You couldn’t tell anything about a guy from his name—because most boys had names that were variations on Catholic saints. Were girls named for saints? Wait—we were. Barbara and Teresa and Rita. Girls in the 1970s, in a place like this, were supposed to get ready for marriage; our classes were Home Economics, Sewing, Typing. There was a class called Mock Wedding, wherein an entire semester was devoted to the etiquette and practicalities of that day. Seriously, your dad and I have shown you the pictures in the yearbook.
In junior high, a boy would call and say to us, “Do you want to go with Tony?” (I’m using Tony because in our neighborhood there were multiples of Tony, Tommy, Michael, Johnny, Ronnie, Ricky, Billy, Wayne, Dwayne, Eddie, and Larry. In my neighborhood there was a Tony whose mother was Salvadoran and father Polish, a short black Tony nicknamed Cricket, for the chirping he made to drive our history teacher crazy, and a Mexican-American Tony. So if a girl said that Tony asked her to go with him, we’d have to ascertain which Tony, by his last name, neighborhood, hairstyle, or sports affiliation—I married basketball Dwayne Sims, not track Duane Sims.)
The caller would not be Tony. He would be Tony’s friend. We would answer yes. Then we would be “going with” Tony until the next afternoon, when his friend would call and say, “Tony’s breaking up with you.” Then we’d be broken up, in all probability without ever having actually spoken to Tony, who might then write months later in our school yearbook something like “Big titty girl.” (I got this lovely ironic missive in my junior high yearbook from a blond drug-dealing kid who lived three streets from me. One of four Rickies in my neighborhood.)
Then we went to high school, where the gradations of possible love became “talking to Tony,” “messing with Tony,” and “Tony, is that you, homes?” The last would be the indication that you and Tony were actually seen, physically together, all the time, and Tony had acknowledged that you were a couple. No one had any money for dating. That was not a word I ever heard said aloud. That was a word I read in Nancy Drew novels.
If we couldn’t afford clothes, we learned to sew in Mrs. Zella Marshall’s sewing class. She was Navajo, with her black hair in a high bun, turquoise earrings, and a way of looking at us over her glasses when girls were taking out their own earrings ready to fight in the hallway.
No matter our race—we recognized one another in our handmade clothing cut from Butterick patterns and sewn on school machines. We recognized girls who had money—outfits bought from Contempo, Clothestime, and Wet Seal.
The boys had their own uniforms. Stoners wore clothing saturated with smoke. Nascent gangsters, no matter what race, wore Pendletons, khakis, hairnets. Kids with money had Levi’s. (The biggest night burglaries in Riverside were at the Levi’s store, where men stole stacks of new denim to sell on the street.)
But athletes mattered most, and they wore letterman jackets. That’s where we really looked different from the rest of America. The names scripted on the backs of young men whose parents had come from the South, brown-skinned guys who flattened people in football: Dr. Doom, Penguin, Bonedell; white guys whose fathers came from the South, or Ohio, or Montana: Blue, Dawson, Bobby; Chicano guys whose parents had been in California forever: Roberto, Camacho, Snake. Japanese-American guys whose parents had survived incarceration camps during World War II: Shige and Kumi. We had a black future comedian: Buddah.
If your father had the money, his letterman jacket would have said Feets, for his size 13s. But we had no money. Your father owned two pairs of pants—one pair of burgundy corduroys, and Dickies before Dickies were cool. I had two pairs of pants, which I’d purchased at a swap meet in an asphalt lot. We were the kind of kids who had to switch items up every day and pretend we weren’t wearing the exact same thing. I borrowed clothes from friends, and I sewed blouses and skirts.
Your father, and you know this because he still does it, identified everyone by vehicle. “Your friend,” he says even now. “The one drove the Duster.” We went out in his sister’s Pinto, which occasioned a lot of laughter at field parties. (The Batmobile had died.) My next-door neighbor Eddie Rose, whose mother was from England, was always “the dude with the Mustang.”
Senior year, I sewed my prom dress, which cost $13 worth of pink satin. We borrowed cars from our parents. People would joke with us, “You ridin’ in the Monarch or the Granada?”
Our parents had identical cars, silver sedans, one a Ford and one a Lincoln, with burgundy interiors. It was hilarious.
If I’d had money, or the ability to get a letterman jacket, mine would have said what the guys called me: Itsy-Bits. Really impressive. I sat close to the blackboard, squinting in my blindness. I had my books, my job at the movie theater, and your father.
In 1978, the Sims family did a formal portrait, in front of the golden fireplace. Everybody wore leisure suits with printed Qiana shirts, wide pointy collars. These are the photos you have seen since you were born. Humans of every race had gotten together and here were six Sims kids—all of whom looked different. Light skin, freckles, dark skin, rosy cheeks, wide noses, and prominent noses like those of Sioux warriors. Not one person looks the same. Christine gets mistaken for Asian, Derrick is very light-skinned with freckles, and your dad looks exactly like his mother, Alberta.
Those freaky damn colonials would have given each child a different casta, and the Sims reaction would have been swift, if anyone tried to say lobo or morisco or chino. The driveway would have been littered with ass-kicked penínsulars.
We loved showing you our high school yearbook, filled with people I see every week. JW North High School Huskies, varsity basketball teams 1976–78: Georgie Smith, only five feet seven, and famous for his ability to dunk. His father born in Texas, and his mother, Yoshiko, born in Kyoto, Japan, the seamstress who made our junior high pompon uniforms, a small, precise-featured woman who spoke Japanese and black English, who measured us with nudging fingers and cloth tape. We grew up with kids named Toshio and Mariko and Rishi, whose hair was braided down into cornrows for football and basketball practice, and blown out into epic proportions for dances.
But the star of our team was Richard Box. He was six feet six, bowlegged, pale as damp sand with hair that combed down straight. His jump shot was perfect. He was chosen for All-State. His mother was German, his father black; he lived one street over from me. His letterman jacket had stitched on the back in flowing cursive: Mulato. The Spanish version of the word. His girlfriend at the time was Mexican-American.
No one ever used that word. He used it with precise irony. We knew what people from other high schools, which were predominantly white or black or Latino, called us: mutts, mongrels, breeds. They’re from way out there. The Inland Empire. Dirt people.
So when Richard Box dunked, that was something; when your father dunked, that was something; but when Georgie Smith, shortest guy on the court, with his bow-legged run and supercilious stone-face, his huge natural like a cirrus cloud of black, rose up in the air and dunked, and gave the bleacher crowd the most evil look anyone could imagine, since they’d been chanting “Kung Fu Fighting” or “Bruce Lee,” everyone else could shut up.
When we graduated, your father went to play basketball at a junior college in Monterey, and I visited him to obsess over the landscape of John Steinbeck novels. (We walked eight miles to Cannery Row, carrying the boombox, so I could see the pier I’d read about.) Then I went home, and my parents dropped me off in the yellow pickup truck, in Los Angeles, where I had a scholarship to the University of Southern California. My task: to become a sportswriter so that my mother could one day meet Vin Scully. I had small goals. I also still had braces, a faint limp, and no decent clothes. Dwayne’s and my best friend, Penguin, whose parents were from rural Florida, played football at a junior college in rural San Jacinto, along with five guys actually born in Florida. They lived in a ragged farmhouse, shared a few pairs of shoes, and lived on powdered soup mix.
So one summer weekend, just before sophomore year, your dad and Penguin
wanted to see the other L.A. We’d been to Los Angeles only for Sims family functions—to Crenshaw, Inglewood, South Central. They wanted to see Venice Beach and Westwood.
We drove my parents’ silver Granada, the hood with paint scoured from the sap dripping off our crape myrtle trees, with shabby tires and aging maroon seats. We went to Venice Beach. We rented skates and attempted to look cool on the boardwalk.
Then we sat on the car hood and ate home-packed food. I changed clothes in the back seat. At dusk, we went to Westwood. Throngs of people moved toward the movie theaters where we were headed. Michael Jackson hung above us on the brick walls, hundreds of huge posters of his just-released solo album Off the Wall. He wore a black tux, a big afro, brown skin, white socks, and that odd shy smile. It was August 1979.
Your father’s afro was thicker than ever, blown out that day with a small handheld dryer with a comb attachment. He used it first, standing behind me at the mirror, him six feet four, me five feet four, my face floating at the center of his wide chest. He’d been lifting weights for basketball. He wore new clothes—a black tank undershirt, khaki pants, and a cream-colored cowboy hat. Everyone was wearing cowboy hats that summer. I wore a white cotton blouse tucked into a white gauzy skirt, with a brown belt I’d gotten at a thrift store. I was copying a summer outfit far more expensive I’d seen in a magazine. When he was done with the dryer, I used it on my hair, which I always wore loose, but as I’d learned back in freshman year from my friend Vicky in typing class, I French-braided the sections around my forehead to keep my hair out of my eyes when I read. I tied off the braid dangling near my ear with a rubber band from my brother’s newspaper delivery supply.
We thought we were ready for L.A. We thought we looked good.
Then two patrol cars swerved onto the Westwood curb beside us, and four officers leaped out and shoved us against the brick wall, just under Michael Jackson.
I remember how it smelled. The bricks. The exhaust. They were shouting so loudly we couldn’t understand what they wanted. We were on foot. We had parked two blocks away. They separated us.
Dwayne Sims and Susan Straight, Venice, California, 1979
It was your father they wanted. The power forward they love on the court. The human they hate off the court. His arms wide as crucifixion on the wall. His shoulderblades wide dark wings. His left cheek pushed into the red brick. One officer held the barrel of his shotgun against his skull, pushing it farther and farther into his hair until it seemed inside his ear.
They were shouting at all three of us: Where you from? Where you from? A black man with a shotgun and a cowboy hat was seen threatening people near UCLA.
I was taken from the brick and turned around. Give me your license. You’re from Riverside? Why’d you come all the way from Riverside to L.A.? Where’s your car? Whose car is it? Does your mother know you’re with two niggers?
I said, She gave me the car.
You sure it’s not stolen? Did you steal it?
My incredulity edged toward sarcasm. I said, It’s a ’75 Granada. But then the heat of fear returned. Penguin was talking back to the cops, refusing to give them his license. I thought they would shoot your father. Through his large ear. Even at that moment, I saw his ear, the one the nuns at Our Lady of Guadalupe had pulled so hard, the one he covered with that beautiful natural, which was smashed now by the cowboy hat they’d taken off.
He was breathing. He fit the description. He matched the suspect. He had not put down his hands to get his wallet out of his back pocket.
I said to Penguin, Please. Please, just give him your license.
I thought, Or Dwayne’s going to die.
The black man. All black men. This black man. The width of his brown shoulders in the tank top as his arms were spread. His wingspan, the coaches called it. He’s got a hell of a wingspan. Great hands.
And your father would say, My dad’s hands are even bigger. All that work, he always says. He’s got the biggest hands of anybody.
Your father’s hands like starfish clinging to the bricks. Don’t move.
One officer went to examine the Granada, parked at a meter. He asked again whether my mother knew who was in the car with me.
My short Swiss mother, who loved sports above all else, who hated television and soap operas and didn’t really like women, who said when I brought your father home, “Well, we can use some height in the family,” who later told me, “Well, all the white boys around here are drug dealers,” who came to your father’s high school basketball games and sat in the bleachers actually knitting, while General Sims II sat on the top row with his friends, six-pack hidden in his coat, hollering “Fall, ball!” every time his son shot—she already liked your father more than me. She’d never come to a single one of my tennis matches, on the courts just across from the gym.
I said, Yes.
The throngs of people had stared at us and then moved around the scene and now thinned out because the police cars blocked the way. The officers said something to your father. The barrel of the shotgun was withdrawn from his temple and the stock cradled in the elbow of the man wearing the uniform.
How would you classify him in a fake Latinate imaginary word?
Descendant of mulatto and negro and colored, all the ways Fine and Daisy were identified, and white slaveowner and Irish overseer and Cherokee and unknown.
Your father was every black man we saw with a gun held to his head or body or in the hovering air just between two humans. Your father was Tom Robinson, in To Kill a Mockingbird, shot in the back by police in a field in the night—Wait, people say, Atticus Finch saved Tom Robinson!—and I always say, Did you not read the end? They killed him anyway. Your father was Jim in Huckleberry Finn; in the original version that man was called Nigger Jim. Your father was killed in countless novels and movies, so often and early that when we went to the theater he and all our friends would place bets on the single black man in the cast: “How long till the brother dies? Five minutes? You think he’s gonna get ten? Nah. They gon’ kill him off in five.”
Your father was the source of fear for white Americans, when he stopped to offer assistance changing a tire, or held open an elevator door, or offered to carry a bag. Your father was the source of fear for his own father, who had seen his sons pulled over while walking, stopped on the street, booked into jail for questioning after someone was killed, suspects because of their tennis shoes, their hair, their skin. Your father was the source of fear for me, because while we rode in the Granada or the Monarch, or the pathetic Pinto, we were always pulled over. I saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel, or dangle outside. The hands I loved. We were so so quiet.
Your father was the guy who, later, on his way to work as a correctional officer would stop for gas at dawn and the cashier would “accidentally” trigger the alarm and police cars would converge and guns would be pointed across the roof while he held up his hands. Your father and I already knew the names of so many young men who’d been shot by police, young men whose names no one says now because there are other names that entered the American consciousness in the last six years, but those names we knew, we always said in conjunction with a place, a street or city where we knew someone shot by police, and finally Lakeview Terrace, where Rodney King was beaten and the whole world saw it.
Your father was the boy whose family had gone to see the Jackson 5 at the Swing Auditorium in San Bernardino. I was the girl who’d learned my first dance in sixth grade from my classmates, the only white girl in our group to perform onstage, and too scared so I was in charge of the record player and dropped the needle precisely on the right song: “ABC,” by the Jackson 5, my classmates moving in perfect synchronicity.
In Los Angeles that night, Michael Jackson was also on the brick wall, his face frozen forever brown-skinned, his natural the exact texture of curl as your father’s. They were born the same year, your father and Michael Jackson. When people say bitterly, “Why did he turn himself white?” I always think of that ter
rible moment when I watched your father hold himself so very very still under the world-famous face with the private yet entreating smile.
Your father did not smile. His license was handed back to him.
The officers said to us: Go back to Riverside. We’re gonna follow you and if we see you walking around here again tonight, we’re gonna shoot you on sight. Don’t come here again.
They stood and waited until we got into the Granada. We drove back to the Santa Monica Freeway, which left the wealthy Westside of Los Angeles, and drove through the neighborhoods where your father’s ancestors had arrived in California: Inglewood, Watts, Crenshaw, and historic South Central, where stood the house of Jennie Stevenson, the eldest daughter of Fine, the little girl who held the bullet in her fingers.
It was Jennie Stevenson who had brought the whole Sims family to California.
We drove east for fifty-four miles until we were home. I pulled the Granada near the curb behind the Monarch, and we got out and stood there in the driveway, on the cement crowded with people because it was August and hot, and the men drinking beer stared at us quizzically, asking why we were back so soon.
12
The Second Bullet
Jennie Stevenson, Outside Tulsa, Oklahoma, Early 1900s
I never hear the song John Lee Hooker recorded with ZZ Top, “La Grange,” without shivering. You know this song: It plays constantly in America, on jukeboxes and television commercials and radios. “Rumors spreadin’ ’round, in that Texas town, ’bout that shack outside La Grange. Just let me know, if you wanna go, to that home out on the range. (They got a lotta nice girls. Have mercy!)”
I see the women.
In folding chairs along the driveway, summer heat held stubborn in the concrete and swarming around our feet, the darkness pooling between the porch light, the streetlamps, and the glowing embers of coals in the oil-drum barbecue, two of the cousins said softly to me, “There was the big house in front, and that was for the white men. There was a little house in the back, down a path, and that was for the black men. But one night a drunk white man came busting into the back house, and he raped her. Jennie. She shot him dead, right there. After that she kept her little pistol hidden in her dress. In her bosom. Whenever we saw her, we knew it was there. Dancing, cooking, whatever. Aunt Jennie always had that gun.”
In the Country of Women Page 10