Windows To The World

Devil in a Blue Dress

Walter Mosley



 Easy Rawlins has one thing he loves more than anything else in his life and that is his house and home, his own patch of property that is his to call his own. It may not be large but he loves everything about it from the dahlias at the front gate to the shingles on the roof'.  But he was fired from his work at the factory because for once he just couldn't tolerate the lack of respect and the different standard that was set for men of color. His main problem is that it is nearing the end of June and come July 1st his mortgage payment is due. 

As he muses about his problems over a beer at his friend Joppy's bar he considers how he would not be where he was if not for his interactions with men  and women he called his friends but he  thinks 'So many people have walked into my life for just a few minutes, and kicked up some dust and they are gone away. My father was like that; my mother wasn't much better.


This night at Joppy's he is offered a job by a man in a white suit, white actually from head to foot. The job is to find a girl for this Mr. Albright.  Her name is Daphne Monet and a rich man is looking for her, she has left him for reasons of her own. Easy is hesitant because he senses danger but Joppy who acts frightened of Albright encourages him to find the girl. With the promise that no harm will come to Daphne Easy begins the search. He first goes to John's a run down music dive that gets  the big name artists because John gave them a leg up when they needed it. It was always jumping.


 As Mosley describes it 'California was like heaven for the Southern Negro. People told stories about how you could eat fruit right off the trees and get enough work to retire one day. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn't like the dream. Life was still hard in LA and if you worked every day you still found yourself on the bottom. But being on the bottom wasn't so so bad if you could come to John's now and then and remember what it felt back home in Texas, dreaming about California.'


Before the night is over, the first of Easy's friends is dead, lovely Coretta who had no harm in her but she had a loose tongue and she might have told something she knew. Easy, although he had been in the war and has killed people is still innocent enough to be horrified and traumatized by the deaths, particularly the murders of people he knows. He still somehow expects to see them one more time again, as the song goes. Easy tries to get out of the job but there is no going back. Unlike his namesake the biblical prophet Ezekiel he cannot perform miracles or tell the future.

Amid double crosses and betrayals, the worst of which come from friends Easy
is in trouble. Suspected of murder by the police who never ask questions without softening a black suspect up with beatings and threats Easy finds himself in a different world. The reader finds herself in a different world as well, a world of racism unimagined by anyone not there in those days. The liberties I have always taken for granted I must appreciate. Easy is almost killed by a group of college thugs who most likely in other circumstances would have been considered gentlemen, just because a white girl spoke to him and he answered.


 The story is not about that kind of thing, it is about how Easy Rawlins becomes a detective, begins to listen to his inner voice that kept him alive in the war, and determines to have a life in which he can control how he is perceived.