Stories

Watts


The summer after I graduated from St Michael's Girls' High School in 1965, I worked as playground director at La Tijera elementary school in Inglewood, which. was then a middle class white neighborhood. I took the bus down Manchester to La Tijera Blvd, crossed the La Cienega Freeway, and walked half a block to the school. My boyfriend sometimes picked me up after work in one of his father's hearses. Brian was being made to work that summer driving huge bunches of flowers around. There was never a body back there, and I thought it was cool to ride home in a hearse listening to War, What Is It Good For?

When Brian wasn't waiting for me in the parking lot, I took the bus back down Manchester and walked the two blocks to my brother's house. One day, Brian showed up with his blue Chevy instead of the hearse. He had painted the Chevy the color of my eyes instead of taking me out. I was not pleased with the romance of this gesture, but he hadn't asked me. He told me to get into the car, white faced. I got in, and he told me to get down on the floor. There was a riot. I was not especially surprised about the riot. I walked every day to church, from work and school and to the little store in streets full of people standing outside to get out of overcrowded, stifling apartments. Over the years, I had watched these cheap buildings slowly replace the little houses in the neighborhood. The huge, green lots had been crammed with tacky apartment buildings, and there was next to no open land. The Chinese people who ran the little store around the corner ground meat fresh for me and not for my neighbors. I sometimes got offered $20 for my body even though I looked about as Catholic school girl as you could get.

People had been idling in front of the buildings in small crowds all summer trying to breathe. I told Brian I lived there, sometimes I forgot I wasn't black, and I was not going to get on the floor of his stupid blue Chevy. He was used to having a lunatic for a girl friend and didn't argue. Brian's car had some kind of control on the accelerator that kept him from going more than 35 miles an hour. He believed that if he got stopped, and I had bare feet, he would go to jail for statutory rape. I was 18 at the time, and so was he, but I wore shoes in his car, if nowhere else. Bryan was a carefully brought up Irish Catholic boy. My dad knew his dad. His sister, Maureen, introduced me to Pat O Brien, the actor. Pat O Brien was surprisingly tall, and he ignored me. Brian wanted to marry me, my dad wanted me to marry him, and his dad wanted me to marry him. I had no intention of marrying anybody. Also, I could not face the idea of being Mrs. Mc Glynn's daughter in law. She got mad if he missed dinner because he was swinging me on the swing set in my backyard. Maureen got mad because he bought me presents and not her. He thought I should hide on his car floor. These were not my kind of people.

The ride down Manchester was about the same that day as it was every day until we hit Broadway. At Broadway, the street narrowed to one lane going each way; there were people from t he buildings to the middle of the street. Brian was forced to drive at more of a snail's pace then he usually did; people were pounding on the windshield and the hood of the blue car. There was a lot of yelling. I have to admit Bryan had enormous courage. He was terrified of my neighborhood at the best of times; now he really did have something to fear, but he had come and gotten me and taken me home through what he knew were very dangerous streets. When we got to my brother's house, I got out of the car, and a group of teen aged girls walking by yelled something terrible at me. I was hurt as I walked up the stairs to the house. I went in and sat down in front of the TV and watched the Main Street stores burn on TV. I stood on the porch and watched the exact same flames rise above Main Street half a block away. The black neighbors were standing on the porch, terrified, watching the same flames. We talked about what was going on and how scary it all was.

My brother, Dick, was in the garage making Molotov cocktails. It's a miracle we did not all blow to Hell. The riot, as I remember, lasted three days during which we watched it on the porch until we were forbidden to stand outside our houses on threat of being shot by the police, who drove up and down the street, yelling through bull horns. Later, there was a curfew that meant we had to be indoors by dark. The National Guard drove down the street on tanks, bayonets at the ready. We varied the experience by watching it on TV. Flames shot into the air. Someone ran through the back yard. Like everyone in the area, we ran out of milk, bread, and the meat we bought from the Chinese store. When it was quiet, we went out to see and try to get food. The Chinese store had a sign on what was left of its display window that said it was Black Owned. It had been destroyed. The meat case was shattered all over the floor. The refrigerator and its contents were all over the floor. We looted some cans and went home. There was nobody to pay. We watched people carrying TVs, stereos, and god knows what else from wrecked department stores on TV. We watched them get arrested. We listened to commentators note what savages we were that we did not respect private property.

I didn't feel like going to work, and I figured the riot was a good excuse, so I didn't go back for three more days after the riot was over. Brian called every day to ask if I was going to work so he could take me. I told him I didn't know, and I didn't until I got up after three days and felt like going. I got on the Manchester bus as usual. As usual, I was the only White on the bus. The people looked at me, and I looked at them the way you look at your brothers and sisters after your parents have had a truly horrifying fight, like we didn't know what to do. I got to work, and the people I worked with treated me like I was made of glass. I took as much advantage of my delicate situation of riot survivor as I could. I had not called, and I very well could have, but we were having a riot, and I knew Inglewood people. That evening, Bryan picked me up without knowing whether I'd be there or not. I guess he had been coming every day because I was being a loony bitch about it, and he genuinely loved me. In September, I moved to Marymount in Palos Verdes, but I went home for weekends sometimes and the Holidays as long as I could stand my family. Then I stopped going home.

I had lived in the same house since I was five years old. I walked the streets to school for twelve years as the area changed from working class white and Mexican American to almost entirely black. When I was young, I used to walk to the little store around the corner to buy cigarettes,100 malted milk balls , and movie magazines for the babysitter. Cigarettes were a quarter a pack, malted milk balls were two for a penny, I had heard that popsicles were two cents, and I was about 8 years old. I didn't dare touch the candy, but the magazine was printed matter, so I walked home reading it. Usually I got into trouble for that because the reading slowed me down, and the sitter waiting for her stuff. Anyway, the guy who owned the little store was Chinese; he sold meat, and he had a huge freezer with a big stainless steel door that closed with a metal handle. He used to open that door and threaten to put us kids in it. He actually did put one of my brothers in once. When he finally let my brother out, whichever boy it was strode out cocky; he had survived the freezer.

The sitter sat in the armchair and watched American Bandstand, smoked, and ate her malted milk balls. I watched the kids. This arrangement worked fine for my mother; the sitter was legal, and Mother pretty much expected me to take care of the kids anyway. Mamie had taken care of us until she got sick, and then Dick had to do it. He made it very clear that I was a dead girl if anything happened he didn't like. He wanted to hang out with his friends who all had duck tails and leather jackets. He did not want to take care of his many, many half sisters and brothers. When I was about 6, a social worker came to the house, stood on the porch watching us with my mother. She told my mother that if she did not get adequate child care, the county would put us in foster care. The next day, Mrs. Spruitt appeared, standing on the same back porch, looking at us. Dick became a free sixteen year old juvenile delinquent. Mamie had died sometime in the meantime, vomiting blood in the only ambulance my parents ever called although my mother was carried out of the little house hemorrhaging every year from James on down.

The year Jimmie was born, there were five of us. I was six years old. We were sitting in the tiny living room watching some kids' show on Channel 11 when my father came in from the kitchen and told me to get the kids together in the bedroom, close the door, and keep them there. I gathered my three sisters and two brothers into the adjoining room, put my youngest brother on my lap, and we waited while the noises went on outside the door. I sat on the bed holding the baby on my lap, talking to the other kids to keep them calm while my father carried my bleeding mother out of the house to the car.

Daddy was an old fashioned Irish father. When he got home, his kids fell silent, all of us, if we valued our lives. He had worked hard all day at Sergeant's Engineering, and he needed his repose. My mother had worked hard all day, too, and she was always pregnant. She took the bus to the Records Building downtown every morning, running to the bus stop. My Dad drove the family station wagon. Mother came home and cooked in the narrow galley kitchen while my Dad sat on a stool and read the four daily papers, one at a time. As he finished them, he gave them to us. My mother made sure we took baths. When Daddy said for us to sit in that room, we did until someone opened the door. That night, it was Mrs. Spruitt who had come when Daddy called, cleaned up whatever mess there was and then opened the door. Mother came back in a few days without the new baby who had to stay in the hospital until he weighed four pounds. That was about a month.