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A Badge of Courage
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Police Brutality, Corruption, and Systemic Racism
Healing, Progress, and Collective Consciousness
Justice, Perspective, and Ambiguity
Individuals vs. Institutions
Action vs. Symbolic Gesture
Summary
Analysis
Smith interviews Elvira Evers, a general worker and cashier at Canteen Corporation. Evers is a Panamanian woman dressed in a plaid shirt. She holds a baby in her lap. Evers describes the looting that occurred in her store. She heard someone throw a bottle and felt a sudden moist, tingling sensation and saw that she was bleeding. Evers’s friend, Frances, inspected her and told her she’d been shot. Evers was in disbelief, lamenting how she’d never done anything to “those people.”
Evers’s monologue offers the perspective of another of the riots’ victims. Evers doesn’t explicitly condemn the rioters, but the “us vs. them” mentality that is at the core of LA’s racial tensions in the late 20th century comes through in her designation of the rioters as “those people.”
Themes
Evers and Frances rushed to the hospital, where an examination confirmed that Evers’s baby’s heart was still beating. She recalls how her doctor told her they didn’t know how deep the bullet had gone and that they would need to operate on her to be safe. They’d also remove the baby. This was the last thing she remembered. Later on, she heard Dr. Thomas announcing the birth of a healthy baby girl. The doctors had removed a bullet from the baby’s elbow. If the baby hadn’t “caught [the] bullet in her arms,” mother and baby would’ve been dead. “So it’s like / open your eyes, / watch what is goin’ on.”
The wisdom Evers finds in her baby having “caught [the] bullet in her arms” becomes a metaphor for transcending racial tension: people must “open [their] eyes” to the world around them—to disparate races, cultures, and ways of being—if they want to survive. Smith emphasizes Evers’s remark to suggest that a major contributing factor to the riots was people not knowing or looking after their neighbors, which led to a broader collapse of community.
Themes
