Pimping Fictions: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing

2. Pimping Fictions: Iceberg Slim and the Invention of Pimp Literature

2 / Pimping Fictions: Iceberg Slim and the Invention of Pimp Literature In the final pages of Pimp: The Story of My Life (1967), the narrator Iceberg Slim details his escape from the confines of a “steel casket,” a solitary confinement cell in the basement of the Cook County House of Corrections where he has been incarcerated for ten months. Having confessed the graphic details of his twenty-five-year career as a Chicago pimp, in this penultimate chapter, Iceberg Slim redeploys his linguistic skills to challenge the book’s chief figuration of racist white authority, the warden. When the warden threatens to keep Slim in solitary confinement a month longer than his official release date, he constructs a legal-sounding appeal to secure his freedom: “I wrote a paper based on what I believed were the legal grounds for my release at the expiration of ten months. It had subtle muscle in it too. I memorized the paper. I rehearsed it in the cell. Finally I had the necessary dramatic inflection and fluid delivery.”1 Signaling a new political consciousness in the book, this moment also dramatizes one of the fundamental themes in pimp fiction: that the fluency and verbal style of pimping can be harnessed to challenge white-constructed spaces of containment. At the climax of Pimp, Iceberg Slim faces off with the warden and delivers the following speech: Sir, I realize that the urgent press of your duties has perhaps contributed to your neglect of my urgent request for an interview. I have come here to discuss the vital issue of my legal discharge date. Wild rumors are circulating to the effect that you are not a fair man, that you are a bigot, who hates Negroes. I discounted them pimping fictions / 41 immediately when I heard them. I am almost dogmatic in my belief that a man of your civic stature and intellect could ill afford or embrace such prejudice. In the spirit of fair play, I am going to be brutally frank. If I am not released the day after tomorrow, a certain agent of mine here in the city is going to set in motion a process that will not only free me, but will possibly in addition throw a revealing spotlight on certain not too legal, not too pleasant activities carried on daily behind these walls. I have been caged here like an animal for almost ten months. Like an animal, my sensitivity of seeing and hearing has been enhanced. I only want what is legally mine. My contention is that if your Captain of guards, who is legally your agent, had arrested me and confined me on such an unlikely place as the moon for thirty days, technically and legally I would be in the custody of this institution. Sir, the point is unassailable. Frankly, I don’t doubt that my release will occur on legal schedule. Thank you, Sir, for the interview.2 Employing a combination of feigned deference, veiled threats, and offbeat humor, Iceberg Slim wins his legal release date in the last pages of the autobiography. This moment dramatizes the possibilities that an adapted pimp language could offer black men who are caged like animals in the American prison system. By equating literacy and freedom in this way, Slim exhibits one of the enduring tropes in the African American autobiography from the slave narrative of Frederick Douglass to The Autobiography of Malcolm X.3 But Iceberg Slim’s autobiography also burlesques these stories of literacy and courageous manhood by featuring the misogynist pimp as the organizing figure of the text. Whereas Himes’s criminal on the run is silenced by the modes of white containment at the conclusion of Run Man Run, Iceberg Slim confronts systematic methods of white violence through his own oppression of women. Pimp: The Story of My Life manages these contradictory subversive and conservative energies through a pimp poetics, and it presents an aesthetic stance that maintains a troubled relationship to African American cultural and political movements. Robert Maupin Beck—the real name of Iceberg Slim—is one of the most influential black American authors that most people have never heard of. After publishing Pimp: The Story of My Life in 1967, Beck went on to author four published novels, Trick Baby (1967), Mama Black 42 / pimping fictions Widow (1969), Death Wish (1977), and Long White Con (1977); an essay collection, The Naked Soul...