The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim by Iceberg Slim

broad with thick ankles led me through Holly’s luxurious house to a kidney-shaped swimming pool at the rear of the house. Holly squealed in apparent joy at the sight of me and came out of the water glistening in the sun, and beautiful in a gold bikini. Her only flaw showed in the deep shadows beneathher eyes—and she came weaving toward me as if she had been drinking heavily.
    She planted a damp kiss on my cheek, and we sat down at a poolside table. She removed a bathing cap and a golden blond wig fell to her shoulders. We sat there making small talk and sipping drinks from a portable bar beside the table.
    Then I got slightly personal. I said, “Baby Sis, level with me. Are you really happy and satisfied now that you’ve made it?”
    She frowned, and her mouth tightened. Then she showed her snowy capped teeth and said merrily, “How could I be anything but happy surrounded by lovely things and beautiful people? Don’t I look happy?”
    â€œI guess you would, to somebody who hadn’t known you when,” I said. I leaned toward her and took her hands in mine. I looked into her eyes and said gently, “Baby Sis, you’ve changed, and our people are losing respect for you. They are saying you despise your blackness. You don’t want that, do you? Is it true what they’re saying? Level with me, Baby Sis.”
    She jerked her hands away and stood up. Her eyes were blazing. Her face looked old and hard framed by the silky Caucasian blond wig. She was furious and drunk. She spat, “All right, here it is, and don’t call me Baby Sis. Say your people, your niggers, not mine. Niggers didn’t put me up here. White people did. I don’t give a goddamn about niggers, or what they think about me. There are scads of important beautiful white people who have forgotten I’m black. I don’t need niggers, and when I was suffering and scuffling down there with them, not one nigger in my whole life ever did anything for me. White people are in my corner. They love me, and that’s where it’s at.”
    I got to my feet while she was still raving and stood looking at her until she stopped to catch her breath. I said, “Holly, I risked my life in Chicago to help you, remember? And I happen to be a nigger.”
    Her jaw hinge dropped, and she turned gray. I turned andwalked through her house to my car in the driveway. As I drove off, I looked back at her house and remembered the flash of nappy crotch in the ratty dressing room where I first met her. And I remembered the skinny kid singer’s gratitude at the airport in Chicago when I sent her home to her mama, and her boast that she was going to be a star.
    She had become a star all right, a black Caucasian star.

A GODDESS REVISITED
    I am convinced that most pimps require the secretly buried fuel of Mother hatred to stoke their fiery vendetta of cruelty and merciless exploitation against whores primarily, and ultimately, all women.
    Throughout most of my life, my unconscious hatred for my mother leapt painfully from the depths like bitter bile from the guts of a poison victim. But I believe that the unfeeling rejection of me by a lovely young girl at an emotionally crucial period of my life might well have been another reason why I became a pimp.
    Her memory, her face, her voice haunted my lonely nights in four penitentiaries. For me, she was a goddess and perhaps such an elusive, unearthly, wonderful creature, real or imagined, torments the private dreams of every man. I will never forget the flavor of those days long ago when the goddess and I were in the spring of our youth. Somehow the bittersweet mystique of the northwest corner at Third and Galena streets in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, will always have a wistful charm and sorrow for me. For it was there in rain, shine or storm, that I sped early mornings to glimpse, to hear the melodic voice of the goddess before the bus arrived to whisk her to Catholic