As promised yesterday, my best effort today riding the bus to and from work to get Walter Mosley's latest, Little Green, back to the library to stop the overdue charges from piling up. Leaving the books to return with some cash, and big cash to pick up my fall wardrobe with my at home menfolk tomorrow, I can focus all my tension on one spot: the likely chance that my scorers will not finish review grant applications by the 18th. I will get not only gray hair but ulcers from this potential failure.
On to Little Green ... unlike J D Robb whose "in death" series I can no longer finish, there is something about Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries that is always fresh, violent, racial but fresh. Mosley has a clear, authentic voice for place and time and although I find it alien, it is believable. Easy has certain primitive ethics that are never breached given drugs, crimes, seedy friends as well as antagonists.
Little Green is a dupe, a pawn, against whom the turmoil of late 60s California hiipiedom is played out. Drug money, free love, and subcultures of opportunistic sellers and changing family values is played out. Easy himself is broken and more than half dead as the story unfolds. He recovers to find his key value is maintaining a family structure, a sort of last ditch Daniel Patrick Moynahan quest before the ghetto culture completely dissolves into fatherless homes, drug dealing, pimping and gang violence. As bleak as this story is, the reader knows it will only get worse and Easy and his side kick Mouse for all their abilities to dodge bullets and best bad guys are the Don Quixote and Sancho Panza of their decade.
On page 163, Mosley succinctly describes the voice, culture and fears of his heritage: " He and ,I as different as we were in age and temperament. had been reared in the same atmosphere: the ether of perpetual vulnerability and subsequent lifelong fear. Black people in America at that time, and all the way back to our first conveyance, the slave ship, had received common traits. From the so-called white man, these attributes were merely hair texture, skin color, and other physical characteristics. But our true inheritance was the fear of being notices, and worrying about everything from rain collapsing the walls around us to the casual glance that might lead to lynching. We -- almost every black man, woman, and child in America -- inherited anxieties like others received red hair or blue eyes."
Easy and Mouse's and many supporting characters share this common DNA and express their actions as dominant genes
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