"The Black Dick": race, sexuality, and discourse in the L.A. novels of Walter Mosley - African American detective novels

African American Review, Summer, 1997 by Roger A. Berger

Mosley himself has commented that Rawlins "has taken on a tough job in the real world: he's trying to define himself in spite of the world, to live by his own system of values. He's trying to do what is right in an imperfect world. The genre may be mystery, but the underlying questions are moral and ethical, even existential" ("Black" 133). Ultimately, Rawlins's individualist philosophy is underpinned by masculinist self-reliance. In Black Betty, he visits Martin, a master cabinetmaker, who had functioned something like a sage in Rawlins's youth:

We used to go to his workshop when we were children and he'd lecture us about life.

"Always use your tools," he'd say. "Your tools and your house. That way they cain't take it away from ya. Don't live on no paycheck and don't never ask the man for a thing. You got what he want right here in yo' hands." He'd hold up a chisel or a pile of freshly smithed square nails. "That way you gonna be a man. A'cause that's what a man is - it's what we could do. You-all be thinkin' that bein' a man got something' to do wit' women, but that ain't true. Woman complement a man but he got to have his own if he wanna be wit' her. Shit! She wanna big dick what she need t'do is t'get her a horse."

Martin always made us laugh. He made us feel good about work and about who we were. Standing at his front door I realized that it was Martin who had defined my desire for property and my love of things done by hand. (151-52)

Rawlins's belief in an individualist philosophy explains many of his actions in the novels, specifically, as he suggests, his desire to own property: first his own house, then rental property, and last business real estate. In fact, the subplot of each novel concerns Rawlins's various attempts to maintain or expand his land ownership. Home ownership in particular gives him a sense of racial equality. As he tells us in Devil in a Blue Dress, "The thought of paying my mortgage reminded me of my front yard and the shade of my fruit trees in the summer heat. I felt that I was just as good as any white man, but if I didn't even own my front door then people would look at me like just another poor beggar, with his hand outstretched" (9). But Rawlins wants more than just home ownership; he wants to "own enough land that it would pay for itself out of the rent it generated" (52), and ownership of rental property reflects his desire to enter the white-American middle class. Indeed, in Black Betty, he has sunk much of his money into a scheme to build a shopping mall, perhaps the ultimate cultural icon of the postwar white-American middle class. His interest in joining the middle class is also reflected by his attempts, in all the novels, to gain a formal education. In A Red Death, Rawlins tells us about courses he's taking at Los Angeles City College - in particular, a class on Shakespeare. In White Butterfly, we see him read from Plato's Phaedo.

Still, Rawlins clearly feels anxious and uncomfortable about his social ambition. He believes, for example, that he must disguise his ownership of rental buildings. His apparent poverty makes him a more effective private eye: "Everyone knows," he tells us in A Red Death, "that a poor man's got nothing to lose; a poor man will kill you over a dime," and that is one reason that he keeps his "wealth a secret" (128). At the same time, Rawlins possesses almost a fanatical desire for material success: