Southland

“Now, the children feel trapped in that part of the city, and because they’ve learned, from watching their parents’ lives, the limits of their futures, they smash whatever they can, which is usually each other.”

Children learn from their parents that they have no future. This realization breeds idleness and even violence. This is a damning assessment of The Pervasive Effects of Racism in America, as predominantly Black neighborhoods like Crenshaw are systematically deprived of resources and opportunities.

“It is only those who aren’t totally shattered by a loss who can comfort the others, who are.”

Jackie feels like an imposter in mourning her grandfather Frank. She didn’t cry at his funeral (or at his wife’s), and she allowed their relationship to grow distant as she pursued a life away from the Japanese American community she grew up in.

“Marriage, to her, meant what her parents had—steadiness, like a small efficient business.” 

This telling quote from a young Lois’s perspective underscores what the reader will come to see in Mary and Frank’s marriage. It’s a marriage rooted in pragmatism and mutual support, with love as a secondary consideration.

“But he wasn’t sure what he thought of this granddaughter. She was so clearly out of her element here.”

Lanier meets Jackie for the first time but sees that she’s a privileged young woman. Although she’s Frank Sakai’s kin, Frank fit right into the neighborhood, whereas Jackie looks scared. In the ‘90s, Jackie, as a Japanese American, is a minority in the predominantly Black neighborhood.

“She wondered, for a moment, what it would be like if she could do this all the time—go out, not while leaving her girlfriend at home, but not having a girlfriend at all.”

Jackie goes out with Rebecca to a bar and has a great time. She wonders what it would be like to not be dating Laura, thus indicating that there’s a strain in their relationship. This passage demonstrates Jackie’s desire for independence as well as her inclination toward emotional detachment.

“She’d seen wide-eyed kids worn down into nothing. And she’s seen other kids turn, like milk, into something sour and spoiled, the change sudden, final, complete.”

As a teacher, Alma has seen how the pervasive effects of racism in America cause promising children to lose their way. Now that Curtis has gotten into trouble, she’s afraid for her son and the road he might take if he doesn’t start acting right. Curtis’s bad behavior stems from retaliating against his racist white peers. Despite this, society views Curtis as the instigator.

“Most of the men he knew of that age were either bitter or resigned.”

Lanier goes to meet with Captain Robert Thomas. He likens his father to a man of Thomas’s age and notes how most Black men in that bracket are either bitter at the cards life has dealt them or resigned to their humdrum fates. Because Lanier can empathize with Thomas, a former Black police officer, he fails to consider Thomas a suspect.

“I tell you, there were a lot of racist cops back then, but on the other hand, some of the first few black men on the force didn’t do much to change their views.”

Thomas’s statement is hypocritical in nature. As the reader learns, Thomas murdered Curtis and the other boys in Frank’s store. Many Black people in the neighborhood call him “Uncle Tom” because they believe he identifies with white people more than Black people. Thomas criticizes early Black officers and suggests that they were partially to blame for the racism they faced from white officers, although he himself has demonstrated extreme acts of violent racism.

“Everyone, it seemed, had something awful in their lives—some death or misfortune that shaped them.”

Jackie continues to wonder at her inability to empathize with people in pain. She sees others as being molded by the scars in their lives, while her life is bland and orderly. She doesn’t know how to deal with feelings, and this in part causes the emotional detachment prevalent in her life.

“And he wondered, not for the first time since he’d come back to the States, if he’d defeated or even recognized the enemy.”

Frank didn’t like killing during the war, but he did so initially to escape the camps and then later to make his family proud. Now that he’s back, and faced with the racism of Lawson and others, he wonders what he really fought for and whether it really changed anything.

“Because it didn’t make any difference.”

Frank says this to a very young Jackie one afternoon, and it confuses her at the time. After hearing about the poor treatment of Japanese Americans during and after the war, she knows that Frank means that his fighting for the country doesn’t make any difference in terms of eradicating hatred.

“They’re dead. He’s dead, my love. They murdered him.”

Frank calls Alma and tells her this when he finds Curtis and his friends dead in the store’s freezer. Hirano thought Frank called his wife Mary, but Jackie deduces that Alma is the one he called “my love.” This realization helps connect the dots for Jackie, who recognizes that her grandfather had an intimate relationship with Curtis’s mother.

“The swarms of children looked to Jackie like a deep, slow river, which she wanted, now, to enter and be a part of, but which she needed just as deeply to avoid.”

Jackie is in danger of being caught in a river of memory and emotions. She wants to wade into the memories, but she also knows how dangerous it is to get stuck in the past, and how murky the past can be.

“They’d walked through several decades to see him, but he wasn’t surprised; the past never stayed in the past.”

Victor Conway sees Curtis and Alma when he looks at Lanier, and he sees his best friend Frank Sakai when he looks at Jackie. He notes that the past is unfinished and always comes back to haunt the present, a theme that is prevalent throughout the book as Lanier and Jackie seek Second Chances and Redemption.

‘“Yeah,’ she said. ‘Don’t matter, though. Never get what you wait for, anyway.’”

This telling comment by a young Alma while talking to Frank for the first time foreshadows their relationship. Their love affair doesn’t last, though they both wanted it to. Frank was scared, and Alma left him for it.

“And when she pulled her hand from her neck and smiled in reply, he felt something shift in him that would never shift back.”

This quote about a young Frank first noticing Alma foreshadows his feelings for Alma for the entire narrative. Frank loved Alma until the day she died, and even after that.

“He loosened something in her, and he both loved what that meant and feared it.”

Frank loved that he and Alma both knew each other as people of color and people with burdens, but he was also afraid of just how much adversity might be shaping Alma without him knowing the details.

“Each of them thought that the other was stronger. Only he was right.”

This damning and telling quote relates to Alma and Frank’s relationship. They each thought the other was stronger, which is why their love worked so well. Unfortunately, and as time will tell, Alma was much stronger than Frank, who feared the social consequences that would come with an interracial marriage.

“In one of those buildings lay the body of the woman he loved better than anything in this world or the next one.” 

Frank loved Alma fiercely. He froze briefly when she asked about marriage, which ended their love affair. Now that she’s dead, he’s nearly inconsolable with the fact that he still loves her passionately, despite being married with kids.

“One family was enough to betray.”

Frank’s love for Alma is so intense that, when she dies, he gets drunk and nearly dies by suicide. At the last minute, he chooses to go on living because he has another family to protect.

“And the Southerners knew the only thing that could break the grip of the heat was an old-fashioned, earth-shaking storm.”

The narrator describes the Watts Uprising as a storm that descended upon Los Angeles. Everyone could feel the heat that the tensions produced, and those from the South knew that only a storm could diffuse hot, tense days.

“The body of the city itself was at a virtual standstill—but within it, the cells rampaged freely, cancerous with life.”

Although Los Angeles came to a standstill due to the dangers of being outside, the protestors were aching to destroy the city as a way to show they had power over some aspect of their lives.

“And now he knew, and discovered in himself, something fresh and untouched, still capable of wonder.”

Frank thought that the war had destroyed all that was good within him. Meeting and falling in love with Alma showed him that he was still capable of being happy.