The Word on the Street : In a tradition that dates back to Africa, black Americans exchange stories, views and news at informal gathering places, gleaning truth from familiar voices.

Unleashed from a nondescript storefront, where Degnan Avenue peters out into the grassy triangle that is Leimert Park, two saxophones shout a complex, free-form argument. Their emphatic cries ride just above the usual cafe chatter, in bursts and shouts contesting what booms from overhead speakers.

The source of the clamor is 5th Street Dick’s, an electric meeting spot where espresso brews and conversation flies in shouts punctuated by broad gestures.

Sometimes live, sometimes mere memory crackling from vinyl, the playlist passes down a brief study of jazz--from bop to hard bop, post bop and beyond--while the clientele gathers the neighborhood “T”, the “talk.”

A varied display of customers, all but one black, takes advantage of a pause: A mother with a restless 5-year-old sips herb tea from a paper cup and chats with a young man in a beige crocheted skull cap, who is flipping the pages of a slim philosophy text. Two mustachioed zoot suiters with broad-brimmed, cream-colored fedoras, out of a dream, flank the entrance like graduated bookends. Shaka Camara, a neighboring shopkeeper, floats by in flowing robes and sandals, pounding out a message on a small drum tucked beneath his left arm.

For about a year now, the site has been a welcome place for people of any stripe or passion to express themselves. 5th Street regular, actor and former Downbeat magazine contributor Peter Sheridan drops by for the poetry, the jazz, the company--but mostly, he admits, for the buzz.

“We talk about the future of the neighborhood, of the city,” he assures. “It’s not superficial talk.”

Continuing a long tradition, 5th Street Dick’s falls into venerable, comfortable company as a prime community hang--a source for news, scoops or rumor, but most importantly “real deal” analysis and the “411.”

Many blacks have long sought that second source to confirm the headlines or flesh out what passed like a dream in a brief sound bite over the airwaves. Because of a tentative relationship with most media and other mainstream information arteries (advertising or publicity), blacks have generally trusted modes of communication and sources that are intimate and long enduring.

The tradition’s cornerstones have been well-trafficked, loud and lively barbershops; the Saturday morning grand tales spilled over the roar of bonnet dryers at full-service beauty salons; over-the-counter catch-up at the corner Mom and Pop; whispers over coffee and tea cakes in someone’s sunny kitchen; Friday night bid whist or domino marathons; chitchat following Wednesday night prayer meetings.

Passing stories, news and analysis orally isn’t a tradition exclusive to African-American culture. Everyone has his or her stories, an appointed time and space for spilling them. But for many blacks, oral testimonies are the sole repository of the precious details, the place where the history is locked tight and hidden from harm.

From the African griot sharing generations of lore around a fire and pre-Emancipation drum and dance gatherings in New Orleans’ Congo Square, to the promised land spit-shine of the Northern barbershop and, finally, to the most recent blip in the party-line evolution--a video cafe aimed at mining African culture--blacks have conjured creative alternatives for communication.

The ritual of sharing stories, allegories, warnings, histories and sometimes rumors at an appointed time and place has historically been a way of rallying support, asserting pride and passing the culture without benefit of the drum.

A Distrust of the Media

For generations, black stories were seldom told: Never headline news, seldom back-page filler. Community concerns and issues remained “family business,” lest the problems might trickle out, seeping beyond the boundaries to affect a larger world.

Black-owned community newspapers took up some slack. But if you wanted to find out about the family next door who moved away under the cloak of darkness or about hints circulating of a highway that would cut through your flower bed or parlor, one visited a favorite gathering place and listened to a wise voice, rich with familiar turns of phrase, like the twists of a road that conjured home.

“There is an African proverb,” says Emma Pullen, an L.A. writer-filmmaker and former journalist. “ ‘The lion will always lose as long as man writes the book.’ The truth of an event depends on frame of reference.”

Of late, Pullen’s creative projects involve excavating voices from the past. “We have to rely on the histories, stories that are passed down to us,” she says.

Years of media disregard and the resulting isolation has bred distrust, she says. The result: Most electronic and print news sources for many blacks remain dubious information arteries and not necessarily primary information sources.

One problem, Pullen says, is that many non-black interviewers are neither sensitive to nuances of black language nor aware that the way a story is told is just as important as the content. Consequently, many blacks may not share all the details of their stories, feeling they will be misconstrued, riddled with holes, a shadow of the truth.

Pullen has embarked on several oral history projects--from gathering testimonials from those who gauged the intensity of anger and flames during 1965 Watts riots (“The Curfew Zone”) to those who bore witness to life of soul singer Marvin Gaye (“Marvin Gaye: Pride & Joy”). She would like to elucidate the past and thus recast history for the future, she says: “We are never interviewed as experts. Our side isn’t in the history books.”

Pullen feels responsible to elders whose voices and actions have cleared and now guide her path. “(My) generation benefited most from the civil rights movement. . . . I skated in on the ‘70s. I didn’t have to go through the brutal confrontations,” she says. “It’s up to me to combine the traditions.”

An Order of Straight Talk

Near Western Avenue and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, in front of Jack’s Family Kitchen, two preteen girls with springy Senegalese braids in purple and pink ribbons shout out Armageddon visions of street chaos and mayhem over the blare of “gangsta” beats. Their boom box and tentative passers-by quake, as they relate their tales of the street.

Behind Jack’s glass door, a parallel universe unfolds. The aroma alone fills you to bursting: hash browns, bacon, biscuits, pancakes and sausage. Rapid-fire explosions of whoops and hollers and the scrape and sizzle of the griddle periodically drown the warbled twang of a prairie guitar or some country-Western jukebox standard.

From around the horseshoe counter, the voices shimmy up a gauge like quicksilver. The intensity shouldn’t alarm you, nor should the flailing arms, Jack Davenport assures, because it’s all a part of the ritual. “I just like people and I enjoy arguing,” says Davenport, his generous smile offset by a neatly trimmed, silver-edged mustache.

Davenport has served up mountainous, nap-inducing, breakfasts with a side order of straight talk since 1969. He built his loyal and loquacious clientele by “showing them that I would be here.”

Sticking out his chest, he boasts: “Eighty percent of my customers are repeats. I like that. (But) I never want to get so busy, so that I don’t have a chance to talk. . . . I like to argue. Sometimes I know they’re right, but I won’t say it that way. To me, that is the only way that you learn. . .by discussing things.”

The spirited discussions most recently have centered on the new mayor, the new police chief, the city’s steady progression of sensitive trials, the hot preoccupation with juries and verdicts. Often it’s politics--local to world--with Jack filling in the holes for those who dozed off just before last night’s news at 11. “They come in here and they read the papers and (the papers) always get it wrong,” he says. “Stuff like that leads toward a discussion.”

Some weekend nights, eight or 10 regulars lean over a narrow table in a corner booth, its red tabletop worn to a shade of blush wine. Domino games--prime arguing time--are the restaurant’s after-hours centerpiece.

“We get to playing and time just passes by. . . . We sit here till one, two o’clock in the morning. Things have gotten so bad that we don’t go out no more,” Davenport says. “We say whatever we want to say . . . We don’t have to lose friendships because we don’t agree.”

The round table’s mandate is simple, he says, averting his eyes, feigning modesty: “We’re just trying to solve the world’s problems.”

Fitting Words to Rhythms

Dr. Beverly Robinson, folklorist and associate director of UCLA’s African Studies Center, says that embracing and then animating the American language has been one of the salient components of African and African-American oral tradition.

Africans, she says, may have felt lost roaming their new land without benefit of their language, but they engraved their signature on it: “We made those words . . . fit the rhythms that we already had. Those rhythms are usually what has determined whether you are on the inside, the outside, you’re hip, non-hip, together, untogether, right-on or out to lunch.”

From field song call-and-response to Jamaican “toasting” that has evolved in this country as rap, the thread is simple to discern: It is the voice that engenders trust.

“I think that the importance of language is something that we brought over and some of us are conscious of it and use it very beautifully--a Vernon Jordan, a Maxine Waters, a Jesse Jackson and an Elaine Brown. And some of us unconsciously use it, like the brothers in the barbershop and the sisters in the beauty shop,” she says. “It just happens because it’s so rooted inside the person, that it is just a natural part of their soul.”

But Robinson offers a warning: Even casual listeners, spoiled by a master orator’s prowess, don’t put up with a half-told or poorly researched tale. A barbershop floor can suddenly transform itself into center-stage at the Apollo Theatre, the rowdy assembly out for blood.

“I think one of the greatest compliments in our culture,” she says, “is to find out: ‘What do you think?’ (But) if you can’t tell the story, ain’t nobody going to listen. But when you can ‘tell the story good’. . .the story creates the images, people get totally involved in it and it’s like the best theater.”

The difference is, Robinson points out, “We don’t perform for people. People perform with us.”

Haircuts and Headlines

Raymond Ferguson analyzes the daily exchanges filling his barbershop--from quickly transfiguring team rosters to tallying community crime: “All they want is somebody to talk to.” He likes to soften the problems with a tease or a smile, and with an island lilt in his voice, his words flutter like a song.

Originally from Belize, Ferguson came to Los Angeles in 1970 and has owned this shop for three years. The building sits along on a strip of Belizean-owned and -operated businesses that front Western Avenue near Vernon. Since up-to-the-minute CNN updates about Belize don’t often flash across television screens, Ray’s Barbershop offers more than just a touch-up for your fade; it is a living Belizean community bulletin board, a place to discuss the fallout from colliding disparate cultures.

Some younger Belizeans became involved with L.A. street gangs and have been deported, he says. “(So) they carry that behavior back to Belize. At one time (people) could take their vacation and go down there and walk around at night. Now you can’t do it no more, because the same nonsense is going on in those streets.”

But as well as providing the community wire service, the circumference surrounding the barber chair, as any proprietor will tell you, serves myriad purposes.

“You go to enhance your possibilities,” says Pacoima writer Emory Holmes III, who celebrated the neighborhood barbershop in a performance piece, “Evolution of Stylesville.” “You go to assert your identity as a black person, and those two mirrors showed endless possibilities. You went on forever.”

More than an expert in image alteration and astute interpreter of headline news, a good barber easily sheds, then assumes, many personas.

Richard Shelton most times looks at his role as pay back: “I was surrounded by so many people who gave me good advice.”

Shelton’s Barbershop, which sits at the edge of a shopping center on Jefferson Boulevard near Western, attracts a clientele from children transfixed with the sheen of the shears to wizened seniors looking to reclaim the crown of their youth. “Some things that you may tell a person may not help them today, but you push that recall button and it will come.”

Shelton’s buzzes early. After barber Nicky Piatt brings the morning paper and steaming coffee, the snap of the white cotton bib and the hum of the electric razor announce the day’s start.

Originally from Texas, Shelton came West in 1953 “to find (my) pot of gold. He didn’t find it, but instead lays claim to a noisy barbershop that cuts or styles about 275 heads a week, and an expert’s knack for keeping the ideas flowing and customers not only entertained but well-informed--from immigration laws to the Rodney King case.

Most important, explains Shelton, are the kids who return and say, “ ‘Mr. Shelton, I wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for you. I would have been in trouble if you hadn’t focused my head.’ They’re so impatient. And if they don’t have that self-control, it’s so very easy to get out of your focus.”

In April, 1992, Shelton found out how thick blood runs in his neighborhood. After watching the flames and smoke choke stores in and around the center--his shop was not damaged--customers who had long ago moved to the western or northern edges of the city stopped by to see him. Shelton was there, positioned behind his chair; razor in hand; audience in place. Says Shelton: “I just keep right on trimming along.”

Ear to the Grapevine

Blacks’ often-precarious relationship with most mainstream media and traditional advertising sources makes reaching black audiences and consumers a tricky test in creativity.

Black publicists have mastered the maze by keeping one’s ear to the ground and staying on top of even the most minute alteration in a trend.

Makeda Smith, who owns Jazzmyne Public Relations in Burbank, says it’s simply a matter of getting out and spreading the word. Her model: the ancestors.

“People underestimate the power of word-of-mouth,” says Smith. “(Black) people feel as if they are victims of the media, so I give voice to people who usually don’t have a voice, or don’t feel that they have access.” Since her target groups may not always keep an eye riveted on the daily news, Smith relies on a sixth sense while haunting a wide array of established and underground galleries, cafes and restaurants where style and talk abounds.

Publicist Myra Bauman, of BaumanCurry & Co. in Glendale, cracked the code long ago. To publicize, for example, a new television show with a black audience potential, she might advise a client to eschew the usual conduits and channel promotional information along an alternate route.

“We might have flyers that are made available in hair salons, restaurants, sporting events, music concerts,” she says. “For a company that is interested in doing good (works) and wants the support of some very important venues in the community, it might include the churches.”

Bauman cites the recent L.A. gathering of the Congressional Black Caucus as an example of the network’s well-oiled machinery: “I had not read anything anywhere about it. Then I went to the first event. It was packed. They went directly through organization networks: social, political, the Black Employee Assn., civic and community groups.” In other words, says Bauman, “They went directly to (people) they knew.”

But the system, like any network, isn’t without bugs.

For five years, Patricia A. Turner, assistant professor of African-American Studies at UC Davis, avidly documented rumors her students casually passed as hard fact. Her research metamorphosed into a book, “I Heard It Through The Grapevine,” about the persistence of rumor among blacks. It will be published in September by University of California Press.

The book spans the spectrum of urban legend in black America: from variations on several rumor cycles including Ku Klux Klan-owned clothing enterprises to AIDS-genocide conspiracy theories. Turner views these as “folk warnings for a community at risk,” many of which possess similar themes of black victimization. Because friends, relatives or ministers related the stories, they were believed to be indisputable fact.

Turner says these rumor cycles offer blacks a vehicle to cope with and respond to a “hostile dominant culture,” and that reading between the lines reveals a complex tapestry of vulnerabilities prevalent in black communities throughout the United States.

She acknowledges, however, that a decline in the importance of the oral tradition has dramatically, and negatively, affected some black urban communities. “It could be argued,” says Turner, “that a lot of the problems in the community result in breakdowns in communication. People don’t spend time getting their hair done anymore, ironing clothes on Sunday. Lots of African-American newspapers, which were important sources 60 years ago, have lost some of their impact.”

Without means to quell them, Turner knows these stories have a will and life of their own. “People think they will just die a natural death,” she cautions.

“They’re wrong.”

Listening for Their Voices

Still, the oral tradition evolves as progeny create and adapt to a new way of “telling.” Stacy Davis, 16, already looks elsewhere for what she calls “dependable” facts. Narrow representations of black urban life--guns, drugs, gangs--don’t coincide with her truths, the full spectrum of black life she lives.

“I know we aren’t all like that. They trash black people. And we are aware of how they’re dogging us,” she says. “My parents are teaching us a whole different side. I know how to decipher the news.” It is, she says, quite simple: “You can tell by ear, if it’s the truth or not.”

In a city as large and untamable as Los Angeles, linking a community and keeping informed those who thrive on interpersonal interaction is a challenge.

“The African-American community really looks to the radio. (Here) the radio personality is perceived as friend,” says Isidra Person-Lynn, public affairs director at KACE/V103 (103.9 FM). “We keep our talk shows live, so that our listeners have direct input in our conversation. A lot of regulars become as important as the hosts.”

Because it offers localized news and advertising about the goings-on next door, black radio has historically been a powerful force in urban centers such as New York. But Los Angeles, Person-Lynn points out, hasn’t been as progressive as other urban centers in providing the sturdy architecture for 24-hour black talk.

Martha E. Jackson, public affairs director for KGFJ (1230 AM), is confident that is changing. During the 1992 riots, she says, the station served two purposes: It alerted residents to street closures, open grocery stores and shelters, and provided an open line and release valve for a tense and bewildered community.

“Not only did people come back to the station for the music,” says Jackson, “they have been tuning in for the shows--just as they’ve gone back and revisited the Sentinel (L.A.’s oldest black-owned newspaper). People are still looking for a different slant.

“Looking for a place to hear their voice.”

Meshing Talk and Video

Just a couple doors down from 5th Street Dick’s, artist and community impresario Ben Caldwell tinkers with the airwaves, looking at ways to advance the dialogue. Out of it first grew Video 3333, followed now by KAOS Network, a performance studio, and student and artist gathering place.

For nearly 10 years, Caldwell has provided a cultural hearth for everyone from junior high students with an urge to rap or a dream to fit their hands around a video cam to college-age philosophers.

He wants to attract and tie into as many city people as possible. “That was the thing that KAOS was all about, to deal with that fuzzy logic about what L.A. was about,” says the bearded Caldwell, surrounded by African fetishes, mud-cloth throws and a forest of video screens.

“But on the real side, I have always thought of this place as more of a place to expand knowledge. I’m very much trying to put our foot in the 21st Century. I personally believe that that is our century.”

A filmmaker by trade, Caldwell says he’s tired of mainstream media’s “icon grabbing” tendencies. He knows the power of those symbols, especially the narrow ones that he says persistently define blacks.

Caldwell has been exploring ways to smash those stereotypes and expand the definitions by presenting in-house programs, readings and round tables that can be beamed across the street--or the globe. He calls it a “video cafe,” and wants to build on it to set up communications systems and skills “within our kids and within our people . . . to expose them to the new technologies.”

Lately, Caldwell has been thinking about his next step: Rediscovering Africa via an interactive television screen. The idea, he says, is “to start figuring out how we as a people can start communicating with each other without always having this great big mega-giant corporation as our conduit for communication.

“This is the future,” prophesies Caldwell, “and 1984 has already passed.”