Southland. Nina Revoyr
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Catholic Church, Doug’s Wine and Spirits, and a burned-out gas station. On the right, Mama’s Soul Food, Victory Guns, two storefront churches, and a store sign that said—she looked twice to make sure—“98 cent Housewives etc.” Each place had a black accordion gate attached to the front. It seemed like every other building was vacant or charred from ’92, or cordoned off because of damage from the quake.
At Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard she took a left, in front of the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza. Now she was near her grandfather’s old store and old house, although she didn’t know exactly where they were. Jackie kept abreast of local news enough to know that this area was undergoing an economic resurgence— but if this was what it looked like when times were good, she couldn’t imagine what it was like when things were bleak.
She counted off four blocks and saw the sign for Marcus Garvey. Then the building—the tall windows and glass doors, the wide flat honeycomb she couldn’t see the back of. There was a small green lawn in the front with manicured bushes and trees. The whole complex glittered against the tans and grays of the surrounding neighborhood, like a mirage in a desert—an idea that clearly had not been lost on the people who worked there. The sign read: “Marcus Garvey Community Center—an Oasis of Hope.”
Now, in the waiting room, she pretended to read a magazine, half-listening to one of the women behind the front desk talk to a young man leaning into her window. Then someone was standing over her, and she looked up and saw Loda Thomas. She had the same grave face, the same stiff-looking waves she remembered from the funeral; when Jackie met her eyes, though, she smiled.
“Thanks so much for inviting me,” Jackie said.
“Not at all. It’s nice to see you again. And it’s always good to have people visit Marcus Garvey.”
Loda took her on a short tour, pointing out the library, the classrooms, the dozens of offices, the exercise room, the kitchen, the computer facilities.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this,” said Jackie, truthfully. Laura would love this place, she thought. It was part rec center, part school, part office. The building itself was not as nice as it had looked from outside. Some of the walls were painted a thick industrial lemon yellow, others were naked gray cinderblock. The floors were covered with a faded carpet, pukeorange and worn through in many places. The furniture all looked like garage-sale pieces or hand-me-downs from Staples.
But the building was jumping. Swarming with life. And Jackie, despite her discomfort, couldn’t help feeling invigorated.
“Yes, it’s quite a madhouse,” Loda said as they turned another corner. There were several small children clumped together in the hallway, and they scattered as the women approached. “We run several different programs here—literacy classes, which are my responsibility, a GED course, computer training, after-school, day care. The after-school program is James’s baby. He’s who I’m taking you to meet. He started that several years ago, along with the young fathers program.”
“I’m sorry, who is he again?”
“James Lanier. He grew up a few blocks from here, and he was just a little boy when your grandfather had the store. He seemed very interested in talking to you. Which is something. He usually doesn’t make a lot of time for people who aren’t connected to his programs.”
Jackie didn’t have time to wonder what this meant, because Loda had stopped in front of a closed door. She rapped lightly. From inside a muffled voice bid them to enter.
Loda pushed the door open and stepped in. Jackie followed. The man behind the desk was looking down, writing something. “James,” Loda said, “this is Jackie Ishida. Frank Sakai’s granddaughter.”
“Hi,” Jackie said. She was oddly nervous.
The man looked up at them and rose from behind his small desk. He seemed huge in the tiny office, and Jackie had the impression that if he spread his arms, he could touch the walls on either side of him. Lanier was about 6’3", and he looked like the former athlete he was—big biceps, thick chest, and slim, solid hips, with a slightly rounded belly. His clothes were neat but not overly dressy—khakis, a white shirt, a thin black tie. He gave Jackie a quick, undisguised once-over, then held his large hand out over the desk. “James Lanier.”
His voice was surprisingly quiet for such a powerful-looking man. Jackie shook his hand firmly, and the solid anchor of his arm made her feel both grounded and unmoored. She felt this man could see right into her, the neat structured piles of her, the lines of her she’d never cross or blur. “Hi. It’s nice to meet you. Thanks for seeing me today.”
Her voice sounded false to her, and to Lanier as well. He waited a moment before he spoke again. “No problem. Thanks for driving down here.”
Loda excused herself, and as she left, Jackie resisted the urge to say no, don’t leave, but if you leave, don’t close the door. But Loda left, and the door clicked shut. Lanier sat down and indicated that Jackie should do the same.
Jackie sat in a plain brown desk chair. She looked around the office, at the books and folders on the table, the scattered papers on the desk, the pictures and plaques and children’s drawings on all the walls. She noticed the baby pictures on the bulletin board above Lanier’s shoulder and wondered if any of the children were his. “Nice office,” she said, too brightly, and Lanier raised an eyebrow.
“It’ll do.”
It came out harsher than he intended. But he wasn’t sure what he thought of this granddaughter. She was so clearly out of her element here. 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.
Lanier, like Sakai, was an insider. It was his business to know the neighborhood, to be aware of which people were harmless; which kids were on a dangerous course he needed to try and disrupt; which kids were already lost. He lived and breathed Crenshaw, always had. Sometimes, as he drove to work in the morning, hearing palm trees rustle and seeing children walk to school and watching the sun start to come into its power, he experienced a joy so perfect and complete that he didn’t need anything else. It would pass—kids would get arrested, drop out of school, or die—but this one moment of perfect happiness, of one-ness with the neighborhood, was the thing that made it all worthwhile.
But now, he felt bad for being abrupt with Frank’s granddaughter. He saw Frank’s angular face on her, his thin sharp blade of a nose. So he looked at her directly and said, “I’m sorry about your grandfather.”
Staring down at her hands, she said, “Thank you.” Then, looking up, she saw that he meant it. He really had a good face. His forehead was wide and expressive, and running across it were three long wrinkles, just starting to lay claim in the flesh. His nose was stately, and Jackie noticed that when she said something, it registered not in his eyes but in his flaring, widening nostrils. His lips were full and moist, and his jaw was square and anvil-like; any fist that struck it might disintegrate on impact. The thing that both disturbed his face and underlined its perfection was the deep, inch-long scar just inside his left ear. 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.
“We all are,” Jackie continued. “It’s been a crazy last few weeks, with him dying and the earthquake.”
Lanier nodded. “Did you have a lot of damage?”
“No, not really. There were some cracks in my walls and I lost a few plates. How about you?”
“About the same. A few plates, a couple of lamps. And we didn’t have much damage here either, so it was real busy for a while—the schools were closed so all the kids were coming here.”
“You know, on top of everything else, my poor grandfather had to live through another big quake. He hated them. My aunt told me that after the quake of ’71, he