Hold Up Watts

I've been thinking a lot about the Inner City lately. Particularly Watts and Compton, two areas in Los Angeles County that are very notorious for gangs and crime. I think about them because I have spent time in both. When I was in Watts I knew that it was one of the worst areas in the country for violent crime. I worked with a group that was putting on a one day sports camp for kids in the Nickerson Gardens housing project. I would later read that this project is the birthplace of the nortorious Bloods gang. The Crips were also born in Watts, which is an area in Southeast Los Angeles. It's described as "drive over country", because you drive over it on a freeway. Even my "street-smart" team members and I would avoid the area when returning to our house near downtown from working in Compton or Lynwood. It's a rough place to say the least. I talked to one resident of the Nickerson's describe how he had been shot at just a few nights before, and how he watched an LAPD squad car get fired upon as it drove though the neighborhood. The LAPD does not go to Watts, unless they absolutely have to. It is the closest thing to anarchy that I have personally witnessed. When the cops do venture there to answer a call, bad things happen. Just the other night a squad car was driving in Watts at 5 a.m...suddently a laser guided sight flashed though the car's interior and a bullet ripped though the hood of the car. The cop was unharmed but he was very lucky to be. Earlier this summer, not long after we vistied the Nickerson's, two L.A. cops sparked massive protests when they fired on a suspect and killed him, and his three year old daugher. In an environment that is no less tense than the one that led to the riots in 1992, one incident like that is enough for the entire city to be concerned.

This gang war-torn part of Southern California was in the news a lot this past week due to the excecution to alleged Crips co-founder Tookie Williams. He was convicted of very horrible crimes, crimes that even I think warrant the death penalty as a reprocussion (I only support the death penalty in the most extremely extreme cases)...however he maintains his innocence. Many people think that he is either innocent, or that at least he has found redemption. He has, from his cell at San Quentin, written several books designed to dissuade kids from joining gangs, he has been a vocal advocate against the gang violence he was once such an active player in. This man, even if he commited the crimes that he was convicted of, has done more for inner city kids in the past 20 years than the vast majority of people anywhere. Ironic isin't it. And honestly, in a case of minority inner city resident versus the justice system, I don't know who to believe because this past summer I heard a lot of things from the inner city minority point of view for the first time and that point of view radically altered my perception of a lot of things. Did Tookie deserve to die? I honestly don't know. I do know that the hundreds that die of gang violence every year shouldn't die. This shouldn't be happening. There is something at work there that is henious, and goes far beyond the simple explinations given in social and political circles when the topic of the inner city is on the table.

These kids in Watts, in Compton, anywhere in Inner City L.A...are kids...they are simply kids...that is all. Children. I watched them play that day in the Nickersons. They jumped around, played soccer, football, basketball (the teens and young adults could seriousl ball, unfortuntely they are only so many that can be good enough to escape the ghetto, and it is a ghetto, they're trapped), they joked around. One kid named James and his friend told me about their plan to take a road trip to Las Vegas when they were older. They said it with such hope, such expectation. However, that is about all the hope you'll find there. Most of them can't see past Watts, can't see past the bleak reality of daily gun fights, a constant stream of deaths of people that they know, constant fear...fear of the other gang, the other race, the police...all they know is the maze of drab apartment buildings beneath a steady stream of jumbo jets approching LAX full of people who have little knowledge of the brazen reality that swarms ten-thousand feet below them.

My friend Michael was shooting a basketball with a kid, about eight years of age, he asked him a normal question..."do you like it here?"

"No", he answered, "there are too many shootings here".

He is right, if an eight year old knows this, then there is something very wrong with a society that allows this to fester without lending a hand, anything, to this black hole that seems to absorb light, hope and innocence. It is not a hopeless situation, unless the status quo of sectarian society caring only about it's own class and social groups contenues to function as the norm. Until then...the people in Watts, both black and brown, will have to fend from themselves.

"You're good people," a visably nervious twenty-something mexican guy with knife scars on his face told me and three of the girls that I was working the sports camp with. "You shouldn't be here. Good people don't come to Watts."

"Somebody has to come here", we told him. We were there precisely because Watts needs good people...but more importiantly we reminded him that there were good people in Watts...not everyone is there to join gangs, deal drugs and shoot people. Some are just trying to survive. He cracked what vaguely resembed a smile. He was encouraged to an extent but said he could never be a good person in Watts. I understood where he was coming from. "Good" and "bad in the inner city are very different concepts than the good and bad that most of us are familar with. "Well you guys better be careful", he said, "they'll mess with you." He was probably right, but as nervious as that made me I kept up a good front. I had to. Fear like that is something that I just didn't know coming from a comfortable place like Central Texas.

We walked back to the park. I walked into the Nickerson Gym...a humble brick building at the corner of 114th and Compton. Without looking outside, if it wasn't for what I had heard (and seen) that day, it would have been easy to imagine being anywhere in the United States. It was a gym with a basketball court and kitchen. However, scanning the walls my eyes glanced over various photographs...one of which was a snapshot of the moment a truce was reached between the Crips and Bloods, the most notorious gang rivalry in America. That truce imploded this year. Watts is again at war. But for that moment there was hope. I went back outside...Michael and I decided to start a pick up soccer game with some of the kids. For the next hour or so, they could forget about shootings and gangs and poverty and the fathers that they never see, and concentrate on scoring goals. For that hour I also forgot about the fear manifest in my surroundings and found myself completely at peace in the middle of the Nickerson Garden's project in Watts. It was at that moment that I gained just a fraction of understanding of what this moment meant to the kids. The smile on my face, and the smiles on theirs as we played on that dusty field in an area that even cops are afraid to enter, was something that I did not expect. Those smiles, the innocence, the oasis of innocence in a place where innocence often dies a early death, struck me as something truly beautiful. A beauty so stark that it still makes me crack a tearful smile months later. It makes me wonder if evil exists simply to make good things that much more attractive and wonderful.