by Iceberg Slim
Here is another old group photograph of my kindergarten class, taken on the school yard with a background of blooming apple trees adazzle with snowy blossoms. On my left is a moonfaced Italian kid named Joe, my close pal. And on my right is a towering, fierce-faced, bully Polish kid with a lantern jaw thrust out, a feared enemy. That was until one soggy summer day (two, three years after the photograph) he put the strong arm on me for a bag of tootsie rolls, and in the scuffle he lumped my eye and put me to rout with tears and snot flowing.
Mama viewed my defeat and flight not only as a craven trait surfacing in her only child, but also as a symbolic transgression against and a humiliation of the whole black race. She psyched me up for victory in the return match by the simple expedient of filling me with the terror that she would murder me if I did not vanquish the bully.
She marched me toward combat, and we spotted him slingshot sniping at a pigeon with a broken wing down near the Rockford, Illinois, gas house. I saw a possible equalizer for the superior size and strength of the bully in a length of rusty pipe in the gutter. I darted for it and seized it, but Mama shook her head resolutely and unpiped me, an action which deepened my suspicion that she had gone bats.
Lantern Jaw had his usual fear-branded audience of scared kids around, and I was dizzy with fright as Mama nudged me up to the brawny kid who kept getting bigger and bigger. I was just standing there when Mama suddenly shoved me hard against the bully. He cuffed me against the side of the head; a quick look back over my shoulder at Mama’s doomsday face was enough to send me into an attack orgy of rage, fear and excitement sufficient to overwhelm the bully and send him fleeing into the wind. I vividly remember that the cheers were thunderous, and so was my berserk heartbeat.
Here is one of me taken in the lap of a department store Santa Claus. Those were joyous days despite the obsessive dreaming and desiring for wondrous, impossible things that I never got—like the gentle pony, Bo Mee, with great golden-flecked eyes that I possessed and loved for so many years, in my dreams. Perhaps for me, a black kid, one reason why those days were joyous was because as a child I was not aware of this country’s exclusion of most black people from the possibility of living its good life. I could still feel a pang of pride when I heard “America the Beautiful” or “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
Of all the horrendous maimings of the black man’s psyche by America’s racism, I believe it is the early crushing and destroying of this heady, vital sense of proprietary pride and emotional kinship with one’s country which ranks as one of the most lamentable and disastrous.
Here is a photograph of a jet-black luscious siren now known as the Black Duchess among dope dealers in the East. When she was a girl I stole her from a shoe clerk in Chicago and “turned her out.” She was the Duchess of Doom for the lovesick clerk. He couldn’t live without her. He blew his brains out a week after she left him. I kept her ninety-six hours. I lament that it had to be me who stole her and his life.
I’m looking now at a picture of a dear first cousin of mine taken at a bottle-covered table in a Milwaukee bar twenty years ago. She is seated with drinking buddies, her babyish face not yet hardened by whiskey and merciless life. She had musical ability but her whiskey-mauled mind suffered too much trauma too soon to allow her to use it successfully.
I looked down at her in her coffin year before last and the once softly-rounded, light tan doll was a sunken, blackened specter. Here is a yellowed half sheet of music and lyrics clipped to her picture. It was her last creative effort. It’s title?—“Let’s Go Get Stoned.”
Here is another of ten-year-old me taken in the backyard of one of the happiest houses I have ever lived in as child or man. Henry, my stepfather, a man beautiful inside but rather odd-looking outside, lived there. And because of his presence it had to be one of the most unhappy houses Mama ever lived in.
Three white buddies are standing beside me with the summer jade glory of weeping willow trees in the background. The four of us were inseparable at school, on hiking and small game hunting trips, and in and out of one another’s homes visiting and eating.
But one day in one vital and irreconcilable area of childhood activity they discriminated against me, and barred me from participation. It was spring, and my fresh young heart had burst forth in goofy passion for a lispy black beauty who lived on the other side of the viaduct. My three pals and I had just had a ball dislodging rocks in my backyard and capturing garden snakes when suddenly, in a mysterious manner, they left me separately.
I sat alone at the edge of the backyard, idly tossing pebbles into the creek below and, perhaps turned on by the hulaing of the willows, decided to visit the lovely fox across the viaduct. It turned out that I got only a brief but prickly peek at her in a pink bathing suit as she waved and got into her father’s car on the way to the beach.
As I started back across the span, I looked down absentmindedly at the railroad cars and the wooded section along the creek. I got a flash of towheads in triplicate among the trees, and decided to join my pals in whatever new adventure was about. I sneaked through the trees to surprise them. I came upon them in a little clearing. Their naked bodies were beaded from a dip in the creek as they stood in a tight circle on the bank frantically masturbating. I stayed concealed and entertained for a few moments before slipping away . . . the shocked young victim of a unique racial discrimination.
* * *
On the Fourth of July, I idly flip the television dial and am treated to an excavated spook, scripted and motivated by the mercenary medium to play his part in a patriotic “Honor America Day.”
Reverend E. V. Hill, the spook, proceeds to do his thing.
He shouts into the microphones with the piercing desperation of one of the multitudes of black lynching victims in America’s gory history crying out against the slicing off of his genitals, “This is my beautiful country! This is our wonderful country! America, for you we will fight and die!”
I wonder how many of the poverty-crushed members of the preacher’s congregation see America through his rose-tinted nigger eyes? The preacher is succeeded by a young white woman with straw-colored hair and a wretchedly pitched voice, vapidly informing nigger me that America is great because of the vast numbers of life insurance policies in effect here, etc.
I think of the thousands of black people who don’t even score for daily grits and greens, of the uncounted thousands who have been hurled into pauper ovens for cremation or piled into graves in potter’s field.
Disgusted, I try the radio. The lush, mellifluous voice of a black balladeer caresses the air. The possessor of the voice, still handsome in middle age, has everything needed to join the Tom Jones and the Humperdincks in the rarified heights of a vocal superstardom except a white face.
He is Arthur Prysock, and he is one of the many physically attractive, magnetic black male performers who have been the victims of powerful white racists in key entertainment positions and publicity media.
Only rarely does a black performer (like Harry Belafonte) with erotic radiations slip past the rules of the entertainment industry into true stardom and financial security. Those black male performers whose erotic voltage is comfortingly low, or nonexistent, stand a far better chance of making it big.
An even more ghastly denial is the systematic destruction of the true, vital heroes of the black race—men like Paul Robeson, Jack Johnson, W. E. B. Dubois and more recently Muhammad Ali, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale. The technique has been to deform and butcher the victim’s image and character in the communications media and in the double-standard judicial slaughterhouses.
Black superheroes of sports and entertainment (those who get the so-called universal approbation and love of white America) are valid heroes neither in spirit nor in posture, even though many unaware blacks may admire and love them as such, and envy their fortune and fame. But if we look with clear eyes at some of these usually older brothers, we see a heartbreaking portrait, as we sorrowfully realize that the brothers’ very
universal acceptance is, in racist America today, an indictment of their pride, integrity and black manhood.
We still love them as black brothers, but pity them for we sense that their balls were hacked off early by the brute blade of this society’s unremitting oppression. These unfortunate brothers exist in a terrible psychic straitjacket of grinning, mute denial of the physical and mental atrocities inflicted upon black people in America.
White racist America hated Jack Johnson, Paul Robeson and Malcolm X. What a monstrous crime it is that the black masses did not and were not permitted to love them at least proportionately to the hatred of their white enemies.
There is a strong probability that as new young black heroes come to center stage, they will neither seek nor welcome the universal approbation and love of white America, which is tantamount, in these times, to racial treason and abdication of integrity and manhood.
The old bittersweet memories fall like leaves through sunshine and storm in the autumn of my life. As I face the looming, unknown winter, my mental eye peers back with remorse at the carnal ruin and sorrow of my poisonous pimp wake.
But there is solace and joy in my determination to build instead of destroy during the sunrisings left to me. I feel such pride at my survival, for the miracle is that I am not a marooned wreck on some gibbering mental reef. I am gratified to be alive at this time and place in the history of the black people’s struggle. What a joyously painful transport it is to be part of that struggle, to be a besieged black man, an embattled nigger, in racist America.
The End
Other Titles by Iceberg Slim
Pimp
Trick Baby
Long White Con
Airtight Willie & Me
Death Wish
Mama Black Widow
The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim
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Copyright © 2013 by Robert Beck estate
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