And what could Darren do? He himself was teetering on the brink, ready to succumb to destructive urges, which would destroy the last vestige of shaky stability in his family. And that knowledge had guided him to the logical answer to the question. There was something he could do. Something he had to do.
Darren left his car a block and a half from La Brea and began walking east, his right hand curled around the rolled-up flyer. He had memorized the address, which would be just across La Brea and south a half a block or so. He knew so from having driven by a dozen times or more in the past week, hoping each time the courage to stop and go through with it would come to him. This time it had.
As he walked he was the subject of much interest from the residents of the neighborhood. He was an outsider; that was of no doubt. Half of those whose eyes were cast upon him looked out from under the wide brims of coal-black hats, their faces framed by long, regal beards. Children with curls dangling in front of their ears stared the most at the black man walking down their street, not because he was black, but because he was not like the other black men their parents had chased out of the neighborhood. He was dressed nice, not fancy, like Mr. Katz at the shoe store. This black man was clean, and he wasn’t pushing a shopping cart piled with bags and cans and blankets. He wasn’t dirty, and he didn’t have lots of little plastic bags in his hand. He looked almost normal, except that he was black.
Darren glanced left and right as he moved down the block. He saw some of the stares, and felt others. And he knew why he was suddenly the focus of attention. He also didn’t care. There were more important things to worry about, more pressing matters at hand. He had hate to deal with; this was just fear.
The evening rush hour was almost over, and Darren had little trouble crossing La Brea. He trotted through a break in traffic and turned right, his feet moving him toward the building frontage he had memorized from numerous no-stop passes in his car. Just inside the lobby, through twin glass doors that let the bright lights spill out onto the darkening street, Darren saw the signboard. He rubbed a nervous thumb on the roll of paper in his hand and uncurled it. Race and Hate: A Program on Understanding. The words on the sign and the flyer in his hand were the same, and the fact that he had it at all was another product of his daughter’s murder. If his son hadn’t started getting into trouble with the law Darren would never have had to come down to an attorney’s office two weeks before, and if that office hadn’t been just a half-mile from where he now stood, and if there hadn’t been a flyer stuck on his car windshield when he came out…
Coincidence or design, Darren didn’t care. It had happened, maybe for a purpose, maybe not, but he was here, standing outside the Hanna Schonman Jewish Community Center in the heart of the Fairfax District of Los Angeles holding on to a piece of paper that told of understanding, and to a thread of hope that it could all be true.
Darren Griggs hated himself for hating others, and he wanted it to stop. For his sake, and for his family’s.
With that determination he pushed the glass doors inward and followed the signs to the indicated room. The door was closed. He knew he was late, a product of his trepidation, but the cliché fit in this circumstance. Never just wasn’t an option. Darren took the knob in hand and opened the door, hoping, praying desperately that his mind and heart would follow.
He stepped into the Ben Kaplan Memorial Conference Room and eased the door shut behind him. It was a large, rectangular room with three sections of seats split by two aisles, the classic theater setup. Maybe three hundred seats, he guessed, with less than a third of them filled, but all of those were packed in the front five rows of cushioned seats. At the front of the room was a stage, where the attention of the assembled group was focused. Until, of course, they turned and saw who the latecomer was. Or, more correctly, what he wasn’t.
Darren saw all heads swing his way. He had expected it, in fact, just as the stares on his short walk to this place hadn’t surprised him. After all, as his father had told him when he was just a little black boy in a very white L.A., “Son, you is ten shades darker than dark. People will notice that. ‘Specially white folk.” And Darren was far darker than anyone in the room — except for the lady at the front.
“Sir, come on in.” Dr. Anne Preston smiled, knowing that her pearly whites would be seen from across the hall. It was her most striking feature, at least according to her boyfriend, and she hoped that it would serve as a quiet invitation to the man who had just entered to join the group. “We’re just getting to the good stuff.”
A few chuckles came from the crowd, and Darren forced a smile back to the speaker. Actually, he found, it wasn’t that hard to muster. Somewhat less than half of the eyes in the room followed him all the way to the seat he chose, in the row directly behind the main body of people. He avoided meeting their looks, instead focusing on the lady at the podium. Dr. Preston, he remembered from the flyer. A psychiatrist. A woman of color, standing before a sea of white. She would be his beacon in this room. His point of reference to block out the fear he felt from the stares.
Anne waited for the new arrival to be seated before moving on, putting the obvious questions as to why this man would put himself in this place at this time with these people. She figured that those musings would be answered when all was said and done.
“I want to talk a little about perception now,” Anne began. “How our perceptions, which are influenced by that old nature-nurture combination, affect everything we see, do, and most importantly, everything we feel.”
She pressed the projection button recessed in the lectern. The lights dimmed just a bit onstage as the slide projector hummed and painted the large white screen above and behind her with two images. One was of a black man, a close-up shot of an expressionless face and head. It was reminiscent of the famed Willie Horton mug shot, less the long hair. To the right of this was another picture, this one of a white man, dressed in blue jeans and a casual shirt, sitting peacefully on a park bench, smiling into the camera. The contrast was obvious. It also had a purpose.
“Jerome Wilkes was a thrice-convicted felon when he met Robert Foster one night two years ago, robbed him, and killed him. He shot him in the back of the head after making him get to his knees. We can only assume that Mr. Foster was begging for his life, but he had no way of knowing that the man who broke into his Atlanta home that night was on parole for another murder. Robbery, rape, murder.” Anne paused for effect. The grimaced faces were her cue to continue. “Jerome Wilkes did it all, and, unfortunately for Mr. Foster, he didn’t like leaving loose ends.”
Darren shifted his gaze between the faces on the screen, but found himself drawn to the man of his color. Why did he have to do that? he wondered. His actions were what white people saw when they looked at any black man. Killer. Rapist. Thief. Not all black people were like that, but the hate came anyway. Inside, Darren’s head was shaking with wonder.