Book Review

The review is interesting enough so as to take it with you on a 12-hour flight to Japan, change flights and then off to Asia. I have done such a number of times as watching the little screen gets to be boring. Not much to do other than read or sleep. The later comes after a few bourbons on the rocks. Land in Narita International Airport, Japan, walk around the area through customs and security. Then to the boarding area a short distance away.

The economics of being a minority.

Book Review: “Devil in a Blue Dress”

The one-handed economist

I can’t remember where I came across this 1990 book by Robert Mosley, but I downloaded it in connection with my ongoing pursuit of detective stories.

This one is different because its main character — Easy Rawlins — is Black, and the action mostly takes place within the Black community in Los Angeles.

The book is set in the late 1940s, after Easy has come back from fighting in WWII, and the text reads as if it was from that era, not 40 years later.

I enjoyed the shift in perspective, which focusses on race as well as nuances within the Black community. The plot is complex — sometimes a bit too much for a lazy reader like me to follow — but the asides lend a lot of character.

Here are a few excerpts:

1. It was a habit I developed in Texas when I was a boy. Sometimes, when a white man of authority would catch me off guard, I’d empty my head of everything so I was unable to say anything. “The less you know, the less trouble you find,” they used to say. I hated myself for it but I also hated white people, and colored people too, for making me that way.
2. Ernest pointed a finger thick as a railroad tie at Lenny’s belly. “Either you get back in the back or I’m’a skin ya. No lie.” Anybody who knew Ernest knew that that was his last warning. You had to be tough to be a barber because your place was the center of business for a certain element in the community. Gamblers, numbers runners, and all sorts of other private businessmen met in the barbershop. The barbershop was like a social club. And any social club had to have order to run smoothly.
3. Somewhere along the way I had developed the feeling that I wasn’t going to outlive the adventure I was having. There was no way out but to run, and I couldn’t run, so I decided to milk all those white people for all the money they’d let go of. Money bought everything. Money paid the rent and fed the kitty. Money was why Coretta was dead and why DeWitt Albright was going to kill me. I got the idea, somehow, that if I got enough money then maybe I could buy my own life back.
4. So, I volunteered for the invasion of Normandy and then later I signed on with Patton at the Battle of the Bulge. By that time the Allies were so desperate that they didn’t have the luxury of segregating the troops. There were blacks, whites, and even a handful of Japanese-Americans in our platoon. And the major thing we had to worry about was killing Germans. There was always trouble between the races, especially when it came to the women, but we learned to respect each other out there too.
5. I was in a black division but all the superior officers were white. I was trained how to kill men but white men weren’t anxious to see a gun in my hands. They didn’t want to see me spill white blood. They said we didn’t have the discipline or the minds for a war effort, but they were really scared that we might get to like the kind of freedom that death-dealing brings.
6. But I’ll never forget thinking how those Germans had hurt that poor boy so terribly that he couldn’t even take in anything good. That was why so many Jews back then understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years.
7. Primo was a real Mexican, born and bred. That was back in 1948, before Mexicans and black people started hating each other. Back then, before ancestry had been discovered, a Mexican and a Negro considered themselves the same. That is to say, just another couple of unlucky stiffs left holding the short end of the stick.

FOUR STARS.