LOVE AND CONSEQUENCES

L.A.’s South Central ghetto, reduced to cliché in a raft of books, movies and rap songs, is seen afresh in this harrowing yet hopeful memoir.

Taken away from an abusive mother when she was five, the author spent three years in temporary foster-care placements, where conditions were “far worse than [those] I was removed from.” Gang-ridden South Central was actually an improvement, even though Jones was part-white, part-Native American, and the neighborhood was almost entirely African-American. Her new home was headed by Big Mom, a force of nature who held down two jobs and kept the Sabbath while raising the four children of her crack-addicted daughter, as well as the author. In calm, declarative prose, Jones lays out her experiences. For all her work and love, Big Mom quickly lost her two grandsons to the lure of the neighborhood Bloods. Her foster daughter soon signed up with the gang as well. “I choose to write as we chose to speak in the world of my childhood,” Jones tells readers, explaining her use of nearly impenetrable slang and swapping the letter b for c: In this world, members of rival gangs hated each other so much that “Bloods smoke bigarettes and Crips celebrate C-day rather than B-days.” The years are a steady march of deaths and the crushing disappointments of poverty, lit up only by the occasional hint that Jones, who’s urged by a teacher to think about college, might have the inclination as well as the smarts to escape the gang trap laid out for her. For all the agony and heartache that lashes across the pages, there’s never a hint of self-pity—just the voice of a passionate advocate who demands that the people she grew up with, well-rendered in bright, short portraits, be seen and remembered as human.

The hardened voice of experience, steely and honest.