The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (10 page)

He stepped forward abruptly and with curly-lipped contempt said, “Nigger, you kicked black women in the ass for bread. How many you got now?”

I was stunned, instantly furious, and my first impulse was to chop him down with still-remembered masterworks of pimp profanity. But I responded with love and understanding. Is there any other response for an old nigger surrounded by Black Panthers? I alibied that when I was young there were no reasonably dependable and available sources of big money and a sense of importance for a slum kid except as a hoodlum dope peddler or pimp.

He wouldn't accept it and attacked my suspected criminal moral attitude with renewed ferocity. As I stood there absorbing the
violent tongue thrashing, my anger evaporated and I was given an insight usually denied a black man my age.

The realization that these young black brothers were the antithesis of the distorted image carried in the collective mind of America's older, brainwashed blacks moved me dramatically. I stood there joyfully aware of the fact that Black Panthers are the authentic champions and heroes of the black race, and are, as a whole, categorically superior to that older generation of physical cowards of which I am a part.

I mumbled good-bye and moved through a gathering crowd of sightseers. I was grateful for the acrid presence of tear gas fumes swirling about the sidewalk which gave a nonsentimental cover for the rare and genuine tears rolling down my joyous old nigger cheeks.

I
t happened on one of those hostile late-summer mornings in L.A. in 1970. The hoodlum smog, having terrorized the sun into hiding, now hurled stinging stilettos into my eyeballs as I approached the entrance of the Black Students Alliance office. I walked into a dim cavern that seemed haunted by some fiery spirit, a feeling heightened by several poster images on the lumpy walls of Melvin X, the assassinated revolutionary.

A reddish-tan young dude rose behind a counter at the murky rear of the room and stood motionless. I felt that something more than a length of pine flooring separated my generation from that of the wary young man facing me. I strode to the counter and bellied against it in a relaxed way. Sticking out my hand I said casually, “I'm Iceberg.”

The wiry body lost none of its tension, and the light eyes twinkled coldly with amused skepticism. “You are?” he replied.

On the counter I laid a book bearing my likeness on its cover. His eyes zoomed from the paper image to my face in a double check. Relaxing, he told me his name, and his hand came forward to meet mine.

“I came here to say how sorry I am about the loss of Melvin X and to get an intimate picture of what he was like in real life. I have a new book in the works, and I'd like to be able to rap about Melvin X in it.”

The slim young man said softly, “What do you want to know about Melvin?”

“Were you close to him? Do you have any idea how his last day was spent? Just rap and I'll take notes.”

He heaved a sigh and began talking. “Melvin had a way about him, a power that drew all the brothers and sisters close to him.”

“Can you run it down?” I cut in. “You know, like what feeling did Melvin's power arouse in you and why? Did you fear him? Did you and the others perhaps . . .”

Suddenly the man's palm was wagging in my face to cut me off as his other hand yanked at the bill of his gray cap. In the careful manner of an impatient schoolmaster speaking to a retarded student, he said, “Man, are you for real? Nobody feared Melvin except the enemies of freedom and justice for the people. Respect. Powerful respect. That's what we felt for Melvin, because he was real and there was absolutely no bullshit about him. He worked and lived only to help the brothers inside the torture chamber prisons and to educate and serve the people outside in slavery for the struggle for freedom.”

He caught his breath and leaned toward me, light eyes ablaze, and said with evangelical heat, “The people loved Melvin because they knew Melvin was prepared to die for them and the struggle. Melvin's power was in his integrity and the beautiful respect and trust thing between him and the people.”

Gently I asked, “Did you see him on that day? Before he was . . .”

A spasm jerked at the corner of his mouth to cut me off. His teeth gnawed at his bottom lip before he nodded. I felt the tremors of powerful emotions. His eyes softened and glanced past me at the open door. His face, unforgettable in the pale light, seemed ancient and haggard, yet at the same time, boyishly fresh; a face both savagely hard and softly innocent. In that sorcerous instant I realized our kinship, for his face was Melvin X's, mine, all black people's. It was a living flesh-and-bone montage of the ancestral nobility, beauty, bravery, misery, pain and struggle of our black race.

Finally the young man said softly, “Yes, I saw Melvin come
through that door for the last time on June 6th. It was in the afternoon. I don't know why but somehow Melvin always looked very tall coming through that doorway. He was actually only five nine or ten. I guess he always looked taller because of the beautiful way he had gotten himself together inside.”

“I picture Melvin as being strict,” I said. “You know, tough on any brother of the BSA that he caught goofing off. Was he?”

“Melvin was so respected that he never had to stay in a real tough bag. He would come through that door and, you know, Melvin never just came on a scene—he exploded on it. The brothers sitting along the walls would stop rapping and look up at him. Sometimes Melvin would notice that the office needed straightening up or something. Then he'd look around at all the faces with those piercing brown eyes of his and chew the brothers out. But they respected and loved him and dug that he was right to stop bullshit when there was work to be done. They dug his concern and love for them beneath the hardness.”

“Did he ever confront any of the phonies in the black middle class?”

The young dude smiled wryly before answering. “Melvin often appeared at meetings of those game-running black bourgeoisie, and his mere presence intimidated them. They knew he was aware that their Oreo noses were rammed up Mr. Charlie's ass. And they probably suspected that for Melvin, the cream, the real elite in Black America were the masses imprisoned in funky ghettos.”

I listened to a great deal more about Melvin X before I walked back out into the casket-gray morning. For days after, I talked to many others who had been and still were his followers.

Melvin X was the kind of effective revolutionary perhaps most feared by the enemies of freedom and justice. He had not risen to revolutionary stardom with its clutter of hounding TV cameras, hatchet-men news reporters and, in their wake, the bloodthirsty sharks of law enforcement. The energies of the revolutionary star are
sapped by constantly defending himself from killer cops and from a long penitentiary sentence or even execution for a trumped-up capital crime.

Melvin X had not been hobbled by notoriety. He was a mere 22 years old, a student at UCLA and the father of twin one-year-old sons at the time of his death. But his followers told me that he had already developed great revolutionary savvy. He moved quietly and powerfully among the street niggers whom he loved so much—educating them, gadflying them for the precious struggle.

Melvin X was an intellectual who had the rare gift of relating to all mental levels, from pompous egghead to grade-school dropouts. He was respected for his iron integrity, his consistency, and the courage and rage that moved him to say such things as:

“We have prayed too long, we have meditated too long, we have talked too long without acting enough. We were never brought to America peacefully, and as long as America remains it must never be allowed to forget the blood and suffering of our mothers, the humiliation and degradation of our fathers and the ruination of our children.

“If all the black people in America is the cost that must be paid in order to ensure future generations to come of a better world, then fuck it. If we have to kill every man, woman and child who stand in our way, then fuck it. If we have to destroy the world in order that the universe will not be polluted, then fuck it. We will not allow ourselves the luxury of life at the expense of freedom. . . . It is by the gun that we have been enslaved, and it is only by the gun that we will be liberated.

“America is nothing more than a war criminal who has to answer for the most atrocious acts that the world has ever experienced. America will be executed, and instead of a funeral, there will be a victory dance; instead of a tear, there will be a smile; and instead of pain, there will be joy. Our Africa, our God, our children, our spirits will all be called upon to destroy you, America. We shall not fail.
We have accepted violence as a way of life, and death as an inevitable end.”

Melvin X said much more that made him an object of admiration and love for his followers and of fear and hatred for his powerful enemies. I don't believe that Melvin X the realist expected to survive to old age, and I'd bet a C note against a nickel that he faced the assassin's gun with icy “kiss my black ass” courage and bitter regret that, unarmed, he would be taking the trip into darkness alone.

As his body was being lowered into his grave at Compton Cemetery, a barrage of gunfire could be heard crackling from a nearby pistol range. A sorrowful black brother with eyes brimming tears said softly, “Ain't it a bitch? They practicing to kill black people. Them pigs ain't hip they playing boss funeral music for Melvin.”

One sweltering dawn shortly after Melvin's funeral I took a walk. As I walked miles through the sleeping black ghetto, I saw an amazing sight, a phenomenon. Gigantic spray-painted and chalk-drawn legends had blossomed on countless concrete walls and building fronts. They were grim bouquets of rage and sorrow to the memory of slain Melvin: Avenge Melvin X! Kill the pigs! Remember Melvin X! Resist to exist! Off a pig! Seize the time! Revolution is for trying! Pigs are for dying! Remember Melvin X!

I walked for hours and everywhere I saw the angry legends. Suddenly there was a freight train rumble of thunder. The morning belonged to Melvin X. I found it easy to imagine that standing a trillion feet tall, he was somewhere way up there in the bleak, gray heavens with his head cocked to one side, exhorting his street niggers in the voice of the thunder and with his brutally coded love and tenderness, to hurry the revolution and make the enemies of freedom shit blood.

America is being led to her death by racist power junkies coasting on a stupid trip—the fatal fantasy that soldiers and police can crush and destroy with clubs and guns an indestructible force: the hunger of the human soul for dignity, justice and freedom. And the
American public is gobbling up the con that the emerging holocaust be stifled with gasoline.

The spiritual and physical victims, the enraged black and white wretches of this racist society, are multiplying and thriving like deadly plants in the rains of repression. Must the livid guts of America and its cops be bombed out and splattered on the wind before the deaf and blind power hypes stop their suicidal tripping and recognize the doomsday rage of the Melvin X's, hear and honor their just demands for dignity, justice, freedom?

F
rom what Mama told me about him, I know that Thomas Jefferson Jones was six and a half feet of black satin sex stimulant. His presence flicked on wicked lights in the eyes of black females for miles around. White women, when white men were about, turned eyes away from the ebony Adonis moving with the glamorous grace of a tiger through the small Southern town on some errand for his boss, the owner of the cotton gin.

Mama, if my memory serves me true, first told me about him when I was seven years old, and repeated the story countless other times through the years until I left home.

I remember the lyrical way Mama described him and how soft and slumberous her eyes became whenever she talked about him and how sad she became and the funny way her voice shook when she told me about Jefferson Jones's last night on earth, when a pack of sex-crazed white men butchered and burned him because a young white woman revealed her love for Jeff.

Because Mama and I were at one point living in Indianapolis, which, forty-odd years ago was rotten with Klan terror and violence, she would warn me constantly against the deadly danger of associating with white girls lest the dread hooded night riders come for her baby as they had for Jeff Jones.

Strangely, this black man who was slain before the turn of the last century became, after a while, a powerfully vivid figure in my mind. It was as if I had really known him long ago. I feel anger and tension
and sorrow build inside me whenever I think about Thomas Jefferson Jones because maybe in my mind he's a gory symbol for the multitudes of lynched and barbequed blacks.

The terror that was Jones's must always be mine and every black man's, for ever since slavery the black beast with his mythic pelvic poetry and epic love bone has tormented the white man. Historically, white women have had a notorious curiosity about the ecstasy potential in the rod of the meek beast.

A trillion pink, alabaster and gold sexpots infest the billboards and our television screens. We are conned that the white woman is the universal and absolute beauty and sexual ideal. Sex hucksters assault and inflame the national psyche through the media of movies, stage, television, magazines, and in every other way a consumer buck can be latched on to.

Now, in sex-glutted, racist America, a new gutsy black man inspired by the brilliantly bold wings of Malcolm X has arisen like a black phoenix from the flames of fear and the ashes of his crushed manhood to fuck over the white man as never before.

This thrilling defiance of the repressive power structure has attracted new hordes of white women. The gut crux of the accelerating racial violence and injustice in America is the black man's rapidly expanding cult of courage and his discovery of the inner riches of black selfhood.