Song of South-Central : In Novel ‘Understand This,’ Completed at UCI, Tervalon Gives an Eloquent, Gritty Voice to Blacks

Growing up in South-Central Los Angeles in the ‘70s, Jervey Tervalon managed to avoid getting caught up in the burgeoning gang lifestyle. When outside gang members would scale the fence at notoriously tough Foshay Junior High School like a band of marauders, he and a friend would hide in the gym-ball box. In high school, he and his college-bound friends were interested in girls and grades, not gangs and guns.

But Tervalon couldn’t escape the sometimes-tragic fallout of gangs a decade later when he was teaching English at Locke High School, a South-Central L.A. outpost fellow teachers wryly referred to as the “foreign legion.”

One of his students--”the last kid in the world who would be disrespectful”--was shot to death in a phone booth after basketball practice, a case of mistaken identity. Another student suffered a nervous breakdown after a cousin was gunned down during a dispute.

“He was another impressive young man: polite, hard-working, a good student--the kind of guy that if you had him for a son you’d be happy,” said Tervalon, 35. “When I saw him starting to crack up, displaying odd behavior that was just totally unusual for him--crying and laughing, causing scenes--I wondered, ‘What the hell is going on? It’s like a war out there.’ ”

And like post-traumatic stress disorder in returning war veterans, Tervalon realized, “You’re seeing this in kids. Young people are shattered. And these are not your kids who are considered losers. These are kids coming to school, getting good grades.”

Galvanized by the experience, Tervalon, who had been writing short stories since high school, began writing a novel about the life-and-death struggles of young blacks coming of age in South-Central Los Angeles.

“Understand This” (Morrow; $20), which Tervalon completed while in the UC Irvine graduate Program in Writing and was published this month, is a gritty tale that delves below the surface of “news at 11” crime footage to show the emotional aftershocks a senseless killing has on surviving friends and relatives.

Told from eight points of view in alternating chapters that crackle with street argot, the novel opens with high school senior Francois Williams witnessing his best friend Doug being shot and killed by Doug’s drug-addict girlfriend only minutes after the two youths had been throwing a football in the street.

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“A little burst of white from the car, another one, Doug rolls away, flips on his back. Rika tears out, runs a stop sign and poofs. I get there before I know what I’m gonna do. . . . “

*

Although Francois is numbed by his friend’s death, his no-nonsense girlfriend Margot dismisses his “crying over some . . . woman beater, some wanna-be high roller, some fool that never (cared) about anybody but himself.”

Spirited and unfailingly forthright, Margot has her eye set on going to UC Santa Cruz, while the shattered Francois walks the fine line between what’s legal and what’s not.

Six supporting characters, including Francois’ mother and the dead boy’s brother, sister and girlfriend, move the narrative forward with their own chapters to create what Publishers Weekly calls “a dizzying mosaic of struggle and despair, promise and hopelessness.”

There’s even a teacher, Michaels, who resembles Tervalon at the end of his five-year stint at Locke in the late ‘80s when he was verging on burnout yet felt reluctant to move on.

Tervalon, a Pasadena resident who teaches a weekly literature class and a literary symposium at UC Santa Barbara, calls “Understand This” a novel of “voices and perspectives that portray a patchwork reality” that shows “the complexities of society in black Los Angeles.”

“I was impressed by Tolstoy’s encyclopedic vision of 19th-Century Russia, and somehow I hoped to be able to create a novel that would share that kind of dynamic, but in the oral traditions that I had grown up with: creating a spoken novel that would reveal the internal lives of these various characters that I knew and that I had grown up with.

“I wanted to see them represented in their complexity instead of seeing them reduced to a sociological analysis; I wanted to see their flesh and blood, and I found out I could accomplish this by having them ‘speak’ themselves into existence.”

The youngest of four brothers, Tervalon moved to Los Angeles from New Orleans when he was 4. Home was in a predominantly black “working class to middle class” neighborhood where, he said, “there was a real sense of community.”

Although his parents--his father worked for the post office, his mother was a key-punch operator--divorced when he was 10, Tervalon said they were always there for him: “My father and mother were avid readers, and they encouraged me to go to college.”

At Dorsey High School in the mid-’70s, Tervalon was an honors student who took advantage of opportunities--from photography classes to flying lessons given through the aviation club. There also were creative writing classes in which he wrote poems about love and death, as well as horror and kung fu stories.

“It was a very stimulating world,” he said.

As a teen-ager, Tervalon and his friends didn’t just hang around the neighborhood. They’d go to the beach and Griffith Park, catch the bus to Hollywood to “stare at the crazies” and go to the downtown museums with their girlfriends.

“Los Angeles wasn’t a claustrophobic closet like it is today for a lot of kids,” he said.

To join or not join a gang “wasn’t really a choice I had to make. I basically had strong interests, and I tried to follow them up.”

As a literature major at UC Santa Barbara, Tervalon continued to take creative writing classes. After graduating in 1980, he returned to South-Central Los Angeles to teach English at Locke.

“I wanted to teach at an inner-city high school,” he said. “I was just primarily interested in teaching literature to the students because reading was so important to me. I thought maybe I could make a difference in their lives.”

The experience also changed his life.

In deciding to write a novel about young people growing up in South-Central, Tervalon combined his feelings over the death of one of his favorite students with the memory of a striking image that had haunted him since his high school days: A friend had told him about seeing another boy shot in the face by his girlfriend after slapping her in an argument in the street.

“I began wondering what would be the reaction of a kid--the kind of internal dialogue, the psychic repercussions--of witnessing something like that,” Tervalon said. “I think one thing that’s neglected in these discussions about what it’s like to grow up in these inner cities is that these children are not adults, they’re not monsters, they’re not soldiers or supermen or superwomen. They’re people.

“We rarely talk about the internal psychology of these kids. We kind of ignore it and think only of the external. Sometimes there’s fear and depression, but you don’t see it. You just see the veneer of a kid that’s unscarred, but inside they’re suffering.”

Encouraged by his wife, Gina, a personnel analyst for the city of Los Angeles, Tervalon applied to UC Irvine’s nationally acclaimed graduate Program in Writing.

By the time he started attending the weekly writing workshop, however, Tervalon had abandoned “a really bad first draft” of his South-Central novel and was writing a novel about his family in New Orleans.

But in reading his work-in-progress to the dozen other workshop members, Tervalon--the only black in the group--found his dialogue being criticized.

A “well-meaning friend” who told him his characters “don’t talk like black people” gave him a copy of a novel that contained what he considered stereotypical “Song of the South”-style Southern dialogue.

“I think she thought she was doing a service,” he said.

Thus motivated to write a novel with characters who talk like the people he knows, Tervalon dropped his family saga and began rewriting his South-Central novel.

“I decided to write something so much in the vernacular, so dense with dialect, that if the readers weren’t from that community they would sometimes be at a loss,” he said.

When he began reading passages of the new novel in the workshop, he said, “They didn’t understand a lot of the dialogue, but they liked it. And I liked that reaction: They were sort of intimidated by it, so I continued to write at a pretty quick pace.”

Tervalon views UCI’s writing program as invaluable in providing an “enlightened” audience for his writing. “It also provided time and the opportunity to write, and I got to meet people who really championed my work like (writing teachers) Oakley Hall and Thomas Keneally,” he said.

It was through the now-retired Hall, founder of the Squaw Valley Writers Community--an annual writers conference--that Tervalon’s manuscript was given to an agent, who sold the book within three weeks.

“I felt very fortunate,” said Tervalon. “I had people telling me ever since 1978 that ‘Things will work out--you’ll make some money; you’ll establish yourself as a writer.’ I’m glad I wasn’t impatient. I knew it would be a long-term process; I’d have to just carry on with a stiff upper lip with my chin forward and just march on.”

Tervalon, who recently completed a one-year screenwriting fellowship at Disney’s Hollywood Pictures division, is continuing to march on.

He has completed a second novel--”a fictional family history of black L.A. over the last 30 years”--that’s in the hands of his agent. And he’s well into a third novel, this one about the black community in Santa Barbara.

“I’d just like to put together a body of work that really explores the material of black life toward the end of the 20th Century,” he said. “I just hope I can really utilize the material like Faulkner did--take the problems and complexities of a small community and make them timeless and universal.”