Beads of Hope : After the Riots, Unity Bracelets Symbolize Binding of Wounds

In the wake of the Los Angeles riots, Deborah Atwater was desperate for a sense of hope.

A few months before, she had finally moved away from South Los Angeles into a safer, middle-class neighborhood in Carson. Now the riots had come and the despair she had fled seemed to engulf every Los Angeles community.

She watched as the rebuilding effort began, but even that was depressing. They were talking about fixing buildings, not confronting how people got along with one another.

And then a thought hit her: She would build something. She bought beads and began linking them together: a yellow bead, a red one, black, brown, white. A symbol.

Because part of the human spirit was missing in action after the riots, Atwater created a 1990s-style MIA bracelet.

She calls it a “unity bracelet” and it sells for $10. She has made only a few dozen so far. It is part business, part spiritual--one woman’s attempt to make sense of the chaos.

You do not buy one without hearing the story of how the pieces fit together.

“Each bead is a different color for each nationality,” Atwater said. “Each one is a different shape, because people are different sizes. Each one is linked together with a pin so that they interlock, because the human race is linked together. I did that rather than stringing them together, where they’d just touch each other but not really be connected. Between each colored bead is a gold one and that stands for God.”

So far, Atwater’s prime saleswoman is her state assemblywoman, Marguerite Archie-Hudson (D-Los Angeles), who has known Atwater since she was Atwater’s counselor at Locke High School in Watts.

“I haven’t taken it off since I bought one,” Archie-Hudson said. “Everybody I’ve seen asks me about it, and when I tell them what it means, their eyes light up. It’s what everybody wants to express. It’s such a wonderful idea. It instantly communicates what we all have been talking about.”

“I want to focus on human repair,” Atwater said. “We have been damaged. We need something to galvanize us together.”

She spoke as she sat inside the living room of the Carson home she shares with her 8-year-old daughter. Her son, who turns 20 this month, is in jail awaiting trial for a drug-related murder.

Atwater said her son was involved in a shooting that grew out of his brief, desperate entanglement with the drug world. “I hope evidence will show his innocence,” she said. “The influences of the community overtook him.”

They were influences she had spent her life dodging. She had grown up in South Los Angeles and remained there as an adult, withstanding the noise of bullets and helicopters and breaking glass near her home on 102nd Street and Vermont Avenue.

What held her there, she said, was the hope of reclaiming a sense of neighborhood--rekindling an era when the folks on your block represented an extended family, when your neighbor would watch your child, or discipline him if he went astray.

Stories like Atwater’s are repeated often by mothers in crime-ridden neighborhoods, women who try to save their sons and are defeated so often that a somber acceptance sets in.

Atwater said her son went through brief, unsuccessful stints in the Job Corps and Navy, where she said he was plagued by the stigma of being from South Los Angeles. “They act like, you must be a gangbanger, because you have the wrong ZIP code,” she said. When he returned home, her son could not find a job. He had begun writing rap songs and hoped to begin recording when he began selling drugs, she said.

“I really tried,” she said. “You send him to private school, you try to keep the family intact. For it to boil down like this is a tragedy; like planting tomatoes and getting asparagus.”

Her son’s arrest last year was the last straw that led to her departure from South Los Angeles.

“It’s not that I was running,” said Atwater, who works out of her home as a party planner. “It’s that I couldn’t endure. I couldn’t hear another gunshot. I couldn’t take another helicopter flying over. The last three New Year’s Eves there was so much gunfire we stayed in a hotel. And now there was this empty feeling of knowing my son was in the hands of the system.”

It was from her new neighborhood in Carson that she ventured out on the evening of the verdicts in the Rodney G. King case to the First African Methodist Episcopal Church in Los Angeles, where thousands had come to protest peacefully.

It was from the church that she walked into the chaos of the burning and looting, into smoke so thick she could not see. She remembered being 12 years old and watching it happen in 1965 in Watts, a world that was so segregated you knew never to venture beyond the train tracks near Alameda Street. She remembered back to having seen a little boy break a drugstore window, triggering an onslaught of looters. Here it was, happening again.

She went home to Carson. A few days later she started making bracelets.

“The riot took us down to zero floor level,” she said. “It was more than just the burning of buildings. It was the burning of old concepts, old habits, the status quo. Now, along with repairing the city, we have to rebuild our human relations, or it’s going to fall through the cracks before we know it.”