Southland

by Nina Revoyr

Now, the children feel trapped in that part of the city, and because they’ve learned, from watching their parents’ lives, the limits of their futures, they smash whatever they can, which is usually each other.

And if their neighbors spoke a different language, wore a different color skin, here—and only here—it didn’t matter.

They’d be sitting on milk crates in front of a market owned by a young Japanese man, a veteran, who’d worked there since he was a teenager; who hired local boys himself; and who’d heard so many of his customers’ stories he could almost forget his own.

It is only those who aren’t totally shattered by a loss who can comfort the others, who are.

Maybe some seam in Frank’s heart had been weakened as well, some internal fault line which waited two weeks, until the panic had lessened, to write its own smaller disaster.

It was pretty much a black ghetto, as far as she could tell—an image that had only been confirmed by the funeral.

Steadiness, in any form, was stifling to her. She liked the extreme, the inexplicable, the ridiculous and evil.

They were citizens now, all of them, transformed into Americans at the mass naturalization ceremony at the Hollywood Bowl in ’54, but to Lois their stories of old Japan were like the best kind of fairy tales—fantastical, with familiar elements and odd but recognizable characters.

And in that moment, as they drove up Crenshaw and back toward their house, although she didn’t say anything or even return the gesture, she felt the weight of everyone else’s fury lift off her, and became her father’s child.

But something in the strange, shifting nature of their relationship did not make this an automatic choice.

She paused now, and Jackie could tell from the texture of the pause—she’d thrown a net around her emotions, but there were holes in the fabric and little bursts of feeling kept wriggling through—that her girlfriend was annoyed.

And something in her voice frightened Jackie—not because it was angry, but because it wasn’t. She wasn’t fighting anymore. She’d surrendered.

Their neighborhood was home to many young, hip people trying to break into acting or music, and to elderly Jews who’d been living there for decades.

Their first date had started over ten-dollar sandwiches at a downtown lunch spot, and hadn’t ended until two days later.

But their relationship, on this different turf, had changed somehow, the way a crop that might flourish in one kind of soil struggles simply to survive in another.

Lately all their hugs had seemed out of proportion to the situations in which they occurred—and she didn’t feel like she deserved this one anyway.

And she’d felt guilty with that death, too; she’d gradually grown accustomed to Mary’s withered half-self, so that death, when it came, seemed more like a subtle change than a catastrophe.

she knew that, at least for this one day, she and Laura had almost been happy.

She would have taken screaming fights over silence.

Now, in 1947, he had as many black customers as Japanese, but he didn’t mind the shift in clientele; money was green no matter what the color of the hand it came out of.

There was a brother too, three years younger than Lois, but he’d been stillborn, expelled from the womb with the umbilical cord twisted around his neck.

SITTING IN the lobby of the Marcus Garvey Community Center, Jackie couldn’t recall a time she felt more out of place.

Hers the only face that wasn’t black or Latino. Out of place here. A stranger. A foreigner.

But the building was jumping. Swarming with life. And Jackie, despite her discomfort, couldn’t help feeling invigorated.

Different from Sakai, whom he hadn’t known well. But who was as much a part of the neighborhood as the eighty-year-old trees in front of his apartment. Rooted deep. Expected there. Permanent. And this fresh cutting, potted in richer soil, producing not nearly as special a plant. A stranger, outsider, even though her beginnings were here.

He lived and breathed Crenshaw, always had.

James Lanier was on the verge of being a beautiful man, and his scar both pushed him toward that distinction and held him safely away from it.

He hadn’t said the name out loud in years, although he’d thought it, dreamed it, watched it weave and twist and circle around him.

No words laced together into a chain of intertwined stories that connected her to anyone’s past. More than gaps in the narrative; there was no narrative.

No one ever did shit.”

Banging his head rhythmically, obsessively, against his bedroom wall, punishing himself for being alive and for not helping Curtis, until his mother couldn’t leave him alone. Cutting his arm with razor blades, steak knives, scissors, pens, so he would feel the pain there and not inside him.

He remembered the “Closed” sign hanging in the window of the empty store for months, the Sakais vanishing like apparitions before the smoke had even cleared.

They were two puzzle pieces jammed together forcefully, their edges nowhere near matching up. But he sensed somehow that the man didn’t want them to match; there was nothing sly in his eyes or over-anxious in his step, in the way he smiled and spoke to her.

That no one talked about history, the internment, seemed a community decision; the entire Nisei generation might have taken a vow of silence.

But it’s almost thirty years later now. You’d think that someone would be brave enough to talk.

He was smiling and his whole face changed. It was no longer a stern mask of angles and stark, immobile lines. He looked boyish and warm, more approachable.

It’s hard—no one’s gonna speak out against another cop.”

But now she remembered the TV newspeople talking about how “it” was coming closer to “us”; telling their viewers—as if they couldn’t see and smell for themselves—of the smoke that hovered over the city.

Her past was like this neighborhood—still there, intact, but she had never bothered to visit. Never driven through its streets, taken in the beauty of its trees and houses. Let it sit there unexplored just down the road from her.

She was surprised and a bit uncomfortable that someone from her family could be lumped together with someone from Lanier’s family, and from the Martindales’. Even though she knew that her grandparents, and great-grandparents, had lived in this neighborhood, she didn’t really think of them as part of it. Their stay here—and her tour—was only an accident, a fluke. They’d been interlopers, visitors, and now they were gone.

They laughed at, struck, and insulted each other, and the old men who were sitting outside on their stoops thought of friends they hadn’t seen in forty years. The young women who were watching, on the street or through the windows, saw the boys’ smooth faces, bright teeth, and tight hard muscles, and their bodies relaxed and opened, mouths humming wordless tunes of desire.

Frank stared. He’d never seen a sign like this, although he’d heard about them in the news, and from Victor’s parents, when they told stories about living in Arkansas. He’d never had to think like this, either—for his first eight years he’d lived in Little Tokyo, and then for his next seven in Angeles Mesa, where there weren’t enough people of any color to legislate such boundaries.

She hadn’t been in the mood to stay with her anyway—they’d been awakened by an aftershock, the third that week, and it had left them both too jittery to sleep.

It was true that some of the faculty were less than thrilled with Rebecca Nakanishi. In the hallowed halls of the law school, where even the liberal students wore ironed pants and buttoned-down shirts, Rebecca stuck out like a drag queen at a Rotary Club meeting. She was irreverent, colorful, and disrespectful of convention, but she was brilliant—third in her class.

“Maybe I’ll just end up at a firm, like you. Maybe this isn’t the time to try and save people.”

She liked the feeling of sitting at a table, with good beer and good company, having nobody’s tears to go home to.

the Chinese and Koreans took to wearing red, white, and blue buttons to distinguish themselves from the enemy.

The wind pressed the dust into every crack of skin, every fold of his clothing; he nailed soup can lids against the holes in the wall in order to keep it out. When the winter came, sudden and harsh as judgment, everything got worse. The wind relinquished its dust in the winter, and instead blew snow and pieces of ice against the side of the barracks. The ice hit hard, a freezing assault, and when Frank opened the door, the cold air slapped his face; the wind sucked the water from his eyes.

of the Negro soldiers in Arizona protesting the internment—because of principle, and because they knew it could happen to them.

Frank would stay and talk to his mother sometimes, but other times, to get away from her sadness, he would go walking by himself.