The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow
Walter Mosley
Published by BasicCivitas, 2008
ISBN 978-0-465-00525-3
Socrates Fortlow spent twenty-seven years locked up in the Indiana state penitentiary. During that time he had been “slashed, stabbed, battered, and garroted,” and after each attack, he woke up the next morning even more determined to survive. In prison, that’s all an inmate can do.
The memories of Socrates’ incarceration linger like a bad smell. They haunt his dreams – asleep and awake – and serve as a constant reminder of who he is and what he’s capable of doing. Without them, he’s lost. Those twenty-seven years anchor him, making everything else that swirls around him a heartbeat away from irrelevant. Socrates doesn’t apologize for being in prison, only for what he’s done. Even the debt he paid to society is chump change compared to those memories. Those haunting memories…
The third book in the ex-convict’s series is The Right Mistake: The Further Philosophical Investigations of Socrates Fortlow, and it is by far one of Walter Mosley’s best. The first, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned, introduces us to the hardened criminal-turn-street philosopher, a man who stands up for what he believes even if he doesn’t have the Ivy League education to articulate it right – especially to those who want him to sit down and shut up. The next book, Walkin' the Dog, sets up the third, as Socrates begins to look further than his self-constructed cell for answers to America’s problems with race relations and feelings of hopelessness. The Right Mistake picks up on the nagging questions Fortlow battles with every day while watching the common folk build walls around themselves out of habit. In order for mankind to exist it has to co-exist, and he knows that’s the hard part.
Thinking's Against the Law
The Thinkers’ Club meets every Thursday night at The Big Nickel, a tin-plated house Socrates leases from a man he helps reclaim what’s his. Seated around the misshapen table are, among others, Chaim Zetel, a Jewish man who takes in young, black men and offers them the chance to learn something other than the street life; Ronald Zeal, a young drug dealer on trial for murder who realizes that what he knows isn’t necessarily what’s what; Billy Psalms, a professional gambler and Socrates’ confidante; Luna Barnet, a young woman undaunted by the Messiah’s shell; and Darryl, the boy Socrates rescues from the fate he knows all too well. They come together to talk, to challenge the ideas they thought were set in stone, and because they’re “looking for pride and a way to make their lives bettah” (226).
The Los Angeles Police Department sees it differently. They bust through the door of The Big Nickel in full riot gear every other day, because an ex-convict bringing gang members together to opt out of killing each other just doesn’t seem right. Something illegal has to be going on. And then there are the streetwalkers, the battered, the uneducated and the invisible. Why should the prostitutes and the homeless and the disenfranchised mean anything to anyone? They don’t matter.
But they do to Socrates and the Thinkers’ Club. In The Big Nickel, everything matters, and it’s there that they attempt to figure out where they’re going. (They already know where they’ve been.) Race relations can’t get any better until the races stop using their race as their trump card. Killing a man because he treats you as less than a man doesn’t make you a man – it makes you a killer. And, as Chaim shares with the group, God can’t help with the winning lottery numbers if the effort isn’t made to buy a ticket.
Walter Mosley at His Finest
One of Mosley’s strengths is creating characters real enough to draw his audience in and allowing them enough flaws to make empathy a hard decision. A man rapes and kills and does the time, and then fights like all hell to avoid succumbing to being that man again. Is he perpetually condemned for the former, or is he applauded for living as the latter? Mosley doesn’t say. Maybe it’s better that way; the Thinkers’ Club admits to not having all the answers, and it seems that Mosley doesn’t either.
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