Walter Mosley's book Little Scarlet begins at the end of the Watts race riots of 1965, in which race, power, class, and crime overturned the city of Los Angeles and forever changed the dynamic between black and white. Power, especially, changed. The Watts riots transformed the landscape of black-white interaction from one in which whites controlled and dominated everything and blacks were the scapegoats, bullied and misused, to one in which blacks recognized that the iron-clad social prison in which they had been living was not so impenetrable after all and that they could walk out from under some of the oppression they had become so accustomed to. As Mosley (17) writes, the change in blacks that arose after Watts was like "a virus that made people suddenly unafraid of the consequences of standing up for themselves." Even more importantly, Easy Rawlins-and by extension, other blacks in and around Watts-discovered that there had been a power shift and that it had been due in part to this boldness.
There were three types of power that were evident in the story-conferred power, allowed power, and seized power. The first type of power that Easy Rawlins experienced was conferred power. Being asked to investigate the death of Little Scarlet, he points out that he will need some authority to poke around, and he is given a letter that provides that authority. As Easy put it, "The letter in my pocket gave me true power" (Mosley 200). In essence, the letter endowed Easy with the approval of the police department, and indirectly by the white establishment, and in this sense it is what every black man dreamed of. It enhanced his ability to get out of sticky situations, and it boosted his credibility with people like Mouse. The letter gave Easy the ability to walk into any situation with the sanction of the white man and behave as if he were white. The down side of conferred authority, howe
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