Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned is a collection of short stories, loosely connected about Socrates Fortlow. Scorates spent 27 years in an Indiana prison for killing 2 people. When he got out, now 50 years old, he moved to Los Angeles, and has, as of the point when most of these stories take place, spent the last 8 years living in a two-room shack in an alley.
Mosley has a few recurring characters across the stories - a partially paralyzed WW2 veteran, a young boy named Darryl that Socrates sort of becomes a surrogate father to - but the stories remain focused on Socrates. In many cases, it's about him struggling with the anger and urge to do violence that a nearly-three decade stint of incarceration did nothing to dissipate. "History" is, I think, set during the riots that followed the verdict in the Rodney King trial, and Socrates deliberately keeps himself inside his home the entire time, because he's afraid what he might do if he goes outside and joins in.
But Mosley also uses that story for a flashback to an earlier time in Socrates' time in L.A., where there was a bookstore he frequented that helped him come to a conclusion about who one should be angry at, and who they want you to be angry at, and who is really following the "rules," which he thinks of as acting in ways society deems acceptable, but might in the way most people might think of it. It's a little like the Joker's spiel in The Dark Knight, about people and their "plans", but from the perspective of a man who feels like he foolishly followed those plans and is only now realizing it, rather than the guy bragging about how he's too smart for all that.
The stories also often deal with the difficulties of going through life as a black man, whether that's being hassled by cops, or debating whether it's OK to tell the police you know who's setting fire to abandoned buildings now that people have started dying as a result. Or just the hassles of getting a regular job, or even just getting an application from the supermarket where you'd like to work to try and apply. These often tie back into Socrates' anger, his desire to meet the disrespect or humiliation the world tries to heap on him with violence. Just how much crap can he be expected to take, and how much is the world going to throw at him?
They aren't all like that. In one case, Socrates realizes he's never gone to see the ocean in all the time since he moved to L.A., so he goes to the beach and ends up meeting a couple of people who share a bonfire with him for a time. It's still not entirely cheerful; Socrates is motivated by thinking of a younger man he beat up not long after he moved to L.A., who he's watched slowly descend through life, and that he wishes he'd apologized to, maybe tried to explain himself. And if Socrates would have asked that young man why he didn't get out of there and do something better with himself, then shouldn't he try to do the same? Go somewhere else, even just for a day, and do something different?
Regret is a strong element in the stories as well. Regretting not apologizing to that young man, or writing to a young woman he knew before prison, or that his mother died long before he served his sentence. The regrets gnaw at him sometimes, waking or asleep, in different ways. Which might be why so many of the stories also revolve around him trying to talk to someone younger and maybe set them straight. Maybe he can't help them, but he doesn't want anymore regrets about not trying.
'C-plus, Socrates thought to himself when he returned to his back-alley apartment. In those days he was still sleeping on three area rugs piled one on top of the other. He wrote the grade down on a piece of paper. For years he gave himself a grade every day. Anytime he wrote down failure somebody had been hurt by those big rock-breaking hands.'
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