The World of Easy Rawlins

In 1942, my father debarked from a troop transport in Casablanca. Even though he had been drafted to fight the Nazi war machine he was unafraid. He was certain that World War II was a white man’s war. He thought that all he had to do was explain to the advancing German troops that he was merely a Negro, not an American at all, really.

But the Germans did consider him an enemy. They bombed him and shot at him in spite of his color. LeRoy Mosley found himself risking his life for the American Dream.

He saw black men die and people of all colors cheering him as a hero. He shared the same goals as the white soldiers but the Army remained segregated. He dreamed about freedom and about going home, but these dreams weren’t the same as they were for the white soldiers.

For the white soldiers, home was freedom.

For my father, home was Jim Crow and Uncle Tom. Home was no vote. At home, the enemy was, often as not, the law.

The worst contradiction my father encountered was when he was discharged and sent back stateside. He found that more of his friends had died on the streets of Houston, Tex., than had died in battle: poor young men fighting over a woman or about a dime debt; people in their 20s and 30s dying of alcohol poisoning.

The Negro soldiers had died for a lie, but the people back home died for no reason at all.

Black soldiers learned from World War II; they learned how to dream about freedom. And dreamers tell stories. Sometimes the stories were lies or dimly remembered family lore. These wild tales expressed the hope that something better would come along and take us away from all this misery.

One favorite subject was Southern California.

“In California you can eat off the trees and sleep right outside under the moon,” many said.

The men coming home from Europe and Asia were no longer afraid of new places. They knew that we all bled the same color blood and that the masters back home were just Southern hicks who had pulled the wool over their eyes.

A migration had begun. But it wasn’t the wagon trains of the Old West. Somebody had heard the stories about California and then found a good reason to go. Maybe they’d lost their jobs or maybe someone was gunning for them; maybe somebody had said “boy” for the millionth time and won the door prize.

Then came the letters home. “There’s so many jobs that they have to hire colored.” “Once you say hello to the Pacific you can kiss the Gulf good-bye.” “I love you.”

My father came out to stay with Helen Nickerson, a kind of matriarch in our extended family.

Thousands of black people came from southern Texas and Louisiana. They came with an immigrant zeal rivaling that of the modern-day Koreans and Caribbean Islanders.

Two jobs during the week and a part-time gig on the weekend was the norm. Buying a house and rearing a family in it, just like any other American, was the dream.

Being black or Mexican or Japanese meant just about the same thing in those days; you weren’t white and therefore you had to work a little harder to make a little less.

Most everybody who came in from the South was hard-working and moral. But there will always be colorful wags and angry gangsters.

Certain jobs weren’t equally available to nonwhites. The police force was one of these. A mostly white police force was a vestige of the old ways for Southern Negroes who were used to being “jacked up” by sadistic lawmen.

This is the Los Angeles of Easy Rawlins. A place where a black man can dream but he has to keep his wits about him. Easy lives among the immigrants from the western South. He dreams of owning property and standing on an equal footing with his white peers. Deep in his mind he is indoctrinated with the terror of Southern racism. In his everyday life he faces the subtle, and not so subtle, inequalities of the American color line.

Easy tries to walk a moral line in a world where he is not treated equally by the law. In Easy’s world, you have to go beyond what people say into what they truly mean; you have to know what the law is but you also have to understand that the reality might be different.

Even though Easy’s world has been formed by white racism, that is not the center of his life. Easy lives among a colorful society of black businessmen, socialites and gangsters. His world is made up of barbers who love opera, of bartenders and cowardly geniuses.

Easy’s home is Los Angeles with its snowy mountains, parched deserts and transient population. He loves his house and avocado tree. He listens to music in illegal clubs, and he appreciates women a little more than he should.

When something bad happens, people come to Easy. They ask him to help them out with a problem they have with the law or maybe a loan shark. Easy intervenes and then asks for a little help in return. Maybe his Magnolia Street building needs a coat of paint. He’s a country boy in the big city.

My father and Easy Rawlins have a lot in common, but they’re not the same man. Easy is the kind of hero that lives in every neighborhood and among every race. He’s a true son of Los Angeles (proven by the fact that he wasn’t born there). He’s a man who, finding himself with dark skin, has decided that he’s going to live his life and do what’s right, in that order.