The avenue before us was well
traveled by National Guardsmen and cops and lined with burned-out, gutted
structures.
“So what you think, Paris?”
“Ain’t had much time to think,
Easy. I had to do some fast talkin’ to keep my store here. They burnt down the
market next door. I had to keep that side of the house soaked with a hose to
keep the flames off.”
“You talk to many of the white
people owned these stores?” I asked.
“A few came back yesterday,” he
said. “Some more today. They’re like in shock. I mean, they don’t know why it
happened. They don’t see how it is that black people could be so mad at them.
One guy own the hardware store up the block said that if he didn’t put his
store in, then there wouldn’t be no hardware store. He said that the people who
live around here don’t want to own a business.”
“What’d you say to that?” I asked.
“What can I say, Easy? Mr. Pirelli
works hard as a motherfucker out here. He don’t know how hard it is to be
black. He can’t even imagine somethin’ harder than what he doin’. I could tell
him but he wouldn’t believe it.”
I liked Paris. He was a very
intelligent man. But he was a pessimist when it came to human nature. He didn’t
think that he might teach that hardware store owner anything, so he just nodded
at the man’s ignorance and let it ride.
Who knows? Maybe Paris was right.
. . .
I read the newspaper while sitting
on the love seat in the no-man’s-land between the kitchen and the living room.
The police had opened fire on a
Muslim mosque on Fifty-sixth and South Broadway. They rushed the building and
found nineteen men sprawled on the blood-stained floor. No one was shot, the
article said, but they were lacerated by flying glass.
The reason given for the attack was
that a shot was fired from an upper floor of the building. But the real reason
was in the adjacent article saying that twelve of fifteen thousand National
Guardsmen had been pulled out of Los Angeles overnight. The police were afraid
of losing their authority, so they responded with deadly force.
Gemini
5 had lifted off by then and the Marines claimed to have killed 550
Vietcong guerrillas in a coordinated attack. Martin Luther King had been in
Watts talking about the aftermath of the riots with Negro leaders, and astrophysicists
were worried that an asteroid named Icarus would collide with Earth in three
years’ time.
To some people that space rock
would have come as a blessing from God. Something sent down to Earth to shake
off the invisible chains and manacles holding down five people for every one
that’s walking around free.
The school bus brought Feather home
a few minutes shy of four and she read to me from her textbook. It was a story
about an old walrus who had to swim five thousand miles from somewhere in South
America to Antarctica. Along the way the walrus saw all kinds of amazing things
in the water and on the shore. He saw whales as big as islands and sea birds of
every size and shape.
—Waler Mosely, Little Scarlet (2004)
