Walter Mosley, August Wilson, and Mosaics of Memory

This brief paper focuses on an early work each by Walter Mosley and August Wilson, two prolific and gifted writers whose works were produced in a steady stream during the past fifty years. In addition to working in two distinct forms—drama and detective fiction—their concerns might appear to be very different as dictated by the apparent traditions and constraints of their chosen forms. For Wilson, of course, the physical stage, its props, and the enclosure of the venue are the frame for dialogue, gesture, and spectacle. The discussion here on Wilson will be through the written script and far less on spectacle, that “script” framed by the stage and its physical dictates. For Mosley, the expectation and convention of the traditional “hard-boiled” novel demanded by mid-twentieth century the clipped dialogue of a lone, unsentimental detective stalking the mean streets for the resolution to the riddle of an earlier, usually violent crime. The crime would be solved and the detective freed, well before any criminal trial, to unravel future crimes. These two writers command our attention in the ways in which they transcend these traditions and expectations of form. Their use of setting and infusion of social history point to a layered view of the city and the history it insists upon. Both writers link present and past—sometimes recent, at other times distant—in revealing the impact of migration, the quest for community, and, most importantly for this discussion, a life-sustaining communal ethic. They brought unique views of and to the stage and the “mean streets” of two cities. Specifically, the works I address focus on Pittsburgh and Los Angeles, two communities in transition and still in the making.¹

I have chosen to focus on Walter Mosley’s first novel in the Easy Rawlins series, Devil in a Blue Dress (1990), and August Wilson’s play, Gem of the Ocean (2006). (Wilson’s play was among the last of his to be produced, but it is historically the earliest in its setting.) Both pieces are set in the aftermath of war—the Civil War in the case of Wilson’s play and World War II for Mosley’s novel. The reverberations of the failed Reconstruction era (1865-1876) were still painfully evident given the legal sanctions and lynching violence well into the twentieth century. Migration as a protest movement is well documented during this period reaching an apogee in the 1920s. During and after WWII, the migration to the West was sharpened with the demand for labor in heavy industry there. In both historical moments migrations often demanded new roles, sharper political protests; migrations forced new choices and new voicings. They were periods of great flux—family members searching to reunite, communities born and reborn, strands of history seeking a tapestry.

Ernest J. Gaines’s masterful Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971) offers a seriously playful demonstration of a community in its birth pangs, when freedom of movement creates a need to rename self, literally and figuratively. Miss Jane is describing the walk to the new land for the recently freed slaves.

Everybody was tired from the long walk and we just sat there quiet, not saying a thing for a good while. Then somebody said: “My new name Abe Washington. Don’t call me Buck no more.” We must have been two dozens us there, and now everybody started changing names like you change hats. Nobody was keeping the same name Old Master had gived them. This one would say, “My new name Cam Lincoln.” That one would say, “My new name Ace Freeman.” Another one, “My new name Sherman S. Sherman.” “What that S for?” “My title.”

(Gaines 17-18)

Naming (or renaming) can serve to memorialize a break with the past. Neither erasure nor fantasy in this moment, it is an act of imagination as much as an effort to master an image of history, individual and shared.

In the Wilson and Mosley pieces with two evolving urban communities—both claiming their own “names” and values—representatives of the criminal justice system are an active presence...