Wisdom went with the words at Native Son

By Timothy Pratt

Friday, May 2, 2008 | 2 a.m.

The first black senator in Nevada’s Legislature, corporals and coaches, the first black women in the fire departments of Clark County and Las Vegas, directors of programs to help gang members, engineers, no-hitter pitchers — they all learned something at Native Son.

For 17 years, until it closed Thursday, the shop on D Street was the place to go for books about black history and culture. But it was a lot more than that.

Its founder, 65-year-old retired firefighter Samuel Smith, was as much guru as he was salesman at what was always more of a clubhouse than a store.

Now all Native Son’s books, posters, crafts, movies and records have been packed away. Now there’s nowhere in town you can easily find “Hebrewisms of West Africa” or “Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers — Live!”

Or get a quicker answer to Smith’s favorite question for youngsters: “What’s 75 times 75?”

Smith sat in a folding chair Wednesday as the last cardboard boxes were hauled out the door. It proved impossible for him to convey what he had accomplished between the store’s concrete walls and dirty carpet all those years. Especially because Smith would rather talk about anything but himself — like people throughout history who share the last name of whoever is sitting across from him, for example.

Many others, however, can speak to the store’s value to a city barely older than a century, to a part of town, West Las Vegas, long in decline.

“It hurts a community to lose a place that builds community,” says historian Michael Green, co-author of “Las Vegas: A Centennial History.”

“You shave off little pieces and eventually they’re all gone,” he says.

Though Smith doesn’t pat himself on the back, his values are always on his sleeve, even as the contents of his bookstore, the launchpad for a generation, are being loaded onto a Ryder truck.

“There’s nothing like holding a book in your hands, or engaging in human discourse,” he says. He slices the air with his right hand. He slaps the carpet with his right foot. He engages you with a sharp “Huh? I can’t hear you.” The skin around his eyes crinkles as he cackles with his tongue through his teeth.

Smith is in session.

“People who study calculus don’t go to jail.” Slice. Slap. Cackle.

Neither do the people who shopped at Native Son. Or those who attended Smith’s free classes in math and reading aimed at preparing students for fire department entrance exams.

Take Melvin Ennis. Now 43, he has been at the store since it opened. His take on books at the time: “If it didn’t have pictures in it, I wasn’t interested.” Smith challenged him to read four books a month. Now he runs a program to help gang members at the Walnut Recreation Center. A few weeks ago, he bought $400 worth of books to start a library for those teenagers, who are more familiar with guns than poet Langston Hughes.

Ennis says he wishes more of the hundreds of people Smith helped over the years would have remembered Native Son — and bought more books there — after they “moved on up.” Smith says the store long ago stopped making money, the main reason for his shutting its doors.

Ennis credits Native Son with encouraging his 14-year-old daughter to write poetry. She studies at the nearby Andre Agassi College Preparatory Academy.

The academy has also learned from Smith. Mike Maxwell, Agassi’s assistant middle school principal, bought copies of “To Be Popular or Smart: The Black Peer Group” at Native Son. He used the books to help teachers understand their students, most of whom are black.

Newcomers to the valley have also found their way to Smith’s store. Gene Tate moved here in 2003 from East Palo Alto, Calif., bringing with him support from the San Francisco Giants for a youth baseball league he had been managing for a decade.

Baseball had always been a “carrot.” “You get attention on the sports side, then you introduce other elements,” Tate says. Those other elements include reading, especially about blacks in culture and history. Tate found books on those subjects at Native Son.

Five years later, Tate estimates he has turned more than 100 youths on to books about scientists such as George Washington Carver, baseball players such as Dock Ellis. Tate makes them write reports after reading.

“You can’t get these books at Borders or Barnes & Noble,” he says.

One day, he met three engineers in an hour at Smith’s store. Another day, to his surprise, he shook hands with the legendary no-hitter pitcher himself, Ellis. Turns out Ellis’ godson also shopped at Native Son.

Smith “knows a little bit about everything and everybody,” Trina Jiles says. She was a 21-year-old receptionist in 1995 when she met Smith.

“He asked if I was interested in becoming a firefighter,” Jiles recalls. “I told him I wasn’t. He said there were no black women in the Clark County Fire Department. I said, ‘That can’t be.’ ”

The next day she went to visit Smith at Native Son. “The first thing he said was, ‘Let’s see how many push-ups you can do.’ I was wearing a dress. I dropped to the floor and did 20. He said, ‘You’ll be all right.’ ”

Jiles began taking Smith’s free math and reading classes at the store. In early 1996, she passed all her tests and became Clark County’s first black female firefighter. Twelve years later, she’s an arson investigator with the department.

She gives Smith credit for her achievements. “He makes you want to give back,” she says.

The store, she says, “is part of our history.”

Native Son opened less than two years before the riots that followed the 1992 not-guilty verdict given the Los Angeles policemen who had been filmed beating Rodney King.

Steven Horsford, now a state senator, was 19 at the time. He remembers meeting with other young black men at Native Son after the West Las Vegas riots resulted in a curfew.

“We talked about what to do as a community to make sure our concerns were heard,” Horsford says.

The store was “a refuge, a place to gain self-knowledge.”

Years later, Horsford went on to direct Nevada Partners, an organization that trains people for jobs. He still does that, in addition to being one of Nevada’s three black senators.

Now he’s talking to Smith about taking his books out of storage and keeping Native Son alive at the Nevada Partners building on Lake Mead Boulevard, only blocks from its D Street location.

Horsford says his organization, which owns the building, would offer the space for free.

“Any time we can preserve a community asset like the Native Son, we should,” he says. “I want young people to be able to access the books I accessed.”

Horsford says there’s one condition: Smith has to teach all who come through.

The senator needn’t be concerned. Smith can’t resist.

“You never know who you can reach,” he says before looking over his D Street domain one last time Wednesday afternoon.