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This is a lesson, and Easy learns many lessons throughout the novel, including, as he runs into more and more corruption and racial hatred, how "many Jews... understood the American Negro; in Europe the Jew had been a Negro for more than a thousand years" (Mosley 138). Comparing Jews and Negroes is another aspect of the book that indicates how deep racial tensions were at the time. In order to solve his mystery, Easy must overcome these racial tensions, and because he is bright and motivated, he does, but it is not always easy.
Mosley brings Southern California in the 1940s vividly to life, and racial relations and prejudice are alive and well even in Los Angeles. He continues,
California was like heaven for the southern Negro. People told stories of how you could eat fruit right off the trees and enough work to retire one day. The stories were true for the most part but the truth wasn't like the dream. Life was still hard in L.A. And if you worked every day you still found yourself on the bottom (Mosley 27).
California may have been a "heaven" but Blacks still faced discrimination there, and that is part of the "bottom" Easy is talking about. Blacks in Southern California still face that today, so what Easy experienced is not so different now. Blacks still live in the ghettos of Compton and Watts, face police brutality, and live in poverty. Violence is prevalent, and one of the problems Blacks faced was lack of interest from the police. When Easy is arrested, he notes how distant the police are from Black troubles. He says, "You never could...
The police don't care about crime among Negroes" (Mosley 171). Thus, Easy is essentially working on his own as a private detective, and he, and other Blacks, cannot depend on the police for help or survival. This is just one more incident of racism Easy must conquer to be successful.
In conclusion, "Devil in a Blue Dress" is a fascinating novel, because it is much more than a simply detective story. The author blends an understanding of 1940s Los Angeles, Black life, and the racism and prejudice that hang over the black community even today. Reading it gives the reader an understanding of what it is like to be Black in a white culture, and how many details, even minute ones, merge to create hatred, prejudice, and misunderstanding between the races. It brings up many disturbing questions, and that seems to be the author's ulterior motive. He wrote a good detective novel, and wrote many others to create a series, but in the end, this book is just as much about race relations and misunderstandings as it is about solving a perplexing mystery. Easy is a good man, who adopts a child, owns a home, and takes care of his family just like so many other men of the time. That he has to face so many obstacles to do what others do so easily is really the point of the story. Easy is extraordinary, not because he is a good detective, but because he has made a career that bridges the Black and white worlds of 1940s Southern California.
References
Mosley, Walter. Devil in a Blue Dress. New York: Pocket Books, 1990.
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