The Black Kids(34)
“You better change clothes when we get home, before your parents smell that stuff on you,” she says.
But before I can get respectable, we have to stop at the store.
The tiny corner store looks as though it’s been cleared like in Supermarket Sweep, except it’s a really sad version where there’s no prize at the end. Inside, it feels like one long blinking fluorescent bulb. The two sun-bleached cashiers, Brittany and Marla, are around my age and usually look a little high, but not today. Today, they dart their eyes at every customer who enters. They’re either fearless, stupid, or just really need the money for a car, or prom, or new shoes.
“Welcome,” Brittany says as we enter, and her greeting sounds like an SOS.
These are things that we need that are missing: milk, eggs, firewood, chicken, and paper towels. There are plenty of vegetables left. Lucia and I talk to each other in Spanish while we wait in the longer-than-usual line. The lady in front of us turns around to glare, and I think she’s gonna tells us to speak English or something, or maybe she can smell the pot on my T-shirt, but I glare harder, so she goes back to minding her own business. Everyone around us has their shopping carts piled high with what remains. We look like people preparing for a war.
On the news this morning before I left for school, they showed how stores were running out of wood planks, so business owners were going to Home Depot and buying and using actual doors to board up windows and other doors.
“What is happening to us?” an older lady says to the cashier, and looks at her like she’s actually expecting an answer.
“I don’t get it.” Brittany nervously flips her blond hair. She and Marla look exactly like the kind of California girls who wind up on the postcards tourists send back home—like, somewhere in Italy somebody’s nonno is looking at a photo of Brittany’s blissed-out butt cheeks on the beach.
“This country is going in the wrong direction.” The older lady shakes her head mournfully.
* * *
When activists argued that choke holds were proving to be unnecessarily deadly force, Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates actually said this about how blacks and Latinos responded to choke holds: “We may be finding that in some blacks when it is applied, the veins or arteries do not open up as fast as they do in normal people.”
Normal people.
That was ten years ago, and he’s still the police chief. Yesterday, when the verdicts were announced and the city was a powder keg, he left LAPD headquarters to go to a fund-raiser in Brentwood to fight police reform efforts.
The Beach Boys are famous Californian “normal people” from Hawthorne, which isn’t really on the beach itself but is just a hop, skip, and a jump away from the water. They built the 105 through the area where their house used to be.
Jo made me listen to what she said is arguably their best album, Pet Sounds, a few years ago. We stretched out across the carpet in her bedroom and she turned the dial on her turquoise record player higher and higher so that we could feel those surfers’ harmonies all the way in our eyeballs.
“Close your eyes,” she said. “Hear all the layers.”
Like every song was a really good lasagna.
Then she told me that back in the day, Hawthorne used to be a sundown town, which means that they didn’t want black people around after the sun went down. There used to be an actual sign posted outside the city that said, NIGGER, DON’T LET THE SUN GO DOWN ON YOU IN HAWTHORNE.
So I guess there’s always been good vibrations for some, but not all.
“I don’t get it,” the California girl said.
* * *
As we pull out of the parking lot, a middle-aged black man, his gray fuzz in a crown atop his head, crosses the street in front of us. His clothes are faded but proud.
“Lock your door, mija,” Lucia reminds me.
I know the man hears the lock click into place, because afterward he looks over at me, puzzled, then saddened, and I feel ashamed of myself.
Lucia grew up in the middle of a civil war and carries that with her in her bones. She’s always a little bit on edge in public places. Even when we’re in an empty parking lot, she has me walk just a little bit behind her, her body as a shield.
“Just because you can’t see the danger doesn’t mean there isn’t any,” she says.
Sometimes it feels like Lucia is a single mother and I’m her child, and we’re just two girls in the world trying to figure it out together. My parents are very busy, and so Lucia has taught me a great many things: how to ride a bike; how to tie my shoes; how to throw a punch (the latter of which she taught me when the boys at school took to calling me “Hooters!” because my chest had grown into two hard, painful knots under my skin seemingly overnight).
In her village, she said, the girls knew how to fight and the boys didn’t mess with them, until eventually they got older and didn’t want to fight and did want the boys to mess with them. There were other people to fight by then.
“Who got kidnapped and killed?” I ask her as we drive along PCH.
“What?”
“You were talking to Daddy about it the other day. You said, ‘They kidnapped and killed all of them. The women and children, too.’?”
“You’re too nosy, babygirl,” she says, and shakes her head at me. Even so, she tells me the story as we drive.