Iceberg Slim: Esquire 10/92

Esquire

October 1992

Books

Sold on Ice

Six Million Readers Can't Be Wrong

Phil Patton

  At one point during the 1930's, the student body of Tuskegee Institute included two future authors. One was Ralph Ellison. The other would become the best-selling African-American novelist ever.

  Robert Beck "Iceberg Slim" "- sold some six million books before he died last spring, just as his publisher, Holloway House , was putting out a silver-bound twenty-fifth anniversary edition of Pimp: The Story of My Life, detailing the career he entered after dropping out of Tuskegee. The last year of his life saw his sales rise with the tide of interest in black literature and his titles adopted in African-American studies courses. They should be taught everywhere else as well.

  The Harvard English department used to offer a course called The Rogue Novel, a title inspiring visions of randy volumes breaking loose in library stacks to debauch the adjacent Brontes. In fact, its subject was the low-life novel, the picaresque, the adventures of underclass operators, hustlers, and survivors, from Defoe to Fielding to Fanny Hill. That's where Iceberg Slim's fictionalized accounts of his life fit, along with Jim Thompson or even the first and most exciting part of The Autobiography of Malcolm X . Admit it: For many people, Malcolm Little's life makes better reading than Malcolm X's preaching.

  While Malcolm escaped the low life through religion and politics, Ice wrote his way out of it. He rose to the top of pimpdom with the relentless cool that won him his street name. After the inevitable run-in with the law, he escaped from prison "like a wisp of smoke," a phrase he liked to repeat. Recaptured in 1960, he was sentenced to solitary in Cook County House of Corrections. Ten months in a steel box made him rethink the street life. He was getting old, and the street was changing. Girls couldn't be fooled so easily: TV had showed them what real plush was. So he squared up.

  His first book appeared in 1969, at just the right time: Ice found himself shelved next to Soul On Ice There followed Trick Baby: The Story of a White Negro, about a light-skinned con man passing for white, street-named White Folks.

  Iceberg's prose bears the same relation to mainstream language as his underworlds do to the square world. He shows up repeatedly as a basic source in dictionaries of slang and volumes on black English. His books come with glossaries: Georgia means to persuade someone to put out without pay. Swipes and cats refer to indelicate anatomical features. Big Foot Country is the South. Cadillacs are either Kitties or Hogs.

  In style, as in dress, Ice believed in excess as an index of aesthetic success. Writing or pimping, he wrote, the rule was the same: "You've got to be spectacular and transcendental- otherwise you ain't gonna get no whole lot of bread." In Pimp, his hero meets a successful older pimp in his pad, at ease and surrounded by his stable: "Sweet was sitting on a white velour couch... wearing a white satin smoking jacket. He looked like a huge black fly in a bucket of milk." Of a man marked for death: "A groundhog will be delivering his mail."