Then there were “the flower ladies.” One day when I was visiting my parents, I found my mom sitting alone, crying. When I asked what was wrong, she hesitated, then told me that, while making bouquets and small talk, one of them casually said something anti-Semitic. She wouldn’t say what. The flower ladies didn’t know my mother was Jewish, but that didn’t make it any less painful.
“Mom, why didn’t you say something?” I asked. She just shook her head. Perhaps she thought that keeping our Jewish heritage under wraps would protect us, that it would be better for my dad professionally and better for the kids socially （in my entire grade, I knew of only two Jewish girls, both named Sandy）。 For my mother, her parents, and their parents before them, assimilation was often the key to survival and success.
My mother’s anxious ambivalence stayed just below the surface. I remember going through a phase on TODAY where I’d react to something vexing by ad-libbing, “Oy.”
One day after the show, my mom called.
“Please don’t say that,” she said. “It makes you sound so…New York.”
26
Florence and Normandie
IF I’D CLAIMED the moral high ground in the Duke interview, another story about race showed me just how much I （and so many others） had to learn. Only a few months later, in downtown LA, unarmed Rodney King was savagely beaten by four members of the LAPD—the whole thing caught on tape. Some call it the first viral video. The cops would be acquitted by a mostly white jury in a mostly white California suburb.
When the outrage boiled over into the streets—small businesses torched, police cars overturned and set ablaze—Bryant opened our broadcast this way:
“We’d like to say good morning on this Thursday, but frankly there is nothing good to be said about this last morning of April of 1992. This one’s a tough one.” Bryant never lost his cool, although sitting just inches away, I could feel how troubled he was. The riots would go on for six days and claim 63 lives.
Some of the worst violence occurred in downtown LA, where groups of young Black men dragged white drivers from their vehicles and beat them mercilessly. A hovering helicopter caught a skinny, long-haired white man at the intersection of Florence and Normandie being pulled from the shiny red cab of his tractor trailer and thrown to the ground. Then his assailants took turns delivering the beatdown—a roundhouse kick to the head, balletic leaping jabs; one dropped a cinder block on the man. The pavement around his limp body was coated with blood; the men picked his pockets before leaving him for dead.
The trucker, Reginald Denny, was immediately held up as the sacrificial victim, the face of phase two of this tragedy.
IN APRIL OF ’93, nearly a year after the riots, I was given the opportunity to interview Denny. That’s when I got to know Johnnie Cochran, Denny’s flamboyant Rolls-driving attorney—I became friendly with him and his wife, Dale. Johnnie had argued many police-brutality cases and had serious civil rights credentials. I couldn’t really see where a white trucker fit in that mix, except for the fact that he’d be at the epicenter of a media firestorm, and there was nowhere Johnnie would rather be.
I sat down with Denny in Cochran’s law-book-lined LA office. I wondered what kind of shape he’d be in and was relieved that he seemed okay in spite of a few dents in his face （he had pins in his cheeks and pieces of reconstructive plastic under the skin beneath his eyes） and a lower lip that didn’t match up with the top one, a result of his jaw being shattered. But Reggie was open, funny, and sweet—I liked him immediately.
At one point I laid my hand against the right side of his face. “It feels like some of your head is missing,” I said.
“It is,” Denny responded, putting his hand over mine and guiding it along the crater where his skull had been crushed.
Denny talked about the men who’d assaulted him, hoping they’d find a way to step out of the bad groove they were in—what he called the “fast train to nowhere.”
“I think what people find so remarkable about you, Reggie,” I said, “is that you don’t harbor any bitterness or resentment or hatred toward these people who have changed your life forever…what do you think should happen to them?”
“Oh God, I don’t know. What can be done to make them better people?” Denny said as the camera cut to me shaking my head. “That’s something that has to happen within themselves. They have to want to be productive and be good citizens.”