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.

Excerpt from the novel A Red Death by Walter Mosley

     Jackson had morphine tablets. He said all I needed was one, but I took four against the bright red hurt in my mouth. I was doubled over in pain.
     “How long ‘fore it kicks in, Jackson?”
     “If you ain’t et nuthin’, ’bout a hour.”
     “An hour!”
     “Yeah, man. But listen,” he said. He had a fifth of Jim Beam by the neck. “We sit here and drink an’ talk an’ fo’ long you will have fo’gotten you even had a tooth.”
     So we passed the bottle back and forth. Because he was drinking, Jackson loosened up to the point where he’d tell me anything. He told stories that many a man would have killed him for. He told me about armed robberies and knifings and adulteries. He named names and gave proofs. Jackson wasn’t an evil man like Mouse, but he didn’t care what happened as long as he could tell the tale.
     “Jackson,” I said after a while.
     “Yeah, Ease?”
     “What you think ’bout them Migration people?”
     “They all right. You know it could get pretty lonely if you think ’bout how hard we got it ’round here. Some people just cain’t get it outta they head.”
     “What?”
     “All the stuff you cain’t do, all the stuff you cain’t have. An’ all the things you see happen an’ they ain’t a damn thing you could do.”
     He passed the bottle to me.
     “You ever feel like doin’ sumpin’?” I asked the little cowardly genius.
     “Pussy ain’t too bad. Sometime I get drunk an’ take a shit on a white man’s doorstep. Big ole stinky crap!”
     We laughed at that.
     When everything was quiet again I asked, “What about these communists? What you think about them?”
     “Well, Easy, that’s easy,” he said and laughed at how it sounded. “You know it’s always the same ole shit. You got yo’ people already got a hold on sumpin’, like money. An’ you got yo’ people ain’t got nuthin’ but they want sumpin’ in the worst way. So the banker and the corporation man gots it all, an’ the workin’ man ain’t got shit. Now the workin’ man have a union to say that it’s the worker makes stuff so he should be gettin’ the money. That’s like com’unism. But the rich man don’t like it so he gonna break the worker’s back.”
     I was amazed at how simple Jackson made it sound.
     “So,” I said. “We’re on the communist side.”
     “Naw, Easy.”
     “What you mean, no? I sure in hell ain’t no banker.”
     “You ever hear ’bout the blacklist?” Jackson asked.
     I had but I said, “Not really,” in order to hear what Jackson had to say.
     “It’s a list that the rich people got. All kindsa names on it. White people names. They movie stars and writers and scientists on that list. An’ if they name on it they cain’t work.”
     “Because they’re communist?”
     Jackson nodded. “They even got the guy invented the atomic bomb on that paper, Easy. Big ole important man like that.”
     “So? What you sayin’?”
     “Yo’ name ain’t on that list, Easy. My name ain’t neither. You know why?”
     I shook my head.
     “They don’t need yo’ name to know you black, Easy. All they gotta do is look at you an’ they know that.”
     “So what, Jackson?” I didn’t understand and I was so drunk and high that it made me almost in a rage.
     “One day they gonna th’ow that list out, man. They gonna need some movie star or some new bomb an’ they gonna th’ow that list away. Mosta these guys gonna have work again,” he said, then winked at me. “But you still gonna be a black niggah, Easy. An’ niggah ain’t got no union he could count on, an’ niggah ain’t got no politician gonna work fo’ him. All he got is a do’step t’shit in and a black hand t’wipe his black ass.”