Field of Drums

Every culture has a drum, every life has a rhythm, says percussionist Ndugu Chancler to an audience of so few that I am embarrassed for him. An event like this -- drummers from around the world, free, with parking, at noon, a Saturday on the heels of summer -- there should be a couple hundred folks filling up the clean white seats, at least. I am sitting up close, beneath a white canopy, third row, so eye contact with Chancler is easy. He's a passionate man -- I can hear it in his voice, see it in his excitement. After all, it is the 19th annual Watts Towers Day of the Drum Festival; Chancler is master of ceremonies, and Watts is his home. The towers are open for the first time since the '94 earthshake, and in the sunlight, Simon Rodia's broken glass hearts cast long, lovely shadows across the afternoon. A rare day indeed.

Drums bring us together, Chancler says, connect us with history, with the spirits. Drums communicate --- one soul to another. The congas talk to the bongos and the roto toms and the timbales and the dholaks and the rainsticks and the taiko and the snare drums. Drum to drum, drum to heartbeat, heartbeat to soul. I look at a woman sitting nearby, in purple African dress. Her dreads are tied up, wrapped in folded cloth, like a queen. She smiles, closes her eyes. There are a couple dozen African Americans in the audience. I am one of a few whites, Latinos and various others. Together we are a nice mix, but we are too few. There is ground and reason to meet, and yet, another rare opportunity lost. Sad, it is.

I am here with a West Indian friend, a drummer in his own right, from St. Thomas. He is anxious for the beat. It is his heritage, his roots, and he brings along a small Asian drum of sorts that he can keep time with. I wouldn't be here, were it not for him. A West Indian with rhythm in his blood can wander anywhere the rhythm calls. Watts, however, is not my world. The rhythm has never called me here. Yet with a few powerful words, Chancler has opened the gates onto this world. Very soon I will push them open even wider.

The first thing I notice as I cross the MTA tracks and turn down 107th Street are typeset signs that direct festival goers to the parking area. It is a dirt lot and the Explorer kicks up dust . Two men dressed in street clothes guide traffic, and welcome guests to the Watts Towers. The city of L.A. wants us here --of this I am quite sure. The gestures are everywhere: brightly-colored banners, healthy trees, pleasant winding paths, the LAPD. I had come here as a child, when I was too young for it to matter; today it matters. I look at all the small homes flanking the towers. They are neat and clean, some painted green, some pink, all shut up tight against the neighborhood. The bars on my windows in South Carthay are fashioned into the architecture, as ironwork. The bars on the windows around here are not for show.

I wonder if the locals feel reverence for the place, as I feel just now. Rodia's wire mesh towers, built over three decades beginning in the '20s, are like the pieces of Joseph's shining coat. Red and blue and orange and yellow, they are made of shells and bottles, bits of tiles and broken plates. They are an offering of sorts, an Italian laborer's gift to the future, a prayer for peace in a battle zone that the artist could perhaps envision. Standing before the tallest tower, some 100 feet high, is almost like being in church. I watch for signs of life coming from the houses, dogs, kids, bicycles, men mowing lawns, fixing cars. There is nothing. Intruders we must be.

The festival begins with Felipe Garcia Villamil, who blesses the grounds with Afro-Cuban chanting and prayer. It doesn't matter that I can't understand him. He is a holy man with a holy rhythm, and the audience, all of us, we listen. Then comes a troupe of drummers called the Rhythm Regiment Drum Corps, a group consisting of kids, some white with blonde hair, some Asian, some black, some Latino, some hip hop, some not, all drumming to the direction of Terry Moore, a small, mighty woman with an amazing grace that unifies two year olds with 12 year olds, children all, into a spectacular oneness, a whole that is like thunder among the small crowd of onlookers. I look at the little girls, the white ones and black ones, with their pony tails and their bows, and I think how lucky they are to be drawn together by the music. Their lives will be richer; their understandings of each other deeper. I grew up near Inglewood, before gangs and drugs and this culture of division and fear. A rich world mine was.