For
Manhattanites, it is a day to savor. Thanks to a fierce storm that swept
through the area the smog that normally befouls the island's troposphere
is now somewhere over Manitoba. Or at least Buffalo. As a result, the view
out the upper floor window is spectacular. Below, the section of the metropolis
known as Midtown sparkles with exceptional clarity. And to the west, across
the glimmering Hudson, the New Jersey palisades look almost close enough
to touch.
The sun, normally seen in the city as a fuzzy, washed-out blob, is New Mexico-bright. As its rays pour into the room, unhindered by curtains or blinds, they create the illusion that Walter Mosley is bathed in a blinding, almost ecclesiastical light, an altogether incongruous effect considering that the writer's themes, as evidenced by his hugely popular series of books detailing the adventures of Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins and his psychopathic friend, Raymond "Mouse" Alexander, deal almost exclusively with murder, mayhem, and profound social unpleasantries such as poverty, prejudice, and perfidy.
Evidently unaware of Mother Nature's little practical joke, Mosley is hunched over a huge, scarred wooden desk, concentrating on a small notebook that sits open in front of him. The topmost page is covered from top to bottom with amoeba-like figures he has painstakingly drawn in black ink. As he mumbles a greeting, he patiently colors the interior of the protozoan sketches a light purple, wielding a fine-pointed brush with delicate, watchmaker-like precision. "This is the way I relax," he grins, explaining that he draws page after page of seemingly near-identical designs, then fills in the outlines in bright, cheerful hues.
While he paints, I let my eyes roam around the room. On a nearby table is Mosley's hat. It is an unusual type of headgear, a leather contrivance with a high crown and a narrow brim, a malleable, truncated top hat as it were. The fact that Mosley would wear an atypical chapeau is not surprising; he is a man who wears many hats: dabbler in art, writer of crime/mystery, science fiction fan, jazz and blues buff, computer expert, political/social activist ... but that's getting ahead of the story.
Except for Mosley, the hat is the only article in the entire cheerless room with any personality. The naked windows, the slightly musty smell, the virtual lack of any utilitarian device (other than a telephone) that would indicate everyday use all lead to an inescapable deduction: This is a meeting place of convenience.
Seemingly reading my mind, Mosley looks up. This is not his usual workplace, he explains. It is a place loaned to him by an unnamed friend for his use when he feels the need to get away, a high-rise burrow he can pop into when the world demands too much of his energy.
Because of the strong back-light his features appear indistinct: an oblong-shaped head topped by a crown of thinning, dark hair. The son of a Jewish mother and a black father, Mosley's skin is a creamy, light brown, the shade of the coffee at Cafe Du Mond in the New Orleans French Quarter. His voice is mellow, soothing, and totally accent less, unlike his characters who speak in the thick dialect of the Southern poor.
Closing his art book and putting away his painting tools, Mosley good-naturedly explains how he came to be a writer after a long career as a computer programmer, and how he ended up in Greenwich Village, on the opposite side of the country from his native Los Angeles.
In all began, he says, slipping into his story-teller's persona, roughly a quarter of a century ago when he dropped out of college and headed for Europe, secure in the knowledge that his high draft lottery number (234) guaranteed that he would not be called into service and sent to Indochina.
But even as a supposedly carefree youth his conscience was being tweaked by the highly developed sense of responsibility that would later be so evident in his writing. After several months of knocking around England, France, and Switzerland, he began feeling guilty about not living up to the expectations of his parents, who were both careerists with the Los Angeles Board of Education.
Abandoning his brief fling at hippiedom, he bought a ticket home. As the jetliner was cruising at 40,000 feet over the North Atlantic, Mosley began giving serious thought to the future. "I knew I needed a job," he says, "but I didn't want to be a doctor or a lawyer because that required a lot of commitment."
By the time his plane touched down at LAX some 14 hours later, Mosley had made up his mind. "I had decided I needed to learn a craft," he says. A few days later he signed up for computer classes.
This led to a job as a computer programmer with large insurance company in Vermont. That led to another job. And another. And another. In the mid Eighties, he wound up in New York, still young and increasingly intellectually restless. Before he left New England, he studied political theory at the University of Massachusetts/Amherst, but when he got to Manhattan his interests changed; a series of creative writing classes at City College of New York had opened broad new vistas.
Excited about his new-found intellectual freedom, in 1986 he began a novel about two black youths coming of age in southeast Texas. Their names are Mouse and Easy.
Called Gone Fishin' -- a title derived from one of the scenes -- the plot is based on a trip they take from their home in Houston to a small town on the Louisiana border where Mouse spent a brutal, unhappy childhood. A simple tale with an uncomplicated story-line, it revolves around Mouse's efforts to collect his mother's modest inheritance from his evil step-father. Easy plays a relatively minor role in the drama, serving mainly as a sort of narrator/observer.
The manuscript's strength is not so much in intrigue (it is not the "mystery" that later Easy Rawlins novels would be) as in the development of character and the insight Mosley brings into a world which few readers -- especially white, non-Southern ones -- have much knowledge.
It is set just before World War Two in a part of the country which was still very much separated along racial lines. In one wonderful scene that correctly captures the mood of the times, an elderly, prim white woman, Miss Dixon, helps a dangerously ill Easy by bringing him into her house, drawing a bath for him, and giving him clean clothes and a place to sleep. But she won't dine with him; it just wouldn't be right. This is what she tells him:.
You know it's not proper for white and colored to sit together. I mean, it'd be as much an insult to your people as mine if we were to forget our place.
The manuscript did one other thing too: it set in stone the fundamentals of character that Mosley would use later in other books. Although Mouse doesn't change much from novel to novel, Easy's maturation is remarkable..
In Fishin', for example, Easy, is a good-hearted but ignorant youth unable even of reading a newspaper. During the course of the book he comes to realize that the only possible way out for a man of his race and class is through education.
I looked at those papers and thought that if I could read what was in them I wouldn't have to think about those dogs; I thought that if I could read I wouldn't have to hang around people like Mouse to tell me stories, I could just read stories myself. And if I didn't like the stories I read then I could just change them ...
Mosley was so satisfied with his creation that he began shipping it around to various agents, hoping one would see enough merit in it to be able to sell it to a publisher. But this was 1988. It was before Terry McMillan, long before Dennis Rodman. In those days, it still was not proved that white readers would buy books about the black experience. As a result, the response to Fishin' was unanimous: It was universally rejected on grounds that it was "not commercial."
Swallowing his discouragement, Mosley kept writing. And he kept using the same principal characters: Easy and Mouse.
His second, soon to be successful, novel was called Devil in a Blue Dress. It picked up five or six years after Fishin' and the locale was Los Angeles, not Houston. In Devil, Easy has learned to read and has returned from fighting in Europe determined to pull himself out of the black ghetto.
In the short period between the time he wrote Fishin' and Devil, the commercial publishing scene had shifted dramatically; Where Fishin' was spurned, Devil was warmly accepted. It eventually was made into a movie by Carl Franklin with Denzel Washington playing Easy.
After Devil, Mosley's career began to gather momentum, each book proving more popular than the one before. A Red Death was next. It, in turn, was succeeded by White Butterfly, Black Betty, and, last summer, A Little Yellow Dog.
But that is only the beginning of the story, not the end.
Two things happened almost simultaneously to Mosley on his way to acclaim. One relates directly to public acceptance of Easy and Mouse; the other to the changes in Mosley's life that allowed him to speak with an increasingly powerful voice about the position of the black man in modern America.
Because of the success of the Easy Rawlins mysteries the same publishers who once felt that they would be lucky to give away Gone Fishin' suddenly awakened to its enormous potential; behind the scenes they began asking Mosley for permission to publish his original novel.
Mosley played coy. Intuitively feeling it could command a price higher than its dollar value, the author left it sitting in the bottom drawer. At least that's where it was until a few months ago when W. Paul Coates came into Mosley's life.
In some ways the men are almost as unalike as Easy and Mouse.
About the same time that Mosley was broadening his teen-age horizons in Paris, Coates was ducking rockets as an MP in Vietnam. Whereas Mosley came home and joined the establishment, Coates returned to become active in the ultimate African-American anti-establishment organization, the Black Panther Party.
While Mosley was working for big corporations like Mobil Oil and Dean Witter, Coates was trying to survive as a very small niche publisher specializing in African-American arcana, churning out a few hundred copies of non-mainstream books about blacks, books with titles like Early Negro Writing 1760-1837 by Dorothy Porter, Five Days on Board a Slave Vessel by Pascoe G. Hill (originally published in 1848), A Time of Terror by James Cameron (which told his story as a survivor of a lynching attempt in 1930), and, more contemporaneously, Seize the Time, by controversial Black Panther co-founder Bobby Seale.
A former reference and acquisition librarian at Howard University's Moorland-Springarn Research Center, Coates has become well-known in black circles across the country as a man dedicated to preserving African-American history. Although he didn't know it, he was on a collision course with Mosley.
After establishing a reputation as an author. Mosley began taking more interest in the politics of writing, especially as it related to African-Americans. One of the first things he did was take over as chair of the Open Book Committee at PEN, an internationally prominent writers group, so he could fight for more ethnic diversity in publishing.
As activists in the industry, both Mosley and Coates, who had not at that point met, listened when Max Rodriguez, publisher of the Quarterly Review of Black Books, told a panel on African-American Publishing at the American Booksellers Convention in the spring of 1995 that successful black writers had a duty to occasionally publish a book with one of the country's dozen and a half black houses.
When he heard that, Mosley thought of Gone Fishin'. Coates, who had heard the industry gossip about the unpublished manuscript, thought of Walter Mosley.
Coates went to Mosley saying that his 18-year-old Baltimore-based company, Black Classic Press, would be delighted to publish it. Much to Coates's surprise, considering a number of other black publishers also were after the manuscript, Mosley said yes.
But Mosley went even further. Knowing that Coates could not afford to pay his normal six-figure advance, Mosley agreed to give him the manuscript without any up-front money, consenting to take only his standard royalties once the book started to sell. When he heard that, Coates broke into tears.
A few hours after I talked to Mosley in Manhattan, Coates and I were sitting over a seafood dinner in Baltimore's Inner Harbor.
A burly, heavy-shouldered man with a thin beard running to gray (think of a retired heavyweight fighter), Coates was finding it difficult to contain his enthusiasm.
Gone Fishin', he says, letting his flounder grow cold, is going to be a really big book for BCP. Up until now, although his company has published some 60 titles, only four or five have been hardcover; and the largest printing BCP ever had was 12,000 copies. Fishin', with a planned initial press run of 75,000-100,000 hardcover copies, won't even be in the same class. And that's not even considering the paperback version, which BCP will not publish. "Pocket Books is going to be doing that" Coates says. "We simply couldn't handle it."
As it is, just for the hardcover edition, Coates had to hire a market strategy team in Los Angeles and create almost from scratch a nationwide distribution system. But there is no question in his mind that the effort will be worth it. "This is like having an all-star on your team," Coates says enthusiastically.
While Fishin's sales will undoubtedly fatten BCP's bank account, Coates also is looking at the long-range benefits not only for himself, but for Mosley, and for black publishing in general.
"As far as BCP is concerned," Coates says gleefully, "it will strengthen our production and give us more exposure. Plus, it will boost our back list and add to our potential for the future."
As if trying to talk himself down off his Mosley-initiated high, Coates soberly stresses that this will be a one-time deal. "Its like a grant," he says, "and you can't live forever off a grant." Realistically, he adds, he has to view it as a one-time opportunity. "We certainly can't look to Walter to give us another one."
As far as Mosley is concerned, turning his unpublished manuscript over to a black house considerably strengthens his commitment to the African-American cause. By shuttling Gone Fishin' to BCP, he literally has shown he is ready to put his money where his mouth is.
And, Coates adds, the fact that an almost sure-fire best seller by a black author is going to be published (in January) by a black publisher also will ultimately benefit other black writers and publishers.
"I would have been just as happy if Walter had gone to another black publisher," Coates says. "What he's doing is moving mountains. This is a multi-faceted approach that is going to help all black publishers."
Having made his decision on what to do with Fishing', Mosley continues to move on. While the path of least resistance would be to continue to churn out more Easy Rawlins's novels (more are planned), his intellectual restlessness also is pushing him in other directions.
In 1995, the same year Mosley published A Little yellow Dog, he had another non-Easy novel called RL's Dream. A darker, more probing book than an Easy story, Dream tells about a relationship between an aging, ailing blues man named Soupspoon Wise and a young white girl from the Arkansas named Kiki Waters.
Unlike the Easy books, which are set in the comfortable near past in Los Angeles, Dream takes place in contemporary Manhattan, Mosley's adopted stomping ground.
But even before Dog and Dream were published, Mosley was extending his creative reach through a series of short stories dealing with a black ex-con named Socrates Forllow and his efforts to rejoin society after serving a stretch for murder.
HBO, the tv people, bought three of the stories which they plan to make into specials. Those three pieces, along with 11 others, will be in a collection to be published next fall by W.W. Norton, Mosley's regular publisher, under the title Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned: The Socrates Fortlow Stories. Those tales are set in modern Los Angeles.
In a major but as yet undefined gear switch, Mosley also admits he is planning a novel that he will describe only as being "about history" as opposed to an historical novel..
However, the ambiguous "history" book aside, If one trend can be discerned in Mosley's writing, it is his steady progression in time. The original Easy and Mouse stories began in 1939 and moved steadily forward. Dream and Socrates are contemporary. And now Mosley is eyeing the future.
In a project still so tentative he has not even told his publisher, Mosley confesses that he has been dipping into science fiction. "I've got nine or 10 fragments done," he says indicating by his tone it is not something he wants to go into in depth. Showing a bit of unease with the subject, he picks up a rubber band and beings stretching it between his fingers.
"My novels," he says, "are about everyday people doing everyday things. But my interests are very broad. It's important for me to keep doing different kinds of things."
Asked if he plans to eventually publish the sci-if pieces, Mosley shakes his head. "Maybe I will, maybe I won't," he says evasively.
Although he has not elaborated, it is a safe guess that even his experiments in science fiction will deal with blacks and their struggles to come to grips with a society -- past, present, or future -- in which whites seem to have all the money and all the power. With the exception of Kiki Waters in RL's Dream, there are few white characters in Mosley's books and those who do appear generally play only minor roles. Writing about blacks, after all, is what Walter Mosley does best.