Southland. Nina Revoyr
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mother had made from carefully stocked provisions, hidden until her daughter’s birthday arrived. She hated her so much that when Grace left the camp to work as an assistant bookkeeper for a church in Chicago, Mary barely opened her mouth to say goodbye.
After the war, the Takayas reopened their restaurant, which they’d been lucky enough not to sell. Mary’s father had bought it from money pooled by their kenjinkai, and when most other Issei were selling their houses and businesses in the panicked spring of ’42, Takaya had flatly refused. 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. Mary worked at the restaurant every day. Her parents promised they’d let her go to college soon, as Grace had done; they just needed to get ahead in terms of money. But as a year passed, then two, then three, college was starting to seem as remote to her as the country her parents had come from.
Then one afternoon Frank Sakai came in and suddenly made her visible. He’d brought his mother, who he accompanied to Li’l Tokyo every week. He sat down and watched Mary, lifting his eyebrows, once, when she looked at him. When she came over to their table, turned his cup over and poured him some tea, he caught her eye and asked softly what was wrong. This boldness was so unusual for a Nisei man that she jerked back and spilled the hot liquid on his arm—a move that would have brought on a scolding from her father if he hadn’t known it was caused by love. No harm was done other than a red streak on Frank’s nicely muscled forearm, just where the boiling tea had hit, and after many embarrassed apologies and bows by both Mary and her parents, the whole incident seemed to be forgotten. Except that Frank Sakai’s steady gaze followed her around the restaurant, and she wondered how he’d known she was depressed. A few days later, her father and one of the customers had a conversation that Mary knew she was meant to overhear. Frank Sakai was a store manager, they made it known, well on his way to establishing himself enough to break away from the man he worked for and start his own business. At twenty-three he was still unmarried, and while his mother had tried to match him up with two beautiful and promising young Nisei girls, he had stubbornly insisted upon choosing his own bride. Mary appreciated her father’s efforts, but they really weren’t necessary—she had already noticed the young veteran with the slight hitch in his step. Her parents started letting her take breaks when the Sakais were there, nevermind that her mother had to pick up the slack of things left undone by the invisible hands. She and Frank spoke of their families, their hopes and aspirations. She wanted to be a teacher, and when she told him this, his eyes darkened with a sadness that she didn’t understand. It didn’t matter, though. She was in love. When Frank came in with his mother, he always watched after her, getting her another napkin when her first one was dirty, refilling her cup of green tea. His mother and Mary’s parents would bow to each other, smile, and then complain good-heartedly about their American children. In this way, they skipped the go-betweens, the meetings, the formal introductions. All the parents were there when Frank asked Mr. Takaya for his daughter’s hand. And as the three parents drank sake in celebration, he and Mary sat quietly, just smiling at each other, fingers intertwined beneath the table.
She moved to Angeles Mesa, into the house on Edgehill where Frank lived with his mother. Frank’s mother cleaned houses now, and Frank worked every day at the store. Mrs. Sakai, after years of propositions, suggestions, pleading, and hints, was not joyous so much as relieved that her only son had finally married. She kept her dead husband appraised of the events, filling him in every evening as she paid her respects in front of the butsudan, and he seemed pleased with the match as well. The children came quickly—Rose about a year after the marriage, in 1948; Lois just a year and a half later. 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. For the first few years, Mary Sakai had stayed home with her children; when Lois was five, she went back to school and finally became a teacher. And there on Edgehill Street they had stayed, for seventeen years, until that other conflagration, the war turned inward, of 1965.
SITTING IN the lobby of the Marcus Garvey Community Center, Jackie couldn’t recall a time she felt more out of place. More like an overseas visitor, scared and clutching her passport. She’d expected something small—a rec room and a couple of offices—not this huge, sprawling facility, room upon room upon room, a layered concrete honeycomb of a building. And people everywhere—mostly women, a sprinkling of men, and a hive of small children, countless bees buzzing and swirling. She sat in her orange plastic chair near the receptionist’s window and tried to take everything in. The cowboy-hat-wearing security guard. The teenage boys examining books in the little shop area, busy as an airport newsstand. The auditorium, which had just hosted some kind of meeting and was now disgorging laughing, jostling women. Hers the only face that wasn’t black. No, here were a couple of Latino women, speaking Spanish. Hers the only face that wasn’t black or Latino. Out of place here. A stranger. A foreigner.
Loda Thomas had told her to come—Jackie had called that morning between classes and run the name Curtis Martindale by her. She hadn’t heard of him. But then, an hour later, she called Jackie back and told her that there was someone in her office who might be able to help. A man, younger than Loda, who’d grown up in the neighborhood. She should come down that afternoon, Loda said. He wanted to see her in person.
Jackie had been too embarrassed to tell Loda that she didn’t know how to get to the Crenshaw district, and so she’d gotten directions from Rebecca—for a price. That morning, in their Tax Law class, Jackie had been asked to discuss the long-term effects of Proposition 13, and Rebecca kept puncturing holes in the argument. Jackie knew, from the angle of Rebecca’s head and the mischievous teasing lilt of her voice, that her friend was getting her back for not returning her call about the notes.
“So if I give you my notes,” Jackie said as they headed to the nearest sandwich stand for lunch, “will you stop attacking me in class?”
Rebecca grinned. “Sorry about that. But you’re so much fun to mess with. You look so tormented and mortified.”
Rebecca Nakanishi was Jackie’s teaser, tormentor, and occasional friend. She was like a smoke-bomb—at parties, at school, she exploded into rooms, as if she knew that someone was about to attack and she looked forward to the challenge. People rarely took her up on it. Rebecca had inherited her glorious black hair and olive skin from her Japanese father, and her green eyes and slender frame from her Irish-American mother. The physical elements worked well together, and she attracted—and appeared to be attracted to—reckless, strong-willed people of both genders. Jackie liked her, but was slightly afraid of her and could only take her in small doses. She couldn’t imagine what Rebecca thought of her.
Rebecca jabbered on as they waited for their burgers, about job interviews and their professor’s bad haircut; finally Jackie loosened up and had to smile. And when Jackie eventually asked her for directions to Crenshaw, knowing that she’d gone to a reading in Leimert Park the week before, Rebecca was glad to give them—she flattened out a napkin and drew her a map.
The map was perfect. After going home and doing some reading, Jackie traded her backpack for a purse, went down to her car, and set the map and her Thomas Guide on the passenger seat. It was a little after three. Judging from Rebecca’s directions, it looked like a twenty-minute drive to Marcus Garvey, but traffic was horrible, the boulevards even more clogged than usual because two parts of the 10 Freeway had collapsed in the earthquake. On Crenshaw Boulevard, just before the 10, there were several blocks of huge, old Craftsman bungalows, which had clearly been stately and gorgeous in some distant time. There was a slow-rolling hill, and from the top, a clear view of Baldwin Hills and Inglewood. The view was surprisingly pleasant, Jackie thought, but misleading—like a glimpse of the ocean that obscured the sandbars and sharks underneath.
As Jackie emerged on the other side of the underpass, she took another breath. She was south of the freeway now, and was decidedly anxious. She locked her doors, and then felt ashamed of herself. But already the