Devil in a Blue Dress

Devil in a Blue Dress The novel is an African-American mystery thriller, set in Los Angeles in 1948, where and when racism was an accepted fact of life. It is about a Blackman, Easy Rawlins, and his search for knowledge about himself and his race. Easy just got laid off his job and the threat of losing his house leads him to accept a mysterious job of looking for a white woman, Daphne Monet, the girlfriend of the richest man in LA at the time.

She has precious knowledge that makes her the pursuit of many other people locked in a political contest, characterized by dirty tricks and smoking guns. Easy's pursuit of Daphne likewise translates into his pursuit of knowledge that means power, black power in particular, and what he goes through in that double pursuit provides him that knowledge about himself and the world he lives in. The novel talks about knowledge being power and what the dominant (white) race and class struggled long in history to deprive the Blacks.

There were laws against teaching (Black) slaves to read and educational support for Black communities was inequitable. Violations to this age-old restriction in the novel are its major attractions. Right at the start is a declaration of the process of change at that time when a white man walks into Joppy's bar and Easy feels a "thrill of fear" towards white people. It signals the emergence of black empowerment. When he lost his job, he tried to recover it but not at the expense of his pride in himself.

The whites who worked with him imputed cowardice and stupidity to his desk job. He later on joined the military in an invasion of Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge, where, despite racial hostility in the ranks, presented some possibility of mutual "respect" getting established. Even then, he was ready to fight for that respect. At the edge of need, Easy accepts an offer of $100 to look for the missing white woman, Daphne, and immediately launches into a Black detective with the basic but suitable qualifications for the job.

He has a high school education, an ability to speak proper English in his native and "un-educated" Black upbringing, and his experience as a Black soldier in World War II. Besides his need to pay his mortgage, Easy is steep in his search for knowledge and this is evident throughout the novel and in his search for Daphne. When the police question him, Easy gets to see that racism renders the truth irrelevant in their treatment of him.

He constantly insists on his right to understanding what is going on, even when he is being released. He also realizes that knowledge has "utility" value as a means to self-protection and as a sales item.

But his chief education is on the meaning of violence -- the kind that connects to power -- beginning with his exchange of experiences on the violence of war with Albright, who states that the only difference between them is their "plain tolerance of slaughter." Easy's close friends, Joppy and Mouse, are representations of competitive violence. Joppy is a former boxer who still exudes raw and mindless force, a murderer in search only of his own self-gratification.

And Mouse is Easy's best friend and protector whose violence skills are at their best when his interests or loyalties are imperiled. Joppy and Mouse's violence places black power only the on the defensive in this world where white power is in control. Every violence appeals to Easy as an occasion to assert self-respect. He may have killed some whites during the war, but he still struggles against aggression. He gets beaten in the performance of his new job as "detective," but he does not retaliate.

It is Mouse, his best friend, who takes bloody vengeance for him and it is precisely Easy's and Mouse's contradictory moral positions that illustrate the full range of black masculine violence. An outstanding feature of the theme of knowledge about violence and Easy's indoctrination into it, he hears a "voice" that counsels him. This "voice" represents a vernacular source of wisdom emanating from the black communal instinct for masculine survival.

This inner "voice" urges him to kill or to refrain from violence, but in each counsel, it tells him to "survive like a man." Easy's perception of freedom consists of economic independence, personal autonomy and the elimination of restrictive categories of self-definition. Half of Daphne's stolen wealth lends him financial security and freedom, two years' worth of salary to him. But his most important concept of freedom revolves around Daphne herself, the lady and the devil wearing a blue dress.

His experience with her cancels the categories installed in his world -- she is a white woman in the black world, a mothering but manipulating woman who is simultaneously black and white, loving and obscene. She is a chameleon who promises him the personal knowledge he seeks yet he never manages to get the truth from her. Daphne lacks racial identification as Ruby Green, a little girl of mixed blood and incestuously disgraced.

Instead of a rage for the purity of the races, she violates the social and sexual taboos she is supposed to represent. In her, Easy discovers the very transgression of the status quo and an object of ultimate rejection and hate for being a murderer. He sees her as death itself and is glad that she is leaving. Easy gets ironically and tragically drawn to this beautiful temptress, whom he sees as the very essence of violent corruption in the world.

Daphne destabilizes the oppositions in the world's hierarchy of power and races and this effect both constrains and supports Easy simultaneously. His sexual affair with her is precisely a rejection of sexually imposed rules and the ideology of white superiority. Daphne is an anarchist who personifies radical freedom and while this.