Mama Black Widow , livre ebook

MAMA BLACK WIDOW
‘. . . my reason for telling my story is not money. I’m doing it 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 . . .’

Any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
First published in the United States of America by Holloway House Publishing Co., 1969
This edition first published in 1996 by Payback Press, an imprint of Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Copyright © Iceberg Slim, 1969
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 0 86241 632 9 eISBN 978 0 85786 977 7
Typeset in Minion and Serif Modular by Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Polmont, Stirlingshire
This digital edition first published by Canongate in 2012
Contents

Preface

1 Mama You Mother . . . !
2 Sally Freaks Off
3 Back to the Web
4 Forty Cents a Hundred Ain’t a Precious Gift
5 The Promised Land Ain’t
6 Merry Christmas in Hell
7 Poor Papa Struck Out
8 Mama’s New Pants
9 Thet Peckahwood Varmint
10 The Wizard of Woo
11 Bessie’s Red Satin Dress
12 A Doll Fella For Dorcas
13 The Magnificent Hard-on
14 Madame Miracle’s Stinking Little Faggot
15 The Freakish Fifties
16 Encore Doll Fella

Epilogue
Preface
One early evening during the first week of February in 1969 I visited Otis Tilson. He was an incredibly comely and tragic homosexual queen with whom I had been acquainted for most of the twenty-five years that I had been a black pimp in Chicago, Illinois.
Otis lived in a third rate hotel at Forty Seventh Street and Cottage Grove Avenue. He was colorful in fresh makeup, platinum wig and rainbow print hostess pajamas with the outrageously full legs.
His almond shaped hazel eyes sparkled as he eagerly took the paper sack containing the gin I’d brought him and said in a throaty contralto, ‘Iceberg, you were an angel not to forget my medicine.’
We sat on a battered sofa in his one room kitchenette. A tall young black stud with a natural hair-do and a hostile face got off the rumpled brass bed, glared at me and slammed the door going out.
I said, ‘Otis, he’s got rocks in his jaws.’
Otis raised a water glass and took a big belt of gin.
He giggled and said, ‘He’s jealous and fatally in love with my old hot yellow asshole and also he’s afraid I might suck a new cock.’
I said, ‘How is Sedalia?’
He wrinkled his tiny tip tilted nose and said, ‘I haven’t seen Mama since I walked out on her in ’68. I guess that rotten bitch is doing as well as anybody can in a wheel chair.’
A moment later as I was setting up my tape recorder, Otis’ smooth yellow face became serious and he said passionately, ‘Iceberg, my real reason for telling my story is not money. I’m doing it 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.
‘This goddamn society is crooked and corrupt from top to bottom. Lots of police, judges and prosecutors put their heads together and frame homosexuals into long jail terms. The hysterical bastards are really punishing the cocksucker and the faggot-hot-to-be-fucked-in-the-ass that are inside themselves.’
Otis paused and looked at me sheepishly.
He said softly, ‘Iceberg, was the machine turned on?’
I nodded.
He said, ‘I guess you’ll have to erase what I said. I got carried away. I’ll be careful and watch my language.’
I said, ‘The hell you will. Any book I have any connection with has to tell it like it is. You were beautiful. The gutsy language is you, the street and life, and it’s real.
‘I know something of what happened to you and your family, and I guarantee all you need do is tell your story like it is to prove a thousand points about this black hell and the poisonous pus of double standard justice, racial bigotry and criminal economic freeze-out, infecting and grotesquely bloating the hideous underbelly of white America’s shining facade of democracy and freedom and opportunity for all.
‘Start your story with Dorcas and that first time you lived with her as a stud. I’m going to lift your whole story off the tape and put it in the book, gutsy and like it is.’
In writing the book, I found it necessary in the interests of literary unity, clarity and values, to restructure and realign some scenes and events from Otis’ rambling and often tearful account. And I supplied transitional bridges. Except for my minimal involvement, the unforgettable story is his.
There are no esoteric psychiatric dialogues, dead preachments or leaden footnotes on the living pages of this book. The dialogue is in the gut idiom of the queer – the black ghetto – the deep South – the underworld. Critical social delineations are in the stark dramas of the internal and external conflicts of Otis Tilson’s heartbreaking struggle to free himself from the freakish bitch burning inside him. And also in the tragic life styles of Otis’ older brother and two beautiful sisters adrift in a dark world of pimpdom and crime and violence where good is condemned and evil applauded.

Iceberg Slim
1969
1
Mama You Mother . . . !
She lay beside me in the late March night, naked and crying bitterly into her pillow. The bellow of a giant truck barreling down State Street in Chicago’s far Southside almost drowned out her voice as she sobbed, ‘What’s wrong with me, Otis? Why is it so hard for you to make love to me? Am I too fat? Do you love someone else? Yes, I guess that’s it. And that’s why you haven’t married me. This is 1968. We’ve been sleeping together for a whole year. I wasn’t brought up like that. Let’s get married. Please make me Mrs Tilson. I hope you’re not stalling because I married twice before.’
I just lay there squeezing the limp flesh between my sweaty thighs and feeling desperate helplessness and panic.
I danced my fingertips down her spine and whispered tenderly into her ear, ‘Dorcas, there’s no one else. I think I’ve loved you since we were very young. I just have to stop drinking so much. Maybe we’ll get married soon. Now, let’s try it again.’
She turned over slowly and lay on her back in a blue patch of moonlight. Her enormous black eyes were luminous in the strong ebony face. Desperately I set my imagination free and gazed at her tits, jerking like monstrous male organs in climax.
I felt an electric spark quicken my limpness. Frantically I closed my eyes and gnawed and sucked at the heaving humps. Her outcries of joyful pain pumped rigid readiness into me.
She pinched it. She moaned and held herself open.
She screamed, ‘Please! Please, fuck me before it falls again.’
I lunged into her and seized her thighs to hold them back. But as I touched her fat softness I felt myself collapsing inside her.
I was terrified. So I thought about Mike and the crazy excitement I had felt long ago when I pressed my face against his hard hairy belly. Then in the magic of imagination, instead of Dorcas it was the beautiful heartbreaker Mike that I smashed into.
Later, I lay and watched Dorcas sleeping. Except for added weight and faint stress lines etched into the satin skin, she looked the same as she had on that enchanted spring day when I first met her twenty years before.
What a chump I had been then to dream that the daughter of a big shot mortician could really be mine.
Mama had warned me then, ‘Sweet Pea, a slum fellow like you don’t have a chance with a girl like that. Her father will see to it. If anyone despises poor niggers more than white folks, it’s high class niggers like him.’
Mama had been right. He had helped to marry her off and broken my heart. The prejudiced bastard was dead now.
By sheer chance I had run into Dorcas a week after his death. She was a trained mortician, but she was lonely and needed help.
I knew right away that there was still lots of warm sweet voltage between us. Two days later I moved from Mama and the tenement flat where I had spent most of my life.
I hadn’t dated a guy since I moved into the funeral home with her. I put off marrying her because I knew that freakish creature I called Sally was still alive inside me. I was afraid of Sally. I couldn’t marry Dorcas until I was certain that the bitch Sally was dead.
I thought about the freshly embalmed corpse of Deacon Davis lying in the mortuary morgue downstairs. I would have to groom and dress it by mid-morning for viewing in the slumber room. I tried until dawn to sleep. But it was no use. I couldn’t get the corpse of Deacon Davis off my mind. I decided to prepare the Deacon and get him off my mind.
I eased out of bed and slipped on a robe and slippers. I took a ring of keys from the dresser top and went down the front stairway to the street. I went down the sidewalk through the chilly dawn to the front door of the mortuary.
I unlocked the door and stepped into the dim reception room. I walked across the deep pile gold carpet into the office. I switched on a light and sat down at the old mahogany desk. I took a fresh fifth of gin from a drawer and sipped it half empty.
The shrill blast of the desk phone startled me. I picked up and said, ‘Reed’s Funeral Home.’
Mama’s high pitched, rapid voice chattered over the wire, ‘Sweet Pea, it’s been over a week since you visited or called me. You know I have a bad heart and I’m all alone. Don’t let that woman make you neglect your Mama. Think about it and let your conscience be your judge.’
Before I could reply, she hung up. I started to call her back, but decided against it. I took two more belts of gin and went through the darkened chapel on my way to the morgue at the rear of the building.
The heavy odor of spoiling flowers and the harsh chemical stench of preserved death burst from the slumber room. I walked into its shado