A Song Flung Up to Heaven - Maya Angelou [17]
Curiosity had often lured me to the edge of ruin. For years, I had known that there is nothing idle about curiosity, despite the fact that the two words are often used in tandem. Curiosity fidgets, is hard to satisfy, looks for answers even before forming questions. Curiosity wants to behold, to comprehend, maybe even to become.
Two days after my tentative foray into the war zone, I had to go again, but this time I wouldn’t allow fear any control over me. This time I would not run.
The combustion had spread, so my previous parking space was now only a block from the riot. I parked there anyway and walked directly into the din.
Burglar alarms continued to ring in the stores that had no front doors or windows. Armed civilians stood in front of ravaged businesses, guarding against further looting. They were heckled.
“Hey brother, you guarding Charlie’s thing. You must be a fool.”
“I sure wouldn’t risk my life for somebody else’s stuff. If they care that much for it, they ought to come down here and look after it themselves.”
“Ain’t that much money in the world make me lose my life...”
The National Guard was heckled, too, but not as pointedly.
“Hey, man, you drew some lame duty.”
“Don’t you feel like a fool standing in front of a supermarket?”
I heard this in front of a pawnshop: “Hey, man, don’t you feel stupid keeping people from stealing something that was already stole in the first place?”
The soldiers worked at keeping straight faces.
The devastation was so much broader. On the second day of the riot, and my first day visiting Watts, there was a corridor of burned-out buildings and cars, but on the fourth day, the corridor had widened substantially.
That night I sat down at my kitchen table and wrote on a yellow pad my description of the events I had seen in Watts and the uprising as it was reported on television.
Our
YOUR FRIEND CHARLIE pawnshop
was a glorious blaze
I heard the flames lick
then eat the trays
of zircons
mounted in red-gold alloys
Easter clothes and stolen furs
burned in the attic
radios and TVs
crackled with static
plugged in
only to a racial outlet
Hospitality, southern-style
cornpone grits and you-all smile
whole blocks novae
brand-new stars
policemen caught in their
brand-new cars
Chugga chugga chigga
git me one nigga
lootin’ n burnin’
he won’t git far
Lighting: a hundred Watts
Detroit, Newark and New York
Screeching nerves, exploding minds
lives tied to
a policeman’s whistle
a welfare worker’s doorbell
finger
Spirit walked with me on my second visit to the exploding section of Watts. I became invisible in the black community. I had to stop and stand still when I realized that no one seemed to see me. When I had visited Watts on the first day of my new job, no one spoke to me or commented on my presence, but I was seen. This time I could have been in a white neighborhood. When a black person appears in a white part of town, there is a moment of alarm, but if the black doesn’t appear threatening, he is erased from the white mind immediately.
In the black community, a black person is always given her humanity.
On this visit to Watts, the responses were different. Neither the looters, the police, the spectators nor the National Guard took notice of me. A group of young men was bouncing a car filled with white passengers whose faces looked like Halloween masks through the car windows. Terror bulged from their eyes, and if the windows had been open, I would have heard the screams pouring out of their wide, gaping mouths.
A phalanx of police slipped by me and were upon the rioters quickly and quietly. The officers began handcuffing the offenders, and I turned my attention to the now