South Central Noir

To help with my chores, I’d been given a bike, with Dunbar Flyer painted on the frame. My Cadillac. Uncle Balthazar fount me a place downtown, walled in with some Okie tents and run-down shacks for families on the dole. My neighbors was poor and grief-worn. From sunrise to long after sunset, when they wasn’t walkin’ around looking pitiful and stunned, they filled the air with curious sounds and voices; singing and playing mandolins, guitars, fiddles, and accordions, all mixed in.

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The Dunbar paid for Rosalinda and Delroy Teal — the parents of the murdered girl — and all seven of they surviving children to come to LA as guests of the hotel and the legal fund of the NAACP. Saturday, after the murder, the Central Avenue Colored Women’s Brigade held a rally and a march from the steps of the Dunbar down Central to the river. Where Magnolia Teal was fount.

Fount by me, folks was saying.

’Bout five hundred protesters showed up for the march. The speechifying was led by Mrs. Charlotta Bass, editor of the colored paper, the California Eagle. That tiny lady was as loud and convincing as a Holiness preacher. The real target of the murders, she said, was Negro life and culture itself.

“I want to address the Negro women, here and across our great city,” she said. “Ladies, it is up to us to do something about the violence being done to our bodies, our hopes, our families, and especially our children. Many are the stories of heartrending courage that Negro women of the slave period have handed down to us. They endured as our sisters, our daughters, our mothers, and the mothers of a hundred rebellions — all of which our standard history texts have conveniently forgotten. Well, we have not forgotten. And we will not fail to root out this cancer festering in our midst.”

The crowd got quiet when Mrs. Bass stepped aside and introduced the parents of the murdered girl.

The Teals put me in the mind of my own ma and pa. Unschooled, dirt-poor laborers. They words was sorrowful and heartbreaking. They sobbed the whole time they was talking. So did they children. All the speakers expressed outrage at the murder of one more colored girl — four since June.

Cops, white and colored, was out in force. Marchers called them buzzards. Eagle reporters passed out posters with pictures of the girls — Etna Pettipeace, Marietta James, Paulina Crabtree, and Magnolia — all who, Mrs. Bass said, was defiled and left like garbage on the street.

Uncle Balthazar made me meet the Teals. It all but wrecked me. They was kissing and hugging and thanking me for finding Magnolia, when all I did was trip on her. Their mistake kept me embarrassed the whole time I was meeting them. Uncle Balthazar seen I was too emotional to hang with the Teals. Told me I could take off.

On the way downtown, I fixed posters on every post and tree I passed. Following the rally, all the colored hotels — the Dunbar, the Monarch, the Clark, etcetera — pledged escort services 24/7 for any colored womens and children requesting them. I volunteered.

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My job as factotum gave me the perfect perch to learn my new hometown. My duties took me into every corner of the Dunbar and acrost the far-flung districts of the city. Uncle Balthazar told me places a Negro could go, and which ones they couldn’t. My uniform was my ticket in, he said. White folks welcome coloreds long as they think theys working for them. My coworkers and several of the old customers took pride in schooling me.

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Sister Chimes was my standout teacher even in that bunch. One of her most thought-stirring ideas was the “golden coffin.” She explained it one day when we was delivering gumbo and sweet potato pies to some rich white folks in the Hollywood Hills. They was hosting a fundraiser for LA’s mayor, Fineas A. Stankey, who lived in a segregated neighborhood just above the Hollywoodland sign on Mount Lee. Mayor Stankey was a Canadian boy. Had a fondness for hamhocks and greens, but not for the peoples that cooked ’em.

The delivery shoulda been done by bellhops or waitstaff, but Miss Chimes, boss of housekeeping, insisted on delivering it. We met at the Dunbar garage off 39th, and picked out the longest limo in the fleet to tote the grub. She wanted to show them crackers that Black folk could arrive in a limo too, if they felt like it.

We delivered the order and Miss Chimes fount a wide-open space overlooking the city. Dusk was coming. We parked, got out, walked a minute, under the trees. Directly, Miss Chimes pulled out a cigarette. “Gotta match?” she said. She smoked it down to a twinkle. Mashed it out and said, “Let’s ride.”