Little Scarlet.

By Walter Mosley. Warner Vision Books, $7.50.

A white teacher in an entirely white art history seminar class, I was recently struck by students' inability to imagine life in any North American cultural setting other than their own white middle-class version. Being a fan of Walter Mosley and just having read his Little Scarlet, I assigned the book in a similar course, believing that its atmospheric mise en scene, its provocative and unflinching presentation of race relations, its caustic and fearless main character, Easy Rawlins, along with its pace and suspense, would serve as a tantalizing hook for my non literarily oriented students. It could compel while undermining stereotypes, pique awareness of white privilege, and make evident the terrible price of race based self hatred. Moreover, the character Easy Rawlins is an incisive metaphor for black experience during the 1960's as well as for us now since the novel's events raise issues still germane today.

At the center of Little Scarlet is an unlicensed detective protagonist in an exclusively black Los Angeles milieu, during the six days of the Watts riots of 1965. Being unlicensed serves as a metaphor for Easy's anti establishment posture, his perception, confirmed by his experience, of white authority around him as racist and corrupt. In agreeing to help the city's police solve the murder of a black woman, on the quiet (since her aunt claims the murderer was white, an accusation, true or not, that could further ignite violence), Easy discovers a series of unsolved murders of black women that white police have not deemed important enough to look into. Black women, to them, are expendable, a heinous fact that shapes the rest of the novel, as does the perpetual racial friction from Easy's natural, but unwelcome assumption that he is equal to the white men with whom he interacts and is a professional with high standards.

Students identified easily with Easy as smart, tough, generous to those in need, empathic and ethical despite his criminal record that makes him a romantic "outlaw." They accepted, with some level of shock, Mosley's manipulation of the color white against a black centered milieu, white as "lifeless" and "colorless," pale in comparison with the resonance of the range of blacks on the color spectrum. In response they discussed the long standing and derogatory white cultural associations with the color black.

On the other hand, students wrestled with Easy's friendship with and dependence on two men, one (Mouse) unpredictable and dangerous, even to Easy at times, the other (Jackson Blue), who dealt in stolen goods but was attempting to go legally straight, albeit by devious methods. The question arose regarding who, in the realm of the possible, could serve as a black unlicensed detective's muscle when back up is required. Most students approved of the situational, reality based ethics necessary for both Easy's survival in a white world and his compassionate service to his community. A few students were less flexible, unforgiving of Easy, who to them appeared ethically flawed.

The pathos in the powerful climax of Little Scarlet moved everyone, in light of both black struggles for equity and the universality of the book's theme, acceptance of self. The string of murders of black women was the tragic result of a black man's equally brutal emotional rejection by his mother, who for decades had passed as white and did not want to be racially defined by her black child. Her race based self hatred led him to murder black women drawn to white men, as his mother had been drawn to a white husband and to deception. By the end of the semester, Easy Rawlins had a new set of fans, ready to follow him through any challenges that came his way, understanding the profound injustice of white authorities' criminalizing him for simply being a black man, and more willing to see the world through a black man's eyes.

Mary Ball Howkins

Rhode Island College