Presciently and timely 1994 interview with Author Walter Mosley #racism #in America
Introduction to Interview
Crime novelist Walter Mosley writes out of a need to show how race may dominate people’s way of seeing life. His portrayal of the detective, Easy Rawlins expresses, in a moving and profound way, the experience of a black man living in the white world of Los Angeles during the beginning years of the second half of the 20th century. Easy, as the narrative’s protagonist, acts out of a knowing awareness of how a rigid, racially-narrow social order can rule life. He embodies a compassionate and wise understanding of convention’s unjust realities. And perhaps he also now leaves us a gift: a perceptive, reflective window through which to gaze upon our present, national tragedies of prejudice and racial hatred. Let us together hope that now and in the future we might “seek good, and not evil, that you may live; … Hate evil, and love good, And establish justice in the gate” (Amos 5:14, 15).
RIW Boulder July, 2015
From:
Interview with Walter Mosley, May 26, 1994, pp. 95-101, in Gross, Terry. “All I Did Was Ask,” Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians, and Artists. Hyperion (New York): 2004.
[Page numbers on the top of each page]
96 WALTER MOSLEY
Describe Easy’s best friend, Mouse, who always gets into trouble?
I see Mouse as the hero of the world that Easy is talking about. He’s a sociopath. He’s very violent. He’s willing to kill people, and it does, not affect him. Easy is the hero of these books because these books are about him. But in the world Easy lives in, Mouse is really the hero. He’s the man who’s willing to stand up and fight and not be pushed down for any reason. Not for a political motive, but just because he’s crazy. He’s been driven crazy by the world he Itves in.
Did you ever know men like Mouse?
Actually, I based Mouse on a friend of my father’s – a man who used to hijack liquor trucks and bring cases of liquor to our house when I was a kid. And he would come over and say, “Well, Roy, why don’t you keep these bottles of liquor for a week and I’ll come back and get them later.” When he would come back of course, my father would have drunk a couple of bottles. So the Guy would say, “Well, you’ll have to pay me for those bottles now.” Finally, he was in a crap game in a barbershop in downtown LA., and he murdered a guy. The guy owed him a dime, and he didn’t want to pay it. So he killed him. He’s in jail now.
Did you grow up thinking, “How can a guy kill somebody over a dime?”
Well, actually, I understood that. You know, if it’s not worth it to kill somebody over a dime, is it worth it to kill somebody over a million dollars?
If you don’t have a dime, or if you come from a place where you have to fight for everything that you have, then you just fight. Its a natural reflex, because when you stop fighting, that’s when you’re going to lose.
Why do you think an insult can incite somebody to murder?
If you’re living in a neighborhood where your rep is the only thing that have •and if people feel that they can insult you and push you around, well, then you’re going to lose everything.
WALTER MOSLEY 97
You have to learn to fight for things that seem ridiculous from an external point of view. But internally, they make more sense.
The life that Mouse was living, and the life that Easy is very close to, is a thing where you have to fight over everything. You stop discriminating between when you fight and when you don’t fight. You just are always willing to fight.
There’s an opening quote in Black. Betty before the narrative of the book begins. It’s headed “Ghetto Pedagogy.” Would you read it and tell us where it comes from?
This is a conversation I had with my father when I was a little boy.
Ghetto Pedagogy Dad? Yes? Why do black, men always kill each other? Long pause. Practicing.
When your father said “practice,” what did that mean to you?
There’s a lot of anger and rage in the black community, but at that time, black people couldn’t exercise that rage on the people outside the community who had caused it – so they took it out on each other. In a way, it was getting ready for something that might not ever happen. But certainly it’s getting ready for something.
Were you exposed to much violence when you were growing up?
I don’t think there was as much violence when I was a child as there is now. However, there was a lot of violence in everyday life, a lot of anger, a lot of rage, a lot of despair. I feel that I react more to psychological violence than physical violence. Physical violence is kind of easy to avoid. But there’s a psychological violence in every day life that black people, and poor people in general, experience in America.
98 WALTER MOSLEY
What was the psychological violence you were most exposed to when you were young?
People who were angry all the time, people who were upset all the time, people who felt that other people were trying to take advantage of them – sometimes they were right and sometimes they were wrong. Confrontations about everything – about how much something cost, about where you were going.
I remember coming out of a restaurant with my father and my mother when I was about twelve. There was valet parking, and so my father comes out, and he gives the guy his ticket. Then another guy comes out after us, a white guy. He gives the parking guy the ticket. The valet goes directly to get the white guy’s car and brings it back. My father goes up to the valet, and he says in a very loud voice. “Well, listen, you know, I want you to understand, I’m not going to give you a tip. And I’m not giving you a tip because you went and got that man’s car before you got my car. But I was first.” I was twelve. I was very embarrassed by this whole thing. But my father was angry. He needed to express that. I think that went on an awful lot when I was a child.
Do you think he was right in doing that?
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. No question about it.
Is it hard to grow up surrounded by so much anger, seeing slights all around you, and not wind up obsessed with victimization?
One of the things that Easy experiences in the books is that sometimes when he’s expecting a slight, it doesn’t happen. And sometimes when he least expects it, it does happen. Sometimes it’s not from white people – it’s from black people. It’s very hard to figure out where you stand in the world.
It’s hard not to feel you’re a victim, especially when you are, in certain ways. But then you have to understand that we’re all victims. And that your job is to live your life and to survive, not to worry about what somebody next to you has or doesn’t have, or what they’re thinking.
WALTER MOSLEY 99
Your father grew up in the segrtgated South. Did he tell you stories about the violence he was exposed to there?
One day my father sat me down and told me about every person he’d ever seen die. It was just amazing. Little children killing each other-black children – black people killing white people, white people killing black people, everybody killing each other, people being hung, people dying because there was not proper protection on their jobs. Then he went to World War II. And he talked about all the people that he saw die in World War II. He worked in statistics, so he typed up the names of all the Americans who had died. After that, he came back to the South and found that most of his old friends who didn’t go to war had also died – in these petty and stupid little fights and arguments, and from disease. So he moved to Los Angeles. It took my father a long time to tell me about all of these deaths. At the end of it he said, “So then, Walter, I came to L.A., and I knew I was finally free. I was in a land where these kind of things weren’t going to happen anymore.” He sits down in a diner, and the guy next to him has a heart attack, keels over, and falls on my father and dies. It was a good way to end it because it was a funny story. But he was trying to tell me there’s segregation, there’s violence because of racism, and from ignorance and poverty – but also, we all die.
Did your mother also come from the South?
My mother came from New York City. She is Jewish, from Eastern European stock. Her father was a doctor and very dominant in a lot of ways. She needed to get away from him and that family. My father needed to get away from Jim Crow. They were both people looking for new lives, new ways. You notice in LA. that everybody is looking for a new life.
Some white people who haw married black people have been in the absurd situation of finding that their families have disowned them for marrying a black person–
And black people, too.
100 WALTER MOSLEY
Did anything like that happen on either side of your family?
Well, it did to some degree. And it was very funny. The matriarch of my father’s side of the family liked my mother, so she could never be completely ostracized. She got along with her, invited her over, and would do things. But some of the family didn’t like her. That kind of wore off after a while, and they got along.
On my mother’s side of the family, my grandfather just didn’t understand. Even though he was a doctor, he didn’t really think that black people and white people were the same species – not only not the same race, but the same species.
A very funny thing happened. Once he came to visit to see his grandson because my mother had demanded it. He was taciturn the whole time, and then went back East. In the meantime, my father built a whole house in our backyard, floored it, walled it, plumbed it, wired it. Did everything. My grandfather came back, and he saw this house, and saw that my father had built it. In a funny way, my father proved that he was better than my grandfather, because my grandfather would have loved to do something like that, and couldn’t. After that, my grandfather really liked him. It was a very “country thing,” you know, because my grandfather was from a rural background, too. They got along great after that.
On the whole, did both families get along?
Oh, yeah. When I was thirteen, I couldn’t have a bar mitzvah, so I had a big party. We invited both sides of the family over. My, aunt Fanny, and my uncle Hiram, and my godfather, Hollister P. Fontano, and the Douglas family. Hollister, who was six foot five, and the jokester on my Father’s side of the family, and Hiram, who only four foot nine, and the jokester on the other side, would stand in a comer, telling each other jokes. It was wonderful.
Sense of place is central in your fiction, LA. is treated almost as a character in your Easy Rawlins series. How did you happen to choose Greenwich Village as the place you want to llve?
WALTER MOSLEY 101
Well, you know, it’s interesting. There are a lot of reasons, social reasons. One, it’s a pretty safe place to live. It’s nice. It’s easy. Different kinds of people live there. Asians, hispanics, blacks, whites, straight people, gay people. But also, the classes live together. One of the wonderful things about Manhattan that’s different from LA, and other places in the country is that it’s not separated by class so much. You could have somebody who’s living in a rent-controlled apartment –an old Italian lady, maybe ninety years-old – And next door, Charles Kuralt. Down the street, Roy Lichtensteln lives. I like that.
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