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They’re Going Crazy Out There 2002 It hardly seems possible now, nearly ten years later, that at the moment Los Angeles was setting fire to itself with the tinder of its driest and least-­ fed souls, I was getting a facial. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and I was reclined in a chair in an Inglewood salon, my face hot and moist and not feeling very much better than it did when I walked in roughly an hour before; but that’s the beauty business, which dictates that you’ll look worse before you look transformed. As I finished up, my face glowing an unnatural red, one of the salon owners came into the room and announced a little breathlessly that she’d just heard the verdicts in the Rodney King beating case, and they were all not guilty. We were all immediately incensed—me and the owners, Belinda and Regina—though not shocked. This sort of thing happens routinely and historically enough in black communities so that people are never surprised. When it happens you renew the outrage that is about the only thing black people have passed intact from one generation to the next, outrage that is generally dormant and subcutaneous until it is activated by something like the Rodney King verdicts. The outrage got me out of that chair and moving faster than I otherwise would have—the whole point of a facial, after all, is to relax in the aftermath—my face still flushed and raw, though now instead of annoying it felt appropriate. Belinda and Regina empathized with Rodney King’s misfortune and the whole miscarriage of justice; they shook their perfect bobs and clucked their tongues sharply. They had more customers to tend to, but they wished me well. I went home because I didn’t know where else to go, yet. During the short drive I listened to talk radio out of habit and heard, to my surprise, growing pleas for calm. That could only mean that people were getting out of hand somewhere, and it was catching and irrepressible. I felt suddenly energized and maniacally happy at the idea of spontaneity, any spontaneity, overtaking They’re Going Crazy Out There 85 a city like Los Angeles, which in my thirty years here had proven damn near impossible. It’s like trying to build muscle on a long, tall frame that refuses to move quickly; the most intense exercises administered to that many square inches just don’t take. Something was taking now, and though I figured it wasn’t good I couldn’t help but marvel anyway. When I got home the phone rang almost as soon as I walked in the door. It was a teacher friend, Ottis, who I had last seen earlier in the afternoon, not long before I went off for a facial. Ottis was a minister and a youngish veteran of the ’60s civil rights movement; he had a passion for history, which is the only reason he taught a few times a week, in the adult school. He didn’t need the money. He was a staunch social progressive who lectured his class constantly about the evils and futile logic of conservatism. “Girl, can you believe this?” he cried. He was clearly in his element, as energized as me. “They’re going crazy out there!” He said he was going over to a rally he’d heard about happening at First a.m.e. Church, near Western Avenue and Adams Boulevard at the northeast border of South Central. I didn’t exactly like the idea of going to a church, which I knew would preach pacifism and healing—a word I would grow to hate—more than address specifics of the verdicts and how they might actually be wrong. The problem I had with religion generally is that it accepted everything and never condemned anything as wrong, or it condemned too many things as wrong, and neither view was useful in the modern world as far as I was concerned. But I had to go somewhere, and Ottis was all charged up, and though he was a minister he would hardly stand for platitudes from Rev. Chip Murray, or anybody else. He picked me up and we drove in the bright late-­ afternoon sun south toward First a.m.e. Going along Crenshaw Boulevard I first noticed a change in the weather; the sun was the same but an unease was rising...

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