Gray Dawn

A Note from the Author

I’ve been writing about Easy Rawlins and his coterie since somewhere around 1988. His first appearance was in a short story called, I think, “Rent Party.” It was about an unnamed young man who had opened his Fifth Ward, Houston, apartment for a wild party. The story started with this young man standing at the front door, taking a ten-cent admission fee from friends, acquaintances, and those strangers who had heard about the event.

He greeted everyone, calling those he knew by name.

When a woman named EttaMae Harris walked up, looking fine and late-1930s hood-glamorous, he felt his heart throb. She was beautiful, strong, trustworthy, and willing, the young man knew, to stand up for her friends. He felt something akin to love for this woman. He would have spoken to her about this feeling except for one thing... That was the next person to show up at the door — Raymond “Mouse” Alexander.

Mouse was trouble. He cheated at cards, messed with the wrong women, disobeyed all the commandments and laws. Ray was everything that the young man was not, but still EttaMae loved him, loved him with all her heart and soul.

The young man greeted Mouse, who handed over his dime and then smiled, saying, “Hey, Easy, how you doin’?”

This was the birth of Easy Rawlins, a character I’ve never felt the urge to introduce because he had always been the teller of his own tales. But this time, with Gray Dawn, something has changed. Easy’s experiences and his world have slipped far enough into the past that, it is possible, many will not understand the reason for his fictional existence.

Easy, and his friends, exist to testify about a volatile time in Black, and therefore American, history.

Ezekiel’s combined tales are kind of like a twentieth-century memoir, a fast-paced unspooling of events that came from a people, an entire so-called race, that had been fighting for liberation and equality longer than any living soul could remember. Black people, during the Great Enslavement, weren’t considered wholly human, and, even after emancipation, were promoted only to the status of second-class citizenship. They were denied access to toilets, libraries, equal rights, and the totality of the American dream, which had often been deemed a nightmare. These somewhat-citizens worked hard, suffered terribly, and, despite all that, made this country a shining example, a beacon of freedom in the face of freedom denied.

Easy is a passionate soul. He identifies with the underdog because he has been that man, because his children (by blood and by choice) are in danger of inheriting this unwanted mantle. He speaks for the voiceless and tries his best to come up with answers to problems that seem unanswerable.

His friends fall into categories that were, at the time, unimaginable for Black folk. In Jackson Blue and Paris Minton, you have IQ prodigies, both of whom can understand anything that has been written or postulated. There’s Fearless Jones, the urban warrior who understands only what the heart demands. You also have Amethystine Stoller and Anger Lee (EttaMae too), women who survive, and even thrive, when the odds are steady against them.

There is, of course, Mouse. Raymond Alexander, a lifelong criminal, rebel, speaker of truths we’d rather not know, the only Black man you’ll ever meet who is not afraid of anyone or anything at any time or place.

And then there’s Easy, possibly the most dangerous character you’ll ever meet. When you see Easy you think you understand him, but, in reality, he is always something else. He is the truth-seeker whom most people do not suspect of such grandiose purpose. They see a Black Man, a man who has been beaten so often that he could never pose a threat that is not immediate and physical. They have no idea that Easy has learned how to open any door, either physical or conceptual. He gleans your secrets, secrets you might not even know that you have.

These characters are not superhuman. It’s just that their quite normal talents must be hyper-present in a world that is set against them for reasons that are clear and still make no sense. They face mouths and doors that utter the words “Whites only.” They are stopped by authorities who see their guilt in the color of their skin. They are heroes whose purpose is to undermine enemies who often do not recognize their own culpability. Their history is almost from another dimension, a place, a series of events that have not happened for the keepers of the official history of this country, this world.

So, when a so-called white security guard stops Easy for being in an office building, a place where Easy has many powerful friends, and Easy’s internal response is hatred, some readers in the modern world might not understand where that hatred comes from. They may no longer have access to the memories of poverty forced on a people, of lynchings based on a word or a glance, of doors to public institutions barred, of children who stolidly believe in their own inferiority.

I ask the reader of this novel to consider what I have said here in the many angry, anguished, and enthusiastic exhortations of life that inform the pages of Gray Dawn.