The Valley of the Shadow of Death

by Kermit Alexander

  Boosted by the coffee and the first signs of the sun, her mood brightened. Nothing would better cheer the boy than a weekend filled with family and friends at Grandma’s house. After all, he had begged his mother to let him stay the weekend at Madee’s with his cousins. And as he went to bed last night he at least seemed happy, smiling, joking. He specifically said how excited he was about the plans to go by the Coliseum the following day, where they would search for remaindered souvenir pins on South Flower Street, and take in the afterglow of the recently concluded Olympic Games.

  Madee too had caught Olympic fever, especially after she had attended the Games, where Mayor Tom Bradley, a longtime family friend, recognized her and greeted her warmly before a large crowd. Afterward, she was so thrilled she said she had floated home. She couldn’t wait to tell her family and friends.

  * * *

  The 1984 Los Angeles Summer Olympics were a magical time for my family and community, and marked a turning point for the city. Securing L.A. as the host represented a major coup for Mayor Bradley.

  Tom Bradley, the city’s first black mayor, had a long and path-breaking history in Los Angeles. After his family migrated from the Deep South in the 1920s, Bradley attended Polytechnic High School, and then received a track scholarship to UCLA. He next served for twenty years in the Los Angeles Police Department, becoming the first black lieutenant. Bradley then became the first black elected to the city council, before becoming mayor, where he would serve an unprecedented five terms.

  For blacks throughout L.A., Tom Bradley was a hero and an inspiration: athlete, trailblazer, visionary. With the Olympic Games, he sought to establish Los Angeles as a true world city, a major node in a globalizing world.

  As the Opening Ceremonies began, the Coliseum and South Central L.A. took center stage. Thousands of doves and streamers soared, Mayor Bradley waved the Olympic flag, President Ronald Reagan addressed the crowd. When he spoke, two and a half billion people around the world listened, making it “the largest audience in the history of mankind.” More athletes and nations attended these games than any before. As each team was announced the Coliseum roared.

  For Mayor Bradley, the event marked the end of a ten-year struggle to return the Games to Los Angeles, where they had last been held in 1932, and where a fourteen-year-old Tom Bradley peered through the fence. Four years later, his idol, track star Jesse Owens, shocked Hitler in the 1936 Berlin Olympics.

  The 1984 Olympics were filled with hopes, and tensions. The Games focus the world’s attention upon the host city. Success means glory, disaster an international black eye. Record security stood in place to counter rumored terrorist threats. While designed by the ancient Greeks to bring nations together in a spirit of competitive peace, it didn’t always work out. The tragedy of Munich and the slaying of the Israeli wrestling team by the Palestinian terrorist organization Black September were just two Olympiads removed. And for Mayor Bradley, security concerns were particularly acute. In 1982 he lost a heartbreaking gubernatorial election to George Deukmejian, who got to the right of him on law and order, tarring Bradley as soft on crime.

  Further, an eerie hypercharged mood marked the lead-up to the 1984 Games, as they signaled a final hot flash in the Cold War. On Christmas Day in 1979 the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, and despite international condemnation, refused to withdraw. In retaliation, the United States boycotted the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. In return, the Soviets, along with thirteen communist allies, refused to attend the 1984 Summer Games. An electric patriotism surged through the city.

  To everyone’s relief, the Games ended in triumph. The United States took home a record eighty-three gold medals. The security stood sound. The Olympic Village remained safe. And, unlike many previous Olympiads, the Los Angeles Summer Games, under the leadership of U.S. Olympic Committee chairman Peter Ueberroth, proved a stunning financial success. One city councilman called the Games “a Super Bowl of all Super Bowls” and “a masterpiece,” while Chairman Ueberroth said, “If I were giving out medals for leadership, Tom Bradley would get the gold.”

  Following the closing ceremonies, composer John Williams’s epic “Olympic Fanfare and Theme” filled the Coliseum. Fireworks lit the night sky. The public address announcer’s voice ended the evening: “The games are over, now the memories begin.”

  The memories included the University of Southern California’s own O. J. Simpson, and Jesse Owens’s granddaughter, serving as torchbearers; the 1960 decathlon winner and UCLA alum Rafer Johnson lighting the Olympic logo; the heroics of Carl Lewis equaling Jessie Owens’s four gold medals in track and field; and gymnast Mary Lou Retton closing out her performances with two perfect tens.

  America was always seen as a place to start a new life, California a place to chase a dream, and Los Angeles a land of hope. Sold as a place to restore health, with a Mediterranean climate akin to the Greek isles, it was the perfect site for a summer Olympic Games. And in the Olympics, as in a Hollywood script, small-town kids from the world over flocked to the land of make-believe and returned bearing gold. For a couple of weeks in the summer of ’84 the dream was revived, flickering across the screen in a brief but brilliant instant. For as the crowds dispersed and the athletes returned home, Los Angeles had captured the global imagination. The city shone with the glow of renewal and arrival.

  The triumph left us with a sense of collective pride. As the Coliseum was located in South Central, and as Mayor Bradley himself once walked a neighborhood beat, local residents took a stake in the Games. Our neighborhood hosted the Olympics and shined before the world. For just a moment, our community wasn’t on the outside, forgotten and left behind. Briefly, we stood at the center, and for once, for the right reasons—on the front page, but not because of drugs, riots, and murders. Triumph brought one large collective exhale.

  For Madee, and my family, the communal victory was personal. We had lived in South Central for forty years and had known Mayor Bradley for almost as long. When he said the Olympic spirit brought “people together, making them forget their prejudices as they celebrated human excellence,” we cheered, feeling a fresh sense of hope.

  My brother Gordon recalled the Olympics as one of the most amazing things he’d ever seen, with the city coming together as one, without factions. I remember South Central at the time as exuberant, with residents taking a renewed pride in place, in their yards and lawns. Gordon said that Los Angeles in August 1984 “was a place in which there were no strangers.”

  * * *

  Two miles south of the Coliseum, Madee replaced her coffee on the kitchen table and read the morning paper. She listened for signs of stirring. The younger boy, Damon, usually rose early, then woke his cousin to play. But she heard nothing. The house remained silent as her family slept.

  * * *

  Not far from her home a ’75 Chevy van rolls east on Slauson.

  The avenue is South Central’s major east–west artery. It is named after land developer J. S. Slauson, a nineteenth-century L.A. booster, who sold the region as a land of orange groves and haciendas, a place where anyone could start anew. In the decades following the completion of the transcontinental railroad in the 1860s, millions traveled west, transforming L.A. from sleepy pueblo to modern metropolis. By 1920 Los Angeles surpassed San Francisco as the state’s largest city. By midcentury, Slauson Avenue was a booming industrial center, the home of the Bethlehem Steel mill, where thousands were employed. Now, in 1984, a new global economics prevails. The plants have moved and the mill is closed. Postindustrial blight remains.

  The van is driven by a black female. Her friend rides shotgun. Three black men sit in the back. The van is industrial with no rear side windows. The men sit in heavy shadows.

  Just after dawn, the storefronts on Slauson remain gated. The van drives past auto body and muffler shops, wholesale carpeting, used furniture, barbecue joints, checks cashed, donuts, liquor stores, Episcopal and Baptist churches, old tires, vacant lots. The streets are ashen, dead to drea
ms.

  The rising sun spreads through the smog on the horizon. Discarded furniture and abandoned cars litter the street. Folks walk about like zombies. Crack cocaine has just begun its tour of ruin.

  The van continues east past barbershops, beauty salons, minimarts, a burger stand, a bar, a Methodist church, a chain-link fence, a shuttered store.

  When it reaches the intersection of Slauson and Western, the gas gauge is pegged at empty. The driver turns into the Shell station, gets out, and pumps two dollars’ worth.

  Inside the van there is no talk.

  The silence is broken as the driver returns, slams the door, and restarts the engine. She peers at the gas gauge. Two dollars barely budges the needle.

  Pulling into the light early morning traffic, the driver continues east on Slauson. Passing beneath the Harbor Freeway, the van falls into shadows, then returns to face the rising sun. It makes a right turn onto Broadway and heads south until it reaches West Fifty-Ninth Street, where it turns left, then slows to a crawl in front of No. 126. It rolls to a stop a couple of doors down the street, just west of Main.

  The sliding door on the van’s right side opens. The three black men begin to exit curbside. One is told to stay with the women. He returns to the rear of the van. The other two leave the vehicle and begin walking westbound. The motor is kept running, the sliding door remains open.

  The two men pass a blue bungalow on their left, No. 122. As they approach the next home, 126, they turn up the walkway and toward the low front porch. A small patch of lawn lies on either side of the path. The porch has two wide steps. It is set between brick columns and surrounded by plants. The porch is wet. Someone has recently watered. The front door is open, with only a screen door standing guard.

  The house is silent.

  As the two men approach, one pulls a small metal object from his waistband and holds it in his hand. The other clutches something wrapped within a light blue jacket.

  * * *

  From the kitchen in the rear of the house, Madee heard the front screen door open, then swing shut.

  She figured it must be me. Every Friday morning I came over for coffee.

  She glanced at the time. It was just before eight. I was running late.

  From within the sleeping house she heard footsteps approaching through the living room, then into the dining room, but from inside the kitchen she could not see their source.

  At any second she expected to hear me say, “Madee.”

  Hearing no greeting, she called out, “Kermit, is that you?”

  She received no response.

  Only continued footfalls.

  “Kermit?” she repeated.

  “Kermit?”

  3

  FROM JIM CROW TO MUDTOWN

  LOOK AT ME as a little boy, five years old, playing in the barn.

  Look at my family on their farm in southern Louisiana, working the fields till the fingers bleed.

  See my father sail for the South Seas to fight the Japanese.

  Listen to the South sing “Dixie” as the crosses burn and the strange fruit swings.

  And look at my mother as she holds my hand as we board the colored car of a westbound train, in search of the future.

  And every time I tell this tale, someone says to me, that’s my family you’re talking about, that’s my story: born of the South, flight from Jim Crow, California dreams, stark awakenings, struggle, injustice, violence, rage.

  This is our story.

  It’s not about saints’ lives, just ordinary folks striving for something better, and what they have been forced to endure.

  It’s about the decisions we make when shut in dark places.

  This is my story.

  * * *

  I am the oldest of Ebora Alexander’s eleven children, born in New Iberia, Louisiana, on January 4, 1941.

  Located on the banks of Bayou Teche, southwest of Baton Rouge, New Iberia sits in the heart of Cajun country. Established by the Spanish in 1779 as Nueva Iberia, the town soon became known for a mix of Indian, Spanish, French, and African cultures. Its history marked by Union occupation, Mississippi floods, yellow fever, and nearly a century of Jim Crow segregation, today New Iberia is famous for its swamps, hot sauce, and jungle gardens. Antebellum estates with sprawling lawns, live oaks, and Spanish moss highlight the region.

  Yearly, New Iberia hosts the World Championship Gumbo Cook-Off, the Cajun Hot Sauce Festival, and the Great Gator Race. In the Sugar Festival, representatives from all of Louisiana’s parishes compete for the title of “Sugar Queen.” Traditional dishes of New Iberia include jambalaya, corn maque choux, and sweet potato casserole with praline topping. The Tabasco sauce factory operates on nearby Avery Island. The town is home to the writer James Lee Burke’s fictional detective Dave Robicheaux.

  My first memories of the South involve the old farm. How my father tended to a pregnant mare, performed a C-section, delivered the colt, then stitched the mother back up with yarn, applying juice from chewing tobacco to help heal the wound. I also recall the slaughterhouses where cows and pigs were butchered, and how my relatives soaked their blistered hands in milk after picking peppers all day. Above all, I remember the fact that every year there were more and more babies. My father was one of sixteen children, each of whom in turn averaged another ten kids apiece. An Alexander family reunion was a town unto itself. I was also told tales of a legendary great-grandfather, a militant family guardian who was said to stalk his enemies deep into the Louisiana swamps.

  My grandfather, King Alexander, owned the farm and was a pastor for the AME, or African Methodist Episcopal Church. King possessed that most valued African trait—he had presence. One simply felt his authority. He didn’t need to say a word. And he was old-school, meaning Old Testament, sworn to take an eye for an eye, and a life for a life. Justice was simple, absolute, and inevitable. If someone did you wrong, you did them back, and the quicker the better. But if you had to wait, you did. There was no statute of limitations on vengeance. Sooner or later, the wrong would be righted. This code was rooted deep in our past, carried by ancestors from West Africa, from Haiti, through the Carolinas, passed from generation to generation, from King to my father, then down to me. In a culture of dueling and vengeance, the children were trained early in self-defense and in weapon use.

  There was no misunderstanding the message: fight and never quit. It was imbued in me. “You will have to fight forever,” my father said, “for the rest of your life.” And with this message came a fire, a built-in sense of anger and rage. I felt cursed with the genetic family temper, and burdened by the duty to keep it under control. “Behave or we’ll bury you,” went another family saying.

  My father, Kermit Sr., and my mother, Ebora, married in 1940. Kermit Sr. was a mechanic, a boxer, a horse trainer, and soon to be a serviceman. Ebora was fifteen and soon to be a mother. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Kermit Sr. enlisted in the armed forces and traveled to Camp Montford Point, in Jacksonville, North Carolina. There he would become one of the legendary Montford Point Marines, the first blacks to join the Marine Corps. As with the famous Buffalo Soldiers of the Army, or the Tuskegee Airmen, the Montford Point Marines earned the Congressional Gold Medal, theirs for valor in battling the Japanese in the South Pacific.

  My father joined the Marines for two reasons. The first was he wanted to fight. At the time, blacks joining the Army landed in support service roles, as janitors and cooks, in the Navy as stewards. And this didn’t change even following Pearl Harbor. During the attack, Dorie Miller, a black sailor, sheltered his wounded captain, manned a machine gun, and defended the USS West Virginia. Miller received the Medal of Honor. He was the first American hero of World War II. But blacks were still denied combat. My father wanted action and refused to be “treated like a slave.” His second reason for joining the military was that he had to leave town. He was wanted by the Klan.

  During the war the Montford Point Marines gained a reputation for ruthlessness. As w
hat were called tunnel rats, it was their job to clean out the underground mazes harboring Japanese soldiers who refused to surrender. On islands like Iwo Jima and Okinawa, defoliated graveyards with none left living aboveground, my father and his fellow Marines hunted the subterranean survivors. The few remaining Japanese, buried deep in the tunnels, finally raised their hands in forfeit when confronted by these dark-skinned Marines. Legend has it they thought them some kind of ghost or ghoul.

  After the war, Kermit Sr. returned to Louisiana, where he sought to buy some land, build a home, and run an auto shop. When the local real estate agent left him waiting all day long, then told him there was no land for sale, he knew he had to move on. Overseas he had risked his life for his country. He felt like a hero. Back home he felt like he didn’t exist. He was going to take control, and escape Jim Crow.

  For a black, in the segregated South, the most routine task was made a degrading challenge. The constant dishonor drove him mad. Where can I go to the bathroom, buy lunch, get a drink of water? Everything was restricted, off-limits, blocked. Colored this, white that, waiting rooms, swimming pools, lunch counters, park benches. And if a white woman walked by, boy you better get off the sidewalk and stare at the ground—or else.

  And after fighting for his country in its most brutal theater of war, in the epic battle against tyranny, his own hometown couldn’t grant him a timely meeting—made him sit for hours, just to tell him, “No, we don’t have any land for you.” Fight for freedom abroad to get denied at home. An ancient traveler through Africa once said he had met no people with less tolerance for injustice. Justice makes a man. He’d had it.

  Throughout the war black servicemen fought the double battle, “Double V” it was called, victory over the enemy abroad, victory over segregation at home. “Democracy at Home and Abroad” was the slogan. For the Montford Point Marines and other blacks in the military, the war provided an opportunity to demonstrate strength and patriotism. As one Marine put it, “sad you have to look forward to a war to prove your ability.” But at the end, the indignities continued. Montford Point was mocked as “Monkey Point,” and blacks returning in uniform were stopped in the South, charged with “impersonating a member of the U.S. military.”