THE SUNDAY PROFILE : His Grand Obsession : To James Burks, the African Marketplace is more than just an annual festival. He sees it as the seed of a permanent cultural attraction. And not even his critics can dim his vision.

The very first one, James Burks recalls, was built out of twigs and clay--an 8-year-old’s Spartan vision of an earth-toned Africa. “It turned out to be a nice little project,” Burks says, his stern face relaxing into smile at the memory of the little village of mud huts molded with his own small hands.

Nowadays, Burks knows that constructing an African village isn’t as simple as getting one’s hands muddy in a labor of love. In his ninth year as director of the African Marketplace and Cultural Faire, he is well aware that this annual show-and-tell is far more high profile, and thus provides a higher precipice from which to tumble.

Just a few days before the Marketplace’s opening day late last month, Burks dashes off his signature on a steep stack of time sheets at the William Grant Still Art Center on West View Street, where he is the full-time director. Although retaining a calm veneer, he can hardly finish a thought, let alone a task, without a telephone ringing, a buzzer sounding or a soft knock on the door followed by “James, I know you’re busy, but. . . .”

For this man who has yet to make the journey, Africa is kept alive in his heart, on his walls, in his daily dealings. The Marketplace arrests his full attention. It is the grand obsession. “I’ve never been to Africa, which is strange,” Burks admits. “I’ve been invited on numerous occasions, and I just have not gone.” One of the reasons, he quietly reveals: “I don’t like taking all those shots.”

Despite its tangled roots and disputed origins, the African Marketplace--which last year attracted an estimated 360,000 people over three weekends--has evolved into a colorful, bazaar-style conflation of fashion, music, memorabilia, food, literature, art, history and film.

This year, as in the past, Jamaican jerk spices mingle with the pulse of Latin drums. Women work under a tent with a hand-lettered shingle reading “The Locksmith,” braiding hair into neat cornrows, while children parade eagerly past a walk of fame of black inventors.

And, also as in the past, Burks can’t pause to take in the full picture, the fruit of his yearlong effort. There are too many hidden details to tend to, too many snags to unsnarl.

What was conceived in 1986 as a back-yard fund- and profile-raising event for the art center has become Burks’ way of working toward renewing long-disenfranchised neighborhoods, reviving spirits. His larger plan is to make the annual event a permanent place where people of color can convene, educate themselves, build a business and ultimately enrich their lives. And so far, on a smaller scale, it has done just that.

Expanding from three vendors to 250, from the back yard of a firehouse to the playing fields of Rancho Cienega Park, the Marketplace might bloom into a stunning adolescent. But Burks has learned that taking people on a quick pleasure tour is one thing. Having them visualize his grander scheme is quite another.

More environment than event, the Marketplace unfolds each summer as a colorful, fragrant, educational ebullient affair celebrating culture and tenacity. More than a vagabond that constantly pulls up stakes, it emerges as a proud centerpiece for a community in search of a master plan. A promise of something better. Even as detractors cry “commercialism,” it continues to grow in size and attendance.

“When we began we knew kind of topically about being an African American and having African roots,” says Cheryle Grace, who has been Burks’ right hand since 1987. “But in working with this project, what you discover and explore is a really clear picture of the history of the African and the diaspora and how it relates to you personally,” she says. “You begin to embrace your Africanism.”

The hope is to provide some clarity, to foster understanding among the descendants of Africans on American soil and those African immigrants who don’t always understand their distant kin. And to smooth tensions heightened through a lack of exposure, of education, of dialogue.

“(The Marketplace) has made us very tribal, very, very connected to the community and has given us a great source for looking at our history and ancestry,” Grace says. “I think if we had the permanent Marketplace it would be like--I don’t want to say like Koreatown or (Little Tokyo)--but we would have a hub. And I think that we need a hub. Our educational and cultural center where we can find ourselves.”

*

Radio news muttering in the background, James Burks pulls in beneath a broad shade tree on the grounds of Rancho Cienega Park. The plates on his cranberry-red Nissan read “TRANQUL” and Burks is doing his best to retain that demeanor--sipping from a bottle of Jamaican ginger beer. Dead center in what will probably be yet another 15-hour day, he plants his cowboy boots in the dusty thruway, then surveys the grounds. Almost instantly he begins to tick off concerns: about the position of the fence, the spacing of the booths, the size of the walkways. . . .

His quick fixes will protract the workday--for the workers uncoiling fat spools of shiny chain-link who will have to move it; for Grace, wind pushing through her blond dreadlocks, who will have to tell them; for on-site coordinator Levin Bailey, who will see that it gets done--to the letter.

Burks, 44, knows that he inspires criticism. He is a man who thinks big, plans broadly and speaks in absolutes. It is not if the Marketplace becomes permanent, it is when.

He is soft-spoken, but there is cool steel behind the words. “I’m a perfectionist,” Burks explains. “And I hate that sometimes.”

His is a difficult portrait, indistinct at the edges, like a photograph whose subject couldn’t quite keep stock-still. “I have people who hate me,” Burks says, “. . . or they love me. They think I’m short-tempered. . . . They think I’m arrogant. I’ve always thought: Somebody has to be that way for the project to work. So I take all the flak and I don’t leave it on anybody on the staff.”

Many who work with or around Burks understand that he is a big dreamer, that he paints his schemes with a dramatic brush, and in bold, attention-arresting colors. “Single-tracked” is how his old boss at Inner City Cultural Center, C. Bernard Jackson, pegs him. “People who are single-tracked are not necessarily likable,” he says.

The roots of Burks’ drive aren’t hard to pull up.

A native son, he spent his childhood in Watts, good with his hands, and with an escapist’s appetite for books--especially fantasy, mythology, comics. Looking back, he supposes, it was a way to travel, to move outside his boundaries. “I wanted to have more. I (wanted) to experience what other people experience. And (reading) fantasy gave me vision . . . it’s fantasy, you can do anything you want to do.”

Burks’ father, a skilled factory worker, handed him a toolbox at age 3. First he used it to make trains, then larger structures. “I would always build the pigeon cages, the clubhouses. But I’d build (clubhouses) with escape hatches, or two stories. I would always try to outdo the next guy.”

His mother and father separated when he was 8, and Burks lived with his mother, then a school district custodian, in Compton. “I had a fun childhood,” he says, recalling rich years full of French horn lessons, band practice, team sports, writing and producing plays for garage productions. “The things that we did in Compton were fun. . . . It wasn’t like now, where there is so much going on there that you’re at risk.”

Long before landing in such high-profile positions as press deputy to then-City Councilman Robert Farrell or as director of the Institute of Performing and Visual Arts at Inner City Cultural Center in Los Angeles, Burks sampled freely--everything from furniture manufacturing and trailer remodeling to chemical milling and custodial work. Through it all, he kept his grades up in college classrooms.

Volunteer work with a branch of VISTA and the L.A. Community Design Center helped to shape and shade his vision. And while earning his degree in urban planning at Pepperdine University, he helped to develop the student-run design center at Harbor College.

Burks says that with this glimpse into urban planning, something began to gel. He’d always had an interest in engineering, in the idea of planning and sculpting cities.

“I guess that’s why I went into architecture. I didn’t know what it was about, but it always seemed like something . . . that would make a living, and make me be important. And I didn’t want to grow up unimportant,” Burks says, revealing just a hint of a smile. “I would become that kind of artistically endowed person.”

*

What most burnished Burks’ artistic skills, in the administrative and the creative sense, was his time--mid ‘70s through mid ‘80s--at Inner City Cultural Center.

“James was always very serious-minded,” says Fred Beauford, former editor of Inner City’s Neworld Magazine as well as the NAACP’s the Crisis. “He always had a business mind while the rest of us expected (funding) to be given to us. James knew you had to work for it.”

Years later, Beauford, who had long left this coast, found himself pulled out of one dream and into another. In the middle of the night, in the dead of winter, Burks showed up on his doorstep in New York City.

“He was visibly frozen,” Beauford recalls, “and he just started talking about this Marketplace. And it sounded like he was talking about the Second Coming.”

Beauford agreed to use his summer break from teaching to help Burks promote his project, although he was skeptical about what he might find. “I was enormously impressed,” Beauford says. “But,” he adds with a wry laugh, “knowing James, I should have known better.”

Burks’ key strength, Beauford surmises, is his steadiness in making incremental advances and improvements to the Marketplace. And what adds to its allure, he says, is Burks’ commitment to keep it multicultural.

“ Everybody shows up. It’s not exclusively aimed at one community. I see all of these farmers markets all over the city as a sign that Southern Californians are finally coming to grips with being here instead of hiding up in the hills. I see all of these festivals and fairs as a way to reach out and get to know our neighbors. So I see James riding a trend. Answering a need.”

Although Burks’ predecessor at the William Grant Still Art Center, the late Hakim Ali, had produced his own series of vibrant festivals, Burks wanted to do more to raise the center’s quiet profile. “This center here needed something bigger. . . . This center needed a Watts Towers, so to speak . . . an identity,” Burks says.

In the summer of 1986 it hosted its first Marketplace under his steady eye--three vendors (one of whom was his mother), one stage and some space for dancing. It was small enough to fit behind Old Engine Company No. 67.

C. Bernard Jackson, co-founder of the 30-year-old Inner City Cultural Center, is proud to see Burks bringing together a fractured city through the arts. Inner City, which grew out of the Watts uprisings, was founded on that very premise, and Jackson sees the sturdy threads of its philosophy running through Burks’ work.

But Jackson also sees Burks as unwaveringly committed--perhaps to a fault.

“He’s strongly dedicated to his vision of what impact the arts can have on the society as a whole. It’s not just about putting on a festival,” Jackson stresses. “He is extremely innovative, and he knows how to go out and get the stuff.”

And, he adds with a laugh, “(Burks) can be a pain in the ass. He can be charming and sophisticated when he needs to be.” But to take the Marketplace a step further, Jackson says, “James Burks has to work on being more likable.”

*

As a man who carves out very little room for his personal life, except for the important hours he spends with his 7-year-old son, Daimien, Burks expects a lot from others.

His strictness and steadfastness can be off-putting. And he knows that barbs fly from all directions. If it isn’t some small drama brewing over the Marketplace itself, it may be a comment about William Grant Still suffering under the weight and pull of the Marketplace.

Some critics, such as Museum in Black owner Brian Breye, are still stinging from some early, unresolved rifts. Breye voices frustrations shared by other merchants and artisans, many of them struggling, who are unhappy with Burks and his mega-operation--the big engine that does. They feel priced out and thus left out and behind.

Rebuilt from the ground up each year, the Marketplace would cost upward of $3 million, Burks estimates. “But I only have $250,000,” he says, factoring in a $24,000 city grant, donated services as well as public and private support. “So that’s what it (has) to cost.”

Breye believes that Burks should give more credit to Ali, and that he should offer a fair price to merchants who cannot afford the Marketplace fee of $750 for the booth, $65 for cleanup, plus $15 for application processing. And that Burks has not made good on his promise to help black businesses and to recycle black dollars.

“Where does the money go from the vending?” Breye asks. “Are we recycling dollars back to the black community? Or to other communities? I would ask him why is the expenditure so high when he receives money for this event from the city?”

But Earnest Preacely, chairman of the Marketplace board, seeks to clarify. He shines a wider, brighter light.

“What makes it difficult is having to operate with limited funds and limited resources. James overcommits himself. His expectations and drive blur reality for him. He believes so much in the dream, that he assumes everyone else is as excited about it. I think he wishes that people understood the concept better. People have let him down, yet he still embraces them.”

Through it all, Burks says, “I’m trying to develop a tight skin, hard skin so that stuff bounces off. . . . I’ve had people accuse us of all kinds of insensitivity toward the black community. Black people. I’ve had people say, why are there so many white vendors in there? They didn’t stop to understand why. . . .”

Emma Pullen, producer of the African Marketplace Short Film Festival, says she understands the complexity of Burks’ vision. “He really does have a worldview and he sees the relationship of African Americans to the rest of the world. I think he is trying to help the rest of us put ourselves in a world context.”

In an attempt to smooth rough edges, the Friends of the African Marketplace and Cultural Faire, a volunteer support group, plans to conduct public forums in the community. This way, Burks can hear firsthand ideas for a permanent Marketplace, as well as address any criticism.

“There’s always somebody in the community who says they’ve done it already. That they can do it better,” Burks says. “And I agree. . . . We’re not here trying to disrespect somebody,” he explains. “The African Marketplace is just a composite of the old Watts festival, the Caribana Festival, the old African Marketplace that was here (at 62nd and Crenshaw) during the Olympics and the old Festival in Black. I don’t think I’m the first. I’m just taking it to a contemporary level.”

Burks wants to make certain his event doesn’t become a relic. That it doesn’t find itself in a sentence that begins: “Remember when the old. . . .” It is what drives him toward the realization of his dream of permanence.

Although he doesn’t often express it, Burks feels the weight of trying to pull off this grand feat amid public scrutiny. Shouldering the worries of both his full-time city job and his full-time dream, he is sometimes frustrated by his limitations. “The problem here is I think that we’ve taken it as far as we can with the resources we have--including me.”

*

This month, Burks will trade his William Grant Still duties for a job as the city Cultural Affairs Department’s coordinator of jobs and volunteers in the arts. But that will not alleviate his Marketplace workload or his stress-induced migraines. If he were to assume the role of executive director, with Grace taking over as the Marketplace’s director, Burks believes only then could he better see the big picture and operate at arm’s length rather than knee-deep.

With his emphasis on replicating the look and feel of various regions of Africa, one might view his project as yet another theme park. But to say that Burks looks at the Marketplace simply as a “Black Disneyland” would trivialize his larger intent--to renew and revitalize neighborhoods caught somewhere between a downward spiral and an ultimately debilitating holding pattern.

If people of many different backgrounds can identify with African American culture in some way shape or form, Burks believes, “suddenly you create a new industry to help stimulate our community. . . . People will say: ‘God this is Crenshaw Boulevard?’ And you are going to take some sort of pride in Crenshaw High School, Crenshaw Boulevard. Crenshaw Mall. . . . This is the big purpose for why.”

In many ways, it is Burks’ attempt to become more proactive, to be a more influential force in his community.

“Every 20 years the black community reinvents the wheel,” he says in a rare quiet moment. “Everybody can see what happened after the Watts Riots is happening again. We’re not dumb. I don’t think there is this big plan in the sky. . . .”

To wait for government agencies to provide the solution is a mistake, he believes. “We’ve got to funnel normal spending patterns into (a) new industry. So that the money is circulated in the community. That’s what we should be thinking.”

And providing jobs is only the tip of it. Burks has worked out a design that he hopes will support the Marketplace as an event while also creating a permanent African trade, cultural and specialty shopping center. “We need to initiate some intercontinental trade between people of the diaspora. And trade in terms of promotion of tourism to countries that have communities of the African diaspora.”

Some have sniffed around this plan, Burks says, and shown plenty of interest. A few neighboring cities have tried to woo him, as have Oklahoma City, Dallas, Miami, Chicago, San Francisco and Las Vegas. But Burks refuses to budge.

“All of them,” he sadly reports, “want to do more than L.A. has provided. So people say: ‘Why haven’t you done it?’ Because I like Los Angeles. I grew up here.”

And although this city is “a difficult nut to crack,” as Burks puts it, he lets his passion override. “And every now and again, it tries to become some sort of reality in life and I don’t let it.”

When it comes to this dream, he seldom eschews whimsy, steadfastly clinging to this belief: “I think if you do anything in L.A. you can do it anywhere in the world.”

James Burks

Age: 44.

Native?: Yes. Born in Watts; lives in Inglewood.

Family: A son, Daimien.

Passions: Going to the theater, traveling, reading, building resources for a permanent African Marketplace and Cultural Faire.

On the arts being supported by the government: “Because people are so used to the arts being supported by government . . . it has taken on an air of welfare, and I’ve always resented that. I feel that we do as much for the salvation of our city as anything else.”

On media misconceptions about South-Central: “When you listen to the media, you think only the gangbangers run this city, but how many black people are in gangs really? Well, if we’re a gang, we’re a positive hospitality gang. And we’re going to gang up on the tourism industry. . . . There are some nice places within the inner city to come to.”

On stimulating community pride and industry: “Our community cannot be stimulated if we don’t have jobs. If we can’t control the industries. Sure, (the Marketplace) is not Ford or GM, but hospitality is an industry . . . a new industry to help stimulate our community.”

On the allure of Los Angeles: “This is a difficult city to crack, but once you reach certain inner circles, it’s fairly easy. And I know how to do things in L.A. I know who to call. . . . I think people . . . want to have that kind of (L.A.) excitement in their lives. Hollywood has that allure. It has that kind of allure for me.”