Walkin' the Dog

Walter Mosley’s novel Walkin' the Dog (1999) centers on Socrates Fortlow, a character from his short story collection, Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned (1998). Fortlow, an ex-con imprisoned for almost three decades for rape and murder, is trying to reform himself after his release and live a straight life—easier said than done when surrounded on all sides by the temptations of the West Coast's seediest, most decadent city, Los Angeles. Walkin' the Dog abandons traditional novel form to present Socrates's story as a series of loosely connected vignettes, their main unifying feature being Socrates. Especially in some of the later chapters, the novel begins to self-consciously mine the associations of Socrates's name, as the novel partially adopts a dialectical format. Previous to this, Socrates had already assumed the position of a mentor toward a local youth. Mosley is best known for his series of crime novels featuring Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, a private investigator based in Watts, California.

Socrates, despite or perhaps because of his criminal past, has grown into a man with a keen, if in some ways unconventional, sense of justice. Nine years after his release from prison, the sixty-six-year-old is still strong. He has an on-again-off-again girlfriend, Iula, and a black, two-legged dog named Killer (named Bruno in Mosley's previous series). He has settled into what seems to be a blissfully mundane and quiet existence. Nonetheless, the goings-on of his neighborhood constantly test him—his ideals and his patience. His struggle, as he puts it, is to “control his own urges”—including the urge to kill—when “those urges would wipe out all the good he had tried to do.” The violent aspect of Socrates's character comes forcefully to the fore in the many stories detailing his run-ins with the LAPD, which Mosley unflinchingly depicts as, if not entirely corrupt, then blighted with corruption and tolerant of the blight. At one point, Socrates, falsely accused of killing a young prostitute, must clear his name. At another, the novel's de facto climax, he finally confronts the crooked cop who has begun to run Socrates's neighborhood like a crime boss. However, instead if slaughtering the man (which he considers), Socrates utilizes the most American of weapons, public protest, to call attention to the topic of police brutality. Soon, his community has rallied around him, drawing media attention and placing the local police under intense scrutiny.

Nevertheless, not all of Socrates's challenges come in such obvious forms. In one story, for instance, Socrates is offered a promotion at Bounty Market, the produce market where he works under the supervision of his friend Marty Gonzalez, but questions whether he wants to deal with the stress of ambition. The new position would entail a certain loss of freedom with its new set of responsibilities. Socrates considers the trade-off from an unusual perspective that allows Mosley to pose an often-ignored criticism of capitalism's monetization of workers’ time in a way that seems fresh and surprising.



Many of the characters and themes began in Mosley's Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned are picked up again in Walkin' the Dog. These include the troubled teenager, Darryl, Socrates's charge and mentee. Socrates's relationship with Darryl grows in depth and significance in Walkin' the Dog, as Socrates, in some ways like all parents, tries to prevent the boy from making the kind of mistakes he had made himself. Mosley emphasizes that the relationship is a reciprocal one; Darryl provides Socrates the companionship and hope he had had no access to while in prison. It is often in these scenes that Socrates most lives up to his name; he questions Darryl about his poor choices in a transparently Socratic way, leading the boy toward important realizations. He asks Darryl on one occasion, “If you ain’t done nuthin’ then why they kick you outta school?” driving home his point.

Mosley's situation of Socrates Fortlow in the LA of the Rodney King-era is a skillful move. It allows him to broach topics—especially the intertwined issues of police brutality, white privilege, and black poverty—in a way that bolsters Mosley's social critique with the realities of a period of history both recent enough to seem relevant, and long enough past to underscore how pernicious and factual America's racial inequalities are.