COLUMN ONE : Coming Together in Anger and Charity : Childhood ideals seem like myths when a reporter revisits a South L.A. neighborhood. Residents now speak of racism and injustice.

On the morning after the first night, the smoke was still thick and oppressive. Stretched out before me as I drove through South Los Angeles were dozens of charred stores, many of them still smoldering, each a monument to rage and despair.

Streets that had once looked distinctive, now looked so similar--a blur of blackened debris and shattered glass. But as I traveled along Slauson Avenue and turned onto Vermont, I realized that, despite the devastation, this particular neighborhood had a familiar feel.

For a month last year, this was my home. I had lived with a family in the 900 block of 53rd Street, documenting the day-to-day goings-on and relationships within a neighborhood undergoing an ethnic transition from African-American to Latino.

Back then, I thought I’d be writing about people joining a movement of blacks who had left South Los Angeles for faraway suburbs and Southern hometowns. But instead I found my notebooks welling with tales of men and women who planned to stay in the community where they had raised their children, the place they had spent large parts of a lifetime.

They were men and women from Mississippi and Louisiana, Florida and Georgia, who lived through segregation and maintained their dignity. They were people who held on to hope even after they found that Jim Crow lived in Los Angeles too.

There were bursts of anger in some of our conversations, aimed at rude store owners, brazen criminals and unfamiliar traditions carried into the community by different peoples.

But when I returned to talk to some of those with whom I had spent so many days, I heard about feelings that had gone unspoken before. We spoke of injustice and poverty and racism. And we spoke of their surprise that things had gotten so bad and had been simmering for so long that it could explode into the worst urban unrest since the Civil War.

“The tensions were obviously there,” said Beverly Blake, a community activist who moved back to her old neighborhood four years ago. “All you had to do was look at the Latasha Harlins case, the amount of violence in our community. The picketing that had gone on around the Harlins case, the outrage over the King incident was an indication of the emotional pitch of the community. But I didn’t know it was to that degree.”

When I went back to visit, days after the unrest, I walked the blocks and noticed fresh spray paint near the old graffiti. “F--- LAPD,” the words read. “F--- The Police.”

I went by the Community Presbyterian Church, the big red building on the corner of 53rd Street and Vermont Avenue. It had become home to the African American Community Unity Center in the months since I’d moved away. In the wake of the uprising it had turned into a way station for those in need of clothing and food, its red brick walls blackened by the fire that destroyed the business next door.

Blake, who once worked at the center and grew up in the shadow of its headquarters, remembered the night the community came together, in all its colors, to save the building.

It was the first night of the unrest, April 29. A man living behind the church used a hose to wet down the roof. “He was fussing about his water bill,” Blake remembered, smiling. “But he stayed on the spot, putting out the fire.”

Mr. Drake from across the street went and got his pickax, climbed on top of the church, and punched a hole in the roof so the insulation inside could be drenched to guard against any stray embers.

“Neighbors started bringing their hoses,” Blake recalled. “They formed a fire brigade. People who hadn’t been to block club meetings in months came out and said, ‘Why aren’t we doing something?’ I saw people of all races, all colors motivated to move on their sense of community.”

“There were no big I’s and little you’s--people worked together,” Blake said. “At that moment, you would not have known we hadn’t been working together all along.”

The center survived, but Terry’s Interiors located next door perished in the flames. Terry Steele had been there himself to save his business back in 1965. He called the people running through the streets “brother,” and asked them to spare his store. They did.

But this time, Steele suffered an asthma attack and had to be taken to the hospital. The verdicts in the Rodney King case had just been read as he and his wife, Zenora, rushed to Cedars-Sinai. On a television in the waiting room, she watched the fires and looting that would later claim their family business.

They lost nearly half a million dollars worth of merchandise, not to mention a lifetime of love and labor. But on a recent night, they realized that human kindness can outshine fires born of anger.

The couple came home three weeks ago to find a note on their gate, asking them to call the police station. By a fluke--or perhaps a blessing--an officer had encountered a looter during the riots who was carrying a Bible with the Steeles’ names penned inside. The grandson of a minister, Officer Gilbert Escontrias knew the importance of the book. And this one, with its worn cover, looked as though it had been well used--”a working Bible,” in the words of Escontrias.

Using driving records, the officer learned that the Steeles lived in Ladera Heights. He called the sheriff’s station in that neighborhood and asked deputies to drop by. When no one answered the door, they left the note that would lead them to Escontrias.

“This is my job,” said a modest Escontrias, reflecting on his efforts to reunite the Steeles with their Bible. But Zenora Steele has another explanation: “It’s a miracle. And I believe in miracles.”

The Steeles say they will rebuild their furniture store, right where it burned down. “We don’t feel this is the end,” she said. “It’s just a new beginning. I think it’ll be a new beginning for the whole area.”

Across the street from Terry’s Interiors is The Pit, a barbecue restaurant whose roasted meats can be smelled up and down Vermont Avenue. I had eaten there more than once during my neighborhood stay last year, nibbling on potato salad, chatting with its patrons. I was worried at first that it might no longer be there. But it survived.

I went in and sat at a corner table with The Pit’s 60-year-old owner, Vincent Sumler, a neighborhood elder. He offered me wisdom, and a Pepsi, for free.

“We didn’t do nothing special,” he said of the day the neighborhood burned. “Just said an extra prayer and went on home.”

Sumler called down to the restaurant the next morning. “We still standing?” he asked Maurice, one of his employees. “Yes,” Maurice told him. “But Terry’s burned down.”

The restaurant remained closed that Thursday. But Friday, it reopened. “And the people came,” Sumler said, smiling. “Praise God. I tell you, you can’t beat God’s giving. . . . He’s taken care of us through two riots, and many presidents.”

Sumler opened his restaurant in 1958. When I interviewed him last year, he told me why he stayed in the neighborhood even after so many others had moved away. It was important for him and The Pit to be there, he said, providing examples to young African-Americans in the community who had seen so many businesses lock their doors and close up shop.

The flames hadn’t changed his mind.

“I want to be with my people as we progress,” Sumler said, smiling at the thought of the rebuilding he knows is coming. “I don’t want to be across town. I truly believe in my people. Yes indeedy.”

I admired him, as I admired the Steeles, Blake and others. I admired their optimism and determination. They were older than me and no doubt had seen countless promises broken. Yet they could still believe in the future, in the possibility for change.

At least there are ashes to sift through, they seemed to say. Salvage what you can, sweep away the rest and build even better than before.

I was not yet born the last time this town burned. And it was disturbing to be here this time, seeing the flames, feeling the anger well up inside myself. I was a ‘60s baby, raised on ideals of equality and justice that now seem more like myth than truth.

I asked Sumler, whose roots are in North Carolina, how he has kept going for all these years, and how I can keep going for all the years ahead of me.

He puffed on a cigarette, gazed out the window to where Terry’s Interiors used to be and told me what he saw. “I see despair at first,” he said. “Then I look a little deeper and I see hope, progress. I see new buildings and more jobs.”

It was time, he said, for black people to face the fact that they cannot count on a judicial system they did not create. They can only count on each other. “Rodney King and Latasha Harlins showed us nobody’s going to do it for us.”

It made me think about connections and community, how you can live somewhere for years and not feel a bond. I once had an apartment at the edge of Silver Lake but I didn’t walk its streets or go to its churches. I didn’t know my neighbors.

When I moved to 53rd Street last year, I was also an outsider. There were some who made sure I knew it. Who gave her permission to come live here? they asked indignantly. Where does she live? Why doe s n’t she study her own neighborhood?

I understood the resentment felt by people weary of a media that too often overlooks the good in their neighborhoods to focus on the sensational and simplistic. To some it didn’t matter that I am African-American. I represented the Los Angeles Times, not their community.

But as the days passed, I grew more comfortable as people grew comfortable with me. And for a little while, 53rd Street was my home. I worshiped at Rose of Sharon, and St. Brigid Roman Catholic Church. An elderly man welcomed me into his house, and told me his life story while spinning the blues on his record player. I listened to the musings of a woman nearing a century old, and lived with a couple who embraced me like their own child.

I felt connected, because I saw family in their weathered faces. And I saw my own reflection.

Sumler, the owner of The Pit, had an invitation for black residents who have left the area and perhaps for those, like me, who are not from the community but nevertheless are part of it.

“They should come back,” Sumler said. “The neighborhood is going to be for us--if we want it.”

About These Stories

Last year, Times staff writers Charisse Jones and Hector Tobar lived next door to each other for a month on West 53rd Street in South Los Angeles, producing a series of articles on life in a neighborhood undergoing dramatic ethnic changes. Once predominantly black, the community has now become one of the fastest growing Latino barrios in the nation. Jones and Tobar recently revisited 53rd Street to see how the riots had changed the psyche and look of the neighborhood.