BOOK REVIEW / Climbing over the tacks and splinters in LA: 'No Crystal Stair' - Lynell George: Verso, 18.95 pounds

LYNELL GEORGE's book about Los Angeles appears just as the city prepares for the civil rights case involving the four policemen who beat up Rodney King last year. A black journalist on LA Weekly, George has gathered together 21 pieces of reportage, pen portraits and essays. They describe what she calls the 'dark thicket south of Pico, south of the I-10 freeway, the heart of 'the community', the interzone known as South Central LA.' This is the place where few whites dare to roam, the place that burst into riots last year.

Only five of the essays in the book, however, were written after the unrest. So we are shown not so much the aftermath of the violence as the life that existed before the camera crews arrived. As the author stresses over and over, the media have for years 'ignored the survivors'.

What you come away with is a strong sense that the black community in Los Angeles is as self-reliant and well organised at grass roots level as any other ethnic community in America. Church life is still strong, from the gospel choirs to the youth clubs to the endless 'fish-bakes' and fundraisers. In one chapter, George traces, in meandering style, the full range of parish life at Ward AME (African Methodist Episcopal Church). She contrasts her own staid United Methodist church (no soloists, no dancing in the aisles) with Ward's long, joyous services where 'worship is a celebration of the gift of life'.

She watches ju-jitsu practice and 'respect workshops' at the Ward Family Life and Education Center, where the instructor's aim is to instil some self-respect in the young before they've had 'a taste of sex, drugs, alcohol, or 'kickin' it' on the corner'. That is, he admits, before the age of 13. Any older and they're considered lost.

Similarly, the author charts the struggles of 'African-Americans' to find an alternative to the crumbling state education system. She contrasts Muir School - 'Killer Muir', with its 25 per cent drop- out rate and 50 per cent yearly teacher turnover - with the strict, successful Marcus Garvey private school, where Brother Reginald X - in a 'steam- pressed, steel-gray suit and crimson tie, and a two-inch part carved into the side of his close cropped fade' - drills the kids with his booming voice.

George's focus on the everyday is both uplifting and depressing - and certainly throws up some new material. Brave people run drop-in centres and helplines in a neighbourhood where they admit 'one of the main businesses is drugs', while the Black Korean Alliance works to stop two interdependent ethnic groups from blowing each other away over matters of a few cents. She reveals, though, that blacks who came to Los Angeles in the Forties, looking for an escape from the Jim Crow South, were greeted with cool stares and crosses burning in the surrounding hills.

'The Reagan years,' says one, 'made racism comfortable. It wasn't until 1984, for instance, that anyone called me 'nigger'.' In the words of George's favourite poet, Langston Hughes, Los Angeles was 'no crystal stair' for many blacks. It was full of tacks, splinters and bare patches. But they kept on climbing.

The notorious Los Angeles 'gangsta' rapper Ice Cube describes himself as a reporter, telling the neighbourhood the way it is, but this shows how little has been written from within South Central. Lynell George's work calls into question the media's tunnel vision of crack babies, drive- by shootings and absent fathers, at one point observing: 'KCBS newlywed nighttime anchors Jim and Bree feign thoughtfulness from a remote billboard.' Her most caustic comments are reserved for Police Chief Daryl Gates, but the news media are not far behind.

The gang 'truce' called during the riots is supposedly still on, but the shooting was back in full swing after a month and Los Angeles's murder rate rose to a record 800 last year. No Crystal Stair offers few solutions to the city's current troubles, and no quick thrills either. But with Rodney King's civil rights trial now under way, plus the trial of the LA Four (the men filmed beating up the truck driver Reginald Denny), it is a quiet but well-timed reminder of what's at stake.