The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (12 page)

“Secondly, those niggers whom we seem to liberate are precisely those types of niggers who possess rare intellect and academic polish. We have to remove them from the seething black masses. If we didn't, they could conceivably give the mindless masses effective leadership against the white race.

“Now, the diametric differences between the nigger world and the white world afford us the devices by which we neutralize and defang the white collar escapees from the ghetto.

“The technique is roughly this. The freed nigger, elective and appointive as well, will face his entry into the white world with no little trepidation. His fears, his insecurity are born of the unfamiliar, unknown facets of the strange new world. Underlying all of this, of course, is his well-hidden but nonetheless strong sense of inferiority. His is an urgent, practical need, perhaps unconscious, to conform to the mores, the protocol of the new world. He has a deathly dread of conspicuous violation of these codes.

“His terror is that the whites who have sponsored him will take notice and hurl him back into the ghetto. He's compelled to emulate white emotional control and polished, patient conduct. We flatter him as he becomes more like us. His identity, his fiery racial resolutions, if he has any, fade and are eventually lost. If he fights the mold, we poke derisive fun at him and make him appear ludicrous. One can't act like a nigger in suave white surroundings.

“We listen with compassion to his now guilt-ripened pleas for help for his black brothers back in the ghetto. We throw him a few crumbs of appeasement. But soon he becomes worthless to them and priceless to us. He has lost his power to lead them, to hurt us. In his thinking and love for the creature comforts, he becomes one of our troops in all respects save for his blackness. He helps us to repress and enslave his own kind.

“You conservatives get uptight about sex between white tramps and niggers. Those girls are fecal matter, dregs, sediment settled at the bottom of the social barrel. Historically and appropriately, the sexual peccadilloes of the dregs are the petty province of conservatives, rednecks, white trash and other hysterical slobs. The typical flower of white womanhood by training and breeding would rather be dead than have sexual congress with a nigger. The niggers and the dregs will always be with us at the bottom of the barrel.”

Uncle Tom's future in the seventies looks bleak in the face of rising black militancy and its predictably punitive policy for blacks who delude and hustle other blacks in the ghettos. And the master's future looks less than bright as he turns on his own white young like a rabid wolf to crush their dissent against racism, poverty and war.

Certainly much of the master's monumental fury lies in his awareness that alarming numbers of young white people would love to defecate upon the graves of America's most illustrious heroes, past and present. The power structure's fear and rage and its irrational blanket vendetta of barbarism against the young dissenters and their mushrooming crop of elder sympathizers have driven the violent arm of the New Left underground.

Much of the master's bestial cruelty toward his own white young is possibly rooted in the traumatic realization that, in the wake of the black revolution, young whites in alarming numbers have rapturously embraced the black lifestyle—its soul-laced music, speech idiom and over-all social attitudes.

Certainly this wholesale imitation of and compassion for blacks would indicate an unprecedented and imminent possibility for wholesale sexual congress with blacks. The niggerization of his young has thrown the master off balance not only because of his classic paranoiac concern for that mythic sanctity of white womanhood, but also because of a potential white coalition with the black revolution.

These, of course, are secondary fears plaguing the master. His
central fears are when and where the fanatical bombers of the New Left will strike and what is the true quantity and quality, ultimate objectives and specific location of the unpredictable enemy. And the master's unease is compounded by the knowledge that his enemy, unlike the blacks, does not have high visibility and therefore enjoy the advantages of easy spying and casual, deadly access to the embattled environs of the power structure and the despised person of the master.

The master's dire situation has arisen not only because he offers no moral leadership, but because his use of repressive force instead of dialogue in dealing with young disenchanted Americans prevents him from examining and correcting the escalating rage and terror. A police state created ostensibly for the stomping down of the niggers and the New Left would soon become a horror state for all the people. Historically, in the face of repression beyond the limits of human endurance, the populace has risen up in general rebellion against a government ignorant of this fact.

The master, the power structure, is diseased with such unreasoning cruelty, arrogance, fear and rage that in the violent seventies it could well drown in its own blood.

R
ain! Female Rain. How do you feel about her? I dig her. I can say that in a slightly special way. She's an old flame of mine. I discovered the femaleness of her while doing a bit with Sweetsend Pappy Luke in the federal joint at Leavenworth, Kansas, long ago. As night cell-house orderly, I was free to stop outside Pappy's cell and rap about the gung ho freak broads we had known. That first spring in the joint was probably the rainiest in Kansas history. Pappy would often gaze up at the opened barred windows near the cell-house ceiling and say, “Slim, listen! She's out there thrashing and sighing and stinking like a broad in heat.”

On many rainy nights, I'd go down the tier to my cell with my balls burning with fever and aching with pressure. There were a half-dozen cells where two packs of butts could summon a pink puckered anus bud to press eagerly against the bars for a guy's blood-swollen organ to rip off. But I would go lie in the quiet gloom of my cell with the terrible convict hunger for the presence and odor of a female. I'd close my eyes, flog my monster and inhale the scent of the rain and imagine it was the raw perfume of a hot lubricating bitch. And there in loneliness and fantasy it was true. The rain was a woman.

Sweetsend Pappy Luke got his moniker hung on him by his con men associates because of his skill and artistry in putting his con victims on the “send” for their bread and for the eagerness with which
they brought back their dough to the grifting palm of Pappy Luke. The Pappy part of his moniker was because his hair turned silvery in his late twenties.

We continued our friendship in Chicago in the midforties when we finished our bits. But eventually a con man has to get in the wind or take a fall. So we lost touch in '50.

Pappy surfaced in October of '67 several days after I had briefly plugged a book on the late Louis Lomax show on L.A.'s KTTV. He had conned the station for my number, and we both were happy as hell to be in touch again. He was in his late eighties, but the sinewy body was uncurved and the sable eyes in the black-hawk face still flashed fire. He was squared up with a comfortable income from real estate, but he was as hot as a flimflammed hooker holding a queer sawbuck in her mitt after giving a trip around the world. He was convinced I got only six minutes on the tail end of the Lomax show because I was an ex-pimp, and he figured black middle-class Lomax was responsible. I begged him to forget it, but he sent the man a soul-stomping wire accusing him of bias against a brother.

Pappy became a great friend and fan as the next few years passed. It was like the peppery old guy had adopted me and, like a father, was vicariously living my ups and downs in the writing game. I didn't fight the situation; I enjoyed the colorful old guy's company and friendship. But one rainy day he came to visit and in the excitement and heat of a rap session the old man almost burst his pump.

I think Pappy's visit was in the first week of January of 1971. Well, anyway, it was shortly after James Farmer hobbled out of Nixon's stable of whores in quest of his lynched manhood. I was sitting in the living room watching the rain through the open door as her trillion jeweled feet danced on the mirrored asphalt, when Pappy's red Riviera pulled up in front. I started to get up to take an umbrella down the walk. But before I could get in gear he had sprung from the Buick and was hot-footing it toward the front door like a guy propelled by a fresh jolt of cocaine. He only grunted when I spoke
and took his white raincoat at the door. He was grimly clutching a rolled newspaper.

Pappy sat with tight jaws on the sofa facing my easy chair. He was slit-eyeing me and banging the paper club against his thigh. I guessed that some square joker or cop had fouled his mood. I squirmed and opened with, “How about a cup of coffee to help you get yourself together?” He flashed a quicksand con smile and chanted, “Mister Slim, Luke is together now, has been together for almost a century, and is going to stay together.” Then with his face aimed down at the rolled paper in his fist, he suddenly zoomed his eyes upward and stared accusingly at me from the top of his head. I knew the old guy was really salty with me when he came on with the formal “Mr. Slim” bit. I riffled through my mind for some promise I hadn't kept. The slate was clean so I said, “What's wrong, Pappy? What the hell do you think I've done to you?”

He violently unrolled the newspaper and hurled a copy of a famous mass circulation news magazine rolled inside it onto my lap. In a breaking voice he said, “How could you sucker off for that conniving white broad and let her dupe you into the fairy-tale bullshit in that magazine? After using you the lousy white folks wouldn't even mention that you write books and that you pulled yourself out of the gutter. Chump, why didn't you ever crack to me that this broad interviewed you? Mark, you need to get yourself together if you were that desperate!”

I had been speed-reading the short article while Pappy was tongue-whacking me. It was about a white dancer who reportedly did her topless-bottomless thing in a San Francisco watering hole for mostly black pimps and whores. She sometimes bared her thicket for a double sawbuck a night and burgled gems of the pimp game from forty pimp skulls toward a Ph.D. and a professorship in anthropology. The piece was crutched and flawed by the usual contrived soul shit that white writers and Ivory Tower black scribes use when writing about street niggers. Some of the observations from my book,
Pimp,
were quoted in the piece. And the piece claimed that the dancer had interviewed me extensively. I had neither heard of her nor seen her in my life.

I put the magazine on the table beside me, looked right into his eyes and said, “Pappy, I never gave that woman an interview. I didn't know she existed until you lugged that magazine in here. Do you believe me?”

The sable eyes X-rayed me for a long, tense moment before he nodded. Then he leaned toward me and said gravely, “Son, what are you going to do about it?”

I said, “What can I do? Everybody I could beef to would be white. Do you believe the magazine publisher or the courts would care a good goddamn that she sliced off a hunk of my black ass? Pappy, let's have coffee and a few hands of rap rummy. It isn't really important. I could forget her and the piece in five minutes if you tossed it out of your mind. C'mon, what do you say, pal?”

He leaned back against the sofa and said softly, “Mister Slim, do you know why that white broad is so important that we can't throw her out of our minds?”

I said, “You swindled thousands of suckers, and I took lots of good bread from bad girls. So why are your balls in the fire about some white woman gaming for a Ph.D.? You sound like a Holy Roller. I'm not ecstatic about the shabby way she handled my name and my work. But she happened to me, Pappy, me. And I can forget her if I want to. I'm not your child. If you just can't make it without a son to push around, why in the hell don't you adopt one?”

He got to his feet and stood over me waggling a heavy index finger near my face. The hatchet face was drawn rigid, embalmed in anger and hurt, and the artery at the side of his neck was a ballooned cable of leaping blood. The strangling sounds in his throat stopped, and he shouted, “You don't have to remind me that a lop-eared sucker like you is not my kid. A son of mine wouldn't need his coat yanked to rags before he woke up to the fact that that nickel slick
white broad is really only a petty part of a nit shit vicious link in the criminal chain of white fraud and robbery of black people's labor, talent, folklore and creativity—ever since this sanctuary for top echelon white thieves and murderers was founded. Your pimp brain can't grasp that the white broad stole something from you and those black pimps in San Francisco more precious than money.

“No, you couldn't be my son. A son of mine would know, for instance, the connection between that white broad and the black men who bled artistry and talent behind the scenes so Benny Goodman could masquerade as the King of Swing. You see and hear big star white broad singers playing soul and blues con on stage, TV and in movies. Do you feel pleasure? Or anything at all? Mr. Slim, I feel pain. I hurt when I hear them.

“I remember black singers Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith and their struggle and tragedy and dreams unrealized. I remember that army of white singers all the way back to Sophie Tucker that aped the style and flair of Ma and Bessie to enjoy the glory and luxury of true stardom denied our sisters because they were black. Mr. Slim, you still think that white broad is unimportant?”

His face went to a sudden grayish pallor, and tiny diamonds of sweat popped out on his forehead. He swayed and gulped for air. I leaped up and eased him down on the sofa. I got an icy towel and bathed his brow. I took his shoes off and gave him some brandy. Sliding my chair close to the sofa, I said softly, “I bought the convincer, Pappy. You're right all the way. Okay?”

Pappy pushed himself up to a sitting position on the sofa. His color was good, and except for his hand trembling as he took a sip of brandy, he seemed together.