by Iceberg Slim
“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?
RACISM AND THE BLACK REVOLUTION
From what Mama told me abou
t 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.
The pedestal reverence of white men (particularly in the Deep South) for their women and their insane ritual of making the black man a disemboweled corpse are like hideous mirrors reflecting the white man’s sexual agony and his paranoic terror of the mythic big black superdick having universal congress with the mythic white supercunt.
The black man has been the victim of these white sexual terrors since this country’s postslavery lynching bloodbath and into today’s more subtle lynching by the courts and by hoodlum police. These long-term atrocities and dangers have had drastic effects upon the black man’s sexual attitudes toward white women.
The black man is tormented, taunted, repelled and magnetized by the white sex phantom haunting his mind. Many black men must hate the white woman with the same ferocity with which they desire her; and even in her embrace, during instants of awareness, they must despise her whiteness and their own weakness.
For she is, after all, the pale, deadly symbol that can trigger a ghastly montage of gouged-out black sex organs, crushed, charred corpses swinging from crooked necks with purple tongues lolled out of lipless, madly staring death heads.
Surely the majority of black men living with black women work for successful and satisfying relationships. Most are probably sound and satisfactory. But in many cases, the black man’s full love and appreciation for the beauty and value of the black woman is soured by his admiration and desire for the white woman. That the black woman has existed and survived in the tortured hurricane of confusion raging in the black man’s psyche is proof of her terrific strength of character.
The effect of the greatly increased availability to black men of white females of all ages, sizes, types, sexual appetites and points of origin—from plush, white upper-class mansions to lopsided shacks in Appalachia—has been a stiffening of competition among black women for the few highly desirable, affluent black men, not to mention the great pool of physically attractive black men of modest means, and even the barroom and pool-hall dudes.
It seems likely that soon the beauty, the sex queen of phony nigger society, the high yellow, simulated, substitute white woman, will feel the red-hot threat of the white temptress marring her arrogant facade.
Many of these neurotic yellow snobs with Cadillacs, minks and the grits and greens problem under control band together in major cities across the nation and form clubs with the tacit understanding that dark-skinned black women will be excluded or sharply limited in number. The effect of this black bigotry is that within so-called black society the dark-hued female, despite her virtues and attributes (she is still the overwhelming majority in black America) is virtually cancelled out as a prime marital target of top black business and professional men.
Because the high yellow most closely resembles the white woman, I and most black men all the way down to the gutters of black America have been conditioned to prefer the white woman or the lighter black woman to the darker for marriage or shack-up. And quite frequently and tragically, it is usually the darker sister who is seduced and impregnated with vicious hit-and-run con.
I believe that the lower sexual and beauty rating of the darker complexioned female by most black men is greatly responsible for her appearance in the overwhelming majority among armies of street hustlers in the many cities I have visited across the nation. Because she is an overshadowed underdog, essentially deprived of the chance to win herself a dependable, desirable man and thereby security and a sense of self-esteem, she is an easy mark for the gaudy black pimp and his hypnotic castles in the air.
Another interesting possibility is that the black street whore perhaps has an unconscious motive when she works that area of the game. For there she has direct sexual contact with America’s unchallenged symbol of wealth, influence and power: the white man. And she demands and gets paid for it.
The basic tension in the black woman’s relationship with the black man is often centered in his psychological emasculation and in the black woman’s reaction to his pain. She anguishes over his tragedy, and too often in unreasoning, cruel resentment she will praise the reputed superior virtues of white men, the hated cripplers of his manhood. She may goad him, prod him unmercifully to be a man, and then, fearing his bloody destruction by racist cops and other killers stalking the ghettos, she will beg him not to rise up, not to be a man.
She is rewarded with the smoldering hostility of her man for her clumsy and painful attempts at therapy. And possession of the alabaster symbol of esthetic splendor and freedom, the white woman, becomes his dream, his obsession, for with her he can trample, stomp upon the traditions and rules of the white world. And perhaps within the pungent fire of her forbidden cunt he expects to burn away his secret self-hatred and find the glory of his manhood. By sexual conquest of the white woman, he can hurt and torment the white man and punish the unappreciative black woman.
My many years as a black pimp gave me an intimate, clear view (through my whores’ recounting of the sexual antics of white men) of the twisted motivations that lie behind the white man’s sexual hunger for black women. Not so odd (in view of the guilt factor) is the fact that the majority of white men who compulsively go into the treacherous ghettos on sex hunts are racists (most white men in America are).
Some of them prefer smooth-looking, well-groomed, clean girls for straight sex. Many will pay to verbally or sometimes physically abuse the girls
. Others prefer the roughest, toughest and least clean girls in the streets on whom to perform cunnilingus, and in other frequent instances to wallow in defecation and to receive other forms of gross sexual punishment.
One effect of racism in America is to impose such an aura of vileness around sexual intercourse between white man (the racist) and black woman that he must regard her in his guilt and hostility as a subhuman animal, a mere garbage dump for his sperm and hostilities. The sadistic racist becomes the whimpering sexual masochist only because his guilt overwhelms his hatred for the black race. The racist submits his quivering body to the beatings and feces of the black woman. Eagerly, joyously, he roots his ecstatic nose into a black cunt to stain himself, punish himself. With balls near bursting, he will leave pleasant nests (and the alabaster supercunt) in suburbia to comb the booby-trapped ghetto for a black female object—his instrument of torture.
The white man is notorious for his “sock it in and run” treatment of black women. Relatively few white men take black women as mates. But thousands of white women marry black men. The arrangement is one of the most trying between two human beings.
The white woman so attached must renounce her whitehood for blackhood and literally become a nigger and all that it implies in racist America. She is shut off in most cases from relatives and friends, and marooned in an alien black world where true black friends are hard to come by. The black man is in the ironic position of possessing the symbol of freedom, yet he is hobbled and shackled by his blackness and must constantly guard against making his white mate the substitute object of his obsessive and smoldering hatred for the racist white man. The worst torment of all can be the gnawing suspicion that his woman is hating him for making a nigger of her and that she dreams secretly of fleeing the black world to return to the white world and a white man.
White women come to black men because they are guilt-ridden apologists for white racism. They come to offer a compassionate white bosom in penance; many are rebels thumbing noses at white social and sexual taboos. Some are derelicts, rebuffed by the white world and ego starved. They can be women who simply meet a black man and desire him, or they can be faddists doing the “in” thing of impaling themselves at least once on a mythic nigger love bone.
