White Butterfly (Easy Rawlins Mysteries, Book 3)

White Butterfly (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)

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She seems to feel more affection for her black friends and family when she speaks to them on the telephone than when in their presence.

She even seems to prefer speaking to dead black people rather than with live ones on the telephone, and among the deceased she has a particular weakness for those who have been dead a long time. She entertains fond memories of ancestors whom she has never met but who, she believes, have entrusted her with a nurturing mission towards her community.

At the same time, she is enraged with her recently deceased sister who has left behind two children to feed. In fact, Blanche needs spatial and temporal distance so much that she even has trouble putting up with her own presence. In Blanche Cleans Up , she becomes highly indignant at a party when she sees representatives of her community being obsequious to a white politician. Her acting stupid is not motivated by constraint.

The only decent one is mentally retarded.

White Butterfly (Easy Rawlins Mysteries)

At that point she is likely to put everything in the microwave oven or let someone else finish the job. She also gets secret pleasure from contravening her employers in using their bathtubs and sitting on their sofas when they are not around. These trickster compensations seem to be small compared to what Blanche gives up for them and one may wonder who, between the servant and her employer, really fools the other, which gives the presence of the second trope a rather unexpected dimension.

On the contrary Blanche repeatedly makes "lovely cups of tea", which sound more British than African American, and the food she prepares and serves to her employers seems to be fairly traditional all-American fare —platters of cold meats, sliced turkey, roast beef and ham, steamed carrots, green beans, baked potatoes and frozen lunches slipped into a microwave oven. But, in the end, she orders croissants, eggs benedict and lobster.

One line in Blanche Among the Talented Tenth refers to collards, cornbread, sweet potatoes, fried chicken and grits 58 , and two more lines in Blanche Cleans Up mention pigs feet, chitterlings and corn bread. However, in neither case did Blanche prepare the food. Consequently justifying the relevance of the third trope —i. In fact, her manner of worship is very much that of an individualist virtually cut off from her past and present community. Her alleged feelings of ease with ancestral rituals is often thrown into doubt by the presence of a semantic field which reveals contradictions between her will for communion with her ancestors, particularly the female ones, and a sort of repulsion when actually faced with the rituals she invents for herself.

She emphatically describes her need to connect with her first ancestral mother, the ocean, which she calls mother water:. The sea was the place where she found the peace and cleansing her friends said they found in church or the mosque Blanche Among the Talented Tenth , This was where she needed to be, always needed to be: in the open, barefoot and totally sure that she, the sand, the water and the wind were one Blanche Among the Talented Tenth , She fought to control the clatter of her teeth.

Her wet skirt held her calves captive This opposition easily reads as a metaphor for the experience of slaves born near warm African seas who were brutally confronted with cold American shores. The reference to being held captive is never a positive one, and in an African American context the connotation is particularly negative. Interestingly, the only water Blanche ever feels comfortable with is the hot sort found in modern American bathrooms. The fact that the heroine has feminist convictions cannot be disputed; however, the character is far from being monodimensional.

It is perhaps best expressed by a statement from Blanche herself, which will conclude the first part of this presentation:. The hole of self hatred she had climbed out of as a young woman was still gaping wide and deep. Just because she was not teetering on the edge any more did not mean she could not be lured back Blanche Among the Talented Tenth , Such readings seem reductive to me and at best debatable. To substantiate her point, she quotes the following two passages:.

Black women, lots of them cooking in the industrial size kitchen and talking loud, laughing and telling stories. But all I really saw was their hands. Working hands. Laying out plates, peeling yams, folding sheets and table cloths into perfect squares, washing drying, stacking and pushing from here to there. Women who lived by working. Brushing the hair of some neighborhood child whose parents were gone either for the night or for good.

Cooking yes but there was lots more work for a negro woman. Dressing wounds of men they started being proud of. Punishing children, white and black, and working for god in his house and at home A Red death , It can be argued from these two passages that Mosley likes women to fit the mother stereotype and to be less educated than his male hero. These are obviously depictions of poor women employed in menial jobs.

One is free to interpret such elements in negative ways but their positive side can also be defended. The only woman he ever marries, Regina, is exceptionally black, as is EttaMae, the love of his life. When Easy evokes white women — a relatively rare occurrence — they are associated with uneasiness. For years after that kiss I dreamed of it, yearned for it When I look back on that night I feel confused. If she wanted me to bleed, I would have been happy to open a vein. Daphne was like a door that had been closed all my life; a door that all of a sudden flung open and let me in.

My heart and chest opened wide as the sky for that woman Blanche vehemently and repeatedly affirms the necessity for all women and, in particular, for very dark-skinned black women, 14 to support and help each other.

Devil in a Blue Dress: An Easy Rawlins Novel

However, such bonding has its limits. There are many descriptions of houses, apartments, rooms, closets, sheds and shelters in the Blanche series. Even the safest places are bleak. The light inside is dim; everything is "broken, creepy, dusty, spooky" and the air is "old, fetid, chilly" Blanche Cleans Up , Enclosures that are traditionally protective, nurturing and warm are depicted as cold, uncomfortable and both threatened and threatening.

The womb symbols in the Blanche series are places that are either desolate or harmful, if not both. The strength and beauty of womanhood, so present in the overt discourse, are not at all obvious at the subliminal level. Once again we find a sort of double talk and ambiguity. Ummm, soccer thighs. There follows a graphic description of what she imagines the man looks like naked.

She rode him like he was the last train away from certain disaster and lay panting and sweaty next to him [ Blanche takes the initiative in everything. Still, I wonder how women readers would react if the roles were reversed in this particular scene, that is, if Leo were riding a stuttering desire stricken Blanche and shooed her into a cab after having silenced her for reasons that from his point of view appeared legitimate.

Books by Walter Mosley

In this respect, the itinerary followed by the two heroes is similar except for the fact that they take the same road starting from opposite directions. Contradictions and ambiguities can be read as signifiers of social and psychological fracture for African Americans but they should not be interpreted solely as weaknesses. Tensions between black culture and white society, between male ideology and female experience find powerful creative expression in Easy and Blanche.

As Henry Louis Gates shows in The Signifying Monkey , the coexistence of opposites, when seen as part of African tradition, is a powerful tool for survival, wisdom and joy.

Devil in a Blue Dress

I would add that their ambivalence about blackness and gender may appear negative from an ideological, politically-correct point of view, but that very ambivalence, these very contradictions, are what make the characters true literary figures and not merely one-dimensional ideological vehicles. One of the most interesting aspects of the writing of both authors is that it sheds light on the interpenetration of conflicting ideologies through the moments of confusion and incoherence that their characters experience.

This complexity that thwarts literary theories is a testimony to the creative talents of Walter Mosley and BarbaraNeely. New York: The Feminist Press. Cade, Toni. The Black Woman, An Anthology. New York: Mentor. Durand, Gilbert. Paris: Bordas. Gates Jr. New York: Meridian. Giddins, Paula.

Hardback Editions

New York: Bentam. Gregory Klein, Kathleen. The Woman Detective: Gender and Genre. Urbana: Univ. Hughes, Langston.

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