Original subtitles

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Fiction, which is the seat of desire,

is what tells us what our world is like,

what we wish our world was like, what it had been,

and what we wished it had been.

When you read western fiction--

and it's probably true of everywhere else, too--

you'll find that before 1920, as a rule,

there were no women outside of certain roles in fiction.

There were no people of color out

of certain roles in history.

They didn't really have a history.

They were supporting characters to a broad white male story.

Those people, those characters, nobody

imagined that a woman could be strong enough

to knock out a man because no woman was

written about like that.

Nobody could imagine that a Black man could understand

the theory of relativity because nobody had written about that.

Nobody could imagine a sophisticated, sensitive

Indian, Native American.

If you want to be in the culture,

in the history of the culture, considered in that history,

then you have to exist in the fiction.

If you don't exist in the literature of that country,

your people don't exist.

People are not going to read history.

They're not going to study.

They're not going to think about-- newspapers aren't

going to cover your people.

So I wanted to write about Black people living in Los Angeles,

now along Central Avenue, and what

their lives are like, and where they came from,

and what they were thinking, and what they were eating,

and what music they were listening to and making

and creating, and what kind of trouble they got into.

And if I could write about that, then

other people could read about it and say, hey, wow,

my life is a lot like their lives are.

And then you're a part of history.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

When I'm thinking about the history of literature, of film,

of theater, it becomes so difficult to wonder if it's all

been a conspiracy because it kind of feels like a conspiracy

because what happens is, if everything that you see

and read has nothing to do with the people you know and love,

then you begin to think that you and your people

are in some way lesser.

I remember reading "Treasure Island".

I love "Treasure Island", you know.

And I wasn't thinking about race,

so it wasn't that there all these white people,

except at the very end, Long John Silver escapes.

And he escapes because his Negress had rowed a boat up

the thing, and she helped him into the boat

and then rode away with him.

And I went, Negress?

What's that?

Like it sounds like Negro.

I guess it was Black.

And I kind of liked seeing a Black person.

And then I kind of like-- but it pointed out

that I hadn't seen any so far.

You know, from the beginning of the 19th century,

there were lots of people of color

all over because, you know, they owned the world.

People came from Africa, from India, from China,

you know, from the New World, and they lived in England.

But in the costume dramas, there's only white people.

It's a lie.

It's a lie about how the world existed.

So I have two lies.

First I have a lie that there's only white people doing things.

And second, I have a lie that I can't

add Black people with real Black Lives into that.

And these are issues to be thought about.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

The interesting thing about Alice Walker and her book

"The Color Purple"--

which, by the by, is not my favorite book.

I mean, I like it.

But it's not, you know, one of those big, heart-rending

influential books for me.

But the thing about her writing that book was she

wrote in a language that I understood,

and I felt I could write it.

And I mean, she was a very good writer.

And so I had a lot to learn to get to that place.

But still, I could imagine getting

to the place of writing that language.

You know, when I read "Hamlet", I like Hamlet.

But I'd never be able to write that language or those people

or that stuff.

But when I read "The Color Purple",

I said, I know these people, I know this life,

I know this language.

I can be a writer.

She opened a door to a place that I knew I could go to.

All the other doors were shut.

And what Alice did with "The Color Purple", says,

I'm writing about something that I know and that I believe in,

and you know many of the same things.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Los Angeles in the late '40s was an amazing place

for all kinds of people.

But let's just talk about Black people.

These Black people had either been into World War II

or had had people there.

They had had experiences which no Black people in America

had ever had, you know, in the real country.

From the war they would come back

to Texas or to Louisiana or Alabama or Mississippi,

experience the intense racism there, and say, look,

either I'm going to leave or I'm going to kill somebody.

So you have this great migration,

and it's a fantastic one.

People were moving up to New York.

They were moving up to Chicago.

They were moving out to California--

and other places, you know, Seattle and Portland.

So these people who came to LA, life was completely different.

You could buy a house.

You could get a job.

You could get three jobs.

Lot of people did.

You made money, sent your kids to school, owned a house,

met people.

You had a really lively Central Avenue.

Oh, you know, Jelly Roll Morton, all the major jazz musicians

are on Central Avenue.

You're partying.

You're having a great time.

There's racism.

The police departments made almost only of white men

from the South.

So you had to watch it, you know.

If they caught you, they might do something to you.

But that's nothing new.

Easy Rawlins comes in there and he says, look,

this is made for me.

He said, well, you know, it's hard here.

A lot of other people, if you came from, you know, Norway,

you say, well, that sounds really hard,

the way you're living.

And they say yes, but it's 10 times better

than I had it when I lived down in the Deep South.

So you have conflict and you have celebration.

And in between those things, you kind of

have a life in which you can learn

a lot about somebody's life and a lot about his or her

interaction with other cultures, other people, other places.

And so later, much later on, when I start writing stories,

I start writing stories about Black people doing things

with each other, you know?

I started writing about people like my father,

people like Raymond Alexander, people like Jackson Blue,

Etta Mae Harris.

I'm writing about Black people living Black lives

as normal lives.

Not as Black lives, this is what a Black person does.

Well, this is what a person does in this culture

in this situation.

And I realized one day that my subject

was not mysteries or crime, but Black male heroes.

And that really kind of shocked me.

I went, right, I'm talking about these people.

And they're all heroes.

It doesn't matter if they're a murderer or they're a coward

or they're a detective like Easy Rawlins,

if they're a kind of a corrupt businessman like [INAUDIBLE]..

Doesn't matter if they're Etta Mae

Harris, who can knock out any man,

or Mama Joe, who's also a witch.

Doesn't matter.

They're all heroes.

Now of course, the women are also heroes.

But the Black male heroes are the major characters

in my novels because there have been very few novels

written about Black male heroes.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Most important thing in writing is telling a good story well.

That's the most important thing.

If you enter a story and say, well, I'm

trying to get people to understand

what it's like to be a Chicano working in the fields

picking strawberries, well, I mean,

that's actually a very good thing to want to do.

But what you have to worry about is the story.

You look at something like "Grapes of Wrath", I mean,

"Grapes of Wrath" is a political novel.

You know, it's about the Okies.

It's about people who've had their lives taken away

by the machinations of investment companies, banks,

the wealthy, and nature itself.

But if it's not a good story, I'm not going to read it.

If you said, well, you should feel this

and you should feel that and you should feel-- who cares,

you know?

Even somebody who's Black who says,

well, this Black person is mad because this and this happened,

I'm not interested in that.

Just show me the story and allow the reasons

to come out behind that.

So I'm actually saying, you know,

the opposite of what many people might say.

Tell me a good story.

And in that good story, I'll buy anything else you add.