I WAS AT THE PIANO, practicing the rough patches of “Für Elise.” My mother had fresh criticism after watching me stumble through it at the recital.
Now she sat on the sofa in her khaki slacks, her legs stretched out in front of her, crossed at the ankles. She was thumbing through a Harper’s Bazaar—looking as cool without my father as she had when she was with him. She was an expert in looking cool and sophisticated. Occasionally she stopped and squinted and aimed her ear at the piano as if this helped her to listen better. Then she said, “Do that part again. It doesn’t flow. You don’t sound confident—like that other little girl. That little white girl from down the street.”
I looked at my mother but didn’t say anything. I’d heard Mrs. Baylor tell her that I didn’t get the part in the play I’d tried out for, and I’d heard my mother say, “There’ll be other plays.” She didn’t think beyond that. She didn’t think of what it was like for me when Jennifer came bounding over after she got back from the beach so we could go to the community center to check the cast list. And my mother didn’t think about how it felt when I told Jennifer I’d already seen the results and that I wasn’t cast but that she got the part of Julie, and how it felt to see Jennifer’s guarded happiness about getting something she’d planned to get.
It was almost time to watch Gidget on television, so I was hoping this practicing torture would end soon and I could take my misery to the den. Unfortunately, my mother looked comfortable there on the sofa, as if she was settling in for a long evening of critiquing.
Our telephone rang. We both glanced at it. Lately when the phone rang I immediately recalled the words Do. Not. Have. Your. Whore. Call. This. House! And I felt funny, a little skittish about answering it. What if it was someone who just wanted to hear my mother’s voice? Like Paula Morrisy, who wouldn’t say anything—but would just listen.
Mrs. Baylor picked up the phone in the kitchen and the call turned out to be for her.
We could hear her side of the conversation. She was talking to her neighbor Miss Cissy, who was calling to tell her about something happening right down the street from Mrs. Baylor’s house. A big commotion, with police and everything.
Eventually she got off the phone and came in to tell us what Miss Cissy had said.
It seemed someone they all knew from the neighborhood, Marquette Frye, had been pulled over for drunk driving. Miss Cissy claimed he wasn’t driving while drunk. He was just making his car swerve to the beat of “Quicksand” by Martha and the Vandellas. Kids were all the time doing that. The song was real popular.
“Marquette Frye was just feeling happy. That’s all,” Mrs. Baylor said. “His brother, who was in the car, had gotten out of the Air Force and wouldn’t be going to Vietnam—something to be happy about. Right? Any fool could see that.”
While we listened, my mother slowly shook her head and rolled her eyes as though it was much ado about nothing (one of her favorite phrases). But according to Miss Cissy, when the officer had Marquette get out of the car, that boy had no problem walking a straight line. He showed the officer that he was not drunk. But the officer was determined. He just wanted someone to arrest.
So he was going to arrest him anyway and have the car towed. He’d made up his mind. Just because he could. On general principle.
“Probably not a bad idea,” my mother said under her breath, and I looked at her sharply. Why did she say things like that? Things critical of colored people? Like when she said, “Negroes and flies. The more she was around Negroes, the more she liked flies.” How could she say that? How could she even think it?
I looked away and continued to listen to Mrs. Baylor, but I imagined Miss Cissy giving her account in a really dramatic way:
So someone ran to get Marquette’s mother so she could take the car. But the police wouldn’t let her. Then this big argument started up. A big argument. And people who were gathering around and seeing these things were saying, “Just let his brother go. He wasn’t driving!” And “Why can’t he take the car?” They know it’s gonna be hard to get that car out of impound. All the fees adding up and stuff. Soon more people were standing around and looking and voicing their opinions—to the police. “It’s a damn free country!” someone shouted. “Itn’t it?”
I could hear that person shouting, “Itn’t it?” I felt a small thrill saying those words under my breath.
Mrs. Baylor paused from her reporting to say, “Wonder if Nathan’s home.” I looked at my mother. She was checking her nails. Mrs. Baylor shook her head and continued with Miss Cissy’s account.
“Then someone’s mother got manhandled,” Mrs. Baylor reported. “Someone’s mother! Cissy’s thinkin’ she seen it was that boy, Marquette’s, mother. Maybe the police thought she was gettin’ too close. You know how afraid they are of colored people. Yes, sir—that’s why they always killing us. That’s why the LAPD recruits their officers from the Ku Klux Klan—or some other Nazi group. You know that’s the truth.” Lily came in from work and listened quietly to the rest of Mrs. Baylor’s secondhand account.
She glanced at Lily and went on. “Cissy said that the people who’d gathered around didn’t like how that woman got manhandled and they began to shout things. Things they been holding inside themselves—for a long time, I believe. The police started getting scared and hurried to call for more backup on their radios.
“Oh . . . it was just brewing. Brewing and spilling over. Miss Cissy and me, we both been thinkin’ that. Someone threw something—a rock, I think, at one of the police. They were shouting curses at those ofays. And Cissy says the police—their faces were so red. Then, some fool set a car on fire. Why’d he wanna go and do something like that? Makin’ people think they could just set fires and stuff. Whoa! That just started everything. People just thinkin’, I might as well tear everything down. That’s what Cissy told me.”
By now Mrs. Baylor was breathing fast. This was happening close to her house. “So the cops called for the fire truck—and more police.” Mrs. Baylor took a hankie out of her dress pocket and wiped her face.
I couldn’t believe all of this was happening right down the street from where Mrs. Baylor lived. Lily didn’t say anything, but she disappeared into her room, probably to get on the phone with Lydia. Maybe even to try to get in touch with Nathan—if they were back together.
“Do you think you need to go home, Mrs. Baylor?” my mother asked. “I can drive you. I’m not afraid of them folks.” I didn’t know if she was talking about the colored people or the police.
Mrs. Baylor shook her head. “No, no. It’s best that I stay here until things calm down.”
My mother shrugged and turned to me. “Start from the beginning,” she said, and the piano-playing critique resumed.
Later, after I was finally released from “Für Elise,” I headed to my bedroom and my mother headed to hers. From behind her door, I could hear the Johnny Carson theme song and the audience’s laughter, as if they were at a party, having a grand time. They were not even thinking about what was going on at 116th and Avalon.
I looked over at Lily’s empty bed. She was in the bathroom—on the phone.
I couldn’t go to sleep. I wandered into the den and turned on the television just to see if the networks were reporting anything about what was going on. There was nothing but regular television. It was as if the news hadn’t caught up with the events.
“Cissy said she thinks there’s about six hundred people in the street now just milling around,” Mrs. Baylor said behind me. She’d come up to check the TV coverage as well. “Things are really getting out of hand over there. Some of them folks broke some store windows and started takin’ stuff.”
And yet, nothing on the news.
When Lily finally got off the phone, there were more reports from Miss Cissy via Mrs. Baylor: The looting continued. Someone threw a Molotov cocktail into one of the mom-and-pop stores and Cissy said the firemen were probably going to use those powerful hoses on the people like they used on Dr. Martin Luther King.
Mrs. Baylor paused to say she didn’t think the hoses were ever used on Dr. Martin Luther King, though. But Cissy had said yes, she believed they were. Miss Cissy declared that the dogs would be coming, soon. But the people were ready! They were ready for the po-leese!
Mrs. Baylor and I stood there at the den window, looking out toward Avalon. Lily joined us and said quietly that she knew Nathan hadn’t gone home. In fact, he was with a friend in Leimert Park. I looked at her. So they were back together. I figured. Mrs. Baylor sighed and looked relieved.
The night wore on, and eventually Miss Cissy stopped calling. We all went to bed to wait for whatever was going to happen to happen.
The next morning I hurried into my robe and peered over at Lily still asleep. Her face was serene. I wanted to get the paper. Surely there were pictures and headlines.
I slipped outside and saw how still Montego Drive looked—quiet as a ghost town, the air hushed and peaceful, the only sound the pulsing rhythm of Mrs. Cantrell’s sprinklers. So untouched by the events of the night before. I breathed in the warm air and thought, Another hot day.
I picked up the paper off the walkway but waited until I was sitting at the kitchen table to unfold it. There it was on the first page: 1000 RIOTERS! 5-HOUR MELEE IN AN 8-BLOCK SECTION OF LOS ANGELES! By eight o’clock people driving in the area began to report attacks. Cars being stoned. Motorists targeted. The article confirmed that store windows had been broken and merchandise was grabbed. A liquor store on Avalon and 109th had been set on fire.
I felt a stir of dread. I went up into the den, looked out the window toward Avalon, and saw nothing but palm trees and clear blue sky. Then I checked Jennifer’s house. Her family was gone. Probably on the trip to Catalina that Jennifer had mentioned a few days before. A ferry trip to Catalina, to go snorkeling. The whole family.
I returned to my bedroom to see Lily sitting cross-legged on her bed and talking on the phone to Nathan. “Stay away from Avalon,” she was saying. “Don’t go back. Promise me.” She looked over as if I was intruding on her, so I retreated to the den to sit on the couch and think.
Miss Cissy had her own theory about what was happening in her neighborhood. Mrs. Baylor told us what she’d said:
The police started this. Plain and simple. They hate colored people. They like stopping them. Especially if they are driving a nice car. They just love throwing them up against that nice car and patting them down.
Plus, they kept Marquette and his mother and his brother at the scene too long. And they manhandled Marquette’s mother (seen it with my own eyes) and one hit Marquette with the butt of his rifle for no reason. I was there. I seen that, too. Don’t believe me. I don’t care. There were plenty of witnesses to that. No reason at all. I’ma see what they going to put in the papers. Watch ’em make it all our fault. And don’t you believe them police reports. They lie just as easily as they breathe. Watch ’em make it somethin’ that it wasn’t. Watch ’em just lie.
I checked Jennifer’s driveway all afternoon, thinking they might come back early. I took Oscar out for a walk just to fill the time. Then I staked out the driveway from the porch with my book on my lap until Mrs. Baylor stuck her head out the door.
“Whatcha doing out here?”
“Just reading,” I said.
“You waitin’ on your little friend to get home, aren’t you?”
I didn’t say anything.
“She’ll be back and she’ll be askin’ you what on earth is goin’ on. She’ll want you to tell her everything that’s goin’ on with the colored folks.”
“But I don’t know anything.”
“That’s not gonna matter.”
I was quiet. After a while, I went inside to get something to eat and to not wait for Jennifer to come back.
It wasn’t until early evening that I heard their station wagon pull into their driveway. I was sprawled on the den sofa switching from Gunsmoke to the televised accounts of all the unrest—the same scene shot from the KTLA News helicopter shown over and over again. I turned off the light and stood at the window, watching Jennifer’s family unload their car.
I saw Jennifer jump on her daddy’s back while he was weighed down with a giant Eskimo cooler. He almost fell over and they both laughed.
I heard her mother say, “Jennifer!” She was trying to sound like she was scolding her, but I knew she wasn’t. I knew she was happy to see Jennifer so adored by her father. For them, all was happy. All would stay happy. I tried to feel that. I closed my eyes to help me feel what they felt.
But I already knew I was going to go through a rough, lonely patch. Linda Cruz would be taking my place. Jennifer would be Julie. Carla had stolen my role. And Lily would be leaving. How was I supposed to get through all of that?
Jennifer’s mother was still pretending to scold. “Your daddy’s tired. Let him be.” But Jennifer hung on anyway, and her father pretended to try to shake her off, which made her laugh and laugh. He started to trot around the front yard like a horse. Jennifer’s mother hauled two grocery bags out of the car and went into the house, ignoring them. She left the door open behind her, revealing a rectangle of welcoming light. Finally, Jennifer’s daddy—with Jennifer still clinging to his back—trotted inside.
The unrest was not stopping. It was going on and on and making the country watch and comment and predict and scratch their heads—as far as I could see.
First thing the next morning, I marched across the street and rang the bell. Jennifer opened the door. “Hi, Sophie,” she said, and stepped aside so I could enter. Jennifer’s mother suddenly appeared. She was putting her hand on my shoulder and looking at me with a face full of sympathy. “Oh, Sophie. How are you?”
“I’m . . . fine,” I said, a little puzzled.
“Isn’t it terrible what’s going on? I’m in shock.”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s terrible.”
“But why? Why are the colored people doing all that . . . rioting? I’m trying to understand. Do you know anything? I mean, do you know people over there or maybe have relatives?” She was looking at me closely and with hope—as if I could clear things up for her, tell her the inside story as to why colored people were acting up in this way. She continued to study me behind glasses that seemed to make her eyes big and owlish and full of expectation.
“I don’t know anyone from there. Only Mrs. Baylor,” I said. “And she doesn’t know anything either.”
Mrs. Abbott fell silent, and I felt as if I was letting her down, and also letting down Jennifer’s grandmother, who was now standing in the kitchen doorway drying a cup. She looked disappointed, too.
Mrs. Abbott shook her head slowly. “Such a shame.” She turned to Jennifer. “You certainly won’t be going anywhere today.”
“Rehearsals start today,” Jennifer protested. She shot me a quick apologetic look, then said, “Can you help me with my lines?”
“Sure,” I said, feeling surprisingly grateful that I still possessed some play-related connection to her—that she was allowing me this.
I turned to Mrs. Abbott. “The . . .” I paused before I said the word riots. “The riots are far away,” I said, as if I had a special duty to calm everyone down. “It’s not near here at all.”
“Of course, but we can’t be sure that this . . . this rioting is going to stay far away.”
What could I say to that? I didn’t like the feeling I had talking to them, that everything was a little bit my responsibility, or that I had some special knowledge about what was going on. Because I had no special knowledge. I was just me.
Finally, Jennifer motioned for me to follow her. “Come upstairs. I got something for you.”
That was a thrill. I wasn’t forgotten. She retrieved a small white bag from atop her dresser and handed it to me. Inside was a pair of white shell earrings. The tiny shells dangled from a silver chain. But they were for pierced ears and mine weren’t pierced. “Thank you. These are really pretty,” was all I said.
I saw another small white bag on her dresser. “Who’s that for?”
“Oh, that’s for Linda.”