The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (14 page)

Watch out! Take my hand, young brother, as we avoid that gilded glob of bullshit about the ideal of the colorless black writer and the superiority of his purely objective art. I believe that in these times a black writer is a success only when the black masses can relate to his work and to him with respect and a strong sense of kinship. I believe a black writer in these times who shuns or
loses kinship with his people is early doomed to dry up and die as a writer. He needs for his creative survival a living, throbbing lifeline to his people, for with only the impersonal white critics' cold pats on his nappy head and the fawning quicksand favor of the white public, his writer's juices will drain away. It has apparently happened recently to the most brilliantly articulate black writer in the history of American literature. The fake fire in his sweet philosophy of love and understanding for our genocidal enemies exiled him a trillion spiritual miles away from the cold rage of the awakening black masses to an intellectual island prison. The fickle white critics now ignore him or come only to maim and defame him, to gleefully stomp the corpse of his creative work.

Brother, what do you think? What kind of writer do you want to be, that you want the world to hear and pay attention to? And just as important, will you become a victim of this nigger-killer society, or survive as a fighter at some level of the struggle for black freedom? Brother, to survive we must strip our total beings of any boob black bourgeoisie values and cream-puff attitudes toward the horror in America which we might have absorbed. Only then can we become aware of the hideous truth that every male human born into this society with black skin is a target for physical or psychological murder or for the kind of sinister mental plague which turns out the kind of nigger robot who strives and hungers for the approval and favor of his enemies. He defends and softens their crime against the black race with kinky bullshit on TV and in the black press. From his fat gut he foul-mouths the wine- and dope-shattered victims of racism in the black ghetto as “lazy leeches” and young black revolutionaries as suicidal scum. His diseased mouth and pen build hot air monuments to himself and other white power structure black whores as proof that any determined nigger can become a success in this society.

Brother, we cannot survive; we will never be free unless we make ourselves immune to confusion, to the diseased rhetoric of certain
so-called black leaders. At this instant my ear is catching a TV interview with a famous and fluent black victim of brainwashing, doing his robot bit on the TV screen before me. Brother, I wish you could watch and listen to this robot bit with me for a moment. I wish you could watch this black brother and listen to him not with hate or rage but with understanding and sympathy. But most urgently with the realization that he is our enemy by the unshakable equation that a defender unwitting or not is our enemy—an ally and friend of our enemy cannot be other than our enemy. I hurt deeply for him and for us as I watch and listen.

The white interviewer leans forward toward our dapper gray-thatched brother who blinks owlishly through stylish bifocal windows. The question—“Do you as a black leader consider Mr. Nixon and his administration indifferent to the problems and needs of your race or perhaps even racist in attitude?”—has apparently insulted and shocked our brother. He winces and draws himself away from the beetle-browed white man with the indignation of a hundred-buck whore cringing away from a two-buck offer for a trip around the world.

The brother recovers quickly and stares toward the ceiling for a long moment while presumably his fifty-grand education and lackey purpose frame a defense for the pygmy president who has brought this nation to the brink of racial and economic destruction. Ah! He has it together. The velvet voice flows smoothly in an alibi that Nixon himself would applaud: “I have no conviction that Mr. Nixon and his administration are indifferent to black progress or are racist in nature. I think it very probable that Mr. Nixon, who is primarily a political animal, is understandably giving top priority at this time to political strategy and fence mending.”

The liberal white interviewer frowns and says, “What are your feelings about the complaints of a number of black leaders that Mr. Nixon's ear and presence are virtually inaccessible for serious discussion of their people's problems?” Wistfully, the brother tells
now about an occasion when he and other blacks were lathered in Nixon's charm at the White House and how it wouldn't have been good manners to sour the social cream with serious talk about black problems. Now the brother is saying sweetly, “But I do not believe the problem of serious access to Mr. Nixon is due to any indifference or racism on his part, but only to the sensible obligation of the men around Mr. Nixon to shield and protect him from as much pressure and unpleasantness as possible.” Brother, I turned off the TV set. Perhaps time and the breed's zero-worth to us or the enemy will put it out of its misery.

Dear brother, I hope I have cleared away some of your confusion. I hope you will understand that the real borderlines to struggle across, the real walls to break through are not without but within our own minds. Because we are black and we are forced to struggle with gun or pen or in some effective way for survival, for honor, for our manhood and for our escape from the painful mental ghetto of the uncommitted nigger in this criminal society.

But jumping into the violent revolutionary movement at this time would be similar to an angry warrior challenging the enemy army with a brick-bat. Get involved with the ghetto struggle. Help your people to struggle.

And write, brother, write. Don't ever want to live for yourself alone. The pimp life trapped me in that awful, empty bag for a quarter of a century. Brother, you've got the guts. You can do anything you want to. And please remember that any advice, knowledge or encouragement I can offer you as a writer and a black brother are there for you to draw from.

Sincerely yours,

Robert Beck

(Iceberg Slim)

O
ne evening in the middle of June 1970, my nightly three-mile walk was unexpectedly delayed by the Elmer Gantry antics of America's foremost entrepreneur of the religious extravaganza. He appeared with his accomplices in a special video flimflam staged with the precision and cold-blooded objectivity of a top con mob. For an ex-street creature like myself, the spectacle of such an airtight “game” was comparable to a religious fanatic's hallucination of the Second Coming of Christ.

I sat watching in amazement and reluctant admiration as our presidential pygmy introduced America's wizard of worship, Dr. Billy Graham. To further heighten my amazement (and blood pressure), one of the great beloved ladies of the black race, Miss Ethel Waters, appeared also to express her love for America's youthful dissenters. Only to later tell the television multitudes how she would like to smack these dissenters for opposing the policies of her “precious child,” Richard Milhous Nixon, close friend and political ally of racist Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.

Fortunately I was aware that the principles of con are basically the same on every level. It looked to me like Dr. Graham, fall guy for the military-industrial establishment's carnage-steeped Asian adventures and burgeoning white hope for America's racists, sought through his video presence to camouflage and purify the Nixon
administration's repressive, racist, war-hawk image in the poignant aura of Mammyism and a religious crusade.

Going out into the ghetto night on my walk, I thought of the ironic plight of Miss Ethel Waters. She had everything—talent, beauty, charm, one of the most bewitching voices in the history of show biz—to ensure her emotional and financial security in the winter of her life; everything except a white skin in racist America.

I lamented that instead of giving her the respect that, as an enshrined black heroine of American Theater, she deserves, cunning white men have seized on her emotional unfulfillment and professional frustrations to exploit her as a maudlin, ethnic attraction in their buck-snatching road shows.

* * *

Several blocks from home I walk into a drugstore and immediately am confronted by an excited, slender black guy with chain gangs and inferno cotton fields in his face and voice.

“Please, suh, gimme uh ten-cent piece,” he blurts.

Instantly, I put it in his palm because his act is either real or such realistic con that it's worth a dime anytime. He whirls and goes pell-mell toward a trio of public telephones; a pompous-looking old white guy in rimless bifocals is just leaving one.

As I pass them, the brother from big foot country is holding out a dime and asking the old white guy, “Ah ain't good at them numbers on thet phone. Please, suh, call the po-leece cuz mah crazee cuzun is gotta butcher knife 'roun unc's house an' he gonna . . .”

As I walk by, he thanks his benefactor for making the call and grins at me. But what the hell, I rejoice because my niggerhood, fortunately, is together enough that I feel neither contempt nor irritation because he has by implication thought me not as competent as the white guy to operate the intricate telephone dial. For I know why he feels that way and how he got that way, and I smile and pat his shoulder as I pass him.

Halfway through the walk a two-man LAPD cruiser moves
close to the curb and dogs my footsteps for a block. I remember that recently LAPD Homicide Lt. Robert Helder was quoted in newspapers as terming the murder of Jerry Lee Amie a “mistake, an unfortunate accident.” Jerry died when four cops pumped twenty-five bullets into the unarmed victim right on his front lawn, in full view of his mother.

I keep walking and visualize Jerry Amie standing helplessly (drunk, according to the police) as his mother screams at the cops not to kill him. Although I am nauseously square and straight now, icy feet of apprehension stomp up and down my spine. I am unarmed and my followers are the heartless, unpredictable enemy, possibly killers with blood lust at peak cycle who might perversely halt and hassle me into a bullet-ripped corpse in the gutter. The gimlet-eyed pressure and the vivid picture of Jerry Amie are too much; I flee into a greasy spoon for coffee.

Standing, I put a quarter in front of my empty coffee cup as two dapper young black dudes get in my face.

One says, “Ice, pull this mark's coat that when you was rapping in your book
Pimp
about the whore game was a skull game, that you didn't mean sucking a cunt.”

I patiently explain that I didn't, and I give them a standard pitch to dissuade them from the pimp game and all other criminal enterprises. But I can tell I'm not moving them. Both are already street poisoned.

I stop in a liquor store for gum. When I get back on the sidewalk, two husky young guys with hard faces stop me and ask how to get to the city of Compton. I am giving them a rundown when several young guys in a car pull to the curb. The driver gets out and walks over and says, “Is everything all right, Iceberg?” I tell him everything is cool and slap his palm as we split.

A block from home I go into a phone booth and stand for a moment looking at the receiver dangling off the cradle. I look about through the booth glass for some prior user. Lifting the receiver I
listen for a live connection. I don't hear anything, so I drop a dime and start to dial. There is a nerve-grinding squeal of brakes and a heavy-set black guy with murder pulsing in his bloodshot eyes leaps from a jalopy and charges the phone booth. He punches the booth door open with the heel of his fist and buries his other hand ominously in his trouser pocket. He stands there with tiny bubbles of spittle nested in the corners of an angry mouth glaring at me.

He shouts, “Motherfucker, didn't you see the phone off the hook?”

Like I said, I was unarmed, and I am not a prizefighter. Surprise fighter, yes. So I open with strategic idiom.

I say, “Brother, I didn't see you around. And you ain't blowed the dime. What do you want to do, take this dime and use the phone now? Or do we chump off and send each other's nigger ass to the joint or the morgue about this white man's chickenshit phone?”

He blinks and some of the menace goes out of his eyes as he cocks his head to one side and says, “Nigger, don't I know you?”

I move out of the tight trap of the phone booth and say, “No, brother, I don't think so.”

Then he grins and slams me hard against the shoulder. “Nigger, you're Iceberg Slim! I got one of your books where you're on the back squatting down like taking a crap. Shit! I know you, nigger.”

Then he looks sheepish and says, “Slim, I been fighting that whiskey and having trouble with a skunk bitch. I got to come to myself, I guess.”

He takes a snub-nosed .38 from his trouser pocket and throws it under his car seat. He offers to let me use the phone first, but I decline, slap his palm and cross my fingers as I set out to walk that last block home. I visualize the potential carnage and feel glad that I didn't act like an uptight, white-styled, middle-class black spouting indignation when the disturbed brother burst into that phone booth.

* * *

Several days after the phone booth adventure, I hear angry voices while cooling off on the sofa near an open window. I raise my glance up over the windowsill and see a young black father in soiled Marine Corps fatigue pants arguing with an older, powerfully-built black guy over blocking the younger guy's driveway with his car. The older guy spews a blast of profanity and hurls himself into his machine. The young guy lounges coolly by the side of his own car watching his opponent shudder the sultry air as the car engine bellows into life.

Tons of hurtling steel bear down on the young guy, but not one hair of his Afro natural moves as the steel monster in passing grazes his clothing. He remains weirdly immobile, like some bronze heroic statue in a sleepy town square, even as the squawking tires bomb his face and sparkling clean car with the grit of the driveway. His animated eyes glow and pulse like black fire.