White Butterfly by Walter Mosley

[meganbmoore]

It’s 1956 in Los Angeles, and Easy Rawlins has retired from being a private eye and settled down with his wife and children. Someone has been raping and murdering black girls, but the police ignore it until a white girl from a good family suffers the same. When the police ask Easy to ask around to see who knows what, he initially refuses, preferring not to get involved, but has no choice once he learns that his old friend, Mouse, will be blamed if the real killer isn’t found.

The book is more similar to Devil in a Blue Dress than it is to A Red Death, focusing on a mystery surrounding a white woman caught up in the black neighborhood, and featuring more of Easy and Mouse investigating together. This will, however, most likely be my last Easy Rawlins book (I have a few others by Mosley that I’ll likely still read, including the Paris Minton books) due to an event fairly early in the book.

Easy wants to have sex. His wife doesn’t. She turns away from him in bed. He anally rapes her, thinking that it doesn’t matter, since her body can’t help but respond. The next morning, he’s confused about why she’s so angry. She says it’s because he raped her. He laughs and says you can’t rape your wife, but trails off when he realizes she isn’t buying it. Later that day, he has sex with a much younger prostitute he was interviewing as part of his investigations.

I’m not surprised about the prostitute. In truth, I was more surprised that he’d apparently been completely faithful until then, as his sexual relations in the first two books tended to be ill-considered at best, and some were morally suspect. But I never really thought I’d read book three of a continuing series where the protagonist raped someone. Granted, the book is set in 1956 and came out in 1992, so I can’t (and don’t) really expect modern sensibilities (and just look at what was going on regarding sex and rape in other genres in 1992) but it boggles my mind that this book went through multiple approval stages and no one went “Hey, this is book three. Anyone reading this probably already likes Easy. Maybe we shouldn’t have a character they like, and who we want them to want to read more of RAPE HIS WIFE AND THEN LAUGH WHEN CONFRONTED WITH IT.”

Mind you, I thought the relationship was rather creepy before that, with Easy’s emphasis on how she looked perfect and how she and baby Edna fit his image of a perfect family (Jesus, his adopted son, is also loved, but not a part of that picture, and he has to use a side entrance to the house to get to his bedroom) and his lack of emphasis on or even mentioning anything else about her that didn’t contribute to a surface idea of a perfect wife.

Mosley says it’s rape, and portrays it as wrong, but in the long run, that pretty much just means that he doesn’t (or didn’t at the tine) think it’s a big deal, or something a protagonist shouldn't do.

Morality and decisions have been rather grey and conflicted since the beginning of this series, but there’s a difference between “conflicted character who makes mistakes” and “rapist.” Easy does eventually realize that he shouldn’t have had sex with Regina when she didn’t want to, but he never really admits that it was rape. I have (I think) the rest of the books in the series, but I doubt I’ll read them. I’m curious to see what happens, and I like Mosley’s writing, but few things kill a character faster for me than rape, or even attempted rape. So while I may enjoy the plots, it’s highly doubtful that I’d enjoy Easy, or be able to view him separately from the rape.