Patsy Neiswander
Mr. Jennings- 4th Hour
Honors English 3
April 1, 2013
Secrets Will Do More Harm than Good
In the novel White Butterfly, by Walter Mosley, Easy Rawlins had to choose between having all of his secrets, lies, and business and having the ones he truly loved stay in his life. Everything changed when he was asked to be one of the main detectives on a serial murder case. He pondered for a while on the opportunity to interact with the police again. He decided to take the chance in the hopes of proving that even an African-American can be a good detective. To Easy, this was going to be a normal investigation, but then things got a little more interesting when the killer took a turn and killed a girl nowhere close to the girls killed before her. She was a girl who was in “college”, lived with her parents and was an all around nice girl. There was something wrong with the whole situation and Easy was going to figure it out. Easy didn’t know that this investigation would take him on so many detours that would tear his family apart because of secrets and lies. He was framed, lied to his wife, and drank to his heart’s content but ended up finding the man who killed his own daughter. Easy Rawlins didn’t know how he was going to put his life back together but he did know that he could be a good detective if he tried.
This novel contains so many avenues that one could take to generate two themes. Two themes that jump off the pages are… keeping secrets from the ones you love, and secrets and lies will ruin all that you know and love. Easy Rawlins and Vernor Garnett are both images of these themes. They both have the secrets and the lies in their backgrounds. Easy’s secrets and lies go as far back as his childhood. Vernor’s lies started because he was selfish. Unfortunately, they both have the ruined life to prove all of their mistakes. Easy’s life was ruined because he couldn’t figure out his double life. Vernor’s life fell apart when he kept a massive secret. Both of them were in trouble and it was about time that they figured it all out.
Keeping secrets from the ones you love. Where does the mind wonder to when this subject is brought up? Easy’s mind went right to his secrets that he was keeping from the ones he actually loved. The bad thing is Easy Rawlins has an unsettling number of secrets. “I felt safe in my secrets. I kept telling myself that Regina was my wife, my partner in life. I planned to tell her what I’d done over the years. I planned to tell her that Mofass really worked for me and that I had plenty of money in bank accounts around town. But I had to get at it slowly, in my own time” (Mosley 35). This quote directly proves that Easy was keeping secrets from his wife. He knows that he needs to tell her but doesn’t really know how. What he doesn’t know is that secrets can come back to haunt anyone. The writer of the literary criticism also makes a good point that goes in the direction of Easy’s lies. “On the other hand, though, this double existence wreaks havoc on Rawlins’s private life, costing him his marriage” (Lock 79). She makes the point that Easy has to be aware of the fact that he is living a double life and it is going to eventually hurt him in the end. He is keeping those secrets and that isn’t the way that someone should live their life.
Easy isn’t the only person in the novel that is keeping secrets from the ones he loves. Vernor Garnett is also keeping a huge secret just because he doesn’t want it to ruin the image of his family name. “He’s been in touch with Robin even after she’d left school; He had to know that she was pregnant” (Mosley 262). Vernor was the one telling Easy that he had no idea of anything that Robin had done. This proves that Vernor was lying to a detective. More quotes from the novel show what length Vernor went to in order to keep his beloved secret. “He was scared over the diary. Robin threatened to come to his office dressed like a whore and with a baby in her arms if he didn’t give her enough money to care for her child” (Mosley 262). Garnett wanted to make sure that nobody knew about this meeting that he had to keep a secret about it from his wife and from Easy Rawlins. In the end, secrets are something that no one wants to keep; all they will do is come back at you with a vengeance which is what will happen to Easy and Vernor later on.
Lies are something that even the bravest of people don’t want to mess around with. They have the opportunity to ruin all that you know and love. Easy and Vernor know this all too well. Their secrets have now come back to haunt them. They have lost everything. Easy was successful in his investigation and was able to figure out the killer. What Easy wasn’t planning on was the fact that he would lose everything all because he never confided in his wife and told her who he really was. “I nodded and bowed. My wife had left me, had taken my child, had gone off with my friend. There was no song on the radio too stupid for my heart” (Mosley 219). Easy lost everything that he had ever had loved in his life. He truly did love his wife and his daughter but the secrets and the lies that he told them ultimately drove them both away. This is also said by the author of another work of literary criticism. “Easy’s understanding of his shifting position within power relations throughout Mosley’s novels reinforce this feeling that Easy must remain vigilant as to his status within these relations- and these relations can change suddenly, dramatically, and without warning” (Velasco 141). This was all Easy’s fault and he definitely knew what he had done wrong. What Easy had to realize now was that there was no way to back now and he had to move on with just him and his son.
Easy’s life wasn’t the only one that was turned upside down because of the secrets and the lies. Vernor Garnet’s life was also taken apart. It was turned all in circle not just because he killed his own daughter but because of the secrets that he kept from his wife as well. “The trial was front-page news for weeks. Everything the prosecutor wanted avoid came out in public. “His daughter’s wild life and death, the father’s crime, the mother’s cover-up” (Mosley 270). All the lies and the secrets were for nothing because it was all put out in the open anyway. Vernor Garnett ended up being killed while he was in jail just two years after all of this became known to the public and he was tried for murdering his daughter. Is that really everything that he wanted to happen with this situation? Garnett tried to cover-up a lot of things when it came to his daughter’s case and ironically of those secrets eventually ended up getting him killed as well.
Takes you on so many different turns but at the same time maintains its purpose and central themes. The secrets theme and the theme of how lies can ruin someone’s life is what make this book unique. Each book has its own set of themes and the set for this novel are essential to the reading process. In the end, Easy turns out to be someone that we keep a secret to protect his double life image that he has for himself. These secrets in the end bring him down and take away the ones he truly loved the most. “Easy’s understanding of himself as a man changes as the circumstances around him change” (Velasco 141). This quote makes the point that Easy was never able to figure out himself as a person and changed whenever he thought it would help him out. It doesn’t matter if Easy or Vernor thought they were in the right. They knew what they were doing was going to hurt the people who cared about them and whom they cared about. It shows that telling secrets may not always be needed in certain situations. Do you need to tell the secrets to figure out what the problem is? Finally, it just goes to show that these secrets and lies will take away from you so much more than bargained for. They both took the risk of losing everything. They both made that choice. Now they are both living the consequences. One of them is left by himself without a wife. The other was murdered in prison. Not a very good ending for such an unnecessary choice.
Works Cited
Ruíz-Velasco, Chris. "Lost In These Damn White Halls": Power And Masculinity In Walter Mosley's Fiction." Midwest Quarterly 51.2 (2010): 135. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 5 Apr. 2013.
Lock, Helen. "Invisible Detection: The Case Of Walter Mosley." Melus 26.1 (2001): 77. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 5 Apr. 2013.
Mosley, Walter. White Butterfly. 1st. New York, N.Y.: W.W. Norton & Company, INC. , 1992. Print