The Tempest Tales
By Walter Mosley
Published by Black Classic Press (2008)
ISBN: 9781574780437
Being mortal means bowing to sin. Man’s survival often depends on breaking one or more of God’s Holy Commandments, often with the understanding that someone – somewhere – is keeping score. But if the justification is valid – like killing a man who rapes a child – then the negative and positive should cancel each other out. No harm, no foul. Right?
“You Didn’t Come Back and Explain to Me Why My Whys Were Wrong?”
Walter Mosley’s The Tempest Tales takes a stab at figuring out the answer to this peculiar conundrum. The title character, Tempest Landry, is a black man who’s shot down in Harlem in the prime of his life by New York’s Finest in a case of mistaken identity. At the pearly gates, he encounters St. Peter, who “looked up with blue-gray eyes that had deep furrows at their corners.”
Although he cannot make out the faces of the people around him, it slowly dawns on Tempest that “each one of the ever growing line of dead souls had witnessed this judgment. This was death and every man, woman, and child who died were onlookers to eternity” (11). When his turn comes to atone for a rather long list of sins, Tempest blanches at the thought of even possibly being guilty and is summarily damned to hell.
But a funny thing happens. With the earnestness of O’Sullivan’s Manifest Destiny convictions, Tempest does the unthinkable by challenging St. Peter. Yes, he bore false witness against a man named Tiny Henderson, but that man had raped, killed, and terrorized his community and never paid a dime for his crimes. Yes, he stole money from the local church, but the good reverend Langly was “throwin’ away the congregation’s money on women and liquor,” and Tempest’s aunt needed to pay bills while she recovered from pneumonia. Yes, he stabbed a boy at the age of fifteen, but that same boy was reaching for a pistol, so it was self-defense.
St. Peter, then, had it all wrong. “Then you will not follow my direction and enter into damnation?” “Not until you can prove to me I done wrong. Either that or throw me in the pit yourself” (14). Hearing this, the heavenly choir stops singing, the accounting angels shudder. “His was the first mortal soul of all time to refuse our damnation” (161). St. Peter, unaccustomed to having his edict rebuffed, sends Tempest back to Harlem to reexamine his life. The moment he admits he’s a sinner, he becomes Lucifer’s property. If he doesn’t, the distinction between heaven and hell blur, propelling Satan across the finish line.
“To Cure Evil, You Gotta Live With It”
Joining him on Earth is the narrator Joshua, an angel hired by St. Peter to convince Tempest to surrender to his transgressions. For the first time since man was created, Angel inhabits the body of a mortal being, susceptible to all the afflictions that humans endure.
He feels love, rage, jealousy, illness, and fear – separate emotions that have a bad habit of running together. His encounters with his charge are heated debates, each trying to impress upon the other his own truths. Where Angel lives by the absoluteness of God’s Law and free will – “You are a free agent, at liberty to take any actions you wish” (69) – Tempest believes in the existence of grey areas. “I have to do wrong sometimes, to make good work” (64).
Complicating Angel’s mission are two of Tempest’s acquaintances, Branwyn, a woman the latter saves from death, and Basel Bob, known in religious circles as Beelzebub. Both succeed at penetrating Angel’s resolve. With Branwyn, he experiences a love very different from any that he’s felt in heaven, one that mixes the pure with hefty doses of carnal lust. Together, they create their own little family of three, along with their daughter, Tethamalanianti. If Bob’s friendship with Tempest yields the results that he seeks, then Angel stands to lose it all. “The sorrow in my heart was exquisite. For the first time I understood my own story” (128). Having something on the line has a way of affecting a man.
The Mosley Legacy
Like Mosley’s other novels – the Easy Rawlins mysteries, the Socrates Fortlow series – The Tempest Tales purposely stops short of neatly tying up life’s moral quagmires. For every hard truth there’s a “yeah, but” that unsteadies one’s righteous indignation. It’s there that Mosley’s characters reside, in that pool of murky grey matter, where they answer to their own hearts. Not quite wrong, but not entirely right either.
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