Walter Mosley "RL's Dream"
Serpent's Tail (1995) £9.99 (1-85242-375-7)
Set in present day New York the book starts with
Atwater (Soupspoon) Wise, a bluesman whose life has been his music, old and ill, escaping
from the soul destroying "shelter" for old men and managing, somehow, to get
back to his empty apartment where all there is to eat is raw flour and where rats have
fouled the kitchen sink. He blacks out and is next found dumped on the pavement outside
together with all his belongings, in the bitter cold of a New York winter, waiting to be
captured again and returned to "shelter" by some official from social services. Before this can happen he is rescued and taken in by a young white woman, Kiki. She looks after him, fiercely protecting him from official interference and trying to bring him back to health. Soupspoon certainly needs a friend like Kiki and, as it turns out, Kiki needs Soupspoon's companionship and support as much as he needs her help. In the story Walter Mosley interweaves and relates the past of both Soupspoon and Kiki. Both grew up in the deep south, both are haunted by events from their early lives. Coming together and being able to articulate and, in Soupspoon's case, tell and record his story, is a coming to terms with their past for them both.
Soupspoon remembers his early life in Cougar Bluff, Mississippi, in the 30's - the beauty of the Delta - the music of the whippoorwill and the hoot owl and the crickets - the smell of the sweet earth and jasmine and magnolia, the lazy rock lizards down along Water Moccassin Pond. He tells of the first time he heard the blues, on his 11th birthday, at the Milky Way - a "beat - up old chicken barn that had been coated with tar and dotted with yellow splotches of paint that were supposed to be stars." Ugly in the daylight, at night it became magic when the bluesmen filled it with their music. And the best of them all was Robert `RL' Johnson, the boy who, it was said, had made a pact with the devil and could make music like no one else. It is of RL and RL's Dream that Atwater, above all, needs to speak and set down for the record.
His story of life in the Delta is powerful. Mosley's writing is powerful. The racism and the racists are ugly , the incidents painful to read about; like Bannon who taught the young Atwater a sense of self worth and the real history of black people burned to death; Jolly Horner whose powerful smiling teeth could bite through nails and whose big hands clapping behind Soupspoon's guitar sounded like artillery, made to play the fool for white men by carrying a two hundred pound spotted pig up a ladder and falling to his death; RL and Soupspoon and their guitars carted off to gaol and beaten up by the redneck sheriff for playing music in the afternoon.
Kiki listens. She has her own dark and terrible secret from her past which has haunted her dreams ever since she was a child in Arkansas. Eventually she is able to tell her story too.
As you read you can see and hear the voices of the people you are reading about. Kiki, with the southern twang in her voice, tough, courageous and with a strong sense of right and wrong. Atwater Wise, still, in old age, a gentle man and honourable in spite of what he has been through. Mosley creates a strong picture of a man of dignity and compassion.
In `RL's Dream Mosley has left the crime fiction genre of his previous books. There is no detective. But there are crimes - systematic, institutional, crimes against the vulnerable. And these are not only crimes of the deep south of the `30s. How different really is the New York of Soupspoon and Kiki or, for that matter the Glasgow of James Kelman's How late it was, how late., the winner of the 1994 Booker Prize. The two books have the same kind of `feel' about them for me. Perhaps it's the passion in the writing or the exposure of the brute truths about what a lot of people in society experience today. Sammy, Kelman's Glaswegian, in spite of everything, survives. He is not broken by the system, nor are Soupspoon and Kiki. Both Mosley and Kelman leave us with a sense of optimism about the potential of the individual but in no doubt as to the unease, the doubts and the dismay we should be feeling concerning the way the system governs and controls the individual. (P.E.D.)
See also review of the Film of Walter Mosley's Devil in a Blue Dress
