money in South Africa. I also witnessed another side of apartheid’s perversity when I discovered that one of the old racist white men at the restaurant paid a black male parking attendant to give him blow jobs in the alley.

  I moved into an apartment with some of the other waiters in Hillbrow, a mixed-race inner-city ghetto with Stalinist-type housing blocks and Art Deco apartments. Low-income folks of every race and creed mixed in Hillbrow, where dance clubs blared from dusk until dawn, vendors sold street food on every corner, and cheap restaurants set up tables on the sidewalks twenty-four hours a day. Cops, prostitutes, and drug dealers all walked the streets in groups of four or more for safety, and rarely did a night go by without the crackle of gunfire. The other waiters and I would go to neighborhood joints to unwind after work.

  I’d always wanted to become a writer, so I decided I would begin working on a book about my time in South Africa. I asked my manager to give me time off to attend the big events that I could see scheduled in the newspaper, such as the Day of the Vow, when Afrikaners celebrated their heritage. One day in March 1994, I opened the newspaper to find that Lucas Mangope, the leader of a black homeland called Bophuthatswana, was refusing to step down as apartheid was ending. The people who lived there took to the streets to demand Mangope relinquish power. I had the next two days off, so I bought a bus ticket to the capital, Mmabatho.

  The bus dropped me off in the middle of town, where rioters were looting anything of value. Mangope’s police made a halfhearted attempt to stop them, but most appeared more concerned about surviving the revolt. I took photos and talked to the looters, who said they were attacking only the stores that belonged to Mangope and his family. As evening set in, I asked journalists on the streets where they were staying, and they told me to head for the four-star Mmabatho Sun Hotel. Luckily, I was carrying every penny to my name and could pay for one night at the hotel, but I had no transportation. I walked in the hotel’s direction, sticking out my thumb at every car that passed me. Luckily, Japanese journalist Takeshi “Go” Kawasaki picked me up.

  Go gave me a lift to the hotel and asked me for whom I worked. I said I was freelancing. He’d come straight from the airport and said he needed an assistant. He offered me one hundred dollars a day, on those days he needed me, and I quickly agreed. That’s how I became a journalist.

  Go hired me when he wanted to go someplace dangerous or difficult, particularly when we investigated violence in the townships between forces loyal to the ANC and the Zulus. He asked me to work every day during the three weeks leading up to the April 27 election and assigned me to dig up any dirt on Mandela. But after twenty-seven years in prison and four more years in varying levels of custody, Mandela had little opportunity to get into trouble. On occasion, Go asked me to go to the townships around Johannesburg when violence flared, handing me a flak jacket and a mobile phone to call in what I saw. I tried to convince him to run pictures I’d taken, but he said the paper preferred to rely on him or wire services like the Associated Press. He transmitted his photos to Japan from the AP office, so I came to know it well.

  On the Sunday before the election was set to begin, I caught a taxi at my apartment and began the trip through downtown to the Asahi office. About halfway there, a car bomb exploded, blowing in the taxi’s windshield. Through the dust and smoke, I could see the shell of a car flipped over and burning on the sidewalk. The blast had knocked out hundreds of windows in the tall buildings along the road, leaving a thick layer of shattered glass covering the street. I counted at least a dozen bodies and only eight frames of film left in my Nikon. A South African police truck pulled up just as I was taking my last frames and warned me that another car bomb was nearby. I walked toward the hotel and saw where police had set up a barricade, and behind it were dozens of photojournalists. That’s when I realized the value of the photos I’d just taken and remembered how Asahi never wanted any of my photos. I grabbed a taxi and told the driver to take me to the AP office.

  Mike Feldman, a top photo editor at the time, grabbed my film, stuck it in a processing machine, and peppered me with questions. He looked at my amateur camera and asked if I’d focused it properly and set the exposure. Looking down at the spots of blood where shards of windshield glass had pierced my shirt, I struggled to hear him through the ringing in my ears. The film processor would give him his answer. He pulled the negatives out of the machine, took out a loop to examine them, and smiled. He offered me two thousand dollars for all eight, and I had my first AP byline.

  Feldman gave me a cup of coffee and sent me to talk to Tina Sussman, an AP reporter. My hands shook as I sipped my coffee and told her what I’d seen. I told her as a freelance journalist, I could write the story, but she politely told me no, that I was a witness and not an AP r
eporter.

  Go was annoyed that I’d taken the photos to the AP, but he accepted my explanation and knew Asahi would still run my photos. Thousands of newspapers used them on their front pages, including all of the South African papers and the New York Times.

  Go let me spend Election Day with South African troops in Katlehong, the most dangerous township in the Johannesburg area. If there was any violence, the troops would serve as a quick reaction force. But Election Day was one of the most peaceful in South Africa’s history. Two weeks later, I watched Mandela take the oath of office along with 150,000 other people on the grounds of the capitol in Pretoria.

  A week later, I returned to Texas with plans to write a book, but I found no publishers interested in my adventures. My friend Mike helped me get a job as a speechwriter for a state senator, but when Go called from Japan and asked if I’d be willing to work for him at his new assignment in Nairobi, where he would cover events in East Africa, I immediately agreed.

  I arrived in Nairobi in January 1995, and Go provided housing, food, a car, and a salary of nine hundred dollars a month. Soon after I arrived, we flew to Rwanda to report on the country’s recovery from the genocide and the refugee crisis in Zaire. But Go’s budget was not large enough to take me everywhere, and he already had a Kenyan office manager.

  My goal in taking the job with Asahi was to build a reputation to get a job with the AP, but I was worried that Go would lay me off before I had a chance. I asked the Voice of America bureau chief, Alex Belida, to have lunch and tell me about getting a master’s degree from his alma mater, Columbia University. Alex told me it wasn’t worth the student loans and suggested I move to Rwanda and work for him instead.