Book Report: Southland

26. Nina Revoyr, Southland (12/20/23) (2003)

I've had this book for a while. The author was, I believe, a faculty member at Antioch University when I was working on my MFA, but I never crossed paths with her, being in the nonfiction strand. This book is also, in part, about Los Angeles in World War II—and that feeds into my own stuttering-along project about a woman in LA during, yes, WWII. 

And in that regard, I found this book valuable as a research volume. 

The bulk of the book, though, has little to do with WWII specifically, but takes place in 1994 and then, in alternating chapters, leaps forward from the 1930s as the stories of various characters are related.

By and large, the characters are Japanese American—the protagonist is a young Sansei (or posibly Yonsei) woman, a lawyer named Jackie Ishida—and African American—as Jackie enlists the help of a man in the Crenshaw District, James (Jimmy) Lanier, who as a boy knew her grandfather, who once owned a store in the neighborhood. As the story begins, she has just discovered a shoebox full of money in her recently deceased grandfather's things, along with a note saying he wanted his store to go to one Curtis Mayfield. 

It turns out Curtis died in 1965—horribly, in the freezer of Jackie's grandfather's store, during the Watts Riots. How did Curtis and three other young Black boys meet their end there? That's what Jackie and Lanier try to find out.

And as they do they—and we—learn about racial relations in central LA, both age-old antagonisms and long friendships, and the shifting fates of various LA neighborhoods over the decades. The story is built on a mystery—who shut those boys in that freezer?—but it's also about people and connections and a desire to get along. And when we can't get along, a desire to understand why not.

Having grown up in LA (well, Santa Monica), I enjoyed all the geographic details. And was struck by the fact that I have absolutely no recollection of the Watts Riots. I would have been ten; we would have been newly returned from six months in Japan. I expect my parents watched the news coverage on TV—since we were far enough away that we would not have experienced the smoke, helicopters, sirens, etc. first-hand. But it feels strange that I have no memory of that awful time.

There are so many little cities in that huge metropolis. Distinct neighborhoods. When the Japanese were removed from the coast in 1942 to concentration camps, the downtown area known as Japan Town was settled by Blacks, becoming known as Bronzeville. After the war, the Japanese returned, and it reconfigured identity again. A similar sort of transformation occurred in the Crenshaw District, in South LA, which over time shifted from mainly Japanese to African American. 

Revoyr does well to focus on that one neighborhood, and the one set of racial relations—though white racism, particularly on the part of the police, is always an overlay. She also brings in plenty of human emotion, though: this isn't a sociological tract, by any means. It's a narrative. It's a mystery. Mostly, it's a story of people learning to know and care for and about one another. In that regard, I thought it was quite successful.