“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.
I said, “Pappy, I’m sorry I cracked tough on you. I feel like a . . .”
Pappy furiously jiggled his palms before my face and growled, “You stop playing that chump con on me. Only sucker friends need to give and gobble apology for telling the truth about each other.”
I said, “What the hell was it that slugged you, your pump?”
He shrugged and muttered, “A lot of mileage and a little indigestion. Now let’s forget about it. You think the white folks booted you in the butt? Let me show you how a so-called enlightened black newspaperman handled you and those black scufflers in San Francisco.”
Pappy scooped the rolled-up newspaper off the floor and started to flatten it out on the sofa. I noticed it was an edition an enraged black pimp named “Drawback” had shown me the night before. The paper carried the reaction of a black columnist to the newsmagazine’s write-up of the San Francisco black pimps and whores.
I watched warily as Pappy flipped pages for the column. His jaws were tight again, and I felt he could probably get mad enough to maybe bust a heartstring if he caught me in slumber on any heavy social or racial issue in the paper. He shoved the paper double-folded onto my lap. I said, “Drawback let me peek at it last night.”
Pappy dipped his platinum top toward the paper and said, “Slimmy, I’m old as fornication, and I’ve been in and out and around the ‘Horn of Life and Plenty’ more times than this chump has been laid. Even now, today, you could shove us both into the street to just hustle from the raw nub, and I’d show you a grand for every nickel of his!”
I said, “Pappy, let’s not get emotional just because some black writer can’t put together an air castle for a whore, or tell a ten grand lie to a mark.”
Pappy frowned and growled, “Well, what do you think of that hate piece?”
I said, “Give me a minute.” I read the writer’s blasting of the black pimps and whores up San Francisco way as sick criminals and as a splotch on humanity. Then I stared at the image of the pleasant-faced gentleman near the top of his column peering with bright, alert eyes through heavy glasses. I remembered how I had enjoyed his excellent stories on sports and its black stars, and also his poignant etchings of Los Angeles’ Central Avenue back in its bawdy days of glory. I remembered how a colleague and friend of the columnist once lauded him in his column as the “Henry Aaron of Journalism,” and as a “compassionate Good Samaritan” with a beautifully broad understanding; as a fearless writer “with the guts to call it as he sees it.”
Then I thought about murdered Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in Chicago and slaughtered Jerry Aimee and Leonard Deadwyler and many other black victims executed by the police. I was vainly searching my memory to recall an occasion when this same black columnist had blasted polemic fury about the criminals in blue when Pappy slapped my knee and said impatiently, “Damn, Slimmy, you read slow!”
“I was thinking, Pappy,” I answered him. “It seems like he’s about to bust wide open with hate for black pimps and whores.” And while Pappy scowled and prepared a withering rejoinder to my weak remark, I thought how the whole episode was really significant only as another symptom of the divisiveness and class mania that have hacked Black America into hating, bitter fragments and maimed its struggle for freedom and justice.
“Pappy,” I told the old man, “we have to try to understand this gentleman so we can understand his whole cult. Pappy, even exhustlers like ourselves have to confess that black pimps and whores ain’t into no Martin Luther King and Mary McLeod Bethune bags out in those streets. But Pappy, I’m wondering what besides guts does a black gentleman with a solid reputation for compassion and understanding have or lack to publicly stomp on black victims of the poisonous American Dream? What kind of intellectual glaucoma afflicts a respected black gentleman so as to allow him to passionately ‘see’ and flay black pimps and whores as criminals, while fiends in blue bloodlet in the black ghetto unseen and uncondemned in his column as the criminal terrorists they are?”
Pappy took a sip of brandy and said, “Slimmy, maybe his paper muzzles him on cops. And what the hell, there’s little risk in kicking the asses of a crew of black scufflers who have a bitch of a time just staying out of the joint and corraling a fast buck.
“Slimmy, let’s take a look at this joker and his cult in a basic way. I’m going to take it for granted that his mama didn’t dump him into a trash can like happened to me when I was two days old, or that his old man didn’t bounce him against the wall and cop a heel like happened to you when you were six months old.”
Pappy tented manicured fingers beneath the cleft in his chin and continued.
“Slimmy, Ivory Towers are really prisons, and a joker’s mind can become sealed into one brick by brick sometimes from his childhood. You can usually tell when a joker is all locked in when he has conned himself that he is so pure high up there above sin and corruption that even his asshole has the fragrance of a gardenia. He glares down at the spermy sinners funning and sucking beneath him and flies into a slobbery rage. Like Christ Almighty himself he wails and pretends to suffer for the imagined shame of a whole race. But deep down in a secret chamber of his being he is really outraged because he’s sealed himself up in his Ivory prison.
“I remember ’way back when I was a tender buck how jokers like him and his cult appeared to the general public as understanding humanitarians and champions of black advancement. Sometimes they do help and advance a certain type of black person, and they fart in righteous condemnation of bigotry in any form. But, Slimmy, ain’t they so poisoned with bias and bigotry for other types of black people that their public images are a fraud and their lives a lie?
“Can any black man really be a leader, a humanitarian and champion of black advancement who tries only to understand and help the progress of those blacks who he probably believes will become social mock-ups of himself? Slimmy, I don’t want to get carried away like a sucker. But if this joker and his cult are not what they appear to be, then they are fakes, social grifters playing the con for honor and respect from the public that they don’t deserve. And the great tragedy about them and us is that we can’t link arms in the death struggle of our race.”
“Right on, Pappy!” I said, slapping his outstretched palm. “But, Pappy, how in the hell can you get it across a barrier like that to the man and his cult the fact of the kinship of all black people, including himself, as nigger victims and targets for repression and murder in America?”
Pappy glanced at his wristwatch and stood up. “I don’t have the answer. And you and I will be dead and stinking before those black jokers wake up to the fact that they are not special human beings to the white man, not even special niggers when the life-and-death chips are down. Thos
e black jokers ain’t going to get out of those Ivory prisons until the day the murderers come for them. Like I said, they’re bricked in there in sweet slumber, terrified of pain, suffering and dying, and most of all, they fear loving the black militant strugglers and street nigger losers ’way down there in the gutter beneath them—because they know the gimlet eye of their white power idols is watching. Slimmy, I could cry like a crumb crusher about it. But I won’t. I’ve got some sinning to do with a young Creole broad, and I’m fifteen minutes late right now. Thanks for everything and later, Slimmy, later.”
He scooped up his coat and, throwing it cape-style across his proud shoulders, went down the walk. I watched him gun the crimson Riviera away in the rain. I sank back into my easy chair. I was all alone again except for the rain out there still dancing her heart out. I closed my eyes and inhaled her wild perfume and let her whispery voice gentle and soothe me like the broad, like the sweet bitch she is.
AN OPEN LETTER TO ICEBERG SLIM
New York, N.Y.
January 10, 1970
Dear Iceberg Slim:
After having virtually memorized your three books, I decided I could come to you as you came to Sweet Jones in Pimp for advice, to get my “coat pulled.” Iceberg, I am not insane, nor am I mentally ill. Not any of that heavy drama. But ever since I got back to the States last year from Nam, I have been unable to find the key to an understanding of myself and of my place in the world about me and of even a way to help my black brothers and sisters. Sometimes when I really try hard to think out solutions to my problems, my mind seems to break up like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. I could get hooked up with some of my mother’s well-off relatives right here in New York tomorrow. But when I got back from Nam, I chose to make it on my own in Harlem and pull out of this ghetto on my own some day.
Maybe I can’t get my head together, because before I went to Nam when I was eighteen, I had never been away from home. I come from a large city in the Deep South. My old man is a big-shot nigger down there who is so brainwashed by whitey’s bullshit that he threw a big thing, a hundred people, to celebrate my going to murder little yellow people in Nam. Mama was different. She hated war and always worried that some day I would have to go. She died when I was sixteen. Iceberg, I was so square before I got to Nam, you wouldn’t believe. I thought hash was what went with biscuits, and that before you got in a chick’s pants you bought rings and a piece of paper.
But I changed in Nam, and I am a man now, and whatever happens I am never going back to my father’s house and to all his nigger society, Uncle Tom crap. I admire you, Iceberg, because you didn’t grin and Uncle Tom to escape from the ghetto. You wrote your way out. Iceberg, I have a strong desire to become a writer. I believe it could be the salvation of my head and I could help my people. I have been writing down some of my experiences in Nam and about how we nigger grunts were treated by our white superior officers. You wouldn’t believe the jive scene over there. One afternoon after we had been out on 36-hour patrol and fought through several ambushes by Charlie, we dragged our raunchy asses to some cover and collapsed. My best pal had been blown apart by a mine, and I had been wounded when one of those shiny star fairies from DHQ dropped in on a chopper for a hot minute. That white mother stood no more than four feet from me spouting the usual off-the-wall shit. I looked at his boots and you wouldn’t believe, they were so clean and gleaming I could actually see my reflection on them. Something came over me, and I was shaking with the impulse to blow that grinning mother out of his shiny boots with a burst from my rifle.
Iceberg, I feel used up, tricked and confused. I have killed, and I found out it’s no big thing to kill or die. I’m not afraid of the devil. I want to be a writer. I want to help my people. I have been writing down some part of the now scene. I want to cast off this jigsaw thing inside my head and relate clearly to what’s happening to black people. If I flunk out as a writer then I will try to fit in some other way, even pick up a gun and join the revolution.
Iceberg, you wouldn’t believe the articles and stuff I have read on what type of writing a black writer should be concerned about. You know, the old hassle about protest stuff and literary art. I would appreciate it very much if you could find time to write me a short note of advice about the writing game.
Respectfully,
W. N.
Dear Brother,
I am answering your letter in the early hours of the morning. Brother, the pain of your confusion and frustration, your hurt as a black man in America, seem so much like my own feelings long ago, except that at your age I was too street poisoned, was perhaps not intelligent enough to sense my need for new values and for advice.
Brother, you have come to me in your unhappiness like a son needing advice and comfort from his father, and I feel proud and deeply touched that you did. But I also feel sadness at the nagging thought that I am too new from the blind mist, too battered, still too unhealed to rise fully to your needs and image of me.
Perhaps I can best advise you by pulling your coat to some personal things about my present lifestyle and some deep feelings and impressions I have as a writer and as an older black brother and nigger in this society. I hope I can give you a clearer, perhaps less painful view of yourself and of our bittersweet ghetto.
Brother, I live in the ghetto and have no desire to break its bonds, for I am, after all, a street nigger learning to write, who is, incidentally, being blessed with an increasing audience for his efforts. Materially, I dream at the moment of more living space and less wobbly furniture. I experience and view the ghetto as a savagely familiar place of spiritual warmth rich in the writer’s treasure of pathos, conflict and struggle. I am convinced that for me it was the only place where I could discover and keep an awareness of who I really am and where I could find my haven, my purpose as a writer and a nigger in this criminal society.
Brother, I fear to flee to some other strange, plush ghetto where I would possibly be marooned among glossy, status-shit fanatics whom I would have to ape for acceptance. Once long ago in my tender stage, I did time in the showplace dungeon of a foxy black socialite located in an exclusive interracial compound in the East. Dear brother, the week I served with that gushy manic depressive phony and her interracial horde of Ivory Tower rectums seemed longer and tougher than any bit I ever served in a real joint. I know that only in some black ghetto can my street nigger soul soar, stay proud and pure and unfucked-over.
Brother, I hope that at this point you still consider me a success. Now just for the sake of finding something useful in another direction, let’s look at a much different kind of black writer, say, one from a lifelong middle-class background, whose writings you admire and respect because you are a different kind of brother. Like a certain older black writer whose writings are virtually unknown to the black masses, I am gifted, craven, cunning or perhaps simply repressed enough to have created a novel dealing with the condition of blacks in America that has won admiration from some white critics and charms even the white racist. “Magnificently detached and objective,” “unmatched aloofness from bitterness and accusation,” say the white critics in gratitude for unpricked conscience. And the white racists will spread the word, “The nigger is a genius . . .,” “What a truthful look into the black ghetto,” to close with the final, damning, “He writes like a white man.”
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 ap
parently 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.