The Hum of Life Where Riots Once Raged

What I remember most are the children. There were three of them huddled together on the porch of a house off Normandie Avenue. The night was bright with fire, and as I drove by I could glimpse their faces. Ten years later, I can still see them.

It was April 29, 1992. L.A. was in pain. Riots were tearing apart the South-Central section of the city. Flames licked at the dark sky and sirens screamed into the night. There was gunfire. There was death.

And the children were watching.

It all came back to me Monday in shades of fiery red as I drove the same streets that were burned and smashed a decade ago. It was a symbolic moment. Television vans that had gathered for the quick and proper visit of President Bush were just leaving. The story was over. Another anniversary had passed. Another politician had swung by.

Judging from the massive coverage, both print and electronic, we’ve pretty much gotten over trying to guess who was to blame for the four days of calamity that cost 54 lives and nearly $1 billion in damage.

It wasn’t just the Rodney King jury or the mayor or the Los Angeles Police Department or unemployment or racism or a genetic memory of slavery itself that had caused L.A. to burn. It was all of those things, and they’re too hard to summarize, too intricate to define in a single story or a single segment.

I once asked a teenage boy who was dying of a rare form of cancer how he felt. It was a stupid question, the kind that mindless TV reporters ask when they shove a microphone into a widow’s face. But I won’t forget the boy’s answer. He said, “How do you describe the color red to a blind man?”

It’s that way when a people, angry and frustrated, enduring pain that is indescribable, explode. How do you define that kind of motivation to someone who has never been hurt?

I went back to South-Central on Monday to try to find the home of the children I had seen that incendiary night. I’ve thought of them often and I’ve looked for them before, without success. I didn’t succeed this time either.

They’d probably be teenagers by now. I wondered how the terror of that night had affected them. Deep fear experienced in childhood rarely makes anyone a better adult. But sometimes it does engender a determination to see that it doesn’t happen to anyone else.

I drove off the freeway at Normandie, the way I had back then, and headed south. I wandered the areas around Halldale and Raymond avenues, searching the numbered streets for anything that would suddenly illuminate a memory.

Once or twice I stopped to take a closer look. A place on West 57th Street seemed vaguely familiar, but so did a home on Denker Avenue and another on Harvard Boulevard.

It was a frustrating experience in some ways, but not in others. The homes in the neighborhoods once torn by riots seemed freshly painted, as though to flaunt their renewal in the face of anniversary. There were fluorescent greens and blues, and yellows so bright that you had to shade your eyes to look at them.

Not all the houses were that way. Some still bore the tired and weathered look of the poor, or of people who just didn’t care. But not every home in any community shines with the determined newness I saw often throughout South-Central. Even one mowed lawn or one carefully tended garden glows with redemption in a dark memory.

South-Central was at peace the day I drove and walked through. It was a day of ordinary people doing ordinary things, and I mean that in the best possible way. Women pushed their infants in strollers. Young boys worked on a car in their driveway. Shoppers went in and out of Ralphs. A man tended his garden.

And children played.

I had pretty much given up ever finding the kids on the porch by the time I reached the Raymond Avenue School. I had turned down 76th Street and was just kind of wandering and looking when I spotted children in a schoolyard.

They were playing kickball. I stopped to watch, fascinated by what seemed the intricacies of the game. They were maybe third- or fourth-graders, with the two teams mixed in just about every way and not divided in any way.

There were girls, boys, blacks, whites, Asians and Latinos on each team. They cheered for one another, and it didn’t make a bit of difference what gender, what color or what ethnic origin they were. They hadn’t even been born when their neighborhoods were burning.

I watched for a long time, until a woman who must have been a teacher or a playground monitor began staring at me suspiciously. So I drove back up the quiet side streets, thinking how good it was to exist on an ordinary day. How much I liked to see nothing happening. How sweet it was to see kids playing.

I hadn’t intended to write anything about that quiet afternoon. Enough has been said already, and I didn’t even find the house I was looking for. But I did find something else. I found a community shopping and working on cars and tending its gardens and cheering each other. I found children laughing. And I just had to tell you that.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. He can be reached by e-mail at al.martinez@ latimes.com.