This forced black women into competition with one another for already limited work, driving down their wages during one of the greatest economic crises in American history. White employers drove up in cars and hired whichever woman bid her services at the lowest price. At the height of the Depression, jobs were so scarce in northern cities that many black women gathered at so-called “slave markets” or “slave pens” each morning to seek daily employment. Wages were as low as five dollars a week, and a typical workday lasted between twelve and fifteen hours. Women were required to wash clothing and bedding, scrub floors, cook and serve meals, dust homes, and perform dozens of other tasks. Domestic and personal service was grueling and often humiliating work. Even in the industrial powerhouse of Milwaukee, over 60 percent of black women worked in domestic labor. Domestic service was one of the few jobs available to black women during the first half of the twentieth century. She worked as a domestic servant and nurse for an older white woman. He had no money to live on his own, and Mary always had room for him. All I needed was the threads and a whore.”īeck moved back in with his mother, who now lived at 1865Įleventh Street in Milwaukee. I was going to be a heart breaker all right. My shoulders were broad and my waist as narrow as a girl’s. “I was eighteen now, six feet two inches tall, slender, sweet, and stupid. He didn’t really care he was young and handsome, overconfident, and ignorant of the double-crosses that awaited him in the complex world of sex work. As a minor, he had always managed to talk his way out of prison, but he was a legal adult now, and for his next offense he would likely be sent to the Wisconsin State Reformatory or prison. He was a notorious small-time criminal with a lengthy rap sheet. He knew he would have to be careful he had already been arrested eight times between the ages of fourteen and seventeen. Beck was determined to infiltrate these clubs and steal secrets from well-heeled pimps. The education he sought was hidden away in the minds of those boss players who frequented Milwaukee’s jazz joints and cabarets. Tuskegee, with its military-style discipline and air of bourgeois self-importance, had shown him that. He knew he was never going back to school. Published by arrangement with Doubleday, an imprint of The Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.īeck returned to Milwaukee in December 1936 and immediately began his pimp career. You can't understand contemporary black (and even American) culture without reckoning with Iceberg Slim and his many acolytes and imitators.ĭrawing on a wealth of archival material including FBI files, prison records, and interviews with Beck, his wife, and his daughters Justin Gifford explores the sexual trauma and racial violence Beck endured that led to his reinvention as Iceberg Slim, one of America's most infamous pimps of the 1940s and '50s. From a career as a, yes, ruthless pimp in the '40s and '50s, Iceberg Slim refashioned himself as the first and still the greatest of “street lit” masters, whose vivid books have made him an icon to such rappers as Ice-T, Jay-Z, and Snoop Dogg and a presiding spirit of “blaxploitation” culture. The first and definitive biography of one of America's bestselling, notorious, and influential writers of the twentieth century: Iceberg Slim, ne Robert Beck, author of the multimillion-copy memoir Pimp and such equally popular novels as Trick Baby and Mama Black Widow. Street Poison: The Biography of Iceberg Slim by Justin Gifford delves deep into the life and crime of author Robert Beck, whose works have had profound influence black culture (available August 4, 2015).
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