Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is that rare breed, a black detective in L.A. He is at home in the Chandleresque world of drugs, violence and casual murder. In Walter Mosley’s series, starting with Devil in a Blue Dress, we follow Easy from 1948, when he begins his career looking for a white beauty for a white man he met in a bar, to the 1960s in his most recent novel, Little Green, where he’s searching for a teenager amid the world of drugs and free sex.

In Mosley’s previous book, Blonde Faith, Easy has run his car off a cliff, not expecting to live. But in the opening pages of Little Green he awakes from a coma, having been picked up half-dead by his murderous friend Mouse, and nursed back to life by his daughter Feather. Ray wants Easy to find a teenaged boy named Evander, who Mouse, for reasons of his own, calls “Little Green.”

Mouse considers Easy his only friend, and given his profession, he is probably right. But Mouse has backed up Easy in several violent situations, and although Easy can barely sit upright he feels obligated to return the favor. He knows that if he stays in bed too long he will die. He compares himself to a shark, “Most fish can sleep after a fashion,” he says. “They get under a rock on the ocean floor or float with a big school of their brethren with guards posted around the edges. But some fish, like the shark, can never stop moving forward. If a shark stops moving he will suffocate in his sleep.” Mouse gives Easy a “permanent loan” of a bright red Plymouth Barracuda, and, weak as he is, Easy takes off to the house of a backwoods alchemist, Mama Jo, who gives him a concoction called gator’s blood. 

Gator’s blood transforms Easy into a hunter. He drives the Barracuda to the Sunset Strip area, where he thinks he might find Little Green. There he is introduced to the world of the hippies. Drugs are common, prostitution is side-by-side with free love, and Easy is invigorated by the hope and philosophy of the young. He meets a free spirit named Ruby, who shared LSD with the boy Evander. Evander, in his LSD trip, has gone off with a stranger named Maurice. Ruby helps in his search for Evander in the peace-loving, but often violent, streets of L.A. 

Mosley’s prose is closer to philosophic poetry. His language has the rhythmic cadence of the black south. His descriptions are masterful, from the fabric of the furniture to the taste of fear in the mouths of the poor.  Color is everywhere, not just in the titles of his novels, or the names of some of his characters. White people wear gray or dark clothes, black people wear green or purple suits, red or blue dresses.  In the middle, hippies wear long dresses, leather, or sometimes nothing at all. 

Integration is still not a reality for most people, but there is “a change in the wind and hope in the air.” In the hippie house, “all the old rules about gender and race, class and relationship, had been temporarily jettisoned for the hope that people could come together like any other social animal. There might have been a hierarchy, but this was a shifting thing, and the herd was more important than any temporary superior.”

But the violence of the slum is always there, and Easy gives as well as takes. “The word slum and the word slump are only separated by one hunchbacked letter,” says Jackson Blue, a black man who has made good in a white man’s world. “A slump is just a temporary kinda thing. The fact that you in a slump means you gonna come out of it sooner or later.” Easy has been in a slump, depressed and suicidal, but he comes out of his search for “Little Green” reborn.

“Words could be either glue or acid,” an old man tells Easy. “Words are the finest invention that human beings have ever made. They build bridges and burn ‘em down. Glue or acid, that’s what the words you say will be. But you got to be careful. Sometimes you might have both parts at the same time. You got to watch out, because some words will at first pull somebody close and then turn him against you in time.” 

Mosley is careful, and sometimes his words are glue and sometimes acid. In Little Green, he recreates the black man’s world of the 60’s, the reality of the aftermath of the Watts riots, the hate and hope of a transformative era.

Susan Guthrie Knight is a former teacher and big box management survivor who sometimes writes but more often reads. She lives surrounded by orchards just north of Gettysburg with her French Bulldog, Fannie.

 

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