The Black Kids(91)
Jo thinks he’s a twat. Still, she’s grateful.
When the jury foreman eventually reads Jo’s verdict, my father will grip the arm of his chair to steady himself. My mother will grip him, her mouth wrapped around a whispered “No!”
I’ll surprise myself by crying out, and some of the jurors will look over at me with pity, but most will look down or away.
When the jury acquitted the officers, the man who struck Rodney King the most, Officer Laurence M. Powell, smiled and said, “I am very happy, very happy.”
When asked what he would say to those upset by the verdicts, Powell said, “I don’t think I have to respond to them. They have to respond to themselves and make their own decision. I don’t think there’s anything I can do to change their feelings.”
Jo will be shaking when she rises to hear her sentence, her pale-pink nail polish already bitten down. Her future will look different than any of us thought it would. Sixteen months isn’t all that long, and yet it might as well be forever. I try to picture us when we’re both older and she’s a former felon.
“We’re gonna fight this,” Grant says, without an ounce of condescension, to my parents, who stand there in shock, our worlds turned upside down.
Because she’s not considered a flight risk, Jo will have several weeks before she has to self-surrender. Until then, she waits.
When LaShawn calls that night to ask me how things went, he will sit with me in silence while I try to remember how to breathe.
But that is not yet. That’s after.
* * *
Before:
The jacarandas are in bloom, and their pretty purple petals line whole blocks. The fires got some of them, but not all. We stand in the middle of burned-out buildings, graffiti on the sidewalk under our feet. Power lines stretch across the sky in messy stripes. It occurs to me halfway through the morning that the reason the sky looks weird is ’cause I don’t see power lines like this in my neighborhood.
I watch the succession of planes, sometimes two or three at a time, into and out of Los Angeles; more people, less people.
Less people. Ronnie and Morgan are leaving Los Angeles as soon as Morgan graduates. Last week they went to Las Vegas to scope out new places to build old dreams.
Grandma Shirley’s store is much smaller than I remember it— not much larger than our living room, although I suppose our living room is pretty large, as far as these things go. The carpet is boring gray but freshly put in and still plush underfoot, perfect for demonstrating the workings of a freshly repaired vacuum. It was soiled by the looters, but an old family friend is gonna come by and steam it at a huge discount. A pity clean. I can’t help thinking what it must be like knowing that your neighbors, maybe even some people you considered friends, were among those trying to take what little it took generations to build.
A few older folks stop by to reminisce and offer Ronnie their condolences. They look at my father as though trying to place him, until they do.
“Haven’t seen you round these parts in years!” they say, or “You forgot all about us, Craig!” And even though he’s a grown-ass man with a good-ass job and a large-ass house in a nice-ass neighborhood, my dad looks like a little-ass boy, reprimanded.
The big window in front is boarded up with plywood until Uncle Ronnie can have it replaced. Usually, that window is bordered with seasonal decorations that Ole Felix painstakingly paints every few months, more frequently if it’s holiday season. Ole Felix isn’t that old at all—only a handful of years older than my dad—but he has arthritis that makes him bend like a much older person. He lived on the block and used to help look after Ronnie and my dad when their mother was at her worst. According to Ronnie, his designs are getting less intricate as his arthritis advances.
When Ole Felix sees my dad, he just holds him, less like a peer and more like a father, and neither of them says a word for a really long time.
“These are my daughters, Ashley and Josephine,” my dad says.
“I remember them when they were but so big.” Ole Felix gestures down to knee-height and looks at us like he’s proud of us for the act of growing. “You got a beautiful family now, Craig. Just beautiful.”
Together we pick through the rubble and try to find things to keep.
I try to pretend like I’m Indiana Jones, but it feels like we’re grave-robbing, except the grave is our grandma’s, or maybe our whole family’s. Every once in a while, my dad and Ronnie find something that makes them lean on each other, and you can tell what they found belonged to their mother.
They seem happy to be in the space together, joking and laughing about old times.
“Girls, come here…,” Daddy shouts from deep inside the store.
Jo and I follow his voice to the little cramped office in the back. He lifts up a heavy antique front-desk push bell, the kind of thing used to summon somebody from somewhere deep inside. And guess what shape it’s in? It’s a turtle! My father, the turtle, with his antique turtle bell.
I start to laugh. Jo and my father look at me quizzically.
“This was from your great-grandfather’s office. It’s one of the few things my grandmother took with her when they left Oklahoma.”
First he passes it to Jo, who cradles it in her hand for a little while before passing it to me.
It’s heavy in my palm. I run my hand along the ornate etching swirling this way and that across the bronze shell. The turtle pokes its head delicately out the front. I hold it in my hand and use my finger to press the shell, and it rings out loud and clear as day. I press it two more times. It’s beautiful.