Finding a Way Home: A Critical Assessment of Walter Mosley's Fiction

Introduction

ix Home is one of the great themes and tropes of the African American literary tradition. Writers from Frederick Douglass to W. E. B. Du Bois to Walter Mosley have made clear their desire for a place to be somebody, a place to feel at home, respected, secure, and comfortable. Certainly any catalogue of those who prominently engage this theme in the post–World War II period alone include Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Toni Morrison.1 Situating home exclusively in terms of its desirability tropes it as a normative ideal; however , the discourse in African American writing reveals home to be a more ambiguous term, a place of paradox, where home is experienced as both refuge and exile. Thus, for an African American writer to be at home in America means to feel the warmth of communal bonds but also to feel homeless, abandoned, isolated , and reviled by America. The power of this paradox resonates in The Souls of Black Folk (1903), as Du Bois reflects on the death of his firstborn son. Sitting in his own well-appointed and comfortable home—his “little coign of happiness” (509)—erected by his talent and energy, Du Bois echoes a common theme in the blues, talking about his son being better off dead than alive and reviled. Despite his near-despair at the death of his son and the future of all black children, Du Bois continues for his whole career to resist the oppressive forces then arrayed against even the Talented Tenth. He describes the gap between the promise of the American Dream and the racist reality of America in hope, not altogether hopeless , of renovating the American home. The irony in Du Bois’s case is that his life ended in self-imposed exile in Ghana, a poignant reminder of the intractability of the problem, even in the face of fifty-plus years of diligent, hopeful effort. Thus, home is a vexed concept for African American writers who dwell in and on it, who attempt to frame its emotional dimensions, furnish it with cultural and historical detail, and populate it with fully human characters in various locales and times. It is in this great discourse of home—one whose inherent questions about meaning and construction implicate history, culture, community, and identity—that this volume situates Walter Mosley. Introduction —Owen E. Brady and Derek C. Maus Introduction x Home is a relational term. It locates us in time and space as well as within networks of values and human relationships. In the present, it is a term that defines the realities that both offer opportunities for self-making and propose the limits for that crucial process. Home also shapes identity—as in homeland or hometown—marking the individual with values and customs of a specific geographical place. But home generates a future, too. It is a goal in an ongoing process of human self-definition that can be designated as “homemaking,” the quest to find or to create out of whatever resources available, a space to exist securely, safely, and comfortably. History, too, plays its role in shaping the home of the present and the desired home of the future. Individual and collective historical experience of place enters this homemaking process as longing (sometimes nostalgic ) for the sense of feeling at home, and sometimes as pain.2 It is these longings, however, that do the most to shape the future, for every one longs for selfacceptance , a supportive family/community, and justice both in the home and in the homeland. Thus, the relationship between home and self is reciprocal: home defines the individual, yet the individual defines home through choices about values, human relationships, and self-expression. Individuals are both made by and makers of the ideological and emotional complex called home. In joining the long-running discussion of home in African American literature , it is useful to situate Mosley alongside and between his contemporaries Amiri Baraka and August Wilson to understand his position in this rich and densely detailed tradition. Mosley, Baraka, and Wilson all “riff” on the trope of home—and its associated “blue notes,” homemaking and homelessness—for purposes of sustaining and surviving as well as resisting and recreating. Like so many of their African American literary precursors and contemporaries, these three writers interrogate what Una Chaudhuri calls “geopathology,” the “incessant dialogue between belonging and exile, home and homelessness . . . [that] centers upon the figure of America, explicating it, first, as a betrayal of place...