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44 Devil with the Blue Eyes Reclaiming the Human against Pure Evil in Walter Mosley’s The Man in My Basement —Francesca Canadé Sautman Walter Mosley’s The Man in My Basement (2004) begins with the simplest of questions: “Mr. Blakey?” (3). Intoned by Anniston Bennet at the door of Charles Blakey’s family home on Sag Harbor, Long Island, that question, filled with sinister undertones , seems familiar to the reader of Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series; the less-than friendly white man, peering at the hero-narrator from his doorway, announces trouble. A small white man endowed with a substantial bank account, a mysterious profession, and undisclosed power, Bennet pressures Blakey to rent him the basement of his three-story home for the summer for an unusually large sum of money and for unknown reasons. Bennet arrives armed with full knowledge of all the details of Charles’s life, which he uses as blackmail so that he can remain in Blakey’s basement several months. In the basement, Bennet plans to confess his many crimes against humanity and elicit or, if need be, coerce a sort of “absolution ” from Charles (120–21; 174). As the confession unfurls in a vast array of egregious human rights violations, it becomes a potential trap, the site for a struggle between the two protagonists over what constitutes good and evil; truth and lies; the value of human compassion; the entitlements of greed and power; the meaning of history; and, most significantly , what it means to be human. That seemingly abstract debate—actualized in a dramatic conflict over competing narratives of African American history—raises questions of origins, responsibilities, and (implicitly) reparations. That the con- flict is verbal makes it no less deadly, as it pits Charles’s struggle to attain dignity, community survival and purpose against Bennet’s sneering affirmation of power. In the end, bested in the contest, Bennet takes his own life. But one particularly 45 haunting item of his confession recurs, engraving itself in Charles’s consciousness all the way to the last words of the novel: “[A]nd whenever I think about children, I remember that there was once a boy who was sold to a dog” (249). The Man in My Basement provokes serious reflection on a number of issues of international human rights, both immediately political and more broadly philosophical , including a compelling evocation of the disenfranchisement, abandonment , and lack of value ascribed to poor children in the world.1 There are clear allusions to the destructive impact of a global economy driven by Western and U.S. imperatives, specifically in Africa, where Western schemes have elicited untold misery under the guise of cultivating the “global village.” In Mosley’s novel, there are numerous references to the 1994 genocide in Rwanda (214, 215, 219, 227), where close to a million Tutsis were killed in a matter of months by Hutu nationalist militias supported by a large segment of the Hutu population, fired up to settle old economic and political scores.2 Mosley also recounts “crimes . . . fantastic and sick” (240); coups and acts of terror that can potentially destabilize nations; and bombings “that could level a city block or blow a jetliner out of the sky” (233–34).3 The right to overcome poverty—elusive in most government-driven definitions of human rights, and one whose implications affluent Western powers particularly fear—is blithely quashed by Bennet’s apology for the forces of global capitalism.4 The poverty of millions is maintained through Bennet’s “reclamations” business that appropriates their resources, strips them of means of subsistence, and fosters the acquisition of more wealth, including symbols such as the stolen Picasso (187–88). In his harrowing litany of crimes, Bennet recounts: “I once gave a ninemonth -old infant as a present to a man’s dog” (215); the sacrifice of the infant to a beast then stands for other acts of inhumanity perpetrated as whims or business obligations by agents of the “clean” and democratic West. The Man in My Basement, an allegorical novel built on the psychomachia that pits the narrator against the self-jailed Bennet and couched in the stylistic frameworks of both the detective novel and the political thriller, is adumbrated by thinking on the place of human rights in today’s brutal world. The “new humanity ” that the novel theorizes is profoundly shaped by the impetus of race, and thus critical race theory interfaces with human rights doctrines. The importance of...

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