The Black Kids(87)
There were enough animals to bother inside the gym itself. Jo and I played with a skittish guinea pig named Rat, who belonged to a sickly girl who lived three blocks away from us. Maybe she wasn’t sickly, just allergic, but my main memory of her is that she coughed and constantly wiped her nose so that there was a thick yellow smear across her pink sleeve. Every once in a while she’d bring out a blue inhaler and puff and suck like it was the source of life itself. Anyway, Jo and I begged and begged for a pet, but my parents said we weren’t responsible enough for one, and it wouldn’t be fair to Lucia to make her clean up after our pet. Rat the hamster had what the sickly girl told us was a show-length coat, which meant that Rat kinda looked like a shih tzu. While the sickly girl watched, we braided Rat’s coat into two soft pigtails that unraveled quickly.
Jo gently lifted a squirming Rat up to the light and declared loudly in front of our parents, “We would take such good care of you.”
I nodded enthusiastically.
Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” wafted in all dreamy-like from a boom box. Us kids ran from pet to pet and climbed up and down the bleachers. Jo and I made friends with several kids we didn’t know who lived nearby and their pet dogs, a few goats, and even a miniature pony named Astrid who pooped green hay bits on the squishy gym floor. We shrieked at the top of our lungs and ran around, excited by the adventure, like it was one big sleepover—entirely forgetting that our houses could be gone, and our toys with them.
At night we slept in rows of green cots, like preschoolers, or soldiers.
The next morning, the fireman stood up on the podium and announced on the loudspeaker, “Fire’s out. You’re okay to go back to your lives, good people.”
And just like that, it was over. We stumbled into the light and went home to see how much of our lives remained.
Mostly, I remember the sounds of all those different people in one room together—taking care of one another, breathing, snoring, being. As though we were one big heart.
“But I don’t want to go home!” Jo whined as she fed one last carrot to Astrid. “We’re having so much fun!”
Daddy laughs at the memory and leans back in his office chair, his hands behind his head. Bleary-eyed from her nap, Jo appears in the doorway and peeks in at us. “What are you two laughing at in here?”
“Yo’ face,” I say.
“Shut up,” she says.
Daddy looks over at the two of us and grins. “Oh, my beautiful daughters!”
* * *
The media and the politicians keep stereotyping everyone who was out during the riots as “savage” or “lawless” or “hooligans” or “thugs,” an “underclass” not representative of the “real America.”
But Jo was out there, and that’s not true of her at all. And if it’s not true of her, then it’s probably not true of at least some of the other people who were out there too. My sister is gentle and kind and thoughtful and opinionated and delicate, and also impulsive and outraged and angry. If anything, Jo was out there because of her values, because she cares too much. I’ve been reading a lot of the books that Jo left behind, all these history and civil rights books, some of her old textbooks from school, trying to understand the world. Trying to understand her. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time doing the wrong thing, but maybe some of her reasons were the right ones. Because a bunch of dudes beating on one dude who was already on the ground until he’s brain damaged and broken is wrong. Because prosecuting people differently for the same exact crimes because of skin color is wrong. Because some people being able to buy private islands while other people sleep outside on the ground is wrong. Because knowingly destroying poor communities with drugs let in to fund wars against foreign regimes is fundamentally wrong. Because even though you finally enact a Civil Rights Act not even thirty years ago, it doesn’t erase centuries of unequal wealth, unequal access, unequal schooling, unequal living conditions, unequal policing. You can’t tell people to pull up on bootstraps when half of them never had any boots to begin with, never even had the chance to get them. Or when you let people burn whole, thriving black communities to the ground and conveniently forget about it. Because maybe the problem isn’t only with “bad” people; maybe the problem is with the whole system.
Because we’re supposed to be better than that in this country. Whoever we are. Because we can be. Sometimes people do real stupid shit when they feel invisible or powerless. Doesn’t make it right, but maybe at least we can try to understand a little?
It’s like the riots pulled focus from one Los Angeles to the other, but it’s all part of the same photo, if you’re looking. Always has been. The palm trees and the pain, the triumph and the trauma—all of us, one big beating heart. The “real Los Angeles.” The “real America.”
It’s like Uncle Ronnie said: it’s our history, in our blood, in our bones.
“Ain’t no new starts,” he said.
CHAPTER 23
LANA SQUINTS AT me from an eye swollen the color of midnight. I feel a little dizzy when I see it, unsteadied by its violence. Unwittingly, I reach my hand out to touch it, and Lana quickly grabs me by the wrist, hard. She-Ra, the cat, looks up at us expectantly from her perch on the front steps, like we’re on Springer and the tabby is urging us to “Fight! Fight!”