‘It’s Like a War Out There’ : Teacher-Novelist Gives an Eloquent, Gritty Voice to the Struggles of Black Youth in Los Angeles

Growing up in Central Los Angeles in the ‘70s, Jervey Tervalon managed to avoid the burgeoning gang lifestyle. When outside gang members would scale the fence at Foshay Junior High School, he and a friend would hide in the ball box in the gym. In high school, he and his college-bound friends were interested in girls and grades.

But Tervalon couldn’t escape the sometimes tragic fallout of gangs a decade later when he taught English at Locke High School on 111th Street, an 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 his 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,” Tervalon, 35, says. “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.’ ”

Like post-traumatic stress syndrome found in war veterans, Tervalon realized, “You’re seeing this in kids. Young people are shattered.”

Galvanized by the experience, Tervalon began writing a novel about the struggles of black young people in Los Angeles.

“Understand This,” which Tervalon completed while in the UC Irvine graduate program in writing, was published in February by William Morrow. It’s a gritty tale about the emotional aftershocks that follow a senseless killing. Told from eight points of view in alternating chapters that crackle with street argot, the novel opens as high school senior Francois Williams sees his best friend, Doug, shot and killed by Doug’s drug-addict girlfriend minutes after the two youths had been throwing a football in the street.

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.”

Six supporting characters--including Francois’ mother and the dead boy’s brother, sister and girlfriend--move the narrative forward. There’s 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 now 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.”

“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 I knew.

“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 a mile west of the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum where, he says, “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 says 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. There also were creative writing classes, in which he wrote poems about love and death as well as horror and kung fu stories.

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

“I wanted to teach at an inner-city high school,” he says. “I was 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.

In deciding to write his novel, 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 says.

“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 the UC Irvine writing program.

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

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

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

Motivated to write a novel with characters who talk like the people he knows, Tervalon began rewriting his L.A. novel.

When he began reading passages of the new novel in the workshop, he says, the other students “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.”

Through the now-retired Oakley Hall, who taught at Irvine and is founder of the Squaw Valley Writers Community, Tervalon’s manuscript was given to an agent, who sold the book within three weeks.

Tervalon, who recently completed a one-year screenwriting fellowship at Disney’s Hollywood Pictures division, has 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 about the black community in Santa Barbara.

“I’d like to put together a body of work that really explores the material of black life toward the end of the 20th Century,” he says. “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.”