Power and Knowledge in Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress - Critical Essay

African American Review, Spring, 2001 by Marilyn C. Wesley

As an influential writer and speaker, Douglass demonstrated power previously restricted by literacy laws largely to whites. This violation of the racial prohibition of knowledge and physical aggression are presented in Douglass's Narrative as linked declarations of full humanity. Yet, paradoxically, the greater educational opportunity for blacks during ensuing decades separated these two prerogatives. In contrast to Douglass's militant assertions, Booker T. Washington connected institutional learning at Tuskegee Institute with patterns of accommodation: "The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly..." (37). [6]

Influential later works from different political perspectives continued to assert the divergence of knowledge and power. Although Richard Wright, unlike Washington, presented aggression as resistance to accommodation in

Native Son (1940), in the autobiographical Black Boy (1945) he proposed black literacy as an alternative to violence. In his 1964 Autobiography, Malcolm X portrayed the continuing schism between knowledge and power in his perceptions of the differences between blacks in two different Boston neighborhoods in the 1940s:

What I thought I was seeing there in Roxbury were high-class, educated, important Negroes, living well, working in big jobs and positions. Their quiet homes sat back in their mowed yards. These Negroes walked along the sidewalks looking haughty and dignified .... (48)

I spent the first month in town with my mouth hanging open. The sharp-dressed young "cats" who hung on the corners and in the poolrooms, bars and restaurants, and who obviously didn't work anywhere completely entranced me. (51)

The most important difference between the classes of "the Hill" and the ghetto is symbolized in Malcolm X's account by a Roxbury teenager named Laura, "a high school junior, an honor student" who "really liked school. She said she wanted to go on to college. She was keen for algebra, and she planned to major in science" (71). Although her attraction to the hip style of Malcolm's world eventually leads to Laura's degradation, initially she makes him feel "let down, thinking of how I had turned away from the books I used to like when I was back in Michigan" (72). For Malcolm the energetic black lower-class cultural style he is so attracted to leads him into a life of frenetic violence that excludes the pursuit of education, which he associates with an enervated black middle class. In prison, however, he pursues an ambitious program of self-education, and in his later role as a race leader is able to combine the knowledge he had previously associated with the black middle classes with the force he connected to l ower-class experience in the rhetorical stance of the Black Muslim movement.

As this brief analysis indicates, the terms knowledge and power, central to the detective genre, are, within the context of black culture, historically determined, racially loaded, and gender-inflected. Accordingly, the meditation on these issues in Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress is from the outset historicized and politicized. [7] "I was surprised to see a white man walk into Joppy's bar," the book commences. "When he looked at me I felt a thrill of fear, but that went away quickly because I was used to white people by 1948" (1). This sentence suggests that former patterns of black capitulation to white authority were in the process of change in the period just after the Second World War. Thus, before the detective conundrum is even introduced, its purpose is established: the detective's discovery of the implications of an emergent black empowerment. Easy Rawlins's qualifications for the career of detection that begins in this work include a high school education; his ability to speak "proper English," comb ined with the savvy to "express [himself] in the natural 'uneducated' dialect of [his] upbringing" (10) when the occasion calls for it; and his experience as a black soldier in World War II--abilities suggesting the juncture of knowledge and power which the plot unfolds.