AFTER THE VERDICTS : From the Heart of the City : For our town, the waiting is over. What do the verdicts mean today, and what will they mean for our tomorrows? Three perspectives on the day of decision. : A Quiet Morning Is of Desperate Importance

Dawn came uneasily to South-Central Los Angeles Saturday, spreading a gray mist over the neighborhoods bordering Slauson Avenue.

A feeling of anticipation was in the air as time crept with unsettling languor toward 7 a.m., when a federal jury was expected to return verdicts in the Rodney G. King civil rights case.

The streets were mostly deserted, due both to the earliness of the hour on a weekend day and, one suspects, to the news about to break on the electronic media.

Memories of fire and rage walked like ghosts through the troubled neighborhood, viewed with anxiety from behind closed doors.

Diane Chapman was one of those frozen before her television set in a small stucco house on South Wilton Place, a street whose residents found themselves unwittingly in the center of last year’s riots.

It’s a pleasant thoroughfare of well-kept homes occupied mostly by middle-aged black people with principles deeply rooted in family and religion.

Chapman, 52, has lived in her home for 23 years, where she raised four children on her own, one of whom, a son, was murdered a year ago.

I wrote about her recently and about her friendship with the detective who had to tell her that her boy was dead.

I write about her today because she was one of those to whom the verdict, that verdict, was so desperately important. Peace spun on its intonation in South-Central L.A.

Chapman arose at 5 a.m. Saturday, unable to sleep, and awaited the jury’s decision from the edge of a chair.

She had reason to be nervous. The night before, two carloads of youths, clenched fists thrust skyward, drove by shouting, “Not guilty! Not guilty!” as though attempting to stir the ‘hood to calamity.

Now she was watching KABC Channel 7 as anchor Harold Greene reported that an army of police has been fully mobilized since 6:30 a.m., and as Christine Lund noted with restrained tension, “Everyone is looking at 7 o’clock. . . .”

Chapman’s attention was diverted only once, when a siren screamed through the morning silence and a firetruck thundered by. Her expression asked, “Has it started already?”--but she said nothing.

Down the street, neighbor Heikes Powell couldn’t take the strain of waiting and abruptly went for a walk. But he was the only one outside on that one-block stretch of South Wilton between 59th and Slauson.

Many others were home waiting.

Time had crept through the gray morning at a snail’s pace, but even a snail ultimately achieves a destination.

Chapman’s 9-year-old granddaughter, Trulysia, had been sleeping on a couch in the living room and sat up as John North, reporting from the federal courthouse, said with appropriate irony, “Here comes the judge.”

It was 7 a.m.

Diane Chapman stared at the television screen, a still life of anticipation. Trulysia clutched a cloth doll. And then it came.

Stacey Koon, guilty. Laurence Powell, guilty. Timothy Wind, innocent. Theodore Briseno, innocent.

Chapman shouted “Yes!” to each guilty verdict, and said nothing at the two acquittals. Trulysia lay back on the couch. It was only after the verdicts had sunk in that Chapman sighed and said, “Thank God, it’s over. We’ll celebrate with a barbecue on the patio tomorrow.”

But if it was a time to celebrate, it was also a time to pray.

Chapman and others on the block will attend church today and kneel in gratitude not only for at least two convictions, but also for the fact that they came unaccompanied by violence in their community.

“Justice was done,” Chapman said, “and I’ll pray that it will stay as calm tomorrow as it is today. The good guys are going to stay good, and the bad guys better run for cover.”

Down the block and across the street on South Wilton Place, all were pleased that there was no fire this time, but not everyone was elated with the verdict itself.

Bernesteen Powell, also acknowledging that they got the “bad guys,” feels nevertheless that all four policemen ought to go to jail.

Bob Early agrees. “They’re all guilty,” he said firmly, “because they were all there.”

Glenda Graham saw it differently. “This is a great day!” she shouted exuberantly. “Justice is served, though it was long overdue.”

Chapman telephoned her sister and then a daughter in Washington, D.C., to share her own exhilaration.

“It’s so quiet in the neighborhood,” she told her daughter, “you can hear a pin drop. Everything’s going to be all right now.”

I asked Trulysia what she thought. “It’s crazy,” she said.

“Crazy good or crazy bad?”

She pondered for a moment, then said, “Crazy in-between.”

As I drove away down the quiet street, City Councilman Marvin Braude was asked by a radio reporter what he thought. He said, “The soul of our city is at peace.”

And so it was.