by Jordan Heaviland

‘A cigarette a day keeps the doctor away,’ would not be out of place as Easy Rawlins’ motto. A Hardboiled Detective, he is no stranger to addiction—yet one of his temptations is stranger than the rest. While being hooked on cigarettes, sex, and mystery, Easy Rawlins simply can’t get enough of phone booths. In Walter Mosley’s Charcoal Joe, the presence of phone booths as one of many liminal spaces is a clever metaphor for Easy’s separation from society.

In The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle, Watson and Sherlock Holmes spend a majority of their time either in the Baskervilles’ manor, or in their office area. There are few scenes that take place outside of these two settings, which include the following liminal spaces: the carriage that brings Watson to the manor, Sherlock’s investigation of the crime scene, and the moors that Sherlock hides in and Watson treks across. These all function as quick doorways from one scene to the next: a quick pop in, ‘hello,’ and onto the next location. Sherlock and Watson both maintain a home base, somewhere to rest, an environment they spend a majority of their story in. Looking at Dashiel Hammet’s novel, The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade spends a majority of his time in his office, conversing with his secretary Effie Perine. Even in Barbara Beman’s short story ‘Set ‘Em Up Joe,’ the unnamed detective picks one place to spend a majority of his time in: the bar. All of these detectives harbor some safe space, somewhere to rest between liminal spaces. Easy Rawlins does not.

Out of all 305 pages in Mosley’s Charcoal Joe, Easy Rawlins spends less than thirty in his own house. He in fact spends more time, triple if not more, investigating and interrogating inside other people’s houses. The first appearance is when he brings his daughter Feather home. He tells Feather that Bonnie, his lover, is coming back from France and, “I’m going to ask her to marry me.” (Page twenty-six) Instead, the night ends somberly as she leaves him for another man: Joguye, an African king being hunted by tribesmen and government officials. The second appearance of Easy Rawlins’ house involves his complicated dating life.

Similar to Easy’s inability to have physical tethers in the world, he also struggles with romantic ones. His lover leaves him and runs off with a hunted man, and Easy pulls some strings and sends her to a safer place with the help of his friend Mama Jo—but to avoid heartbreak he chooses not to know where they end up. Mama Jo tells him that this predicament was predictable, telling Easy that Bonnie was “a granite cliff” (Page 107) and he was “the ocean pounding away” (Page 107): it “…was beautiful, but you know in the end one’s unable to leave and the other’s always got one foot out the door.” (Page 107) After his tragedy, he embarks on several sexual endeavors with other women throughout the story. Only one of these events takes place inside his house. “Holding my erection, Asiette guided that intimacy… for quite a while my worries retreated—the spontaneous, if temporary, remission of a broken heart.” (Page 109) However, the night is cut short as armed intruders break in while Easy and Asiette flee to the bushes to hide. 

The final scene inside Easy’s house is neither one of sex nor heartbreak, but care on the verge of romance. He discovers a prostitute he once knew, and brings her under his care for a night of rest and comfort. He tells Augusta to get some rest, and receives the reply “People don’t pay me to rest.” (Page 203) However, Easy insists, telling her to “Go on upstairs and run the bath,” before adding, “I’ll make the eggs while the water’s rising.” (Page 203) Easy declines when Augusta offers for him to join her in the bath, although both parties observe that he wants to. She asks him, “Are we gonna fuck?” (Page 205) and Easy respectfully declines, instead asking her questions about the case. Even his own home is often a place of business, just like everything else is as well the means to an inevitable end.

Easy is separated from the rest of society—both by his own actions and the actions of others. One of his many degrees of separation comes from thousands of wires connecting the whole city. Unable to make a home out of his house, Easy instead turns to a new outlet: phone booths. His first phone call comes before we even see his house. Melvin Suggs is a police captain, his type is not known for being fond of hard boiled detectives, nor African Americans—both traits of Easy Rawlins. Suggs and Easy trade information using codenames on phone calls because, “It didn’t look good for a police captain in Melvin Suggs position to be sharing information with a Negro like me.” (Page 22) In this instance, Easy is separated from those around him by barriers of class. In fact, in the same diner that he makes the call, he is called suspicious on account of his race. “Someone called, said you looked suspicious,” the cop tells Easy (Page 23), and eventually Easy is forced to give up his ID to the man. 

Fortunately for Easy, later in the book he is able to take a couple of steps closer to the line. As the novel progresses, Easy becomes more focused on standing up against the racial prejudices that he faces. In one scene, Easy is sent to a crime scene, but a policeman holds him back—not willing to hear the detective out, likely due to his race. Easy snaps at the man with, “I said mothahfuckah, move your hand.” (Page 248) This gives a strong turning point in the story: Easy goes from somewhat meekly taking insults and accusations due to his race—like in the diner—to now asserting his authority in front of policemen, arguably some of the most dangerous people to him. As this changes so does the way he interacts with people around him, and certain barriers come down. Later in the case, Easy must track down a jewelry store owner to extract information and he asks a gas jockey for directions. He is initially refused, but is not surprised. “I was a black man in a brown suit asking directions that would take me into the middle of a white neighborhood.” (Page 267) Yet Easy is not hesitant to enter a white-dominated neighborhood, in blinding contrast to the man who upheld separations like phone calls in the beginning. He interrogates the white jewelry store owner in a public—and mostly white—diner. One of the degrees has been lowered, and Easy is now closer to room temperature.

We started off with liminal spaces and traversed a liminal space to get to this point. Easy has spent his entire story inside of transitional spaces. Yet in his life exists one thing that is non-liminal: his daughter Feather. Easy Rawlins describes his daughter as the only reason to stay. After finding millions in cash, he thinks to himself, “If Feather wasn’t in my life I would have been out of L.A. that night.” (Page 230) He cites her love for her Ivy Prep school as part of this reason. One notable thought of Easy Rawlins goes: “There are ten thousand perfectly good reasons to not have children but hearing the love in Feather’s voice trumped every one.” (Page 101) Feather is clearly everything that matters to Easy. She is his tether to the world, his only non liminal space. He pledges to her, claiming, “I owed Feather everything, and no pain would ever get in the way of that debt again.” (Page 32) Yet he is too wrapped up in his movement to make it come true. Instead, he is an addict in the alleyway, tying a tourniquet around his arm before shooting up another dose of: phone booths.

“We just saw each other this morning,” (Page 25) Easy Rawlins says, dismissing his daughter after she tells him she is happy to see him. She responds, “I know… …I just missed you I guess.” (Page 25) The next time Easy speaks to his daughter is over a phone call, as she asks him if he’s going to drink again. The next two interactions with his daughter are over phone calls, on page thirty-eight and 101. She tells him, “I love you, Daddy,” (Page 102) but he doesn’t say it back. It is not until page 140 that Feather and Easy meet in person again. She asks him, “Are we going home tonight?” (Page 141) but Easy tells her he needs her safe in a different house for “a few more days.” (Page 141) He adds, “That’s why I’m picking you up. I don’t want you to forget what I look like.” (Page 141) He’d rather not have the vivid image of a red telephone take his place.

Easy summarizes, “I offered to go for pizza but Feather was looking forward to making dinner with Jewelle.” (Page 143) He has officially lost her. Dinner with a telephone isn’t as delicious as dinner with a loved one. Easy’s unfortunate addiction to mobility, to rush from liminality to liminality, has pushed away everyone. Even his one tether to the world seems to have moved on, as Easy turned more and more red every day. While he was able to turn the temperature down on the degrees of class separation, Easy Rawlins so far has failed to save his relationship with Feather—and it will be irreparable if he does not quit his addiction.  

Addiction breaks people down, tears apart families, and can separate citizens from society. Although Easy has conquered his alcoholism, and nearly conquered cigarettes, he still struggles with another. Even though he has begun his journey to move past racial and class separation, he has done heavy damage to his relationship with his daughter. He is constantly shifting, always liminal, impossible to pin down—the Tardis-like phone booths being his vehicle. In Charcoal Joe, Walter Mosley’s use of phone booths as liminal spaces gives a clear insight into Easy Rawlins separation from society.