KING CASE AFTERMATH: A CITY IN CRISIS : VIEWPOINT / JOCELYN Y. STEWART : ‘Distance has a way . . . of fostering comfort and ignorance.’ : South L.A. and the Valley: Worlds Apart

Chatsworth is about 40 miles from South Los Angeles.

But in the days following the riots, the drive from South Los Angeles where I was born and raised, to Chatsworth where I now work as a Times reporter, has become a surreal journey through worlds that have suddenly grown even further apart.

South Los Angeles, my home, is burning.

The service station where I buy my gas, the grocery store where my mother shops, the hardware store where my father buys paint when it’s time to change the color in the bathroom--all are gone. They are now only smoldering skeletons of once familiar places.

Charred buildings, broken glass and the stench of burning wood gives the neighborhood an eerie feeling like a set from some doomsday movie--almost too real to be real.

But it is.

Oddly enough, shuttling between Chatsworth and my home these last few days has made the devastation of South Los Angeles and its meaning even more painstakingly clear.

There is no smoke in Chatsworth or Woodland Hills or Reseda. These places look the way they did last week and the week before that.

Nothing here has changed.

While passing the manicured grounds of the Northridge Fashion Center, I found myself wondering if, in this cloud of calm, people here really know what has happened to South Los Angeles and to African-Americans in this country.

Of course, everyone has seen the images of the city burning, the looters, the shootings. But do they know what this means to people like my parents and my neighbors? People who worked hard for years to buy homes and raise families in a place that would offer greater opportunities than the places they left; places with names like Wisner, La., and Jackson, Miss., where opportunity and justice wore a “whites only” sign.

They came west to California hoping to find jobs, homes and a place where they could live with dignity.

I spent the second day of the riot covering events in the Valley. I was anxious to return home. I felt I should be there. But with the city under curfew and too exhausted to make the trek back to South Los Angeles after a 16-hour day, I spent the night in the Valley at a hotel.

Before returning home the next morning, I stopped at a grocery store in Northridge to pick up groceries for my parents. Every grocery store in my neighborhood is either burned down or closed; there is no place to buy food.

Like other stores in the Valley, this market modified its hours in anticipation of violence. As I waited outside with a group of shoppers, a middle-aged man approached and peered inside the store’s windows.

He was clearly perturbed that the store was not yet open. Maybe he had an important meeting and feared being late, or maybe he just had to have a croissant to go with his morning cup of coffee. He kept peering inside and pacing--as if simply making his presence known would send store workers scurrying to open the doors.

I thought about the people in South-Central, like my 80-year-old neighbor, Mrs. Foxworth, who likes bacon for breakfast and still walks to the market to buy it, only now there’s no market to buy it from. And even if the market was there, there’s no way for her to pay for it because the mail carriers stopped delivering mail to South Los Angeles so she won’t receive her Social Security check.

No grocery stores, no mail deliveries, no bus service, spotty phone service and for some who live in Compton, no power and electricity.

Suddenly, I was perturbed with this man. I wanted to tell him to be patient, that this is a small inconvenience and didn’t he know what was happening in other parts of the city?

I concluded that he didn’t. Distance has a way, sometimes, of fostering comfort and ignorance.

If he didn’t understand the impact of the physical damage, could he or others understand the deeper damage of the beating and the verdict?

The damage goes beyond the burned buildings and lost services. It cuts even deeper to the ability of African-Americans to believe that they can receive justice in this country; a belief African-Americans have held tightly to even in the dreariest of situations.

They have respected and revered this system even more than those who are intimately involved in it. When they found no justice in the places where they lived, they left and set out for new places, believing all the while that justice existed; they simply needed to find it.

But the verdict in the Rodney G. King case and the sentencing in the Latasha Harlins case told them something very different. It said succinctly and clearly: wherever you live, whoever you are--man, woman or child, defenseless or armed--you are in P.W. Botha’s South Africa, Bull Connor’s Mississippi, George Wallace’s Alabama and you will be treated accordingly.

Those who kill you and beat you out of fear or any other stated motives will be tried, they may even be convicted, but ultimately our system will in all probability exonerate them and then call it justice. If four black officers had beaten a white man in Chatsworth, would those officers have been tried in Compton or Watts by an all-black jury? Would those officers, after participating in a merciless beating captured on videotape that aired worldwide, now be sitting at home with their families and loved ones?

Until we can all face the awful truth in answering painful questions like these, we can build and rebuild, but the threat of violence will always be there.

For now, I will shop for my family and neighbors in the Valley until our stores are rebuilt, but I and many others understand that another type of building will need to occur in this city and this nation if real healing is to ever occur.