The Devil In A Blue Dress Character Analysis

The Devil in a Blue Dress exhibits multiple hard-boiled crime novel characteristics, Walter Mosley uses these characteristics to influence the reader’s perspective on racial issues. Mosley creatively uses racial differences to illustrate the challenges facing minority classes in 1940’s America. The novel is set in Los Angeles, following the Second World War. Racial disparity was still a very real issue at this time prior to the Civil Rights Movement. Mosley shows the challenges that people of color faced through realistic events that the characters’ experience. The main character of the novel is Ezekiel Rawlins, an African American, a World War II veteran and a man of simple tastes. Walter Mosley highlights the social problems related …show more content…
I think that the Ezekiel’s attitude toward his house is important to demonstrating an issue associated with race, “I loved going home. Maybe it was that I was raised on a sharecropper’s farm or that I never owned anything until I bought that house, but I loved my little home” (56). Easy hadn’t owned anything until he had bought his home, it was still a fresh concept for men of color to own property. Easy owned his property and he would do whatever it would take to keep it. DeWitt Albright offered Easy a job and hundred dollars to locate a woman named Daphne Monet. Albright is a businessman of sorts; his business doings strike Easy as questionable. Easy is concerned about what may happen to the woman that he is searching for after he finds her and shares her location with Mr. Albright. “’You see, Easy,’ he cut me off, ‘Daphne has a predilection for the company of Negroes. She likes jazz and pigs’ feet and dark meat, if you know what I mean’” (63). DeWitt Albright needed the help of a black man, he couldn’t go looking for her without raising suspicion. A white man such as Mr. Albright would stick out like a sore thumb in the kinds of places that Daphne is hanging around. Easy was a tool that Albright would use to go places that he couldn’t. Easy is able to go to these places because of his race. Yet another example of the differences in daily …show more content…
Race is important because it affects how a character is thought of and treated by other characters. Easy is looked down upon by the white men in the novel because he is an African American. The role of race impacts each character differently, Ezekiel loses his job at Champion Aircraft because he disagreed with his manager, had a white man stood up to Benny as Easy had done it is more than likely that he would not have lost his job. Easy losing his job at Champion Aircraft is an example of how African American men were discriminated against in the workplace. The daily life of a black man has its differences from that of a white man, Easy is overjoyed to see his home whenever he goes home. Easy owns that property, a very new concept for African Americans. Easy is used by Mr. Albright because a black man is able to go where a white man can’t, such as John’s, the club where Easy learns more about Daphne. Ruby Hanks is also affected by her race, when she created a new identity she changed her race. As a white woman Daphne, or Ruby, falls in love with a white man named Todd Carter. This would not have been possible had she stayed true to her identity as Ruby Hanks. Walter Mosley influenced my thoughts of the characters through race depiction, the characteristic of race had the greatest impact on the role that each individual played in the