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84 Fearless Ezekiel Alterity in the Detective Fiction of Walter Mosley —Jerrilyn McGregory In his work Walter Mosley has created a diverse cast of African American male characters that oppose a prevailing essentialist view of identity. Two of the most powerfully counteractive characters in this vein are Tristan “Fearless” Jones and Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins.1 Mosley reveals Fearless “out” in all his rage and fury, whereas Easy chiefly operates on the “downlow,” protective of his home and hearth. Easy typifies the folkloric trickster archetype and Fearless functions as the quintessential “badman” vernacular hero. Although they represent different character types, Fearless and Easy each exist as examples of the Other from the perspective of mainstream society. Mosley’s putative heroes operate as Others both because of their race and because of their necessarily transgressive actions, making them “criminals by color” (LS 235). Both returned as war heroes “old enough to kill men in a war” but are not yet deemed men back home (Devil 43). Such an implicitly exclusionary identification functions in direct opposition to the process of realizing a self, or desired personal identity.2 There is a great deal of empowering potential in both the trickster and badman roles, but neither ultimately offers a fully liberating paradigm for the realization of an authentic self. As a result, both Fearless and Easy fulfill their roles with an additional dynamic twist. Despite being regarded as the Other and, thus, “less than themselves,” by oppressive forces, Mosley’s African American protagonists contest this status with an additional layer of intentional re-Othering. Through this self-initiated process they gain free agency, positioning themselves as sentient individuals deserving of recognition (i.e., being a part of the American “homeland” for which they fought), not just as figures defined exclusively by their relation to the dominant culture. Confronting internal colonialism by articulating a vast array of defensive mechanisms, Mosley’s heroes struggle to reclaim and retain a Self when faced with conditions of imposed alienation. Fearless Ezekiel: Alterity in the Detective Fiction 85 My approach is ultimately a polycentric critique of Mosley’s fiction.3 Of course, African Americans are not monolithic. Literary critic Lawrence Hogue notes, however , that elitist African Americans “had to crush African American differences, particularly subaltern African America’s cultures and belief systems” (39). Yet the vernacular aspect of the culture makes space for internal differences within the group by privileging dialectical utterances, such as “if the shoe fit wear it.”4 In this essay, I argue that Mosley’s Easy Rawlins and Fearless Jones detective series position the so-called Other as being derived from (and helping, in turn, to shape) notions of self and identity, thereby disrupting preexisting binary oppositions between privileged and marginalized groups. Mosley constructs a number of extraordinary characters who, if the power structure insists on their alterity, reconstitute their identity as Other by questioning this construction via self-definition. In essence, they invert the existing system by relexively referencing these oppressive forces again as their own Other, or the Other’s Other. Rather than simply imposing a double negative, though, these protagonists shift their gaze by constructing an awareness of their regarded otherness while conspiring to combat these exoteric factors by their refusal to internalize oppression. First, Mosley’s fiction contests Western constructions of manhood, offering a new, more complex identity as the “radical Other” through an emphasis on alterity .5 The radical Other gives meaning to one’s self within a collective sphere in which his or her identity is normally extremely proscribed. According to Richard Yarborough,“[Masculinity]containedthefollowingcrucialingredients:nobility,intelligence , strength, articulateness, loyalty, virtue, rationality, courage, self-control, courtliness, honesty, and physical attractiveness as defined in white Western European terms” (168). Nathan Grant explains how these criteria tended to exclude African Americans because of a self-fulfilling presumption of their atavistic Otherness: “Black men, however, had at best a tenuous hold on these definitions. At every juncture was the specter of black male as beast, a kind of raging, drunken Caliban who deserved his end of finally being subdued by his white male betters” (3). Easy and Fearless simultaneously conform to and overturn these presumptions about masculine identities as they enact their own distinct drives for an autonomous self. Easy’s friend, Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, exposes his own sense of limitation through his assessment of Easy: “You learn stuff and you be thinkin’ like white men be thinkin’. You be thinkin’ that what’s right fo’ them is right fo’ you...

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