Twilght

by Anna Deavere Smith

  that was seeing it as a riot and an uprising.

  There’s both horror and rage and a sense of extreme impotence,

  and saying, “What are we gonna do?”

  So,

  I got together with a group of people

  and we organized a press conference on

  the Warner Brothers lot

  on

  Wednesday,

  um,

  with

  the entertainment industry people,

  and it was

  really quite an extraordinary event

  because

  some people objected,

  even as late as Wednesday,

  to the fact that our press release

  said …

  calling it an uprising

  and decrying the verdict.

  And

  some

  powerful people in Hollywood

  called up, having looked at our press release,

  and saying,

  “Well we agree with everything but how can you decry the verdict?”

  (She laughs)

  And we said, You can’t, you know.

  This is not gonna happen

  if people in the entertainment industry are gonna get up and speak

  out.

  The truths gotta be told.

  We’re not gonna, like,

  pretend to be parents here,

  and it was such an obvious

  paternalistic

  response.

  And there was a lot of

  discomfort,

  I felt,

  not amongst the young actors,

  not amongst

  some of the young directors,

  but amongst the older

  group,

  that were more established,

  that there should be

  a response saying,

  “Stop the violence.”

  But not one that was prepared to say,

  “This verdict is out of the question

  and we don’t blame you.”

  And it was a funny thing

  because

  we did this press conference on

  twenty-four-hour notice,

  again

  because Hollywood is a little bit about putting on a show.

  People were worried and saying,

  “Gee, what happens if the news media don’t show up,

  or the wrong people show up and you fail?”

  There is a sense

  of, “If we’re going to go out

  we have to make sure that we don’t fail,”

  which has come from

  twenty years of Republican and

  Democratic

  party politics—

  as opposed to street politics—

  where it isn’t about failing,

  it’s about

  struggle

  and telling the truth

  and being angry

  and

  so what if only three people show up?

  You’ve done something.

  And then there was …

  Our house became,

  it was,

  there were about fourteen kids

  who live in West Hollywood

  and

  who work at Warner Brothers or at our company

  who came

  to live at our house.

  Well, they feel like kids—

  early twenties

  to mid twenties—

  and they all moved in

  because they felt their houses weren’t safe.

  Yeah,

  their houses weren’t safe.

  And they had come to our company

  because of our politics

  and known it was a place to come and talk,

  so we said come back to our house and stay with us, and

  it became

  Camp Rosenberg for the next five days.

  (she listens)

  In Brentwood,

  I think was the most interesting thing for me,

  which was taking

  all these kids

  who’d grown up

  hearing about the sixties,

  who were political,

  who had no place to put it—

  white kids,

  black middle-class kids

  who were living at our house—

  and for them,

  being glued to the television,

  they had a kind of Jungian collective unconscious

  connection,

  as political kids,

  now, with what happened before,

  but no place to put it.

  I was organizing this press conference and on the phone all night

  going down with the food.

  I’m sure you’ve heard from everybody what those weeks were like.

  People who had lived in Los Angeles all their lives,

  had never been to South Central,

  I mean, went in caravans with me.

  I mean, that’s pretty scary.

  I don’t know any other city that would happen in.

  I’m in Chicago now,

  people are in the South Side all the time,

  you can’t avoid it,

  and everyone knows Harlem,

  and it isn’t true

  in Los Angeles.

  A lot of people who have lived there for twenty-five years

  had never ever gone.

  And these kids had never gone.

  It’s as if it is a different

  country,

  and that’s the view—

  and that’s the horror of Los Angeles.

  So it was an extraordinary time.

  First I went to the AME,

  and from there I went to Diane Watson’s headquarters,

  and

  first we went

  throughout Beverly Hills and West L.A.

  and made everybody give us food

  and talk about feeling like I was back in SDS,

  trashing someplace,

  going in and saying you’ve got to give us food

  and stopping everybody who was on the line out

  for money

  and everybody on every aisle—

  “Give me a buck, give me this”—

  and watching their reactions to it

  was also fabulous for these kids.

  It was like street theater.

  There they were going up

  to managers—

  they watched

  me do it a couple of times—

  and going up to the people and organizing

  people in Mrs. Gooch’s in Beverly Hills,

  and at one point we had run out of stuff

  and we kept going down,

  and in the early—

  in the morning, when we went,

  it was …

  there were lots of people in clean-up and all of that

  by

  late

  Saturday afternoon.

  You got there

  and

  and the line

  of people distributing food

  into Diane Watson’s,

  right behind her headquarters,

  into the warehouse there,

  was now a completely

  multiracial

  and multicultural line of people.

  Young people in their twenties

  passing food

  and everybody …

  everytime someone came up

  in a Mercedes or a station wagon or whatever

  with food, who had never been there before,

  everybody was applauding,

  and there was a sense

  of

  a community here,

  and you

  felt the possibility,

  you believed

  that it actually could change,

  and of course

  here we are a year later,

  (seven-second pause)

 
; didn’t change.

  All,

  all

  the

  language

  was there,

  and all the big gestures

  were there,

  and,

  and,

  I guess

  what disturbed me,

  which I really … what I would wanna talk about the most

  about that week,

  was watching rich white people guard

  their houses

  and send their children

  out of L.A.

  as if

  the devil was coming after them.

  And

  it wasn’t realistic.

  It was,

  I think, a media fest

  of making white people

  scared

  of the African-American community,

  and, and

  nothing had changed.

  Nothing.

  And everybody—

  people who were well-intentioned and understood that nothing had

  changed …

  The degree to which

  the city—

  the white community—

  went into a sense of real terror,

  and, and

  an inward looking self-protectiveness,

  as opposed to standing up and saying,

  “We are gonna stand by whatever,

  if the verdict is this,

  and

  these people are found not guilty,

  it will be unjust and we will stand together.”

  It was as if nothing,

  no connection, had been made,

  because it can’t be made

  in four days.

  It’s a fake …

  It was a fake

  euphoria we all felt.

  It was the euphoria of,

  “Look at what’s possible not what’s real.”

  Uhm,

  and, and

  everything

  retreated,

  and the most—

  the heightened example of it being retreated was …

  of the retreating was the way

  the media treated

  the last week

  and the way

  the white community reacted to it

  and the rich white community reacted to it.

  (five-second pause)

  (much lower volume, much less intention)

  Everybody’s scared in L.A.

  Application of the Laws

  Bill Bradley Senator, D-New Jersey

  (His office in the Senate Building. A Sunday in February 1993. A well-lit office with wonderful art on the wall. He is dressed in jeans but is wearing very elegant English shoes. His daughter is in the other part of the empty office doing her homework. They are on their way to a basketball practice for her.)

  I mean, you know, it’s still …

  there are people who are, uh,

  who the law treats in different ways.

  I mean, you know, one of the things that strike me about,

  uh, the events of Los Angeles, for example, was, um, the following:

  I have a friend,

  an African-American,

  uh, was, uhhh,

  I think a second-year Harvard Law School student.

  And he was interning

  a summer in the late seventies

  out in LA, at a big law firm,

  and every Sunday

  the … the different partners would …

  would invite the interns to their home

  for tea or brunch or whatever.

  And this was a particular Sunday and he was on his way driving

  to one of the partners’ homes.

  There’s a white woman in the car with him.

  I think she was an intern.

  I’m not positive of that.

  They were driving and they were in the very …

  just about the neighborhood of the,

  uh, partner, obviously well-to-do neighborhood in Los Angeles.

  Suddenly he looks in the rearview mirror.

  There is a, uh, police car,

  red light.

  He pulls over.

  Police car pulls in front of him,

  pull … police car pulls behind him,

  police car pulls beside of him.

  Police jump out,

  guns, pull him out of the car,

  throw him to the floor,

  put a handcuff on him behind his back.

  All the while pointing a gun at him.

  Run around to the woman on the other side. “You’re being held

  against your will, aren’t you, being held against your will.”

  She gets hysterical

  and they keep their guns pointed.

  Takes them fifteen or twenty minutes to convince them.

  “No, no, I’m not, uh, I’m not, uh, I’m, I’m, I’m, I’m an intern, law firm,

  I’m on my way to a meeting, partner’s brunch.”

  And after that, he convinces them of that, while his head is down in

  the ground, right?

  They take the handcuff off.

  They say, “Okay, go ahead.”

  They put their hats on, flip their sunglasses down, get in their police

  cars, and drive away, as if nothing happened.

  So my first reaction

  to that is, um …

  The events of April aren’t new

  or the Rodney King

  episode isn’t news in Los Angeles

  or in many other places.

  My second thought is: What did the partner of that law firm do on

  Monday?

  Did the partner call the police commissioner?

  Did the partner call anybody?

  The answer is no.

  And it gets to, well,

  who’s got responsibility here?

  I mean, all of us have responsibility

  to try to improve the circumstances

  among the races of this country.

  I mean, you know, uh, a teenage mother’s got a responsibility

  to realize that if she has more children the life chances of those

  children are gonna be less;

  the gang member’s gotta be held accountable for his finger on a gun.

  Right?

  The corporate executive has gotta be responsible for hiring and

  promoting diverse talent

  and the head of the law firms gotta be responsible for that as well,

  but

  both the corporate executive and the law firm have to use their moral power.

  It’s not a total contradiction.

  I don’t think it is. The moral power of the law firm

  or corporation when

  moments arise such as my friend’s face in the ground with the gun

  pointed at his head because he was in the wrong neighborhood and

  black

  and the moral power of those institutions have to be brought to bear

  in the public institutions, which in many places are not

  fair.

  To put it mildly.

  Right? And the application of the law

  before which we are all in theory equal.

  Something Cooking Here

  Otis Chandler A director of the Times Mirror Company

  (Former editor of the Los Angeles Times. An elegant man, thoughtful and soft-spoken. We are in an office at the Times. He is drinking iced tea.)

  I think

  if you think about America and you think about the families

  that have had the opportunities

  by accumulation of wealth, whether it be newspapers or mining

  or

  whatever, and you think about

  who … what families

  have really made a contribution over many generations, there aren’t

  many.

  I can think of the

  (He counts his fingers)

&nbs
p; Kennedys,

  the Rockefellers,

  maybe the Mellons in Pittsburgh,

  hopefully,

  immodestly, the Chandlers

  in Los Angeles,

  but there aren’t very many.

  Most of ’em

  just sat around and piddled the wealth away,

  became alcoholics or whatever. They couldn’t … couldn’t take the

  notoriety

  and the open door.

  They didn’t go for it.

  But

  I don’t want you to go away

  from this

  visit thinking that I’m …

  that I

  feel it’s hopeless

  or that it can never be made right

  or that we should just throw money at it

  or we should just make speeches.

  It’s going to have to be a lot of things

  and a lot of people participating,

  but there has to be that commitment

  for the long term.

  It can’t be

  well, let’s just

  do a couple things

  for a few years and it will go away.

  I think, Anna,

  we’re talking about

  a long time

  to get a handle on this.

  We’re talking about a lot of things

  that are gonna be tried

  and fail.

  We’re going to have to be patient,

  we’re going to have to be resolute,

  that this is all going to … someday,

  whether

  it’s five years or ten years,

  but this is going to be a safe,

  pleasant city

  for everybody,

  regardless of where they live

  or what they do

  or what the color of their skin is.

  Somehow we have to make

  that wonderful …

  Somehow we have to make

  that dream

  come true

  and I’m not going to give up.

  Somehow this whole thing cannot be allowed to lapse

  back into business as usual.

  There’s nothing to stop …

  within another year or two …

  I wish I could answer your question

  and provide hope.

  There’s hope but there’s no easy answer.

  I’ve thought a lot about that

  and I’ll give you a few thoughts.

  We mustn’t …

  we,

  the whole community,

  political leadership,

  private leadership,

  we can’t allow

  again

  the situation to be …

  to deteriorate

  again

  after a year or two years of hope and building

  and new alliances, promises,

  political speeches,

  a new mayor, all of the things that are going on now,

  and then

  be diverted.

  Inevitably

  other things creep on the agenda

  and pretty soon,

  human nature being what it is,

  and

  that

  can’t happen again