BOOKS & CULTURE 3
Walter Mosley, Modern America’s Answer to de Tocqueville, Is Something of a Mystery
This shaman’s books can take you on a spiritual journey without LSD, Peyote or Ayahuasca
The great thing about books is how they can open our minds to perspectives beyond our life’s experiences.
Near the end of Walter Mosley’s novel Fortunate Son, a simple sentence blinded me with its brilliance. And it reminded me how I could learn more from one book by a real writer than the last six years of reading content.
“He didn’t retain much of the knowledge he perused; he didn’t expect to collect ideas but merely to be exposed to them.” — Walter Mosley, Fortunate Son
Isn’t that the essence of our best hope for social media networks? That we learn compassion and empathy by hearing the perspectives of other people?
Sadly, social media seems to do the opposite.
The echo chambers of Facebook and Twitter only amplify our differences. And assholes of every color and political persuasion stand on their anonymous soap boxes and scream “fire!” in crowded virtual theaters.
Like science fiction writers, Mosley uses the mystery genre to address society’s most incendiary issues.
You may know Mosley as the executive producer of the hit FX series “Snowfall” but I know him as a teacher.
Mosley published his first Easy Rawlins mystery, Devil in a Blue Dress, in 1990. You may have seen the Denzel Washington movie, but the book has so much more depth. With Easy Rawlins, Mosley crafted stories that influenced me more than my history textbooks.
As a young student, I felt proud of my country when I learned about Alexis de Tocqueville, the French traveler who defined our nation’s essence in his two-volume Democracy in America (1835 and 1840).
De Tocqueville believed our democracy was sustainable because everyone had a vested interest in preserving the system.
Fast forward forty-something years later, and Mosley opened my eyes with his descriptions of racism and police brutality in Post-Wold War II Los Angeles.
Los Angeles, my childhood home.
The place where I mourned the deaths of JFK, RFK, and MLK as a kid.
A place where a disturbed, middle-class child from a broken family could make every error possible and suffer no real consequences because of his skin color.
A place where I believed in the American dream but only because I was one of the people who benefited from the system.
If you feel the American dream is dead, you are only partly correct.
That dream was never real for people of color, even during the days when America fought to save the four freedoms coined in an FDR speech.
African Americans have served our country from the Revolutionary War to the war on terror and are still treated like second-class citizens.
The trained warriors who came back from World War I expected equal treatment. When they pushed back against Jim Crow America, white supremacists mounted wars of terror that started with the Red Summer in 1919. And how many of us only learned about the 1921 Tulsa massacre because we saw Watchmen on HBO?
WWII vets faced a less obvious form of discrimination hidden in the G.I. Bill. It denied African Americans the path to wealth through real estate that powered America during the 1950s and 1960s.
If you want to understand everything from the Watts Riots to Black Lives Matter, start by examining the policies that maintained the cycle of poverty.
With disarmingly simple language, Walter Mosley reveals dark secrets about America.
Problems that Easy Rawlins can’t solve in 313 pages.
Fortunate Son is a departure from Mosley’s usual whodunit. His novel reads more like a children’s story but symbolizes the relationship between the races in America.
Thomas is a sickly black child whose sensitivity and perception drive the story. When his mother dies, he begins a horrific journey thrust upon him by the color of his skin. Somehow, Tommy finds happiness in the smallest of things.
His golden-boy step-brother Eric wins at everything but feels empty. He can only find peace by searching out Tommy’s wisdom.
For people upset by the exaggerated journeys followed by a black child and his white step-brother remember this is a parable. Aesop’s fable set in the rough back alleys of Compton and the pristine private gardens in Beverly Hills.
The story is also autobiographical as it follows the path of Mosley’s childhood. He is the son of a Russian Jewish mother and a black father who escaped Louisiana after WWII. The events in the novel seem to reflect the discrimination and pain he must felt for being black as well as not being black enough.
As someone who has lived in, but not been accepted into either world, he is the rare writer who can create authentic characters of all colors, viewpoints and motivations.
Speaking for the author, Tommy shares an insight about Eric that symbolizes our inability to see the bigger picture.
“…a book that had the word America written down on it. And I was lookin’ at it, and then I saw that E-R-I-C was right in the middle of it. Eric was in the middle of America.” — Walter Mosley, “Fortunate Son”
In other words, we can’t see the forest for the trees because they are big, white, institutionally-powered racist motherfucking trees.
The only difference is in the way our blindness manifests itself. In Fortunate Son, Mosley examines white privilege. In 1999’s Walkin’ The Dog, he examined black anger in response to discrimination.
Many readers have overlooked Mosley because the mystery genre is not held in the same regard as fiction. But his life experiences and mind-altering prose make him one of the best chroniclers of the American experience.
America’s 21st-century answer to de Tocqueville.
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