Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim

Iceberg Slim

Description

I want to say at the outset that I have become ill, insane as an inmate of a torture chamber behind America's fake facade of justice and democracy. But I am not as ill as I was, and I am getting better all the time. Iceberg Slim's fiction has caused controversy ever since it first appeared in the late sixties. His first novel, Pimp, was a frank and at times brutal portrayal of his own life in which he gave graphic insights into his twenty year reign as one of Chicago's most successful and streetwise pimps. All his subsequent books (bar this) took the form of fiction but maintained his vivid and uncompromising take on the urban underworld. The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim is a departure from the rest of his work in that it is a collection of essays. They are similarly straight up and honest but are all the more chilling for their total directness. The wisdom gained through a life of serious excess and violence is considerable and in this varied collection of soul-bearing confessions, Iceberg Slim reveals why he has been revered widely as the spokesman of the street.

Sujets

• Lettres et linguistique

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 18 octobre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780857869692
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE NAKED SOUL OF ICEBERG SLIM
I want to say at the outset that I have become ill, insane, as an inmate of the torture chamber behind America’s fake facade of justice and democracy. But I am not as ill as I was, and I am getting better all the time.
I want to make clear that my reason for starting these notes at a point of personal anguish and suffering is that these experiences marked the end of a corrupt pimp life and were the prelude to a still mauled but constructive new life.

First published in the United States of America by Holloway House Publishing Co. 1971.
This edition first published in 1996 by Payback Press, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
This digital edition is first published by Canongate in 2012
Copyright © Robert Beck, 1971, 1986 Foreword copyright © Diane Millman Beck, 1996 Introduction copyright © Milton Van Sickle, 1971
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 0 86241 633 7 eISBN 978 0 85786 969 2
Typeset in Minion and Serif Modular by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Polmont, Stirlingshire
www.canongate.tv
I dedicate this book to the heroic memory of Malcolm X, Jack Johnson, Melvin X, Jonathan Jackson; to Huey P. Newton, Bobby Seale, Ericka Huggins, George Jackson, Angela Davis; and to all street niggers and strugglers in and out of the joints.
‘ The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. ’
William Blake
Contents
Foreword
Introduction

From a Steel Box to a Wicked Young Girl
Letter to Papa
Rapping About the Pimp Game
Baby Sis
A Goddess Revisited
Vignettes: Conqueror Jackson
Vignettes: An Old White Slave And Shield
Vignettes: the Professor
Vignettes: the Black Panthers
Melvin X
Racism and the Black Revolution
Uncle Tom and his Master in the Violent Seventies
About Rain and Rapping with Sweetsend Pappy Luke
An Open Letter to Iceberg Slim
Iceberg Adrift: Musings, Lamentations
Foreword
Death, the cruellest con of them all, came to claim my husband, Robert Maupin Beck (Iceberg Slim) on April 30, 1992.
The irony of L.A.’s erupting streets coinciding with my husband’s death was not lost on me. We often spoke of the Panthers and how they cared about the people, and how they were put down by the powers that be. People will only take unjust abuse so long and then they must speak out. Sometimes, it erupts in violence, recognised by Martin Luther King as ‘language of the uneducated and the unheard’. Slim understood that. The day the streets erupted he told me, from his hospital bed, ‘Well, it’s starting’. His understanding about life – his wisdom and teachings – not only in his books, but in conversations with me, sometimes for hours on end, helped me – helps me even now, every day. I grew so much as a person while married to Slim.
Slim’s fans were, and are, solid. They had an understanding of the man and his work. His detractors, those who would judge him, knew nothing of him, only that he had been a pimp and they would have nothing to do with him. Such was the case of a well-known African-American actress who, in the 1970s was scheduled as a guest on a radio show. When she found out Iceberg Slim was also scheduled, she refused to go on.
Slim was an astute student of human nature. He may not have been happy with his detractors (and those who would attempt to use him in some way) but he always understood where they were coming from and would often ‘break it down’ to me in sociological or psychological terms. But the praise from his fans meant a great deal to him. His life’s blood is in the pages of his books. And to have his work recognised and appreciated was the ultimate compliment.
Although Slim’s first book Pimp , raw and eloquent, was the brutal truth of the life he had led, his very being was captured on the pages of The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim . The stories in Naked Soul are all as poignant as they are powerful, but they are an eclectic mix. To write a general preface about all of them together, well . . . But I would like to speak about one of the vignettes, ‘Letter to Papa’. Writing this was a catharsis (of sorts) for Slim. He often talked with me about the good times he had with his father and often relived that day on the boat of the infamous mayor Big Bill Thompson when Slim, with his young knees shaking, saw his father fearlessly stand up to the racist tyrant and order him out of his kitchen. The good times were foremost in his mind having long ago forgiven his father the bad.
Not being a writer I feel on sort of shaky literary ground; I thought of telling how Slim’s mind, and the cynical wit that I could relate to, stayed sharp to the end. But the last few years he began to realise that, in the end, what is really important in this life are three things: health, the love of those around you and memories. And we had one hell of a good time walking down memory lane. Every time I listen to Dinah Washington, Billie Holiday, Arthur Prysock, I think of him. Every cloudy, overcast day I think of Chicago and of Slim. Before he passed he gave me a sealed envelope and told me to open it only after his death. I would like to share a small part with you: ‘I hope that when strong, hoodlum winds blow in California, you will think of the Big Windy and me. Perhaps if you become troubled in spirit, you could come to visit with me for a moment. Maybe, just maybe, I can comfort you from deep within the earth.’ I do visit him, and keep him apprised of what’s going on in this uncertain world.
There were no others like Iceberg Slim. He was one of a kind. His wisdom, his teachings, his books will enlighten and entertain generations to come. And I thank you all for keeping his name alive.

Diane Millman Beck
Los Angeles
July, 1996
Introduction
Robert Beck – or Iceberg Slim as his people know him – is living evidence (for those who need it) that times have not changed – only the con. A century ago, fifty years ago, twenty years ago, the Establishment line was, ‘Take it easy, don’t rock the boat. Justice will come – but it takes time.’
Today the con is, ‘We must have Law and Order. Now civil rights legislation is being passed. Justice will come – but it takes time.’ (Tomorrow, the con will be something like, ‘You can’t get anything by bloodshed. Take it easy. Justice will come.’) The truth is, nothing has changed. The same Establishment against which Jack Johnson fought single handedly (see The Big Black Fire by Robert H. deCoy – the only biography of the greatest fighter prior to Muhammed Ali which captures the essence of the man and his times), the same Establishment that murdered Bessie Smith, the same Establishment that murdered Malcolm X and Melvin X – to say nothing of the nameless thousands every year in the collective ghetto of our nation – that is the same Establishment of today – and it hasn’t yielded one inch in all this time.
Most of the black writers of this time are screamers – and some are pretty loud. But Iceberg Slim – the greatest story teller of the ghetto – doesn’t waste his time. He knows that a black man is something a great deal more than just one of the downtrodden and damned; that every black man carries not only the collective burden of his blackness – but he is also very much an individual human being.
His first book, Pimp: The Story of My Life , is essentially a modern and very much American version of Crime and Punishment . This is not to suggest a borrowing from or even an influence by Dostoievsky – but it is a very sincere and sometimes frightening attempt on the part of Iceberg Slim to face himself and his life; and his final transformation – or salvation, if you wish – is as intensely meaningful as any religious enlightenment recorded by the saints. In this book you hold in your hand, Iceberg Slim recounts how he happened to write Pimp , and why he wrote it himself rather than trust it to another (see ‘The Professor’). Elsewhere in this group of essays and vignettes you will see the effect that book has had on the black ghetto youth. To many, Slim has become a folk hero and his followers dream of emulating him. They are thrilled with the excitement of the street, and feel strong enough to weather its deadly dangers.
Pimp fast became an underground best-seller – and, now, four years after the first edition, it is still a bestseller (though it will never appear on the Establishment Bestseller List). Iceberg Slim followed with Trick Baby , a story of the con game and of a black man so light that he could have passed had he not felt his blackness so strongly (and this was a whole generation before black was beautiful). A small portion of Trick Baby is repeated here in ‘uncle Tom and his Master in the Violent Seventies.’ Repeated because it recounts something of the inner workings of the Establishment con – much as John A. Williams revealed it in the King Alfred Plan in The Man Who Cried I Am (a book which should be read by every American who is concerned with something more than his income tax).
Iceberg Slim’s next book was Mama Black Widow , the story of a Southern family which was destroyed when it moved to a Northern city. It is interesting to compare the Tilson family – and Otis Tilson, who tells the story – with James Baldwin’s Rufus in Another Country . Rufus was utterly destroyed by Whitey – or so Baldwin would have us believe. And there is much pain in the telling. But Otis Tilson tells his story ‘for my poor dead Papa and myself and the thousands of black men like him in ghetto torture chambers who have been and will be niggerized and deballed by the white power structure and its thrill-kill police . . .’ And if this were all there was to his story, Iceberg would merely be another Baldwin or LeRoi Jones or Julius Lester or the like. But, as mentioned earlier, Iceberg Slim is no screamer – not that he evades issues, by any means. But he is too strong a man and too hon