Distance learning: Monday

8:00 am    My alarm goes off. I reach out and turn it off and go back to sleep, lightly.

8:30 am    I get out of bed and go to the twins' room to wake them up. Monday seems to be the one day everybody sleeps in. The school thinks we should start work at 8:30 am, but since that is earlier than we start working on any other day, we think 9 am is better. I go back to my room to dress, then make tea and bring the paper in. Rocket Boy eats breakfast.

9:00 am    "OK, guys, you're supposed to do Dreambox or Lexia for 45 minutes. Which do you want to do?" Kid A chooses Lexia, Kid B chooses Dreambox. Kid A has trouble signing in to Lexia. We email his special ed resource person for help. Finally, at 9:40, he manages to sign in and I start the timer for both kids (for 20 minutes, since we are running late).

10:05 am    According to the official schedule, we're supposed to spend 30 minutes getting organized, reading teacher feedback, and making up late assignments, and 15 minutes doing a brain break, but that all goes by the wayside, because we're late on account of the Lexia problem. "Shall we do math, social studies, language arts, or do you want to do your classes in the order you usually have them?" We spend ten minutes or so arguing about this.

10:15 am    We start math. Kid B and I read through his teacher's complicated instructions, finally locating today's work. I get him started and move over to help Kid A. Kid A is supposed to work on assignments in Khan Academy, but he has forgotten how to log in. We spend an hour or so changing his password, signing in and realizing we've signed in to his 5th grade class, searching through old assignments to try to find the code so he can sign in to the 7th grade class, realizing he should have used a different user name, trying to change his password for the different user name, and finally emailing his teacher for help. During all this I start laughing hysterically, never a good sign.

11 am    Kid B has finished the first part of his math on his own, but now has to calculate his walking speed. This involves the sidewalk. We find a tape measure and some chalk and my phone and head outside. "You should use this tape measure, it's better," says Kid A, so I put back the first tape measure and take the one he's holding. Kid B and I go out to the sidewalk and start measuring. It turns out that Kid A's tape measure only has inches and we're supposed to use centimeters. We put Kid A's tape measure back in the house and get the cm tape measure. We measure out ten meters and use my phone to time him walking the distance (10 seconds). Then we time it again (8 seconds). We decide the second measure is more accurate and go back in the house.

11:30 am    Kid A's math teacher hasn't responded yet, so we decide to do social studies instead. He first has to check in, which involves filling out a form and submitting it. We discover that it has a 12 noon due date (why? why?), so he gets it in just in time. Then we have to read two pages about different types of government and do a worksheet. The worksheet seems embarrassingly easy to me, but is very hard for Kid A, who gets every single question wrong until I point out things he's missing.

12:15 pm    I check on Kid B, who is having trouble with his math. I help him understand some graphs and then get him started on the third part of his math assignment. I check my email and there is a response from Kid A's math teacher, thank goodness.

12:30 pm    Kid A manages to sign in to Khan Academy using a link from his math teacher. Not reading carefully, he zips past the place where he's supposed to enter her class code and ends up in a session that looks wrong to me. Ignoring my concerns, he starts doing an assessment (but why? it's not supposed to be an assessment). I leave him and go back to help Kid B.

12:50 pm    I help Kid B with the last problem on his math and get him to start social studies. Since social studies check-in ended at 12 noon (why? why?), he is marked "late." We work through the same reading and assignment that Kid A and I did earlier, and fortunately he understands it better and it doesn't take so long. He submits it and I tell him he can have a break before we move on to reviewing for and taking his make-up social studies quiz.

1:30 pm    I make chicken nuggets in the microwave to feed my hungry children. Kid A also has a piece of pie. At some point during the morning I ate breakfast, but I honestly can't remember when. For lunch I have crackers and dip, because I am losing my mind and those feel comforting.

2:00 pm    Back to school. Kid A is having trouble with his strange math assessment thing, so I try to help him. The problems he's working on have nothing to do with what he's been doing in math class. I express my concern about this once again. He finally looks closely at the screen and notices that it says "5th grade." We're still in 5th grade! I take over, log him out of 5th grade, log him in to 7th grade, put in the code his teacher sent, and finally we find the homework. There are 10 things to do! He throws a fit, but I point out that the fit wasted time he could have spent working on his 10 assignments. He finally gets started and realizes that some of the 10 are videos he's supposed to watch. There are really only 3 assignments. I leave him to it and go back to Kid B.

2:20 pm    Kid B now has to review what they call a "pear deck" to get ready to retake the map portion of the social studies quiz he failed last week. We sit down together to review it, and immediately I get confused (because I have not been studying Central Asia as closely as the kids have). I end up dragging out an atlas to help us, but even it is confusing regarding the exact location of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan. Finally Google Maps shows us where they are. Encouraged, Kid B settles down to retake the quiz (I don't help with that).

2:40 pm    I go back to Kid A, who has done some of his math on his own but has gotten most of the questions wrong. I work with him to re-do them. He knows the concepts but doesn't read the questions carefully. Even when I read the questions to him, he gets them wrong. I have to get him to slow down and pay attention. When he slows down and pays attention, he gets every answer right.

3:20 pm    I go back to check on Kid B. He is struggling because his language arts teacher has a check-in deadline of 2 pm and it is now way past that. (School is supposed to end at 3:15 on Mondays, but we need to keep going because we aren't done.) Unlike with social studies, he isn't just marked late -- he can't submit the check-in assignment at all. I tell him to go on to the main assignment, but it apparently depends on his having done the check-in assignment. Nothing shows up for him to do, so he has nothing to work on.

3:30 pm    I officially lose it. I go back to my computer to write an angry email to Kid B's language arts teacher (who I actually like a lot), my hands shaking too much to type. Rocket Boy asks me what's going on. I start screaming at him, shut the door, finish my email, hit send. Then I start to cry. I go out to the front of the house, stand at the front door, crying, and bang my fists on the door in frustration. Rocket Boy tries to get me to stop, so I go out onto the front porch. But there are people walking by, as always. I go back in the house and out to the backyard, the tears flowing freely now. I lie down in the middle of the backyard, sobbing my heart out. (It's possible that some of the tears are for Chester, who died a week ago.) Rocket Boy tries to get me to stop, warning me that our next-door neighbor might call the police if she hears me. I say, "No one is going to call the police about someone crying!"

4:00 pm    The crying is very cathartic. I eventually calm down, sit up, and then go back inside. I write Kid B's language arts teacher another email, apologizing for the first one. Then I try to get Kid A to do his language arts assignment. It isn't too long, but it is mystifying. He is supposed to finish a magic planner, or something like that. "Do you know what this means?" I ask him. "Yes." "Have you started it?" I ask. "Yes." "Can we work on it?" "No, I'm tired." After bugging him several times, I realize that he is worn out (and of course so am I), and my meltdown was hard on everyone. I email his language arts teacher to explain what happened. I also email his math teacher to thank her for sending the code earlier and I tell her a little bit about what happened.

6:30 pm    We decide to walk to the grocery store to get sushi for dinner because nobody wants to cook. It is cold outside. The walk does everyone good. Tomorrow is another day. Unfortunately.

Goodbye Mr. Fluffy

You know how sometimes you feel so bad you think you can't go on? This isn't one of those times. I can go on.

And yet, oh my god.

First RBG, then my baby. The pain of losing my cat helps to block out the pain of Trump getting another Supreme Court pick. The wretchedness I feel about the political situation distracts me from the agony of Chester's death from an aortic thromboembolism yesterday morning.

This does not mean that either of these are good things. They are wound around in my mind in a loop of misery.

Yesterday I was just spacey all day, couldn't focus, couldn't think. Today some of the pain gets to seep through, very unpleasantly. 

Enough for this post.

Negative

Rocket Boy and I got tested for Covid-19 last Thursday and we got our results yesterday -- Negative. Of course. My symptoms were a "thunderclap headache" on Tuesday, milder headaches the next few days, fatigue, a slight cough, sneezing, bit of a sore throat (all of that could be allergies), some digestive discomfort (but that's probably just IBS). RB's symptoms were a fever of 99.4 Tuesday night and feeling lousy (though he was fine by Wednesday night), plus he was planning to fly back to St. Louis yesterday and wasn't sure if he should. Oh, and Kid B had headaches for a couple of nights. It's possible that we all had a very mild bug.

When I got the negative results I realized I was disappointed. I'm afraid of the virus, because I'm so fat and have breathing problems. But the thought that both Rocket Boy and I could have mild cases and then be done with it was very appealing. Now I have to go back to worrying about catching it.

Deaths in the U.S. as of Monday: 194,235. Last week: 188,983. That's 5252 deaths in 7 days. The week before it was 5500 in 7 days, so it is going down. Unfortunately, Boulder County's numbers are going up, and it's almost all from CU students. Our 7-day average is now 56 cases, which is 17 cases per 100,000 people. Maybe this is a Labor Day blip. I hope so. 

A week ago, September 8th, it was snowing. That's really hard to believe, even though I lived through it. How could it have snowed? We went from high 90s on Sunday, to 80s-90s on Monday, to low 30s on Tuesday. I think that's right. And a few days later we were back to temps in the 80s and not a sign of the white stuff except for the remnants of the kids' failed snowman (they rolled up two big balls, lifted one on top of the other, it fell over, and they left it like that). We only got about 5 inches -- they say -- it didn't seem like it was even that much. But it was very messy and wet.

Actually, there is still a sign of it -- everyone in the neighborhood has huge heaps of tree branches piled in front of their houses. The storm was really hard on big, leafy trees. We had a colossal branch come down from the elm tree, but fortunately it dropped in the back of the backyard, near -- but not on -- the back fence. Rocket Boy had to saw it all apart for us to be able to drag it to the front yard.

And of course you worry now that many branches were weakened and may come down in the next storm, even if they've lost their leaves by then. Oh well, life in Colorado.

I'd rather be living here than California, though, or anywhere on the west coast. I'm so upset about the fires there. And the terrible air. It's actually dangerous in Oregon and Washington. There's nothing really I can say about it, just that I'm sad. We have fires in Colorado, too, but as you can imagine, the heavy wet snow was a big help with those.

We celebrated Rocket Boy's birthday on Saturday, in a low-key way, as he prefers. He got cards from my older sister and his brother, as well as two from the twins and me. That's it -- no presents. He tried to get someone else to choose what to do about dinner (take-out or eat out), but no one had an opinion, so he was forced to do what he wanted to do -- eat out at the Great Scott's in Broomfield. They've created a nice patio seating area where you can watch trains go by, so that was fun. RB, very unusually, had an Irish coffee to drink, his one concession to the day. Oh, and I made a blueberry pie and we all had some when we got home. It was a nice day.

On Sunday he really wanted to do something special with the twins. He thought of taking them to the Colorado Railroad Museum, but they were having one of their Saturdays with Thomas the Tank Engine, and it was sold out. So then he decided to take them to ride the Georgetown Loop railroad instead, even though they'd just gone, back in June. Kid A threw a fit about going, so ultimately only Dad and Kid B went, but I think they had a good time together. It was a beautiful day and masks were worn by all.

Rocket Boy is now scheduled to fly back to St. Louis on the 20th, but he's thinking of changing his flight AGAIN, because he's now possibly being assigned to the 4th wave of employees going back to work in his building, rather than the 3rd. He'll find out for sure tomorrow. In some ways I wish he would just go back already, and then he could come visit us again in October. But it's a lot simpler, and cheaper, to extend this visit, so that's probably what we'll do. Then we might not see him again until Thanksgiving, but I'm not sure. We'll see.

Last week school was stressful, and this week is starting out a bit stressful as well. On the plus side, I had some important conversations with one of Kid A's teachers and his resource person, and I think we're doing better now. On the negative side, it's still so hard. Today, toward the end of "Advisory," Kid A came to me and announced that he'd finished all his homework. I said, "why aren't you in Advisory?" He said, "Oh, she's not meeting with me today." I said, "Are you sure?" We went and checked Schoology. Sure enough, he was supposed to be meeting with her today. "OK, sign on for the last five minutes," I told him. 

I just have to set it aside and move on.

Change in the Weather

Today is Labor Day, last day of a pleasant three-day weekend. It is warm outside but not horrible, upper 80s, and the air is bad, but not bad like it was yesterday when the smoke from the Cameron Peak fire was overwhelming us. This has been a dreadfully hot summer, with almost no rain, and I'm so tired of it.

So, starting tonight, we're going to have a change. Here's what the Weather Service says will happen:

A strong cold front will drop south across Colorado. North winds are expected to gust up to 50 mph and temperatures will plummet as the cold front pushes through.

It is hard to wrap my head around that. And as if that isn't enough, they also say this:

Heavy snow will fall in the Front Range Mountains and Foothills Tuesday and Tuesday night, with accumulations of 8 to 14 inches in most areas, and locally heavier amounts around 20 inches possible. 

That snow will continue into Tuesday night when more significant accumulations will be possible on trees and elevated surfaces, resulting in tree damage and possible power outages. If significant accumulation occurs, be mindful of where you park your car -- not under trees, and be alert for falling tree branches.

I have actually never seen a weather forecast like that before. I went out and looked at our trees, to see what might fall on us tomorrow. Our cars aren't parked very close to any big trees, so they'll probably be OK. What is close to a big tree is our roof! Our enormous Siberian elm hangs its branches right over our house. And then there's our fence! Doesn't the maple tree in the photo look like it's gearing up to drop its branches on that fence? It's happened before. Years ago, pre-twins, that tree dropped a gigantic branch into our next-door neighbor's yard.

At least Rocket Boy is still here, for a few more days, to help with the clean-up.

Other than the impending weather, I don't have much else to report. I'm very worried about the weather in California, which has reached apocalyptic conditions. It was 110 in Los Altos yesterday, 121 down south in Woodland Hills. It was predicted to be cooler today, but instead it's 110 in Los Altos again. And they're still having terrible, terrible fires. We have fires too, of course, but the snow and rain will help with that.

We made it through our first full week of school. It wasn't a great experience, but it could have been worse. I'm learning how to deal with this new type of distance learning. I can let the kids work on their own more than I could last spring, but not as much as I was hoping. I need to read their teachers' Schoology pages and get a clear view of what's expected, because the kids don't do it themselves. They say they read them, but they don't read carefully enough to understand the content. Not worth yelling at them, just need to do some more work myself, keep them on track until school goes back to normal.

They're saying that BVSD may bring K-2 kids back to in-person school soon, which would be wonderful (even though it doesn't affect us). But covid rates in Boulder are going up. In the paper today it said 65 new cases were reported on Sunday, the largest one-day increase since the pandemic began. Thank you, University of Colorado, and an extra special shout-out to the fraternities and their illegal rush parties. 188,983 people have died of the virus in the U.S. so far, an increase of about 5500 since a week ago. College students don't tend to die of the virus, but if there's a lot of it in the community and older people start catching it, hmm. 

Rocket Boy has a reservation to fly back to St. Louis on September 14th, a week from now. We will miss him a lot, but in some ways it will be a little easier having him go back, because this little house is very crowded with four people trying to work and to get along. The main problem, as I see it, has been the weather. When it's in the 90s every single day, and you have to keep the house shut up until evening, tempers flare. Tomorrow, when it's snowing and blowing, and perhaps the power will go out, tempers will also flare. I'm hoping we have a few days of decent weather before he leaves, so that we can have the windows open and do things outside without being miserable.

Reading post: The Conjure-Man Dies and four other mystery novels (and a short story)

My next book for the Classics Challenge is The Conjure-Man Dies: A Mystery Tale of Dark Harlem by Rudolph Fisher, published in 1932. This fulfills category #6, "A Genre Classic." Like the books I read for my last challenge category, The Conjure-Man Dies is a novel of the Harlem Renaissance, and Rudolph Fisher was an important writer of that period. He wrote one mainstream novel and then this wonderful mystery -- and then he died, at the age of 37, in 1934. I was so disappointed when I learned that! I thought I'd discovered a great new mystery writer. But no. One and done. In addition to being an excellent writer, Fisher was a medical doctor, and his death may have been an indirect result of his research in radiology. He sounds like a brilliant, multi-talented man, and I'm so sorry he died so young.

Anyway. I originally had trouble finding a 50-or-more-year-old genre novel by a Black author, and had settled on a science fiction work, The Einstein Intersection by Samuel Delany, which was published in 1967. And that would have been fine. But I really wanted a mystery, since that's by far my favorite type of genre fiction. My first google searches for "classic Black mystery novels," etc., didn't produce anything that looked good to me, but while exploring Harlem Renaissance novels I found The Conjure-Man, and what a find it was. I'm still really tickled about the whole thing.

OK, so, the book. The Conjure-Man Dies is fun: a classic mystery with the flavor of old Harlem. The conjure-man, an African psychic, is seemingly found dead in the middle of a session with a client, and Detective Perry Dart of the Harlem police force arrives to investigate. He is aided in his task by Dr. John Archer, a physician who lives across the street from the house where the murder took place, and later by Bubber Brown, an unemployed street cleaner turned private detective who is also one of the suspects. Here Brown tries to explain to Dart how he decided to become a detective himself:

     "Well, y'see times is been awful hard, everybody knows that [note: it's 1932]. And I did have a job with the city--I was in the Distinguished Service Company---"

     "The what?"

     "The D. S. C.--Department of Street Cleaning--but we never called it that, no, suh. Coupla weeks ago I lost that job and couldn't find me nothin' else. Then I said to myself, 'They's only one chance, boy--you got to use your head instead o' your hands.' Well, I figured out the situation like this: The only business what was flourishin' was monkey-business---"

     "What are you talking about?"

     "Monkey-business. Cheatin'--backbitin', and all like that. Don't matter how bad business gets, lovin' still goes on; and long as lovin' is goin' on, cheatin' is goin' on too..."

(I can just see the string of novels that could have followed this one, where Detective Dart's formal investigations are aided by Brown's less orthodox ones, and Dr. Archer is called in for forensic and medical advice. It's such a shame that Rudolph Fisher died young. But I digress.) Of course, the mystery is eventually solved, with plenty of twists and turns, and I honestly didn't see the ending coming (maybe wasn't paying attention, because the clues are there). We get to visit lots of different milieus within Harlem. The whole thing was pure fun.

One thing that struck me about the book is that white people are almost entirely absent. They play a background role -- they ruined the conjure-man's life, for example -- but they aren't directly involved. I'm so hyper-sensitive about Black people and the police that I kept waiting for something awful to happen to one of the characters, Jinx, who ends up jailed for a time, or for a white cop to take over from Detective Dart and ruin everything, or for something bad to occur. But nothing like that happened. The police followed the law. There was no police brutality or corruption. I wonder if that's what it was really like in Harlem in 1932. Probably not, but hmm.

After reading that delightful novel, I thought I'd explore early Black mysteries a little more. The Conjure-Man Dies is believed to be the first mystery written by a Black author about Black people and published in book form. There was an earlier mystery by a Black author that had only white characters (The Haunting Hand by W. Adolphe Roberts, 1926), and there were two earlier mysteries by Black authors published only as serials in magazines. The second of these, The Black Sleuth by John Edward Bruce, has been edited and published in book form as part of the Northeastern Library of Black Literature, so I decided to read that (conveniently, Prospector has partially opened up again, so the book came whizzing to me from the University of Northern Colorado libraries).

The Black Sleuth is not really a mystery novel, it's a political tract about Black rights with a little bit of mystery thrown in at the end. It's also a big mess, ending before the crime (a jewel theft) has even been committed (for part of the novel, the sleuth, Sadipe Okukenu, follows the thieves because he thinks they are going to steal a diamond that he shouldn't even know exists). This is from Chapter 12:

Now, The Royal Arms was one of the new fashionable hotels of London that employed a black waiter, in compliment to its American patrons, who made it their habitat during the London season, and Sadipe, our hero, who was not ignorant of the plot which had been hatched to rob Captain De Forrest, had communicated to his chief his desire to be placed in this menial position.

There is simply no way for Sadipe to be "not ignorant of the plot" unless he is psychic. Furthermore, in Chapter 1, Captain De Forrest expresses horror that a Black person (he uses a different word) will be assigned to the case of his stolen diamond. This is followed by several chapters of flashback, and then suddenly we have Sadipe already investigating the crime before it is committed. I always wondered how so many 19th century authors could write and publish novels in serial form without getting mixed up or wanting to go back and change the beginning in order to have the ending work out right. I didn't see how it could be done unless you wrote the entire novel first and then just published it bit by bit. The Black Sleuth is an example of what can go wrong when you do it the other way. 

The editor of this volume, John Cullen Gruesser, has done a masterful job of analyzing and explaining the work. Even with all this effort, the story makes no sense, but that's part of the fun of it. The Black Sleuth was originally published in McGirt's Magazine, which Gruesser calls "a successful early black publication," edited by someone named James Ephraim McGirt. Its highest estimated circulation was 1500 and it lasted for only six years (1903-1909), but that apparently counts as successful. The last known episode of The Black Sleuth probably appeared in the July/August/September 1909 issue, even though the story was clearly not over. There was one issue after that, which for some reason did not contain an episode, and then the magazine folded. But get this, "only seventeen of the fifty or more issues of McGirt's that were published survive, and these are scattered among various libraries." Doesn't that just give you chills? For me, the story of the magazine and the serial evoke a whole world of Black intellectuals (the author, John Edward Bruce, was a journalist who wrote for over 100 Black publications) functioning as best they could in a hostile white world that didn't even deign to preserve their work for posterity. In the end I didn't care at all that the story itself was so goofy -- it's the backstory that's fascinating.

Moving forward in time, the next writer who gets mentioned in articles about early Black mysteries is Chester Himes, who wrote in the 1950s and 1960s. This puzzled me. Did no Black people write mysteries in the 1940s? In fact, they did, but they couldn't get published. One example is Hughes Allison, better known as a playwright, but who also wrote short stories, though he had trouble publishing them. His story "Corollary" appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine in 1948. Another mystery story, "Imposture," appeared in Negro Digest in 1949 (just before the magazine folded, of course). I read "Corollary" and enjoyed it very much. Allison published no more mysteries before his death in 1966. I'm sure there were other Black writers of that time period, writing mysteries about Black people, who just couldn't get published.

OK, so Chester Himes it would have to be. His first "mystery" novel was A Rage in Harlem, published in 1957, and he went on to write several others featuring the Black detectives Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones. A Rage in Harlem isn't exactly a mystery. It's about criminals, and they are eventually tracked down by the detectives (and murdered by them, with no repercussions), but for the most part we know who did what to whom. There's a little confusion about some possible gold ore, and there are many questions about the motivations of Imabelle (the novel's original title was For the Love of Imabelle). But for the most part the "mystery" just isn't. The enjoyment of the book comes from the intricate way the pieces of the story fit together, and, more than anything, its humor.

Yes, humor! Before I read this novel, I had gotten the sense that Himes' mysteries were "hardboiled," but after reading this one, I wouldn't put them in that category. Hardboiled mysteries can contain humor, but they aren't slapstick. Himes, on the other hand, is funny. The character of Goldy, aka Sister Gabriel, amused me every time she/he appeared, despite the fact that she/he is addicted to cocaine and morphine and has to keep shooting up. I was reading the book in bed late at night and kept snorting with laughter, annoying my husband.

It's true that A Rage in Harlem takes place in a very seedy environment (Harlem has changed a lot since the Renaissance period). Many people are murdered, many other crimes are committed as well. There are white cops around, and they're nasty. Anyone who doesn't believe in the concept of systemic bias against Black people should read Himes. For instance, in this passage two white cops are looking for a knife that Imabelle used to cut a man who was hassling her. Two Black men are nearby, and one admits to having seen someone pick up the knife:

     "Where'd he go?" the first cop asked.

     The man pointed up Park Avenue.

     Both cops gave him a hard threatening look.

     "What did he look like?"

     The colored man turned to his companion.

     "What he look like, you think?"

     The second colored man disapproved of his companion's volunteering information to white cops about a colored boy.

     "I didn't see him," he said, showing his disapproval.

     Both cops turned to stare at him in rage.

     "You didn't seen him," one mimicked. "Well, God damn it, you're both under arrest."

A little later the cops let them go again, but this passage and others illustrate the unfair and illogical world the Black people in the story have to live in. However, in Himes' universe there is justice, it just gets doled out a little oddly. 

I enjoy reading mysteries for two reasons. First, I enjoy the mystery, the secret, the not knowing and then gradually discovering clues which solve the puzzle. But secondly, and perhaps equally important, I like the fact that at the end of the story, all's right with the world again. If the world is a bad place, it's still a bad place (I don't like "cozy" mysteries), but at least temporarily the good guys have untangled the mess and put things back where they belong. At the end of A Rage in Harlem, everything has been sorted out and put back in its place, and I felt very good when the story was over. Despite the body count.

I decided to continue this exploration of Black mystery fiction by re-reading Walter Mosley's outstanding Devil in a Blue Dress. Although published in 1990, Devil is set in 1948. Mosley has said that he based the character of Easy Rawlins, his detective, on his own father and other men he knew growing up in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 60s (Mosley was born in 1952). 

Mosley started writing fiction in his 30s and has published more than 25 novels since then. He's an excellent writer and has probably done more than anyone to interest white people in mysteries about Black people. I remembered liking Devil in a Blue Dress and its sequels very much, but I'd forgotten the details (mysteries do tend to run together in my mind). When I re-read it I was struck by something I'd forgotten: in the novel Easy Rawlins doesn't just learn how to be a private detective, he learns how to stand up for himself in a world that is bent and determined to keep him down. Easy has a voice in his head that helps him figure out what to do:

     The voice only comes to me at the worst times, when everything seems so bad that I want to take my car and drive it into a wall. Then this voice comes to me and gives me the best advice I ever get.

     The voice is hard. It never cares if I'm scared or in danger. It just looks at all the facts and tells me what I need to do.

...

     The voice has no lust. He never told me to rape or steal. He just tells me how it is if I want to survive. Survive like a man.

     When the voice speaks, I listen.

The voice is already a part of Easy before the book begins. But now he is often in dangerous situations and thus often needs to hear the voice. Over the course of the novel he seems to integrate the voice into his daily life and become more sure of himself. By the end you feel as though you've watched him mature into a fully human being, despite the attempts of white people to drag him down. The importance of this didn't hit me when I first read the book because I hadn't first read so much classic Black fiction. It's meaningful that the book is set in 1948, because white America was so oblivious to racism at that time. As the series goes on, we move forward in time and see how Easy lives through other eras in history, making the books an education in themselves, in addition to being really good mysteries. I realized after re-reading Devil in a Blue Dress, that I have only read the first four in the Easy Rawlins series and there are now TEN others, so I plan to read the rest. Eventually.

I was going to stop there (at least for this post), but decided to include one more Black mystery novel because I hadn't read one by a woman yet. Of course, I didn't even know there were any mystery series written by Black women until I started this project. One author who is often mentioned is Eleanor Taylor Bland, who died in 2010. On my most recent trip to the Bookworm, I picked up a copy of her first mystery, Dead Time (1992), started reading, and had trouble putting it down. It's a standard police procedural, with the main difference being that the hero is a Black woman and a single parent (her husband, also a cop, was apparently killed on the job). Marti MacAlister is an appealing character, and the story is a nice blend of gritty and cozy. I know I said I don't like cozy, but I don't mind if the main character has some joy in her life. 

Marti regularly runs up against people who don't think a Black woman could/should be a detective. In addition, she is partnered with an older white male detective who has his own ideas about what her role should be.

     Police work, as far as Vik was concerned, was divided into two categories: man's work, which involved supervising the evidence techs and all other personnel at the scene, and woman's work, interviewing people.

     Since her interpretation differed, Marti pulled on a pair of transparent rubber gloves and went over to look at the body. 

That excerpt gives a good sense of the tone -- Marti doesn't waste time getting angry about how she's treated, she just keeps quietly insisting on her rights. The plot of Dead Time is a little contrived, but I stayed interested to the end, even though I'd long since figured out who the killer was. I'm looking forward to reading more of this series.

So, as a result of this Challenge, I have added to my to-read list the other seven Chester Himes novels featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Grave Digger Jones, the ten additional books in the Easy Rawlins series by Walter Mosley (plus perhaps some of Mosley's other books), and the 13 additional books by Eleanor Taylor Bland that feature Marti MacAlister. Both Himes and Mosley have had books made into movies, so I could watch those as well. In addition, I'd like to explore works by Barbara Neely, Gar Anthony Haywood, and Grace F. Edwards, who died just this year. I won't read these right away -- they'll go on the back burner until that time when I need a new mystery series to drown myself in.

Next up in my attempt to complete the Classics Challenge, a white author for a change -- William Faulkner, whose Absalom, Absalom I never managed to finish way back when, maybe 40 years ago. But first I may take a short break and read some of the other books piling up around me. Oh, the joy of having too many things to read!