Hashi Choices

I’ve been hesitant to post this entry because it raises some uncomfortable questions. But here goes anyway.

I am very concerned about representation in literature. I think more people need to see more characters that look like them, sound like them, and value what they value in our popular stories.
I am a white, Jewish, cis male who was raised in a upper middle class home. I understand privilege.

I want the hero sitting opposite Flint to be a person of color, a woman of color in fact.

I do not want to appropriate someone’s culture for entertainment value.

The short answer here is two fold, at least in my opinion: Research and Sincerity.

As a quick aside, the answer cannot be I can only write about white Jewish guys because that’s the only way I’ve ever experienced the world. I do have empathy and imagination. So I think the people who are more concerned with appropriation as opposed to representation must begin the conversation acknowledging this is all a matter of degree. 12 Angry Men has already been written. Are there any other stories that exclusively involve white dudes worth telling? Even Rambo has a girl and a bunch of Vietnamese “bad guys”.

Having acknowledged that it is all a matter of degree, I do think about Ernest Tidyman and Walter Ellis Mosley a lot. If you are unfamiliar, Ernest Tidyman was a (white, Jewish) novelist and screenwriter. Among other characters he created Shaft. Yes, the man who would risk his neck for a brother man, was conceived and conceptualized by a white jew. Walter Ellis Mosley is also a novelist. His most popular character is Exeikel ‘Easy’ Rawlins.

Shaft holds a higher place in the American Pop Culture universe, I think. But Mosley was the first black man to receive the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

The point today is ‘blackness’ and the African American experience as it was conceived and depicted by Tidyman is a hundred and eighty degrees opposite of ‘blackness’ and the African American experience as conceived and depicted by Mosley.

The most dramatic example of this difference can be seen in two scenes that mirror each other at the start of each novel. In Shaft, the white cops are looking for our titular detective because “the word on the street is something heavy is going down” and they want his help. Shaft has no interest in helping white cops so he tells them to fuck off. Then one cop says, “What are you doing that’s more important than this?” Shaft laughs in his face and says, “Getting laid.” And then he walks off, without giving the cops another thought.

In Devil in Blue Dress, the first novel featuring Easy Rawlins, there is a scene at the start of the story, where the white cops come looking for out titular hero. They want to speak to him because a woman he knows has been murdered. They knock on Rawlins’ door. He is nothing but polite to point of subservience; however, when he asks why the cops want to bring him downtown, when he asserts his rights as an American by simply asking “What’s the charge, here?” rather than answer him, the cops beat the shit out of him.

Shaft is great.

It showed an American audience a black man who gets to win, be the most powerful guy in the room, and be a sex machine to all the chicks. And this is something that had rarely, if ever, been seen before. Especially in popular fiction. Compared to Willie Best (one of my personal heroes, you should look him up) Shaft is a much needed breath of fresh air.

However it is also fair to say that Shaft is a “Black-skinned replica of the white action hero commonly found in the detective genre.” In fact that is exactly what Matthew Henry said in his 2004 exploration of Shaft in the African American Review.

As a matter of film history, MGM intended to cast a white man as John Shaft until African American director Gordon Parks was added to the project. While the recasting of Shaft changed the racial context of the story, the script changed not at all.

Easy Rawlins’ whole story is about race. And justice, or lack there of. And the world being very, very unfair when you are the bottom of the social pecking order. In no universe could Easy Rawlins be a white guy. The story wouldn’t make any sense. His story. The mystery he’s solving. The bread crumbs he can follow through parts of LA no white cop could traverse.

People take advantage of Easy. They lie to him. They hurt him. He is rarely allowed to be the most powerful man in the room. And he doesn’t win as much as he survives and lives to see the worst of the worst bad guys get punished in a outside the law kind of way. But the last lines of the book are optimistic, even hopeful. “We [Easy and his neighbor] sat on my porch drinking whiskey and laughing. We laughed for a long time.”

Hashi, my heroine, is Native American. Her name means ‘sunshine’ because it’s thematically important to have Flint be drawn into the light. Race is not overtly discussed by our heroes. But race touches every part of their story. It bubbles under the surface, always present but never directly acknowledged.

I hope these choices put me on the spectrum squarely between Tidyman and Mosley. I did a lot of research into Hashi and her people. And I sincerely tried to make her a real person as opposed to a generic mannequin in Native American garb.