Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim

Justin Gifford is an associate professor of English literature at the University of Nevada, Reno. He wrote in the Preface to this 2015 book, “Robert ‘Iceberg Slim’ Beck---a pimp for twenty-five years, who went on to become a writer of bestselling paperback originals… might at first glance seem like an appalling choice for a biography. After all, he abused hundreds of women throughout his lifetime, and he is practically unknown to the American mainstream. His books… have been read primarily in America’s forgotten corners: prisons, ghettos, and military bases. However, Beck has had an enormous influence on contemporary black music, film, literature, and popular culture… his pen name, Iceberg Slim, became synonymous with black urban cool, and entire cultural industries grew up around his work… and yet, apart from what he reveals in his own writings, very little is known about this fascinating and contradictory character.” (Pg. xiii)He continues, “Although Beck more often than not provided a thorough and accurate confession of his life in his writings… he also occasionally embellished the truth, switched around events in his life, and outright lied to protect his ego and reputation. Wherever possible, I have tested his stories against the historical record as well as the available prison files and interviews, and I have tried to provide the most accurate account possible of Beck’s life… the facts, stories, and documents I uncovered in my decade-long search … only add to the complexity and ambiguous allure of one of the most influential renegades of the twentieth century.” (Pg. xx-xxi)He explains in the first chapter, “The transformative moment of Back’s life came in 1967 with the publication of his memoir, ‘Pimp: The Story of My Life,’ under the pseudonym ‘Iceberg Slim.’ He and his first wife, Betty, a white woman from Texas, originally conceived of the book as a living-room theater to entertain and educate their young children… A strong case can be made that … Beck transformed American popular culture and black literature. ‘Pimp’ became a potent symbol of subversive style and one of the most influential works of antiestablishment literature of the twentieth century… according to its publisher it is the best-selling book by a black American author of all time.” (Pg. 3)He recounts, “Beck’s triumph … was overshadowed by the poverty and isolation in the final years of his life. At the height of the blaxploitation era of the 1970s… Beck enjoyed the public spotlight for a brief moment… He appeared on a variety of talk shows and was profiled in numerous newspaper and magazine articles. Anthropologists interviewed him for Ph.D. dissertations on the world of the black pimp… Despite these successes, Beck could never quite cross over into the mainstream…. They were marketed by the white owners of Holloway House as sensationalist pulp fiction… In one of the many ironies of his life, Beck was ultimately pimped out by a literary industry that treated him and his works as a disposable commodity… For the last ten years of his life, Beck lived in seclusion in a second-floor studio apartment … in South Central.” (Pg. 4-6)He outlines, “To a wide range of readers… Iceberg Slim is the definitive voice of black urban life. To his critics---many feminists, the literary establishment, some Black Panther radicals, and much of mainstream America---Iceberg Slim is a misogynist who wrote trashy paperbacks that promote violence against vulnerable young women… However, the real story of Beck’s life is more complex and contradictory… He was a victim of sexual trauma, convict scholar, drug addict, Chicago pimp, bestselling author, father, and would-be revolutionary. His life story… provides a dark reflection of black America’s urban development and decline in the twentieth century.” (Pg. 6)He recounts, “The end of Beck’s childhood and the beginning of his life of crime coincided with his first encounter with pimps…. ‘I was so impressed. The options for young black people at that time were not the way they are now to get some of the so-called finer things of life. So I just started admiring these fellows… I wanted to become a pimp, so I could have all these beautiful clothes and the diamonds and the women. You know, groups of women… And that’s how I got street poisoned.’ … ‘Street poisoned’ was the term Beck used again and again in his writings and interviews to describe this critical transition moment from childhood to young adulthood.” (Pg. 21, 23)Nevertheless, as a young man he was enrolled at Tuskegee Institute: “Beck… found Tuskegee to be oppressive. Order and discipline were the two virtues most extolled by university faculty and administration… Tuskegee emphasized that work, not leisure, was the driving philosophy… Beck ignored his classes and instead spent his time trying to seduce the young women on campus.” (Pg. 41-42)After he left Tuskegee, “he was caught ‘keeping company with a married women and receiving three hundred and eighty dollars from her.’ … We will probably never know the whole truth… the most likely scenario is that he was trying to run a variety of swindles … and they all backfired on him at once… Beck could no longer hide behind the defense that his actions were merely youthful shenanigans; this time he was going to jail.” (Pg. 52-53) Later, “Beck received a two-year sentence in Wisconsin State Prison… He felt numb. He had been out of the reformatory for only six months, and now he was headed right back to jail for an even longer stretch. And this time, he wasn’t going to an institution for first-time offenders---he was heading to prison for real.” (Pg. 63-64)After Beck heard pimps performing a ‘toast,’ “Beck was witnessing one of the origins of gangsta rap and hip-hip in these toasts. A pimp toast was a long, profane poem that was performed orally and emphasized exaggerated sexual humor. It was composed of creatively rhymed couplets (often improvised), and featured punning, wordplay, and aggressive boasting… Like the dozens and the pimp book, these toasts grew out of African American oral expressions, and they became the direct forerunners of the comedy of Rudy Ray Moore and the gangsta rap of N.W.A., Ice-T, and Snoop Dogg.” (Pg. 92-93)He notes, “In the spring of 1944, Robert Beck was living the pimp’s dream. He had the Hog (his Cadillac), the vines (his fine clothes), and the scratch (his cash money) of a well-heeled pimp… he avoided being called up for [armed forces] service by refusing to reveal his address to the armed services.” (Pg. 97) But before long, “When Beck arrived at Leavenworth on June 6, 1945, he realized immediately that Leavenworth was a tougher prison than anyplace he had previously been incarcerated.” (Pg. 103)Yet later, “At the end of his term, the prison administration threatened to keep him a month longer … Beck composed a letter to the warden to challenge this illegal incarceration, and remarkably, it worked… Drawing on legal-sounding arguments, semi-veiled threats, and humor, Beck quite literally wrote his way out of prison.” (Pg. 136-137) Soon, “he felt divided about his choice to abandon the career that had defined him for a quarter century. As he said goodbye to the last woman who had worked for him… ‘it was good to realize that I would no longer brutalize and exploit black women.’” (Pg. 141)He recounts, “the third-tier paperback press Holloway House Publishing Company … represented one of the most unexpected artistic responses to [the 1965 Watts riots]. The company was started by two Jewish copywriters, Bentley Morriss and Ralph Weinstock… Morriss teamed up with Weinstock in the late 1950s to helm the pornographic magazines ‘Adam’ and ‘Knight.’ In 1959, they formed Holloway House… and began to supplement their nudie materials with paperback books they had commissioned… The company shifted to publishing black-themed materials following the Watts Riots… According to Bentley Morriss, ‘These were the early sixties… We felt it would be kind of cool to do books, black literature of which there was really very little. And so we felt it would be kind of personally rewarding and let’s see if we can make some money at it… Over the next forty years, they would sell hundreds of novels by many dozens of black authors to millions upon millions of readers.” (Pg. 152-153)Of Beck’s book ‘Pimp,’ he states, “It was a book that would transform contemporary black culture, laying the groundwork for blaxploitation films, street fiction, and gangsta rap… [It] would also indirectly influence future generations of would-be players by putting into print the dubious practices of the pimp book… [The book] made no direct references to the civil rights movement, the Black Power movement… or any of the other struggles of that movement… it was not a book with an overt political message…. Beck narrates in gritty detail his life as a pimp both to warn young blacks about the dangers of a criminal life and to hole American society accountable for producing the pimp in the first place.” (Pg. 161)He points out, “The company audaciously reported to newspapers and magazines that it had cold millions of copies of [Beck’s] books, at the same time telling Beck that it had sold only a few hundred thousand. By the early 1970s, America’s most famous pimp was seemingly being piped by the commercial literary marketplace that had made him a star.” (Pg. 182)He records, “According to some sources, at nearly sixty years of age, Beck went back to pimping one final time. Others claim that he took to running around with a number of women. He wasn’t pimping; he was cheating on [his wife] Betty. What is known for sure is that by the mid-1970s, Beck was hanging out at Los Angeles’s infamous Parisian Room, a haunt for musicians, pimps, and black celebrities… Even while pushing sixty, Beck also supposedly followed the code of the pimp that he had immortalized in his books, much to the amusement of his other patrons.” (Pg. 187, 189)He continues, “Despite being old enough to be the father, or even grandfather, of his prostitutes, [jazz great Red] Holloway testified, Beck returned to the pimp game with the same ferocity that had made him notorious in Chicago. If these stories are true, he had betrayed the memory of his mother, Mary, and he had betrayed his marriage. While he started writing to absolve himself of the terrible life he had lived as a pimp, his success as an author had tragically brought him full circle back to the game. However, these stories seem pretty far-fetched… according to his own daughters, Beck was not pimping again. He was cheating on Betty…” (Pg. 190) He concludes, “In 1978, the money finally ran out from the books and the film, and that was the beginning of the end… [Betty] sold the white mink for a security deposit and first and last months’ rent. She packed up her belongings and, taking her four children, she walked out of Beck’s life forever.” (Pg. 195)This book will be “must reading” for anyone wanting to know more about the man behind the popular books.

I just wanted to turn you on to a very cool book. Just finished reading STREET POISON: The Biography of Iceberg Slim by Justin Gifford. I've always dug Iceberg Slim's books, but aside from knowing he really had been a pimp at one time, I knew very little about his real life. This book does a wonderful job giving an account of his life, from his criminal days and prison stints, up to his unlikely (but terrific) literary career, to his becoming a minor celebrity, to his death. One of the first writers of crime fiction from an African-American point of view, Slim's work was a precursor to everything from blaxploitation films to gangsta rap.If you're a fan of Iceberg Slim, or of cool street-level fiction of any kind, you really ought to check this one out. Dig?

The book is a bit generic, but Justin Gifford is an expert on his subject as it is so narrow. The book leaves the reader able to come to his or her own conclusions about Iceberg Slim. A good slice of history, life as a pimp, and the politics of the urban book publishing industry. I was left wanting to know more about the history that came before the "Great Migration" and how the phenomenon of the Black pimp emerged.

The book is BRAND NEW just like it was described !!!

don't remember book

The history of racism in Milwaukee, Chicago and LA is particularly very disturbing.

Brutal, but enlightening and entertaining this was a terrific tale. Great time to read this one,it certainly answers many questions while shining an unflattering light on U.S. inept domestic policies.

Excellent as is Pimp

Iceberg Slim, oder Robert Beck oder auch Robert Lee Maupin, ist heute ein Name, der zumindest jenen Personen irgendwie vertraut ist, die auf Hip Hop oder blaxploitation Filme stehen. Hier dient er meist als Paradebeispiel des Pimp, aber auch als eine Stimme der schwarzen Bürgerrechtsbewegung, zwei Punkte, die nicht völlig kompatibel scheinen. Iceberg Slim ist aber nicht nur der berühmteste Pimp aller Zeiten und eine Stimme der Bürgerrechtsbewegung, er ist auch einer der erfolgreichsten schwarzen amerikanischen Autoren und gilt als einer der Godfather des Hip Hop. Das klingt alles recht merkwürdig, verspricht aber auf jeden Fall eine interessante Biografie.Justin Gifford ist associate Professor für englische Literatur an der Universität von Nevada mit Schwerpunkt afroamerikanische Literatur. Nun legt er mit „Street poison“ die erste vollständige Biografie Iceberg Slims vor.Gifford portraitiert das gesamte Leben von Iceberg von der frühen Kindheit bis zum Tod. Es gelingt ihm dabei die Faktoren herauszuarbeiten, die den jungen Robert Maupin in Kindheit und Jugend so prägten, dass er letztlich über 25 Jahre als Kleinkrimineller und Pimp verbrachte, bevor er, 40-jährig, seine Kriminellenkarriere zugunsten einer Familie und eines stabilen Lebens beendete, und zu einem erfolgreichen Schriftsteller afroamerikanischer Literatur wurde. Das Buch ist im Grunde in zwei etwa gleich lange Hälften geteilt: Die erste umfasst die Jahre 1918 – 1962, also seine Kindheit und die Jahre als Kriminellen. In der zweiten Hälfte wird seine Transformation, die Karriere als erfolgreicher Schriftsteller, und sein Aufstieg zu einer Identifikationsfigur der Schwarzen in den USA beschrieben.Der Autor greift dabei viel auf Icebergs autobiografische Bücher zurück, genauso wie auf Gespräche mit seiner Witwe, seinen Kindern und Weggefährten, sowie auf alle Aufzeichnungen in öffentlichen Archiven die er aufspüren konnte. Insgesamt ist so ein umfassendes Werk entstanden in dem das Leben von Iceberg Slim nicht einfach nur nacherzählt wird. Vielmehr gelingt es Justin Gifford zum einen ausgezeichnet herauszuarbeiten welche Faktoren, welche Einflüsse und Lebensumstände dazu führten, dass aus einem jungen Mann ein brutaler und emotionsloser Zuhälter wird, zum anderen aber auch wie er es schaffte aus diesem Leben auszubrechen, und wie er die Transformation zu einem erfolgreichen Autor und vor allem Vorbild und Sprachohr für Millionen schwarzer Amerikaner vollzog.

good