EASY'S EARLY DAYS

By Jack E. White

Mystery writer Walter Mosley finished his first novel, Gone Fishin', in 1988, but he couldn't find an agent or a publisher who would touch it back then because they feared that a thriller about working-class African Americans would bomb at bookstores. Then along came Terry McMillan's Waiting to Exhale. Settling in on the best-seller list for 43 weeks, her tale about four middle-class black women proved there was an audience for commercial fiction by black authors and sent publishers scrambling to find the next black blockbuster. Mosley's second manuscript, Devil in a Blue Dress, a continuation of the story he'd begun in Gone Fishin' and featuring the same hero, Easy Rawlins, was scooped up in the rush. The book received rave reviews when it appeared in 1990 and sold so well that Mosley never had to return to his former job as a computer programmer. But his career really took off in 1992, when presidential candidate Bill Clinton declared that Mosley was his favorite thriller writer.

Now, four more hot-selling Easy Rawlins mysteries, a Denzel Washington movie based on Devil, and two visits to the White House later, Mosley, 45, finds himself in the enviable position of being able to bestow his work on whichever publisher he chooses. And when he decided to publish the once neglected Gone Fishin', he selected Black Classic Press, a small house in Baltimore, Maryland, that specializes in reprinting historical works by black authors. This is a significant move for two reasons. For starters it may show, as Mosley says, that "a black writer can bring his or her work to a black publisher and make it work. There are about a dozen black writers whose work sells really big. We're making millions for white publishers, and I thought it was time to give back something."

But beyond that gesture of racial solidarity, the publication of Fishin' is noteworthy because it is, in some respects, the best of Mosley's novels. Set in East Texas in 1939, it is a morally murky coming-of-age story that explains why it ain't easy being Easy. The tale concerns a pivotal episode that Mosley has alluded to in the previously published novels: the murder by Easy's homicidal sidekick, Mouse, of his stepfather. Witnessing the killing--and accepting a payoff to keep quiet about it--is the original sin that dogs the rest of Easy's life as he joins the great black migration to Los Angeles, fights in World War II and struggles to find a place of dignity for himself in a society that maintains, at best, only grudging respect for African Americans.

As in Mosley's other novels, the plot is mostly incidental, a prop for his rich characterizations and astute social observations. In Fishin', Easy emerges as an Everyman of the segregated pre-World War II rural South: semiliterate, marginally employed, the victim of numerous acts of offhand racism. He inhabits a blues-toned, all-black world of juke joints, odd jobs and broken people wrestling with the same dilemma: "If all you got is two po'k chops an' ten chirren, what you gonna do?" The answer: improvise and live with the consequences.

In less talented hands this could have become a heavy-handed tract, but Mosley never stoops to propaganda. And while his characters often verge on the bizarre, they are leavened by a reaffirming dose of humanity: Domaque, the hunchback with a thirst for reading; Miss Dixon, a half-crazed white spinster whose whims determine the fate of black families unlucky enough to live on her land; Momma Jo, the hoodoo priestess who forces herself on Easy in a hilarious seduction scene. But overshadowing them all is the enigmatic Mouse, who combines terrifying bloodthirstiness with naive romanticism; he murders his stepfather so that he can inherit the money he needs for his wedding. As Easy observes in a typically terse but pungent passage, Mouse "was an artist. He always said a poor man has got to work with flesh and blood."

In his renderings of a black preacher's rolling sermon or the colorful chit-chat among the locals in a general store, Mosley displays a pitch-perfect gift for capturing the cadences of black speech that rivals the dialogue in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Mosley, the son of a black maintenance supervisor and a white Jewish mother, has, like Ellison, a nuanced appreciation for black-white relationships that goes beyond the stereotypes that mar much recent fiction by black authors. Gone Fishin', of course, is not in Invisible Man's league; few novels are. But it firmly establishes Mosley as a writer whose work transcends the thriller category and qualifies as serious literature. The big mystery is why any publisher would ever have turned it down.