Bell verses Beck on why pimping makes the most sense for a young black man longing for economic freedom in the 1940s. After landing in jail a number of times, Beck seeks the mentorship of Baby Bell, an enforcer and notorious pimp in Chicago. Later in his life, Beck versed himself in the nonfictive work of James Baldwin and Richard Wright, but his early teachers were novice and successful pimps. Gifford attempts to texture the black women in Beck’s life, including his mother, employees and partners, while indicting a Northern American system of oppression that encouraged Beck and his workers to make a living underground. While Beck longed for his most popular book, “Pimp,” to be read as a critique of white supremacy and the underground economy it fostered in American cities after the Great Migration, neither that novel nor Beck’s less successful work deal with the ways black women suffered and survived the terror of employment discrimination, restrictive covenants, police abuse and the sexual and psychological abuse of men like Beck.
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SIGN UP for the free Essential Arts & Culture newsletter > In addition to providing phenomenally researched material into the life and writings of Beck, including FBI files, unpublished fiction and letters written from Beck to his publisher, Gifford provides us with robust historical, pointed political context for new and seasoned readers of Beck’s novels “Pimp,” “Trick Baby” and “Mama Black Widow.” In “Street Poison,” Gifford patiently crafts a narrative that shows how Beck, a Chicago pimp, became the godfather of hip-hop, an integral cog in Hollywood’s Blaxploitation era and one of the most-read black authors of the 20th century. Gifford’s first book, “Pimping Fiction: African American Crime Literature and the Untold Story of Black Pulp Publishing,” was a critically acclaimed comprehensive exploration of cultural history surrounding the work of Chester Himes, Donald Goines and Robert “Iceberg Slim” Beck.
I wanted to provide my 18-year-olds with a context from which to contend with the ways the nation encourages its citizens and the world to make heroic American men out of architects of misogynoir.Īt its best, Justin Gifford’s new biography of Iceberg Slim, “Street Poison,” does exactly this. As an anxious 26-year-old teacher straight out of grad school, I hoped that my first-year students would dig beneath popular conceptions of pimp culture to see how the structural poisons of misogyny, anti-blackness and white supremacy are produced, practiced, theorized - and hopefully rejected. The course was called Narratives of the Underground. I taught Robert “Iceberg’s Slim” Beck’s compact gold and purple book, “Pimp: The Story of My Life,” in my first college class 14 years ago.
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