Originally appeared in the Boston Book Review.
(Date approximate).
“I love you Daddy. I need you.”
“You need this?”
And she made a sound that I cannot duplicate. It was deep and guttural
and so charged with pleasure that I got dizzy and lowered myself to the floor.
The sounds Etta made got louder and even more passionate. She never made
those sounds because of me; no woman ever had.
Mouse is crazy, I thought, just crazy!
But I wished for his insanity.
Etta did too.
Etta did too.
"A Red Death" (2002)
HB: Tell me about Mouse.
If Easy comes up to Mouse and says, “This guy from the IRS
is after me,” Mouse says, “Well, what’s his name? I’ma kill the motherfucker.”
He stands up to whatever the fears are in a fearless manner.
HB: There are times when Easy feels Mouse is over the edge.
In “Black Betty” he thinks of him as “an ancient pagan,” who needs “to
celebrate and anoint his freedom with blood.”
WM: He’s crazy. Maybe not even crazy. He just doesn’t fit
any other description.
HB: Sometimes it seems Easy’s view of Mouse is the white
view of black people — unrestrained, terribly violent and sexual.
WM: But only from an external point of view. My mother’s
Jewish, and a couple of years ago people asked me to go on a tour for a Jewish
Book Festival. I had a lot of fun, because there are a lot of Jewish characters
in the books. I got asked on this tour if there’s a black side to Easy and a
Jewish side and if the Jewish side is intellectual and philosophical. It’s true
that there’s a black and Jewish influence on my work, but that’s not it.
Easy doesn’t represent the white point of view in any way.
But I do think, from the outside, Easy might be an entry point. People identify
with how he sees things and how he makes decisions. He’s a window on the black
world — Easy, not Mouse.
HB: Mouse is opaque. He’s not a window on anything.
WM: Easy is kind of a historian. He’s experienced in the
time; he knows the smell, the taste, the sound, the nuance of everything. Mouse
doesn’t know any of that stuff. He doesn’t ask Easy if the guy is white or
black; he doesn’t care. He just says, if he mess with me, that’s it. He’s much
more a universal character in that way.
HB: I compare him to Johnny Boy in Scorcese’s “Mean
Streets.” Harvey Keitel plays an Easy Rawlins type, balancing a lot of things,
his wildness and his sanity, trying to hold it together. Robert DeNiro’s Johnny
Boy doesn’t give a fuck. The intense relationship between those men drives the
movie.
WM: Kind of like the relationship between Meyer Lansky and
Bugsy Seigel. Bugsy was a loose cannon. At one point Lansky had to say OK about
the killing of Bugsy — there weren’t too many ways around that — but he loved
him.
HB: How did you find Mouse?
WM: I was writing a first person narrative about a rent
party in Fifth Ward Houston, Texas in the late thirties. It started, “His name
was Raymond but we called him Mouse because he was small and had sharp
features. We could have called him Rat because he really wasn’t very nice but
we liked him and so the name ‘Mouse’ stuck on him.” I didn’t know it was Easy
talking until about four pages later.
And it built from there, from stories my father told me, and
so on. Also, I kind of wish that he existed. I think of other people in
literature like that — in a funny way, Kapinsky [??] in “All Quiet on the
Western Front,” and Long John Silver in “Treasure Island.” They’re kind of
lovable. You forgive them; you like them more than you dislike them for what
they’ve done.
HB: Mouse is lovable?
WM: It depends on how you see yourself in the world. If I
knew someone like Mouse, I would never talk to him, never accept a favor from
him, never even ask him what time it was. I’d just leave him alone. Because I
don’t think I could control him. Easy believes, whether he’s right or wrong,
that he can control Mouse. It’s like hang-gliding; he thinks he can ride those
air currents.
HB: In “A Little Yellow Dog” Mouse gets religion. And learns
to read, which nearly traumatizes Easy. He says, “I could feel the world
turning under my feet.” Mouse, it turns out, is reading “Treasure Island.”
WM: Mouse may be a sociopath but he’s not two-dimensional.
He’s looking for something. The church is there in the community. So he
addresses it.
I was really interested in his going to the minister. What
does Mouse get out of religion? Crazy people are religious, too. Evil people
are religious. But it doesn’t stick. At the end he says, well, killing’s all in
the Bible, so killing’s OK. At the end he’s still Mouse.
HB: But we don’t know if he is going to live or die after “A
Little Yellow Dog.”
WM: Well that’s what literature is about, right? We’ll see.
I don’t know yet either. I have some time to figure it out.
HB: You wrote an angry essay about why you wound up writing
mystery novels.
WM: I think you’re talking about “The Black Dick.”
HB: Where you said that giving in to the formulas of the
mystery genre was the only way you could get published.
WM: I couldn’t get my first book, “Gone Fishing,” published.
The attitude of the publishing world was that you couldn’t write a book about
black men and have an audience — unless you had Bigger Thomas or were writing
“The Invisible Man.” But not a book about fishermen; you couldn’t write about
two young men coming of age in the sole company of black people where politics
was not an issue, race was not an issue, and they weren’t all that educated so
it couldn’t be existentialism.
I didn’t mind making Easy a detective. I did mind that I
couldn’t do other things. [“Gone Fishing” will appear in January, 1997].
HB: Is Chester Himes an influence?
WM: I hadn’t read Chester until after I’d written “Devil in
a Blue Dress.” I like his work very much but we’re very different writers. I
tend to think more about Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston. Chester’s work
is angry in a way that I’m not angry.
HB: You have the ability to evoke the presence, primarily of
black people, in a few powerful strokes. For instance, in “Black Betty,” you
say Big Hand Bruno “had the ability to swagger even when he was standing
still.” In “A Red Death” you write, “His color was dark brown but bright, as if
a bright lamp shown just below his skin.” In “A Little Yellow Dog” you describe
“a sweaty fat man who looked to be formed from a pile of wet mud.” Strong
imagery.
WM: Thank you. One of my favorite novels is “Dead Souls.” I
was always stunned that Gogol could explain Russian peasants in half a sentence
and then go on and say something else in the other half. That’s how good he
was. The other great Russian fiction writer for me is Babel, who also does it.
I knew when I first found it, it was something I loved.
The thing I liked most about Carl Franklin’s direction of
“Devil in a Blue Dress” is that Carl managed not to stereotype or caricature
black people — really important, because everybody else, black and white, does.
When I go over the top in my books I try to remember that when you come back
down you have a real person to deal with. That’s important to me and to my
audience, I think.
HB: Denzel Washington stressed Easy’s laid-back,
wait-and-see side. On the page, Easy feels closer to the edge, hotter.
WM: True but Easy is also a very contemplative guy. He has
middle-class aspirations. He’s not only literate but thoughtful about what the
right thing is and how to do it. He loves his kids. And even before the kids,
he loved his little garden. So both sides are there.
HB: At the end of the movie Denzel looks around and the
camera scans his L.A. neighborhood. This is before the Civil Rights Movement.
Maybe no one’s well-to-do, but the neighborhood has integrity. That last
lingering shot is there to show you the community is intact, not
self-destructing.
WM: That last scene is a little more powerful than it would
be in my book, where there’s a lot of attention to how things fall apart, for
example Daphne’s confusion about who she is and who she wants to be. But the
ideas are the same. The book’s about community — the jazz club you go to, the
neighbors you talk to. Carl underlined it. Book’s have more leeway. A movie has
to make its points and get out of there.
HB: Speaking about music, you write in “A Little Yellow
Dog”: Three notes and I knew who was playing. Three notes and I remembered the
first night I’d heard that tune, the woman I was with, the clothes I was
wearing (or wished I was wearing) . . . That horn spoke the language of my
history; traveled me back to times that I could no longer remember clearly —
maybe even times that were older than I; traveling, in my blood, back to some
forgotten home.
WM: I like music very much. Easy likes music. I’d bet Mouse
doesn’t like music at all.
HB: “RL’s Dream” revolves around the story of Robert Johnson
WM: “RL’s Dream” is a very important book for me in a lot of
ways. Call it a literary novel if you want, or a blues novel. It’s about
something which was lost.
One book I read said there was a time when the only door
your house had was a back door and it was always open because you were always
going to leave quickly. The blues, and many other creations of black people,
were victims of that loss. We move ahead like cultural nomads, dropping
everything we’ve done, creating completely new lives in order to survive. I
found that if you lived on a plantation and wanted to move, you could leave any
time you wanted but had to leave everything behind — couldn’t take the horse,
the wagon, couldn’t take the furniture, even if you’d paid for them.
The blues is one of the things that got left behind. The
people who picked it up, whether black or white, were mostly from a university
setting. My idea was to write a novel about what it was like to live in
Mississippi. What was it like to be an orphan living on the streets? And then
later on, with the girl, what was it like to be raped by your father every day?
Trying to talk about the blues as if it were mundane or pedestrian, not some
high intellectual thing. I paid a price for that. Some people — the blues is
their bailiwick — said we already know this stuff. Yeah, but the world doesn’t
know it.
HB: “RL’s Dream” is about the blues but I didn’t feel it in
the prose the way I do, say, in “Black Betty,” where it’s there all the time.
WM: I was talking about the lives of people in that book,
telling how those lives were structured. The Easy books feed off that
information but are not about it. “RL’s Dream” is a blues novel but not a musical
novel. Also the Easy books are first person, and less contemplative. Easy
doesn’t have enough time to be contemplative.
HB: You’ve started a new series, centered on a character
called Socrates Fortlow. Will these be short stories?
WM: A book is coming out — “Always Outnumbered, Always
Out-Gunned: The Socrates Fortlow Stories” — in the form of short stories, but
there’s a narrative line so you could look at it as a novel.
People say, you’ve got to do something for the children. But
they don’t really mean it. If you really want a story for children, you write stories
like the Socrates stories. Because for children in the inner city you can’t
really say there’s a film in which a good policeman tries to stop the bad
gangsters, and so on. You have to write the truth and the truth is very
serious. You have to state the truth and have the confidence that the young
people reading it are going to think about it. But nobody has that kind of
confidence in America.
I wrote the first Socrates Fortlow story for the Whitney
Museum’s Hopper exhibit. They had asked me to write something for the catalog.
HB: But Hopper never paints black people.
WM: Once. And I used that painting.
My story’s about a kid who’s murdered somebody. The kid asks
if Socrates is going to turn him in. And Socrates says, “No, we just two black
people talking to each other. But you did something wrong.” And he leaves it at
that. That’s what I’m interested in doing with the Socrates stories. They are a
series of morality plays. But my Socrates doesn’t have the leisure the original
had. When he makes a decision, he also has to take an action. How do you get a
job? How do you get seconds on your dinner? And what’s the cost?
HB: How does the black-Jewish thing play out for you?
WM: I had a long conversation with a rabbi, and told him my
mother’s Jewish, which means I’m Jewish. He said, “Why would anybody lie about
that?”
My father is black, or was, and my mother is Jewish, and
they made me. I don’t know what they were saying to each other while they were
making me, but the act was an act of love. I was very close to both sides of my
family. I knew everybody. They knew each other. It wasn’t an issue.
The Jews who came from Europe to America up until the
forties or the fifties were people who experienced severe racism. I’m not
talking necessarily about the camps but about ghettoes, pogroms, the kind of
jobs you could get. Like my grandfather. They wanted him in the Russian army
but he didn’t want to join because he didn’t want to clean out toilets. That just
wasn’t his idea of fun. So most people when they came over identified with
black people in America. That’s why I was on this Jewish book tour. Often their
grandchildren and great-grandchildren don’t know the history. They identify
with what they see on television, and don’t really understand.
I met an older Jewish woman who said, “You have to write
about your mother; you have to write about your mother, too.” I said, “Listen.
I.B. Singer is a great writer, and Malamud, and a lot of people who write about
that. But I’m black in America.” When I was a kid, I said, “Dad, who am I?” And
he said, “You’re a black man.” Certainly there are a lot of Jews in my books.
But that’s not the story I’m telling.
That happens a lot. Black women come up to me and say,
“Can’t you write a black woman detective? Just one?” Maybe I will one day, but
you know.
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