Brother, we cannot survive; we will never be free unless we make ourselves immune to confusion, to the diseased rhetoric of certain so-called black leaders. At this instant my ear is catching a TV interview with a famous and fluent black victim of brainwashing, doing his robot bit on the TV screen before me. Brother, I wish you could watch and listen to this robot bit with me for a moment. I wish you could watch this black brother and listen to him not with hate or rage but with understanding and sympathy. But most urgently with the realization that he is our enemy by the unshakable equation that a defender unwitting or not is our enemy—an ally and friend of our enemy cannot be other than our enemy. I hurt deeply for him and for us as I watch and listen.
The white interviewer leans forward toward our dapper gray-thatched brother who blinks owlishly through stylish bifocal windows. The question—“Do you as a black leader consider Mr. Nixon and his administration indifferent to the problems and needs of your race or perhaps even racist in attitude?”—has apparently insulted and shocked our brother. He winces and draws himself away from the beetle-browed white man with the indignation of a hundred-buck whore cringing away from a two-buck offer for a trip around the world.
The brother recovers quickly and stares toward the ceiling for a long moment while presumably his fifty-grand education and lackey purpose frame a defense for the pygmy president who has brought this nation to the brink of racial and economic destruction. Ah! He has it together. The velvet voice flows smoothly in an alibi that Nixon himself would applaud: “I have no conviction that Mr. Nixon and his administration are indifferent to black progress or are racist in nature. I think it very probable that Mr. Nixon, who is primarily a political animal, is understandably giving top priority at this time to political strategy and fence mending.”
The liberal white interviewer frowns and says, “What are your feelings about the complaints of a number of black leaders that Mr. Nixon’s ear and presence are virtually inaccessible for serious discussion of their people’s problems?” Wistfully, the brother tells now about an occasion when he and other blacks were lathered in Nixon’s charm at the White House and how it wouldn’t have been good manners to sour the social cream with serious talk about black problems. Now the brother is saying sweetly, “But I do not believe the problem of serious access to Mr. Nixon is due to any indifference or racism on his part, but only to the sensible obligation of the men around Mr. Nixon to shield and protect him from as much pressure and unpleasantness as possible.” Brother, I turned off the TV set. Perhaps time and the breed’s zero-worth to us or the enemy will put it out of its misery.
Dear brother, I hope I have cleared away some of your confusion. I hope you will understand that the real borderlines to struggle across, the real walls to break through are not without but within our own minds. Because we are black and we are forced to struggle with gun or pen or in some effective way for survival, for honor, for our manhood and for our escape from the painful mental ghetto of the uncommitted nigger in this criminal society.
But jumping into the violent revolutionary movement at this time would be similar to an angry warrior challenging the enemy army with a brick-bat. Get involved with the ghetto struggle. Help your people to struggle.
And write, brother, write. Don’t ever want to live for yourself alone. The pimp life trapped me in that awful, empty bag for a quarter of a century. Brother, you’ve got the guts. You can do anything you want to. And please remember that any advice, knowledge or encouragement I can offer you as a writer and a black brother are there for you to draw from.
Sincerely yours,
Robert Beck
(Iceberg Slim)
ICEBERG ADRIFT: MUSINGS, LAMENTATIONS
One evening in the middle of June 1970, my nightly three-mile walk was unexpectedly delayed by the Elmer Gantry antics of America’s foremost entrepreneur of the religious extravaganza. He appeared with his accomplices in a special video flimflam staged with the precision and cold-blooded objectivity of a top con mob. For an ex-street creature like myself, the spectacle of such an airtight “game” was comparable to a religious fanatic’s hallucination of the Second Coming of Christ.
I sat watching in amazement and reluctant admiration as our presidential pygmy introduced America’s wizard of worship, Dr. Billy Graham. To further heighten my amazement (and blood pressure), one of the great beloved ladies of the black race, Miss Ethel Waters, appeared also to express her love for America’s youthful dissenters. Only to later tell the television multitudes how she would like to smack these dissenters for opposing the policies of her “precious child,” Richard Milhous Nixon, close friend and political ally of racist Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina.
Fortunately I was aware that the principles of con are basically the same on every level. It looked to me like Dr. Graham, fall guy for the military-industrial establishment’s carnage-steeped Asian adventures and burgeoning white hope for America’s racists, sought through his video presence to camouflage and purify the Nixon administration’s repressive, racist, war-hawk image in the poignant aura of Mammyism and a religious crusade.
Going out into the ghetto night on my walk, I thought of the ironic plight of Miss Ethel Waters. She had everything—talent, beauty, charm, one of the most bewitching voices in the history of show biz—to ensure her emotional and financial security in the winter of her life; everything except a white skin in racist America.
I lamented that instead of giving her the respect that, as an enshrined black heroine of American Theater, she deserves, cunning white men have seized on her emotional unfulfillment and professional frustrations to exploit her as a maudlin, ethnic attraction in their buck-snatching road shows.
* * *
Several blocks from home I walk into a drugstore and immediately am confronted by an excited, slender black guy with chain gangs and inferno cotton fields in his face and voice.
“Please, suh, gimme uh ten-cent piece,” he blurts.
Instantly, I put it in his palm because his act is either real or such realistic con that it’s worth a dime anytime. He whirls and goes pell-mell toward a trio of public telephones; a pompous-looking old white guy in rimless bifocals is just leaving one.
As I pass them, the brother from big foot country is holding out a dime and asking the old white guy, “Ah ain’t good at them numbers on thet phone. Please, suh, call the po-leece cuz mah crazee cuzun is gotta butcher knife ’roun unc’s house an’ he gonna . . .”
As I walk by, he thanks his benefactor for making the call and grins at me. But what the hell, I rejoice because my niggerhood, fortunately, is together enough that I feel neither contempt nor irritation because he has by implication thought me not as competent as the white guy to operate the intricate telephone dial. For I know why he feels that way and how he got that way, and I smile and pat his shoulder as I pass him.
Halfway through the walk a two-man LAPD cruiser moves close to the curb and dogs my footsteps for a block. I remember that recently LAPD Homicide Lt. Robert Helder was quoted in newspapers as terming the murder of Jerry Lee Amie a “mistake, an unfortunate accident.” Jerry died when four cops pumped twenty-five bullets into the unarmed victim right on his front lawn, in full view of his mother.
I keep walking and visualize Jerry Amie standing helplessly (drunk, according to the police) as his mother screams at the cops not to kill him. Although I am nauseously square and straight now, icy feet of apprehension stomp up and down my spine. I am unarmed and my followers are the heartless, unpredictable enemy, possibly killers with blood lust at peak cycle who might perversely halt and hassle me into a bullet-ripped corpse in the gutter. The gimlet-eyed pressure and the vivid picture of Jerry Amie are too much; I flee into a greasy spoon for coffee.
Standing, I put a quarter in front of my empty coffee cup as two dapper young black dudes get in my face.
One says, “Ice, pull this mark’s coat that when you was rapping in your book Pimp about the whore game was a skull game, that you di
dn’t mean sucking a cunt.”
I patiently explain that I didn’t, and I give them a standard pitch to dissuade them from the pimp game and all other criminal enterprises. But I can tell I’m not moving them. Both are already street poisoned.
I stop in a liquor store for gum. When I get back on the sidewalk, two husky young guys with hard faces stop me and ask how to get to the city of Compton. I am giving them a rundown when several young guys in a car pull to the curb. The driver gets out and walks over and says, “Is everything all right, Iceberg?” I tell him everything is cool and slap his palm as we split.
A block from home I go into a phone booth and stand for a moment looking at the receiver dangling off the cradle. I look about through the booth glass for some prior user. Lifting the receiver I listen for a live connection. I don’t hear anything, so I drop a dime and start to dial. There is a nerve-grinding squeal of brakes and a heavy-set black guy with murder pulsing in his bloodshot eyes leaps from a jalopy and charges the phone booth. He punches the booth door open with the heel of his fist and buries his other hand ominously in his trouser pocket. He stands there with tiny bubbles of spittle nested in the corners of an angry mouth glaring at me.
He shouts, “Motherfucker, didn’t you see the phone off the hook?”
Like I said, I was unarmed, and I am not a prizefighter. Surprise fighter, yes. So I open with strategic idiom.
I say, “Brother, I didn’t see you around. And you ain’t blowed the dime. What do you want to do, take this dime and use the phone now? Or do we chump off and send each other’s nigger ass to the joint or the morgue about this white man’s chickenshit phone?”
He blinks and some of the menace goes out of his eyes as he cocks his head to one side and says, “Nigger, don’t I know you?”
I move out of the tight trap of the phone booth and say, “No, brother, I don’t think so.”
Then he grins and slams me hard against the shoulder. “Nigger, you’re Iceberg Slim! I got one of your books where you’re on the back squatting down like taking a crap. Shit! I know you, nigger.”
Then he looks sheepish and says, “Slim, I been fighting that whiskey and having trouble with a skunk bitch. I got to come to myself, I guess.”
He takes a snub-nosed .38 from his trouser pocket and throws it under his car seat. He offers to let me use the phone first, but I decline, slap his palm and cross my fingers as I set out to walk that last block home. I visualize the potential carnage and feel glad that I didn’t act like an uptight, white-styled, middle-class black spouting indignation when the disturbed brother burst into that phone booth.
* * *
Several days after the phone booth adventure, I hear angry voices while cooling off on the sofa near an open window. I raise my glance up over the windowsill and see a young black father in soiled Marine Corps fatigue pants arguing with an older, powerfully-built black guy over blocking the younger guy’s driveway with his car. The older guy spews a blast of profanity and hurls himself into his machine. The young guy lounges coolly by the side of his own car watching his opponent shudder the sultry air as the car engine bellows into life.
Tons of hurtling steel bear down on the young guy, but not one hair of his Afro natural moves as the steel monster in passing grazes his clothing. He remains weirdly immobile, like some bronze heroic statue in a sleepy town square, even as the squawking tires bomb his face and sparkling clean car with the grit of the driveway. His animated eyes glow and pulse like black fire.
The older guy jumps from his machine in the street and races to the trunk. A female companion leaps out behind him and tearfully tries to dissuade him from opening the trunk, where perhaps he has stashed some deadly weapon.
The younger guy explodes into action and speeds down the driveway in his car. As he passes the struggling couple, he says with eerie sweetness, “Don’t split, baby. I’ll be right back.”
The older guy gesticulates and prances about for a few seconds before roaring away. Before the racket of his leaving has died, the young guy wheels back into his driveway, and within ten minutes starts to hose down his car. The older guy barrels back seconds later and stands menacingly in the street glaring up the driveway at the young guy, who steps away from cover to stand defiantly staring at his opponent.
There is a patient, ominous looseness in the young guy’s body, like that of killer gunslingers in the Old West. As he slouches there with hands on hips, I notice a curvy bulge at his belt line near the small of his back above the flowing tail of his shirt. The cemetery radiations from the young guy are so powerful that the older guy lets himself be persuaded by a pal to cop a heel after a bit of halfhearted threats and profanity.
Fortunately, in this set-to between black men, there was no bloodshed. But usually the tragic reverse is true. It is not surprising that black men imprisoned in the ghettos of America use one another as substitute objects upon which to vent the rage and hatred they feel for the white man.
* * *
I am still cooling it on the sofa when a dear old friend, an elderly domestic worker, comes to visit. She has a decision to make, and she wants advice. She is excited because she has received a letter from a so-called black man of God who virtually promises to wipe away all earthly problems for her if she will send to an Eastern post office box a donation of ten to one hundred dollars for a prayer cloth.
Religious hustlers white and black suck the sweat and blood money from superstitious, elderly ghetto residents and from poor whites. These vultures have talents and morals inferior even to those of admitted hustlers and con men in the street. The pimp at least victimizes alert young people who conceivably will have time left in life to cast off the pimp’s evil spell and to recoup financially and emotionally. The con man bilks victims who are not paupers and who are looking for something for nothing. In my opinion, even the force-oriented character of the stickup man is superior to that of the craven religious hustler. The bandit puts his life on the line and faces his usually armed victim baldly and boldly and with noble recklessness.
The religious shark preys on the poor, the lame, the blind, the hopeless, the aged, the near senile, the sick, the dying. He shoots fish in a barrel. He hasn’t the guts and intellect to go out and play his con against some kind of threat, challenge and risk. And he is so limited, so bereft of creative ideas, he has to use God as a prop.
My dear friend handed me the prayer cloth letter. It read:
HOW TO USE THE PRAYER CLOTH
The Prayer Cloth may be laid upon the sick, placed in the bed, or carried on the person. It may also be used in other ways, and for many kinds of blessings as your faith may direct you. As you use the Prayer Cloth, think in your mind that this represents me, the MAN OF GOD, laying my hands upon you and praying the prayer of faith for you. EXPECT the answer as you use the Prayer Cloth. In fact, if you believe, the Prayer Cloth will be just like the hands of Jesus being laid upon you!
One Prayer Cloth may be cut into many small pieces and used in many different places, or by many different people. EVERY THREAD is blessed by prayer and faith in Jesus’ name.
FOR PEACE OR A BLESSING IN THE HOME—Place the Prayer Cloth in some secret place in the home. It represents the prayers of the MAN OF GOD for your home, and the presence of God to bless your home.
IT DOES NOT MATTER HOW SOILED OR WORN the Prayer Cloth gets, it still brings results if used in faith. It may be washed if desired.
FOR FINANCIAL OR MATERIAL BLESSINGS it may be carried in the purse or pocketbook. Carry it when you go looking for a job, or to transact business, or to court. It will represent the presence and power of God going with you in these matters.
FOR THE SALVATION OF LOVED ONES, AND THE DELIVERANCE OF THOSE WITH BAD HABITS LIKE DRINKING, USING DOPE, ETC.—Place the Prayer Cloth or a piece of it under, in or about their beds, or wherever they sleep, or wherever they SHOULD be sleeping. Let it be a secret. I gave one lady a Prayer Cloth for her husband who was drinking badly and told her to put it under his mat
tress. She came back later and said, “I placed the Cloth under my husband’s mattress and he quit drinking, but he found the Prayer Cloth and went back to drinking!” So let this be a secret.
THOSE WHO WANT TO STOP USING TOBACCO—Carry or keep the Prayer Cloth on you where you usually keep tobacco, and trust God to take the desire away.
PLEASE, PLEASE, DO NOT SEND ANY CLOTH OR ANYTHING TO BE BLESSED. LET ME SEND YOU MY OWN PRAYER CLOTH AND BLESSINGS.
* * *
I advised my old friend until my voice got hoarse against sending part of her rent money for the prayer cloth. Finally, reluctantly, she agreed that, in view of her great faith in God, buying a prayer cloth from a far-off stranger would really be an indictment of that faith and a painful extravagance.
* * *
Mama’s warmth, inner beauty, intelligence, sweetness and thoughtfulness as a mother and human being are reflected in old letters, photographs and other dusty memorabilia she had hoarded and treasured through the seasons of her life. I’m joined by an enthralled spectator as I open Mama’s ancient steamer trunk with its welter of faded stickers plastered on in dozens of bustling baggage rooms in the early gypsy years of our lives.
Ah! Here is a photograph of me at twenty-two in full rainbow pimp regalia. Slumberously evil eyes stare into the camera with an odd malevolence, perhaps due to the powerful “speed ball” (heroin and cocaine in combination) I had mainlined a half hour before I sat for the photographer.
My wee one shudders in mock repulsion at the image of the dapper predator with the insane eyes and hollers, “He ugly! He ugly!” And I feel glad that my pimp image repels her.