Sweet, whose parents had likely been slaves, tells Iceberg that the best pimps, the ones who wrote the book, were freed slaves who had come to Chicago from the South. He had a stable of ten whores, and was universally feared and respected. Sweet, who is close to fifty when they meet, had come to Chicago from Georgia as a teen and made a fortune. Slim soon finds his mentor in the city’s top pimp, Sweet Jones. Everybody in both worlds kissed your ass black and blue if you had flash and front. It was simple, just pimp my ass off and get a ton of scratch. My hope to be important and admired could be realized even behind this black stockade. I was still black in a white man’s world. Slim knows he doesn’t yet have the toughness or experience to make it as a pimp in this rough town, so he goes looking for a mentor. It was an elderly white man trapped behind enemy lines. A terrified, glowing face loomed toward me in the tunnel’s gloom. They were battle-shocked soldiers doomed forever to the front trenches. The frightened, hopeless black faces of the passengers peered through the grimy windows. The rattling, crashing street cars were army tanks. The streaking headlights of the cars arcing through the night were giant tracer bullets. It was like walking through a battlefield. My senses screamed on the razor-edge of cocaine. I walked toward a rainbow bouquet of neon maybe ten blocks away. He calls his neighborhood Hell, and describes a nighttime walk after shooting cocaine: This is part of Slim’s initiation into the cutthroat underworld of a notoriously corrupt city. He said, “You must be that square, Rip Van Winkle, I heard about. He stepped back and looked at me like I was fresh in town from a monastery in Tibet. I said, “That stud would have gotten busted sure as hell if the heat had made the scene.” The man then lifts the woman onto his shoulder, throws her into his car and drives off. On his first night in Chicago, in the spring of 1938, he sees a man beat an unconscious woman almost to death in front of a huge crowd of onlookers.
He finds a hotel on a street where rich white tricks cruise for black whores, turns his girl out on the street, and then goes looking for more to recruit. Slim, then going by the name Young Blood, arrives from Milwaukee with about one week of experience pimping his girlfriend, Phyllis. The book takes place mostly on the south side of Chicago between the late 1930s and the late 1950s. He simply gives a straightforward account of a cruel world in which the cruelest rise to the top… at least for a while. He doesn’t sugarcoat anything, nor does he lace his narrative with apologies to reassure delicate readers. Slim writes with a fire that you rarely see even from great authors at their best.
This is one brutal book, and a damn good one.
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