Reprieve From Pain Walter Mosley’s New Novel Evokes The Legacy Of African Americans In Story About Dying Blues Guitarist

“RL’s Dream” By Walter Mosley (W.W. Norton, 267 pages, $22.)

“If the blues was walkin’ shows, momma and hands was feet I’d do a handstand for ya, darlin’ walkin’ right down on Hogan Street —Soupspoon Wise remembers the blues, from “RL’s Dream”

Walter Mosley is back with a work of fiction that is a departure from his much-praised mystery novels.

If you haven’t read his “Devil In a Blue Dress” (1990), you are missing out. Mosely gained some public appeal when Bill Clinton named him as one of his favorite writers during his run for presidency. Since then, Mosley has made his own bit at being a president - he currently holds that office for the Mystery Writers of America, as well as being on the board of directors for both the National Book Award and PEN America Center.

As a writer, Mosley’s skills come highly recommended. His plotting isn’t particularly outstanding, but what he accomplishes with characterization, scene and mood strikes a deep chord. His writing sinks down deep in your bones, deep down home.

I chanced upon “Devil” while working in a book store and filling out a special order. The opening chapter called out to my African-American heritage.

When his main character Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, who operates around south-central Los Angeles, thinks back to his own upbringing in Texas and Louisiana, I find myself reminiscing: about my great-grandfather whose appendix burst because he didn’t know how better to ease the pain he felt in his side than to drink a bottle of castor oil; and about my father who was beaten up in Kankakee, Ill., because he looked like his brother, who had been messing around with the girlfriend of another man; and about myself as a teenager going to parties at a club where people had been shot.

This little club was dark and had low ceilings. We would go there after the more pristine dance clubs had closed. The atmosphere was thick with cigarette smoke and sexual tension and was potentially lethal. This was a frequent hangout for those who were barred from the safe discos, who were too broke to make the cover charges, or, better yet, those who decided to cut to the chase: forget the glitter, go right to the slow grind, the drinking. I never saw violence there, but it happened on occasion, and it was in a neighborhood where the police were not too quick to respond if there was trouble.

Walter Mosley has a way of evoking these thoughts. His new novel “RL’s Dream,” in fact, hits them right on the head with the harmonic legacy of African America. The story centers on a dying guitarist in New York City named Soupspoon Wise who once played with the legendary bluesman Robert (RL) Johnson. Soupspoon is taken in by a young white woman named Kiki, and it is their combined presence that charts our course through their biographies and the enigma of the blues.

What better way is there to begin a blues novel than to show us the pain of its central characters: For Soupspoon, it’s the painful walk back to his apartment after escaping from a social service shelter; for Kiki it’s a trip home from a hospital via subway after having been stabbed by an 11-year-old. This is the impersonal meanness of New York, a place with no time for personal tragedies or histories.

Both, however, get a reprieve from their pains when their stories intertwine. Kiki arrives home in time to rescue Soupspoon from eviction from her building. She recognizes the old man as a tenant and remembers that he had been nice to her once. In a flash she decides to take him in, and she will tear apart his evictors to do it if necessary.

Her hard edge wins out and this, coupled with her later tenderness in helping Soupspoon into a bath and into her bed, send the man back to his youth in Cougar Bluff, Miss. It was during his youth (in which he is referred to by his given name, Atwater) that he came to the blues, where he remembers hanging out around an old, hole-in-the-wall juke joint called the Milky Way. His memories are the reader’s glimpse into the Delta, where the pervasive heat, humidity, and prejudice are enough to tweak a soul enough to cause it to sing out.

Present and past intermingle in this novel. In the present, Kiki uses her work for an insurance company to secure the funds for Soupspoon’s medical treatment, and the aging bluesman decides to use this sudden new twist to his life to trace down his memories and look back at a life that revolved so much around his friend Robert Johnson. When he is able, he picks up his guitar again and plans to play the music that still resides within him. And he hunts down his ex-wife and any other old acquaintances who would have known Johnson, hoping their memories will fill out his story.

In the past, young Atwater takes us into the juke joints and into the homes of men and women who influenced him. In one scene he and Robert are thrown in jail after playing along a roadside, drawing field workers, male and female, to hear them.

In Soupspoon’s words: “There must’a been 40 people listening and dancing to me and Bob. Forty poor-as-the-day-they-was-born colored souls. We was higher than a holy roller’s shout when the county sheriff come up.”

After firing shots and terrorizing the crowd, the sheriff tells Soupspoon to get up from where he is crouched. Soupspoon looks to see that Johnson is caught in the sheriff’s grip, and in the retelling he says, “The look on Bob’s face spoke the whole history of Mississippi colored life. RL was a brash young man, conceited and wild. But when that lawman grabbed him, he just slumped down and took it.” The alternative, according to Soupspoon was death, a quick death.

Kiki has her own past to confront. The shadow of sexual abuse from her father haunts her dreams and is the reason behind the hard edge she uses to survive in New York. Her memories take us to Hogston, Ark., where she was raised and where she remembers escaping to the shack of Hattie and Hector, an old black couple who hid her from her father. She tries to chase away her demons with alcohol, but to no avail - when the devil is ready for you there is no place to hide. Robert Johnson could have told her that (as legend has it, the bluesman sold his soul in exchange for his guitar skills).

This wouldn’t be a Mosley novel without some element of immediate danger. For Kiki and Soupspoon it is the violent specter of Fez, one of Kiki’s co-workers. Fez serves to hasten the novel along, speeding us to a conclusion that closes the chapter on an era. And as I mentioned earlier, Mosley’s plots need work, and this isn’t an exception. Even so, he accomplishes what he sets out to do. He presents you with the blues.