Scenes From the Battlefield

Billowing smoke from a dozen fires cast the intersection in the kind of light that illuminates battlefields, a strange, flat, half-light that tints the day in amber glow and sharpens the outlines of destruction.

Flames clawed skyward from what had been a market, windows popped in explosions of glass at a cleaners and the wall of a men’s store collapsed in a shower of fiery embers that sent firefighters scattering out of harm’s way.

It was a time of fire and thunder.

The undulating wail of a burglar alarm blended with the rising scream of sirens and the pounding beat of rap music from a passing car to enribbon the scene in the chaotic madness of an asylum.

A woman sobbed, a man cursed, kids looted, passersby took pictures.

Thus did morning come, with eerie surrealism, to South L.A.

I was at the corner of Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard and Coliseum Street, staring at the night’s work of rioters who responded to a bad verdict with convulsive rage.

It was one of many street corners still burning as dawn rose over the smoky residue of an area largely populated by blacks.

I had gone there to see for myself what had been wrought by the acquittal of four policemen accused of beating Rodney King. I never dreamed it would be like this.

“What’d you expect?” 29-year-old Terry Adams demanded amid the ruins of a community. “That wasn’t just Rodney King they were beating on the ground. It was every black person in America.”

Thursday. I had spent the day before downed by a bad back, the legacy of a wartime injury long ago.

That put me in front of a television set trying to fathom the logic of jurors who, seeing that George Holliday videotape a dozen times, could still say there was no excessive violence involved in the cop beating of a helpless civilian.

And it kept me there as the day lengthened and trouble deepened over the city from Pacoima to the Crenshaw District.

“It’s a hellish night in the City of Angels,” a television newscaster said, and he was right.

Gunfire pierced the sky, buildings burned, innocent people were beaten bloody and others died in pain; trees blazed like tiki torches at rituals of destruction.

It’s easy to blame and it’s easy to condemn, and I heard a lot of both during the time I wandered through the ashes of the next day’s dawn.

Blame the verdict, blame thugs, blame racism, blame Tom Bradley, blame Daryl Gates, blame the system, blame America, blame the whole damned white race.

“Our people are in pain,” Terry Adams said, watching flames still rising from a Thrifty across the street. “Why should we draw a line against violence? The judicial system doesn’t.”

“Who do you turn to when you’re angry?” 20-year-old Trynon Robinson asked. “There’s no one. We had to show our rage, so we showed it here. What else were we gonna do, take a bus to North Hollywood?”

I heard over and over again that it wasn’t just the Rodney King verdict that set the night on fire. The name of Latasha Harlins was mentioned often.

She was the 15-year-old black girl shot in the back by Korean grocer Soon Ja Du, who was fined $500 and put on probation by a white judge, Joyce Karlin. Anger over the mild verdict has never subsided.

“It proves my point again,” Terry Adams said, turning his face away from thick clouds of smoke that drifted across La Brea Avenue. “Justice wasn’t created for black people.”

On another street corner, Bronson Ogles, 21, said he kept seeing the King beating in his head, the police batons swinging a thousand times, like in a nightmare.

And at one point yesterday, he thought the next Rodney King might be him.

Ogles tells it this way: “I was just standing there watching what was going on and a policeman said I’d better move. I asked why and he said, ‘Because if you don’t, I’ll kick your ass.’ For what? For nothing. That’s what we’re up against, man.”

Nearby, looters raced in and out of Sid’s Liquors, its front door smashed open. Cops arrived and the looters fled. The cops left and the looters returned.

“We’ve lost our ability to control this city,” a police captain had said earlier. “Why risk your life?”

A looter was delighted. “You take what you get when you can get it,” he said.

Luther Merriweather, 40, shook his head. “I thought I’d never see this again,” he said. “It’s like the Watts riots 27 years ago.” Will he move away? “Naw. Life goes on.”

A new burst of sirens sounded in the distance. A dozen motorcycle cops rode in a column up Crenshaw, sitting stiffly upright. A group of black people stopped and stared.

One of them asked, “Will it ever stop?” There was deep sadness in his voice. No one answered.