Excerpt from the novel A Red Death by Walter Mosley

     “Name?”
     “Ezekiel Porterhouse Rawlins,” I answered.
     “Date of birth.”
     “Let’s see now,” I said. “That would be November third, nineteen hundred and twenty.”
     “Height.”
     “Close to six feet, almost six-one.”
     “Weight.”
     “One eighty-five, except at Christmas. Then I’m about one ninety.”
     He asked more questions like that and I answered freely. I trusted a Negro, I don’t know why. I’d been beaten, robbed, shot at, and generally mistreated by more colored brothers than I’d ever been by whites, but I trusted a black man before I’d even think about a white one. That’s just the way things were for me.
     “Okay, Ezekiel, tell me about Poinsettia, Reverend Towne, and that woman.”
     “They all dead, man. Dead as mackerel.”
     “Who killed them?”
     He had an educated way of talking. I could have talked like him if I’d wanted to, but I never did like it when a man stopped using the language of his upbringing. If you were to talk like a white man you might forget who you were.