Southland

An unusually hot Santa Ana blows through town, causing everyone to feel lethargic. Curtis and his friends refuse to sit on the bus for hours just to go to a beach where they’re not welcome, and they can’t swim at the pool currently (Black people only get one day a month to swim). When Kenji hears Curtis complaining to Frank, he makes a slip-n-slide device, and the kids all have the time of their lives. However, future events trump this happy memory: “The next time Curtis saw hoses was on the evening news, from Birmingham, Alabama” (182). The menacing police officers on the television with fire hoses scare Curtis and remind him of the intimidating cops he knows—even Thomas, despite being Black, scares Curtis.

The national events put him in a foul mood, even though Angela is trying to hit on him. She notices how kind he is with Cory and Jimmy and notes his concentration when he runs track. She begins bullying him playfully at try-outs until he finally kisses her. They begin dating, and Angela feels lucky to have entrance into Curtis’s world: “There was no one else like him, the mischievous, beautiful, always-tender man of a boy. And he was hers, he was hers, he was hers” (185).

Jackie visits her future employer downtown after leaving Angela Broadnax’s place. She then walks around Little Tokyo and finds a bookstore. There, she finds a Japanese newspaper and gets Akira Matsumoto’s information. She sets off, eager to tell Lanier, but then has a memory of attending a festival in Little Tokyo when she was younger and stands on the street reminiscing. She remembers how much everyone loved her grandfather at the festival: “Everyone seems to look at him, everyone—and as his smile got wider, his stance more erect, Jackie felt a simple, overwhelming pride that she had never felt for her parents” (189).

She also remembers her family’s history. Frank’s father, the first Sakai in America, stayed in a boarding house in Little Tokyo on 1st Street. Her father’s family owned two boarding houses on the same street, as they’d been in America longer. This family, the Ishidas, made their wealth via a landscape business and looked down on the Sakais, who always seemed to struggle.

Jackie asks Rebecca if she’s willing to go out for drinks, and she waits for Rebecca to dress. Although Rebecca, beautiful and flirtatious, attracts both men and women, Jackie is more attracted to non-Asian Americans. Jackie talks about what’s going on with her family and Lanier as the two drive to the bar, and they both talk about their future jobs. At the bar, Rebecca even jokes that Jackie can give Lanier to her. Then the conversation turns to a group of undocumented Thai women whom the government has scheduled for deportation. Someone trafficked the women into the country and forced them to be sweatshop workers. They have no prospects if they go back home, so Rebecca’s future company is trying to see how to help them and who to sue to keep them in the States where their prospects are better. Jackie realizes that she has no idea of the issue’s full extent. When she asks if Laura’s boss, Manny Jimenez, is doing anything, Rebecca reveals that he’s been silent. Manny, a city council member, usually sticks up for migrants, so his silence shocks Jackie. She also wonders why Laura hasn’t said anything about the issue: “She wondered why Laura hadn’t talked about this, not remembering her own continents of silence” (196).

As Jackie and Rebecca drink, Rebecca teases Jackie for being on her side—Rebecca works with non-profits while Jackie works in corporate law. Later, Jackie again wonders at her and Laura’s relationship and how they keep things from one another. More importantly, she wonders at how nice it feels when Rebecca touches her briefly in the bar.

Jackie and her Brownie troop are selling Girl Scout Cookies, and Frank and Lois are watching her because her mother and father are busy with work. When Jackie asks a woman if she’d like to buy a box of cookies, the woman rudely tells her no, but when two white Girl Scouts ask, she stops and buys cookies from them: “Frank and Lois were stunned. Jackie looked puzzled for a moment, not knowing how she’d been insulted, and then ran back toward the store, unconcerned” (201). Frank follows the lady and demands that she buy a box of cookies from Jackie. He stands in front of her car, and then when she refuses and tries to make as if she will run him over, he keys her car. She finally goes back over and buys cookies from Jackie, cursing in the process. Frank tells her not to cuss in front of his granddaughter.

Jackie returns to her Aunt Lois’s apartment, and the two make small talk about a house she and Ted have put an offer on. Finally, the conversation steers to the shoebox on the table. Jackie begins going through it to find clues. She feels that her search for both Curtis and Frank began in the box and that it will end with the contents of the box as well. She finds old war photos, including some of Frank’s now-deceased best friends who perished in battle. There’s also a photo of Frank that she remembers from when she was young. She asked Frank about the photo before, but he only responded, “Because it didn’t make any difference” (207), a reference to his war experience. Hearing the horrible things that Frank’s dead friends’ families had to endure—despite their kin dying for the country—helps Jackie to understand what Frank meant.

Jackie then finds a note from a child. The child is Curtis, and he’s thanking Frank for crayons and a coloring book. The intimate message shocks Jackie and Lois, especially as they didn’t think that Frank knew Curtis until much later when he began working in the store. Jackie next finds a Holiday Bowl team portrait. Jackie decides to ask Lanier if he knows the people in the photo to see if they might have any more leads. For the first time in a long time, with the photos from the boxes, Jackie felt “happier than she’d been in forever” (209).