Professional Wordsworth: Law, Labor, and the Poet's Contract Book

Ballantine, in its Library of Contemporary Thought series, commissioned Walter Mosley to write about race and economics at the millennium. The result is this brief but exhilaratingly impassioned volume, and I look forward enormously to what I suspect is its follow-up, TWELVE STEPS TOWARD POLITICAL REVELATION (Nation Books, 2011).

Mosley is justly celebrated for creating the Easy Rawlins mysteries, the visionary RL'S DREAM, and the Socrates Fortlow works, but he has also earned a nearly heroic reputation for hands-on activism in the literary community, including his support of institutions as diverse as the Poetry Society of America and the Black Classic Press. WORKIN' ON THE CHAIN GANG draws both on his activism and his imagination, and the result is a lyrically insightful, elegantly argued, and morally bracing book.

Mosley uses metaphor to unite, rather than divide, those less than enchanted by our neo-gilded age, now deeply tarnished. ”There is an echo of Jim Crow in the HMO,“ he writes, in the way people are ”shunted aside, denied access, and allowed to suffer with no real democratic resource. Downsizing is an excellent way of robbing a worker of her accrued wealth. The widening gap between rich and poor is a way of demonizing the latter, because poverty is a sin in the richest country in the world. These new systems of injustice wear the trappings of freedom, but they are just as unacceptable as their forebears.“

Everyone in our country, Mosley insists, can learn from slavery’s legacy, which he calls ”a torch in the darkness“ for its strength, resistance, and creativity in dealing with oppression and marginalization. What other example are the current protestors on Wall Street, who are coming from all over the country to confront joblessness and the corporate takeover of America, following if not that of the Civil Rights era, which carried that torch into the 20th century. Indeed, Mosley states outright what the other writers mentioned above imply: ”Black American history is American history.“

For a recent interview in advance of his appearance at the Southern Festival of Books, other interested readers might take a look at a compelling exchange between Mosley and Michael Ray Taylor () or look at my own review here of a new volume issued in the University Press of Mississippi's "Conversations" series. You'll find some repeated information, yes, but some freshly added items as well ().