Arts & Entertainment

Easy Does It

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There wouldn't be an Easy Rawlins in 2007. Easy Rawlins doesn't belong in 2007. One of the reasons that I'm stopping writing him is that I've done this Easy from 1948 to 1967. That Easy was during a 20-year period, a very important moment in American history. Today you have a much more complex world, and how the black man navigates that position becomes very difficult. Every once in a while you're ready to die. Every once in a while you swallow your pride and you do what you're told. It's a different world and the issues become, one, more psychological, how you deal with them; and, two, become more complex. It's about what people are doing and why they're doing them. Sometimes it's based on racism and sometimes it's not.

Most of your main characters are similar, black male heroes: Fearless Jones, Easy Rawlins, Socrates Fortlow. Why is that?

Every time I write a character, it's a black male hero. There are none in American literature. Yes, there's Jim from Huckleberry Finn, and there's ... [pause] John Henry, the steel drive man. But these are caricatures, not necessarily negative ones, but they're caricatures. But to write about heroes that represent America, they don't exist for black men. This is a major issue, one, because you have white America thinking that there are no black male heroes because there are none in their consciousness. And then all these black men who are striving to do what's right striving to make something happen in their selves, their families, their world, don't have any literature to back them up, which is a very important thing. I do write about those heroes.

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