Los Angeles prides itself on being a city of diversity, a city where everyone, regardless of race, gender, sexuality, or creed, is not only tolerated, but welcomed. There is a sense of being just far enough to the West that the sins of the East, with its smallpox carrying settlers and its slave-owning founding fathers, haven’t stained us in quite in the same way, and in our mythology we paint ourselves as the true land of the free. We hold Women’s Marches, ban plastic bags, and refuse to cooperate with ICE raids and demands to close sanctuary cities. We insist that this is who we are, who we have always been.
And yet, the truth of Los Angeles’ history, like most of America’s, lies in violence. In the indigenous blood spilled by Mexican settlers, the Mexican blood spilled by white Americans expanding west. It lies in the often overlooked stories of Japanese Americans, forced from their homes and into internment camps during World War II, of Black families, pushed into new kinds of segregation by redlining and racism and police brutality. Today, it lies in the homelessness crisis, in the tent cities that border our freeways, pepper our sidewalks. It lies in Rodney King, Marquette Fry, and LAPD’s violent responses to this summer’s Black Lives Matter protests. We might try to hide them, might even be able to convince ourselves that they aren’t really there, but the reality is Los Angeles has sins of its own, and it’s long past time we go to confession.
Nina Revoyr, in her novel Southland, is ready to take us to church.
Southland tells the intertwining, multigenerational story of two Black and Japanese American families. It’s a story that sprawls over half a century, from the 1930’s to the 1990’s, uncovering hidden truths of what it meant to be an “other” in Los Angeles during those decades. It’s a difficult read, not because of the way it’s written – Revoyr’s prose is straightforward and easily digested – but because as each new portion of the story unfolds a new wave a grief emerges with it, drenching the reader in unease. At first, this unease seems rooted in the violence, the loss, on the pages, in the images of four innocent boys shivering to death in a locked freezer, of a drunk doctor murdering an interned pregnant woman and her unborn child in a botched C-Section. But, as the story continues, as the atrocities begin to pile up, it becomes clear that true power of Southland lies in its place.
From her first mentions of the forced Japanese internment, Revoyr makes it clear this wasn’t just happening somewhere, it was happening here. “During the last week of April, 1942, the Japanese of Los Angeles awoke to find that evacuation orders had sprouted overnight, from trees and poles all over the city. They had a week, the orders said, to prepare for their departure; they were being moved inland, away from the coast. All over L.A. – all over the coast – Issei and Nissei rushed frantically around their homes and neighborhoods.”
That these were their homes, their neighborhoods, is abundantly clear, and the proof of that remains today on the streets of Angeles Mesa, where blocks of houses still have perfectly trimmed bonsai trees in their yards, Japanese style tiling on their roofs. Standing in that neighborhood today, it is exactly as Revoyr describes it – “Many of the houses also had old Japanese-style doors, black strips of wood criss-crossing the white body of the door, like crust laid over a pie. A few places had window shutters modeled after screens in Japan, and stone lions placed on either side of the entrance. The roofs were black and tiled, some multi-layered and pagoda-style.”
“Many of the houses also had old Japanese-style doors, black strips of wood criss-crossing the white body of the door, like crust laid over a pie. A few places had window shutters modeled after screens in Japan, and stone lions placed on either side of the entrance. The roofs were black and tiled, some multi-layered and pagoda-style.”
The homes are still beautiful, unique, but there is a certain solemnity when you stand on the sidewalk and take them in. Here, people were pulled from their homes, families were pulled apart. Bricks with “Go Back Japs” written on them were flung through these windows, and immigrant families’ belongings were piled on these lawns. Yet it doesn’t feel like a place of erasure, but rather one of defiance, resilience. Despite it all, the houses still stand, the trees still grow, refusing to disappear and demanding that the things they bore witness to be remembered. They are a rebellion against the American idea of assimilation, an assertion that Japanese culture matters just as much as anything white America might bring to the table.
Forced from the homes they created, Japanese Americans took a route strangely common to Los Angeles literature, a path leading them from the city to the desert. In Los Angeles fiction, from Didion to Kerouac, the desert is almost always present, often lurking somewhere in the background and symbolizing some strange kind of freedom. Its vast openness exists in opposition to the sprawling, compact city, and time and time again cowboys ride their horses into its setting sun, heroines race their cars through its endless sand. And while the freedom that awaits is often lonely, melancholy, it is a freedom nonetheless.
Southland tells a different story.
For Frank Sakai, Kenji Hirano, and the thousands they represent, the desert is a prison, and, for some, even a final destination. It’s a place to escape from, not to, and its setting sun holds no romance, just the bitter cold of night.
“They were taken to Manzanar in the height of summer, on a day so choked with dust that when the guard pointed toward what he said were their quarters, Frank thought he was directing them into the desert.”
For Frank, the vastness of the desert is a threat, not a promise. This is no pilgrimage to find himself among the sand dunes, no pitstop on the road to Vegas where the drugs can take hold, and there will be no riding off into the sunset. Instead, Frank and his family face hardship and horror, wind that “pressed the dust into every crack of skin, every fold of his clothing” during the summer, then in winter “blew snow and pieces of ice against the side of the barracks.” Here, before his release, his escape made possible only by enlisting in the U.S. Army, Frank loses his father and sister to this desert, losses that represent the almost 1,900 real deaths caused by internment. And while Manzanar may not have existed within the limits of Los Angeles County, the romantic L.A. mythology of the desert, of its role as a place of escape and excitement, ties us to it, and holds us responsible.
Still though, other places have suburbs, other places have deserts, and while Revoyr makes it clear that Angeles Mesa and Manzanar belong to us, I can hear the naysayers attempts to absolve Los Angeles of its blame – sure, those Japanese were from L.A., but technically Manzanar was in Inoyo County, so it’s not really our fault, and the federal government was the one that gave the order after all. I’m sure Revoyr imagined these objections too, and so she gives us an image so intensely Angeleno, so irrevocably weaved into our city’s mythology, that we cannot accept it as anything but our own – the ocean.
It’s the quintessential image of Los Angeles, so much a part of what we believe ourselves to be that televised Lakers games open with shots of Santa Monica even though the Staples Center is fifteen miles inland. And while other places may have beaches, they will never have our beaches, our vast expanses of soft white sand, our always tumbling waves and foaming shorelines. When Frank Sakai encounters the ocean in the summer of 1939, it is with the wide-eyed wonder that this mythology invokes. “They smelled the ocean before they saw it,” Revoyr writes, “Frank had only been there once, as a tiny child, and now, when it finally came into view, he couldn’t believe its blue-green color, its majestic rolling voice, the way it flowed and folded endlessly into the distance.” It’s a sight, a feeling, that every Angeleno knows well, a sense of greatness and insignificance all at once, of wonder and reverence. As Frank and his friends, two Black boys named Victor and Barry, jump out of their car and head towards the sand the scene is joyful, idyllic. And then the illusion is abruptly shattered.
“It was a dark brown board, attached to a pole that was sunken into the edge of the sand, and it had two arrows painted on it, one pointing right, the other left. Above the left were painted the words ‘Whites only.’ Above the right were the words, ‘Colored only.’ They all stared at it, unbelievingly.”
My immediate reaction was also disbelief. I know, of course, about America’s history of segregation, its misguided attempts of separate but equal, but for some reason I never expected it to extend to California’s shoreline. In my home state of Florida our history books talk about pools being drained because a Black person went swimming and “contaminated” the water, of the pillowy white sand of the Gulf side beaches being reserved for “Whites Only,” but, like Frank, I bought into the myth of the Los Angeles coast, and assumed that those hateful divides could never stretch to our waters.
And therein lies the true power of Southland. Were it set in some southern state, some unknown county where Confederate flags still fly today, we could shake our heads and condemn the past but still say I guess that’s just the South for you and move on without a second thought. But it’s set in Los Angeles, in California, on its beaches and in its deserts, surrounded by its people, and therefore demands that the City of Angels address its demons. We are closer now, certainly, to the city we want to be, a city where cultures combine rather than clash, where the beaches and hills and desert mountains belong to everyone, but we aren’t there yet. And unless we face where we’ve come from, unless we are willing to reckon with Nina Revoyr’s Los Angeles and acknowledge our shortcomings alongside our successes, we never will be.
Rachel is a graduate student at the University of Southern California, where she studies Literary Editing and Publishing. A Bookpackers intern, she is passionate about using literature to uncover deeper understandings of the people and places around her. Find her online at: @rachelmcope