Here's one of the best passages I've ever written, Red's black friend explaining the logic behind the development of the LA freeway system in 1954:
Butch said, “If she wants to live in the best neighborhoods, man, the lady got no choice but to pass for white. Nobody’s gonna let Negroes move around at will. Why the hell do you think they’re building all these new freeways? Think about it.”
“I
don’t see what this has to do with freeways.”
“Come
on, Red, open your eyes!”
He
pulled a ballpoint pen out from a pocket and began drawing on a
napkin, all the while continuing with greater excitement.
“What
do the white City Fathers fear most of all? The expansion of Negro
neighborhoods, man. The darkies infiltrating good white
neighborhoods. I’m not jiving. Looky here.”
His
diction was changing as he spoke, so that now he was sounding more
like Lovin’ Dan the Sixty-Minute Man, with his hip vernacular, than
like the cultured Butch I knew. He turned the napkin around so I
could see what he’d drawn so quickly, a pattern of lines with a
circle in the middle.
“This
is the Freeway Grand Plan, okay? They even published it in the
newspaper. Now this here is Watts, man. So more Negroes have been
moving into Watts, so it’s expanding to the west, right? Oo-ee, we
got to head off them niggers at the pass! And so we start building
this here Harbor Freeway to block them off, and this here Santa
Monica Freeway to catch and trap all the ones that slip over the
boundary before we can finish up the Harbor. But now Watts is
expanding east, man, cause it’s got to go somewhere, and so we got
to head off them damn niggers again, oo-ee, baby, let’s build
ourselves the Santa Ana Freeway, only this time a whole mess of
niggers got so far east we got to come down with another one, too,
the Pomona Freeway -- look at it, Red. All these freeways ain’t
nothing but fences to keep the niggers from getting too close to good
white neighborhoods. You mentioned South City. Well, what’s South
City, man? A town because people want it to be a town? Hell, no. It’s
nothing but the part of Watts that got over the Santa Ana but got cut
off with the Pomona. It ain’t a freeway system, Red, it’s the
walls of a prison!”
I
stared at the napkin.
“You’re
saying,” I began slowly, “That the purpose of the freeway system
is to contain Watts?”
Butch
laughed. “Shit, man, I think I’d better pay the check, you so
dumb.”
