"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

At the same time that Rawlins seems acquainted with virtually everyone in the black community, he remains fundamentally isolated, a marginal figure in South Central L.A.

His isolation both increases his effectiveness and provides him with a means to comment on the corruption that pervades both the white and black communities. In White Butterfly, Rawlins tells us that he "once thought that businessmen had some kind of honor or code" but that he is now "straightened out about that" (130). "The police," he tells us later, "could come to your house today and drag you from your bed. They could beat you until you swallow teeth and they can lock you in a hole for months" (270). In fact, everything and everyone in L.A. seems caught up in its corruption, sometimes even Rawlins himself. As one character in Devil in a Blue Dress comments to Rawlins," 'Easy, walk out your door in the morning and you're mixed up in something' " (19). Similarly, at the end of White Butterfly, Rawlins listens to Quinten Naylor, a black police detective who has derided Rawlins, apologize:

"I always thought that I could work inside the police and keep my hands clean. I put myself above you. Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I think you live right. But maybe I'm not so much better." (283)(9)

These moments clearly echo Chandler's Philip Marlowe, who comments in the famous ending to The Big Sleep:

What did it matter where you lay once you were dead? In a dirty sump or in a marble tower on top of a high hill? You were dead, you were sleeping the big sleep, you were not bothered by things like that. Oil and water were the same as wind and air to you. You just slept the big sleep, not caring about the nastiness of how you died or where you fell. Me, I was part of the nastiness now. (Omnibus 139)

All that remains possible is some kind of allegiance to a masculine-warrior moral code. Even if unjustly assaulted by the police - and Rawlins is often called upon to demonstrate his extraordinary physical courage and endurance, because in each novel he is arrested and brutally beaten by the police - he must uphold this code. In the end of each novel, he uncovers the murderer, no matter what the personal cost. In fact, this devotion to an abstract sense of duty contributes to the destruction of his marriage in White Butterfly.

Rawlins's acceptance of a hardboiled detective moral code may also be seen in his adoption of what might be termed an individualist philosophy, one in which his own experience, rather than larger historical patterns, takes precedence and gives meaning to his life. Rawlins explicitly locates the cause of all of his suffering in A Red Death not in racial terms but in terms of individuality and masculinity: "I suffered all of this because I wasn't, and hadn't been, my own man" (236-37). Later, he rejects larger historical explanations when he comments that

I didn't even believe in history, really. Real was what was happening to me right then. Real was a toothache and a man you trusted who did you dirt. Real was an empty stomach or a woman saying yes, or a woman saying no. Real was what you could feel. History was like TV for me, it wasn't the great wave of mankind moving through an ocean of minutes and hours. (259)