What Goes Around…
It’s 1962, and 2:30 AM on a dark and deserted street in one of LA’s many suburbs.
Except it’s not quite desert. Parked on the side of the road is an older model car with a
black woman and a young girl standing beside it. I’m am on my way home from a late
date in my even older stickshift coupe – just the one front seat.
I pull over and a conversation begins. “Are you out of gas?” I ask.
“I don’t think so,” she answers. “I don’t want to be a bother. Maybe you could stop at
the next gas station and tell someone?”
“No, ma’am” I say, “I’m not leaving you and your daughter out here at three in the
morning. Where do you live? I’ll drive you home.”
The protests begin. She might have been the most polite woman I’d ever met.
“I can’t trouble you.”
“It’s no trouble.”
“I live too far away.“
“Where do you live?“
“Over near Atlantic.“
“That’s only a mile or two away. Hop in.”
We never exchanged names, but in a few minutes we were in a run-down neighborhood
with dirt front yards and sagging chain-link fences. Except for one house in the center of
the block with a white picket fence, a small green lawn, a well-tended flower bed, and a
trim pathway the woman and her daughter now walked up and into their home which, I’m
pretty sure, had a telephone.
…Comes Around
A few months later, I’m on the way home from night classes an hour away, and it’s
about 11 PM when my car breaks down in South Central LA – also called Watts – pretty
much an all-black area. I’m on one of the larger but now deserted city streets, standing
next to my car with my books and my thumb out. Nobody goes by and I start walking.
I’m at least 10 miles from home. A couple of cars go by but don’t stop. Then one car
does. I approach the passenger window and look in at a black man in his 50s who says
“Get in.”
I do, and thank him.
“You don’t wanna be out here this time of night. Where do you live?”
I tell him, and he says he’ll take me to the city limits. “I don’t want to be in your town
this time of night, either,” he says, and drives me five or 6 miles closer to home.
“Thanks for the ride. I really appreciate it. I can walk from here.”
He u-turned and drove back to his neighborhood. It only took me another hour or so to
walk home, and on that walk home, I thought, once again, about what’s wrong with this
world—and what’s right with it.3
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