Hustler Masculinity in African American Culture Lamar J

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Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School

2009 "Can't Knock the Hustle": Hustler Masculinity in African American Culture Lamar J. (Lamar Jordan) Garnes

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

—CAN‘T KNOCK THE HUSTLE“: HUSTLER MASCULINITY IN AFRICAN

AMERICAN CULTURE

LAMAR J. GARNES

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Awarded: Fall Semester, 2009

The members of the committee approve the dissertation of Lamar J. Garnes defended on August 20, 2009.

______Jerrilyn McGregory Professor Co-Directing Dissertation

______Christopher Shinn Professor Co-Directing Dissertation

______Maxine Jones University Representative

______Maxine Montgomery Committee Member

Approved: ______Ralph Berry, Chair, Department of English

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members.

I dedicate this to Johntrel, Derek, my mom, Nana, and Aunt Lenora and to Dreams and Dreamers

ACKOWLEDGEMETS

First and foremost, I would like to thank the creator for being there even when I thought He/She wasn‘t and without whom none of this would have been possible. I would like to thank my family for their support. I could have not completed this project without the help, guidance, and dedication of Dr. Christopher Shinn, Dr. Jerrilyn McGregory, Dr. Maxine Jones, and Dr. Maxine Montgomery. Thank you all for believing in me and my project. I would also like to thank the Florida Education Fund for providing financial and academic support and mentorship through the McKnight Doctoral Fellowship. I would like to thank the late Dr. Charles Heglar of Albany State University for continuing to believe in my abilities and for being a great mentor. I would also like to thank Dr. Joan B. Holmes, director of the University of South Florida McNair Scholars Program, and Mr. Bernard Batson of the University of South Florida for believing that I could do this before I did. Addie, Antonio, and Tamara thank you for being their when I needed you through the process of completing this project. And to all others who listened to me gripe, worry and talk my way through this project, I thank you for your ear and your time. Thank you.

iii

TABLE OF COTETS

ABSTRACT ...... v

INTRODUCTION: —DIGGIN‘ THE SCENE WITH A GANGSTA LEAN“: THE AFRICAN AMERICAN HUSTLER IN URBAN AMERICA 1

1. —AND SHINE SWAM ON: FROM THE PLANTATION TO THE SILVER SCREEN ...... 14

2. CLAUDE BROWN, —PUSHER MAN“ IN THE PROMISED LAND ...... 28

3. —DON‘T BELIEVE THE HYPE“: MALCOLM X‘S JOURNEY FROM HUSTLER TO BLACK LEADER OF THE DIASPORA 46

4. —LADIES FIRST?“: ELAINE BROWN VYING FOR POWER IN THE BLACK PANTHER PARTY ...... 64

5. —THE (BIG) PAYBACK“: THE BLACK HUSTLER FROM HERO TO COLOR-CODED COMMODITY ...... 86

EPILOGUE: —BRIDGING THE GAP“: THE NEW GENERATION HUSTLING ...... 105

WORKS CITED ...... 111

BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH ...... 122

ABSTRACT

“Can’t Knock the Hustle”: Performances of Black Hustler Masculinity in African American Literature and Culture, reinterprets the African American social movements of the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s, emphasizing how the controversial performances of black men as black hustlers contributed to them. Reading the Black Power movement as a youth- driven reaction not only to the elders in the Civil Rights movement but also to the 1965 Moynihan Report that defined black men in terms of criminal deviance, I demonstrate how young black men sought to retain the masculinity, which they felt their elders had been stripped of, by becoming hustlers themselves. This study also claims that the selected texts should be privileged as hustler narratives, drawing attention to the function of the hustler as participating in a wider American tradition of upward class mobility. In the process, the black hustler hyperbolically emulates, criticizes, and rejects or restructures such concepts of individual ”rags- to-riches‘ capitalism and/or middle class respectability in order to achieve his own status and define his own terms for the construction of alternative black masculinities. Chapter One reconnects the black hustler to the badman, a hero in the African American folk tradition, and interrogates how the federal government and the film industry respectively demonized and commodified it. Chapters Two and Three illustrate how hustler masculinity in Claude Brown‘s Manchild in the Promised Land and Malcolm X”s The Autobiography serves as a social critique of race and class in the inner-city and argue that the (re)establishment of cultural, political, and/or spiritual communities are necessary for black males performers to transcend hustler masculinity. Chapter Four examines Elaine Brown‘s A Taste of Power and discusses how and to what extent she could lead the Black Panther Party when hustler masculinity plays a large role in the organization and function of relationships in the party. Chapter Five demonstrate how the commodification of the black hustler in the semi- autobiographical and fictional narratives of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines along with the presentation of the hustler figure in Blaxploitation films contributed its present denigration and sensationalism. The Epilogue addresses how hip hop performers such as Ice Cube, NWA, Nas, Jay-Z, and 50 cent, amongst others, are recovering and recuperating the figure of the black hustler to its representation prior to the early 1970s. Such work is needed because it assists in

v developing an understanding of how young black men learn to perform masculinity in particular kinds of urban communities and also to complicate how we understand black masculinity in terms of what Michael Eric Dyson called the —politics of respectability.“

ITRODUCTIO

“DIGGI’ THE SCEE WITH A GAGSTA LEA”: THE AFRICA

AMERICA HUSTLER I URBA AMERICA1

"Can't Knock the Hustle": Hustler Masculinity in African American Culture examines the function of an oft-maligned, yet commercially popular, purely American character: the black male hustler. This work seeks to explore how the figure of the black hustler functions for young black men in poor urban areas as a conduit for personal transformation, which can be observed directly in the autobiographical and fictional narratives of Claude Brown, Malcolm X, Elaine Brown, Iceberg Slim, and Donald Goines. In each of the texts, hustler masculinity reflects the social construction of black manhood through what has been conventionally perceived to be a confidence game of deceit, artifice, and cunning, whereby the self-stylized street hustler, who sees himself as a lone wolf in a predatory world, gains money or prestige often by illegal means such as by dealing in drugs, gambling, and prostitution, as well as by so-called —legitimate“ means, i.e., typical —strong-arm“ business practices. As a result of his exploits, the hustler gains a certain reputation and notoriety through his actions and through his trademark flashiness and ability to subvert the dominant racial and class systems that were meant to destroy him. Hustlers transform other young black men in search of masculinity into community pariahs, yet in some instances, they can also ironically help to build and maintain communities by indirectly promoting the values of self-reliance, calling attention to the importance of creating more independent and self-sufficient communities which then turn hustlers and their followers–from Malcolm X to Elaine Brown–into strong black leaders, cultural producers and business professionals. This dissertation demonstrates how the black hustler can be a potentially redeeming figure rather than a purely negative character because he teaches young black males about

1 Most of the chapter titles refer to the title or lyrics of a popular song, including the title of the entire dissertation. Each title sets the tone of the chapter. The dissertation takes its title from the Jay Z song of the same name, which appears on his debut album, Reasonable Doubt (1996), which is based on his lived and imagined experiences as an inhabitant of Brooklyn‘s Marcy Projects and as a drug dealer. The introduction uses lyrics from William Vaughn‘s —Be Thankful for What You Got“ from his 1974 album of the same name.

1 survival and about the value of community bonds and their role in their personal development into stronger and more independent men. Although the black hustler is a quintessential modern figure, the American slave plantations gave birth to the black hustler. As Frederick Douglass‘s arrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself (1845), Gayl Jones‘s Corregidora (1975), Ernest Gaines‘ Of Love and Dust (1967), and Alice Walker‘s The Color Purple (1982) suggest, African American males have learned to be men from their masters on plantations, and much of what they were inadvertently taught has influenced their lives and that of later generations well after they gained their freedom.2 The plantation system used and exploited black bodies for profit, and much of this profit had been attained through the sale, labor, and procreation of these bodies. Black men on plantations would learn after the end of slavery that they could not perform the same type of masculinity as the master had performed it, yet the master/slave dichotomy continued to inform and guide inter- and intra-racial relationships. Some black men mimicked the actions of their former masters regarding the sale and use of black bodies, particularly in relation to the treatment of black women, initiating the creation of what would become the black hustler. The figure of the black hustler is still relevant today. Politicians and others inside and outside of the black community have discussed, studied, and written about the crisis of black masculinity since the 1960s. Hustler masculinity serves as a viable alternative in poor urban communities for teen and young adult black males who are disenchanted by the presentations of respectable black manhood that are deemed acceptable in society. These social expectations actually serve to give young black men the feeling of being emasculated, rather than being respected by their peers. Beyond serving as an

2 In each of the texts, the narrator suggests that African Americans have internalized many of the negative attributes, which were forced upon them during enslavement. The protagonists and other major and minor characters are forced to deal with this aspect of their personal stories. In the case of Douglass‘ narrative, he implies that the master is his father, connecting himself through blood to the institution of slavery, and it is the institution and its socialization that he is fighting against when he wrestles with and defeats Covey in the narrative‘s climax. In Jones‘ novel, the protagonist, Ursa Corregidora, is linked to a Brazilian plantation and slave owner by blood and through the stories about her great-grandmother and grandmother‘s enslavement in Brazil. She is taught that she is supposed to —make generations“ so that the stories live on, but this mission is detrimental because it maintains the forced rupture that existed between black men and women on the plantation. Ursa loses the ability to have children and is forced to deal with her past, present, and future so that she is moving towards reconciliation. Gaines sets his novel on a timeless plantation in a Louisiana parish. Marcus‘ arrival on the plantation interrupts how the plantation and its inhabitants have functioned. Walker‘s novel, like Jones‘, deals with how the master/slave dichotomy negatively affected black heterosexual relationships.

2 alternative to accepting black male powerlessness, hustler masculinity also serves as a paradoxical rejection of hegemonic masculinity because it hyperbolically imitates it.3 The hyperbolic performance magnifies and critiques white male dominance. As a result, these young black men are steered toward a form of black masculinity that fosters the creation or strengthening of urban black communities. Of the many approaches to black masculinity that have arisen out of the varied processes of definition and redefinition, black hustler masculinity,4 as I will define it throughout the dissertation, refers to individuals, typically males, who operate completely outside of the bounds of society‘s moral correctness and include but are not limited to pimps, drug dealers, and fencers. They participate in and become successful mainly through their operations in illicit economies. Although the black hustler seeks to rise socially by obtaining economic dominance, Americans generally shun and demonize him and define and identify him as a criminal. Yet material wealth still continues to signify —success“ in America, and for this reason, physical appearance and style function as indicators of his upward social mobility and prosperity in the ghetto. Because the hustler acts upon strident beliefs in male dominance, his actions are also understood to be deeply misogynistic. In an effort to attain or achieve a livable black masculinity, hustler

3 In —Welcome to the Men‘s Club: Homosociality and the Maintenance of Hegemonic Masculinity,“ Sharon R. Bird uses the terms emotional detachment, competiveness, and sexual objectification of women to define hegemonic masculinity (121). I am using hegemonic masculinity interchangeably with dominant masculinity. In both cases, they refer to the terms that Bird sets forth but also refers to the breadwinner, rugged individualistic, competitive, white, heterosexual masculinity upon which mainstream masculinity in America has been defined; this form of masculinity is also inherently white, protestant, heterosexual, and middle class. By definition, black men are excluded solely on account of their race and class positions.

4 I am not the first to use the phrase, —hustler masculinity.“ Douglass Edward Taylor uses the phrase in his dissertation, Hustlers, ationalists, and Revolutionaries: African American Prison arratives of the 1960s and 1970s (2002). Although Taylor appears to be the first to use the phrase, he defines it within slightly different parameters in his discussion of The Autobiography of Malcolm X. Taylor states, —Hustler masculinity is based on an ability to secure wealth by means of power, violence, cunning, and lawlessness. Performatively, it manifests itself as cool pose, a ”ritualized form of masculinity that entails behaviors, scripts, physical posturing, impression management, and carefully crafted performances‘ that signify ”pride, strength, and control‘“ (Majors and Billson 4). Hustler masculinity is also performed through what I refer to in Chapter II as ”showdowns,‘ agonistic confrontations in which two men square off against one another before the gaze of a third party in order to determine which one of them is the ”better man.‘“ (4-5) Understanding that there are obvious elements of violence within hustler masculinity, this study re-focuses attention on the self-affirming aspects of hustler masculinity such as the male-centered community that it tends to create and the mode of resistance that it initializes.

3 masculinity suppresses the identities of women. The hustler has to be able to wield power over something or someone in order to fulfill what he assumes are the requirements for black male hegemony, and he mimics how male/female relationships have traditionally functioned in the United States. According to this particular worldview, the black hustler defines himself against women and how they have frequently been positioned or absented from public spaces. Women represent the polar opposite of what it means to be a man and are used to gauge the degree to which a man has successfully attained full manhood. Women are also used as signs that demonstrate the level of a man‘s achievement in life. The hustler‘s value rests in his ability to make a woman submit to him and his demands and by exploiting a woman‘s skills for his profit. Although hustler masculinity is one that seems to rely on appearances, it is a sort of coping mechanism that is informed by what Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson have referred to as the —cool pose.“5 Majors and Billson assert that —cool pose is a ritualized form of masculinity that entails behaviors, scripts, physical posturing, impression management, and carefully crafted performances that deliver a single, critical message: pride, strength, and control“ (4). Cool pose is essentially a performance or process through which poor young African American males learn to adapt to the harsh realities of their urban environments, the lack of opportunity, and the inaccessibility of hegemonic masculinity in an effort to present a veneer of control and authority. Hustler masculinity, or what Todd Boyd has termed —hustler ethos,“6 seeks to operate outside of the bounds of the conventions of white, heterosexual middle-class masculinity (Am I Black 14). It also relies on a system of masking and unmasking as it is described by the cool pose. In assuming hustler

5 Marlene Kim Conner also defines cool in What Is Cool?: Understanding Black Manhood in America (1995). Cool is defined as a stylized black masculinity in different black communities. This definition means that cool in a musical or entertainment community is different from cool in a working-class community. In What is Cool?, Conner outlines the development of cool and argues that it was developed during slavery as a response to the institution and —became essential for survival of these early African American males to remain outwardly calm while“ their women and children were violated and abused (6). She states that during slavery and since cool functioned as an outward rejection of whiteness and the rules and confines of hegemonic masculinity.

6 Todd Boyd utilizes the term —hustler ethos“ in Am I Black Enough for You: Popular Culture from the 'Hood and Beyond (1997) to refer to the attitude or persona that numerous black men have assumed in the post-Civil Rights era, specifically entertainers and athletes, as a sort of response to what he defines as the shortcomings of the Civil Rights movement.

4 masculinity, black males fail to realize that their rejection of dominant masculinity is not a complete rejection because, in building this hybrid form of masculinity, they are relying on traditional definitions of white male dominance to inform their own. Their definition does not oppose American hegemonic masculinity in its presentation or in its practice but operates through a hyperbolic presentation of and understanding of American capitalism and its aggressively male-gendered underpinnings. Essentially, in attempting to create a space for themselves, young black males perpetuate the oppressions that they are attempting to escape through the creation of this alternative space. The embracing of hustler masculinity is also a performance that positions white men as the enemy (Majors and Billson 27) and seeks to attain a sense of masculinity through the maintenance of a mask that exudes detachment, complacency, and control. Beyond the constant masking, hustler masculinity also relies on a system of strict codes and a hierarchy of positions where the man who profits the most from the least amount of work stands at the top. In —The Hustling Ethic,“ Julius Hudson describes the hierarchy and the rules. He describes a system that bestows the most honor or prestige upon the pimp, the quintessential hustler, because he profits solely from the work of others. In the typical structure of a successful pimp‘s organization, the pimp has a —bottom woman“ (the main woman or manager of sorts), and there are a number of other types of women that he employs. Each woman possesses skills that lie outside of the realm of prostituting like shoplifting (or —boosting“), running scams, persuading other women of other pimps to leave their pimps and join hers, and a plethora of other activities that would prove financially advantageous to the pimp. The women do all the work, and the pimp oversees or manages them; the pimp also provides what he feels are basic necessities–shelter and protection. He uses his sexual prowess and his image to acquire more women. It may seem crude to define the market capitalist business model in similar terms, but it operates in a homologous manner, where the CEO manages and relies on the skills of his workers at every level to increase his wealth. He also gains employees by providing basic necessities such as pension and health insurance and uses these and other benefits to persuade others to join the organization. Young black men aspire to hustler masculinity in order to cope with the economic disparities that exist because of the limitation that have been imposed by race and by having to live and survive everyday in urban ghettoes. These barriers make it nearly impossible to succeed in a capitalist society. As Garth L. Mangum and Stephen F. Seninger state in Coming of Age in the Ghetto: a Dilemma of Youth Unemployment (1978), —The approach to the labor market significantly dichotomizes the respective positions of ghetto [urban poor] and middle-class youths. In this arena the black youth‘s

5 deprivation–in regard to education, race, social class, lack of proper role models–severely handicaps him“ (76). In turn, this translates into higher crime rates and imprisonment rates in poor black urban areas. Conveniently, as Loïc Wacquant argues, —the formula ”Young + Black + Male‘ is now openly equated with ”probable cause‘ justifying the arrest, questioning, bodily search and detention of millions of African-American males every year“ (—From Slavery to Mass Incarceration“ 56).7 As a result of the mass movement of blacks from the South to the North between 1910 and the 1950s and the inability of black men to acclimate themselves completely to white capitalist concepts of masculinity, black men become hustlers. Also, they are imprisoned at high rates that have been rising since the second mass migration during World War II. Black men have been overwhelmingly overrepresented in prisons since the mid-1980s.8 “Can’t Knock the Hustle” addresses the main issue of how young black men from economically- disadvantaged urban neighborhoods utilize hustler masculinity to acquire a form of masculinity that is attainable to them since race and class exclude them from being able to ever reach a form of dominant masculinity. It is through their performances as black hustlers that they begin to emulate and then critique the inadequacies and wrongs of dominant masculinity. Hustler masculinity functions as a conduit; it teaches young black males to value community as it critiques and eventually rejects white male dominance. Although the black hustler is a self-isolated character, community plays an important role. Hustlers build communities consisting solely of other hustlers, and in these communities, young men come to understand what it means to hustle, learn the rules, and adopt mentors. Because it is a community of hustlers, it is a very unstable because it lacks trust; each hustler is trying to figure out how to dupe the other hustlers. Nonetheless, exposure to community as hustler masculinity teaches it can

7 Kelly Welch further details how stereotypes concerning young black males and criminality have become pervasive throughout society since the Civil Rights movement in —Black Criminal Stereotypes and Racial Profiling“ (2007).

8 Marc Mauer in Race to Incarcerate (1999) and Jerome G. Miller in Search and Destroy: African American Males in the Criminal (1996) both write at length about young black men and the growth of black prison culture which has occurred as a result of the migrations to the cities and racial profiling of crime. They both evaluate the rates in terms of race, environment, recidivism, and types of crimes for which black men are most likely to be imprisoned. Other studies such as Elaine F. Cassidy and Howard C. Stevenson‘s —They Wear the Mask : Hypervulnerability and Hypermasculine Aggression Among African American Males in an Urban Remedial Disciplinary School“ (2005), Michael Tapia and Patricia M. Harris‘s —Race and Revocation: Is There a Penalty for Young, Minority Males“ (2006), and Jerome H. Schiele‘s —Cultural Alignment, African American Male Youths, and Violent Crime“ (1998) demonstrate how the intersections of race, class, and gender affect how young black males are seen and how they choose to behave.

6 positively influence and reinforce their identities. However, the figure of the black hustler has not been traditionally discussed or presented as having any redeeming qualities. For instance, Patrick Daniel Moynihan, as Assistant Secretary of Labor for policy during John F. Kennedy‘s and part of Lyndon B. Johnson administration, assisted in defining black hustler masculinity as pathological, and the film industry presented the figure as fast-talking, fashionable and virile in Blaxploitation films of the early- to mid-1970s, oversimplifying the hustler; both the federal government and the film industry affected how the figure of the black hustler would later be understood and performed. This dissertation does not provide simply a literary analysis but also involves the close readings of folklore, government documents, autobiography, fiction, film and music. This cultural studies approach directly builds on and follows the critical methodologies of Patricia Hill Collins, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Todd Boyd that concentrate on interrogating the interstices in which gender, class, and race converge or intersect as they relate to hustler masculinity. Much of the study also employs concrete data and critical analysis from sociology, psychology, criminology, film studies, gender studies, and music criticism to arrive at a more complete examination of hustler masculinity. A large part of the focus here is on the Civil Rights and Black Power movements because black masculinity was on the national stage, and hustler masculinity is largely absented from critical discussions of both. This historical discussion of masculinity in the 1960s and 1970s, in the midst of a political movement, is coupled with a discussion of African American folklore to locate the origin and trace the development of this post-bellum folk creation. Critical investigation of this particular performance extends itself beyond the study of texts and offers alternative readings and understandings of the choices that young black men in poor urban areas make because it removes the legal and moral ramifications of hustler masculinity and focuses on the function that it serves as a re-articulation of hegemonic masculinity. It can assist in expanding the dialogue on black masculinity in which the deviant black male is concerned and redirect public attention to solutions and/or alternative approaches to helping and understanding these young black men without painting them with the wide brush of criminal pathology. In this dissertation, I demonstrate through close analysis of African American autobiography, pulp fiction, film, and music produced since the mid-1960s that hustler masculinity assists in ushering poor, urban, young black males toward alternative masculine identities. These identities are structured around music, spirituality, or politically-based communities. Becoming a member of a self-reflective community is important because it helps steer these young men away from hustler masculinity and as Keith Clark states in Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest Gaines, and August Wilson (2002),

—these male-centered communities become spaces that promulgate spirituality and psychically intimate connections between black men and constitute collective acts of resistance and regeneration“ (5). These communities are places in which these young black men can be positively affirmed and nurtured. To reach this stage, these young men first perform hustler masculinity which critiques hegemonic masculinity and reveals its inadequacies. They develop the black hustler as a response to the harsh realities of urban space and as a hyperbolic expression of hegemonic masculinity, from which they are inherently excluded due to race and class. It is through this exaggerated performance that these young men are exposed to the oppressions that originate from white male dominance and come to recognize how or why they are excluded. It also introduces the young men to the concept of a self-reflective community because they function in a world that is peopled by others like them who are responding to the environment in similar ways; this community of hustlers proves to be unstable because it is built upon the principle of competitiveness, which does not allow trust to be established or sustained. The ineffectiveness of the community forces the young men performing as hustlers to acknowledge the hazards and move toward alternatives within their respective communities. This new positioning allows them to become functioning members of their wider communities. Unlike previous studies of this particular form of black urban masculinity, this study demonstrates how the figure of the hustler guides these young black urban males towards an alternative form of black masculine expression and helps to transform them from supposed vehicles of destruction and exploitation to community builders and sustainers. Chapter One, —”And Shine Swam On‘: The Growth of the Black Hustler from the Plantation to the Silver Screen,“ locates the black hustler‘s origins in African American history and folklore and demonstrates how he came to be re-imagined and used in popular culture by briefly tracing his historical development in the post-slavery, rural South to his re-articulation as a response to the urban North and Midwest. By focusing primarily on African American folklore, the chapter demonstrate how the black hustler is the contemporary physical incarnation of the badman and/or —bad nigger“ as defined in the works of Lawrence W. Levine, John W. Roberts, Roger D. Abrahams, Bruce Jackson, and others. Very much like the black hustler, these characters–Stagolee, Railroad Bill, Shine, and a host of others– operated outside of the confines dominant society set forth for black men in the South and in the urban North and Midwest. The folk characters, often based on real individuals, lived and functioned on their own terms and confronted the oppressor or the oppressed indiscriminately. For this reason, many blacks

8 held them up as heroes, hence the abundance of toasts and blues songs in which these characters and the ritualization of reciting and passing down of these stories that has taken place for decades. Beyond drawing connections between the black hustler and post-slavery African American folk heroes, this chapter also illustrates the sites at which the black hustler was demonized, stripped of his ability to critique dominant American society, and transformed into a two-dimensional product for mass consumption. In 1965 at the height of the Civil Rights movement, Daniel Patrick Moynihan released his infamous U.S. Labor Department report, —The Negro Family: the Case for National Action,“ which sought to interrogate why African Americans had not achieved socioeconomic equality but only succeeded in negatively critiquing the structure of the black family and questioning the fullness, or lack thereof, of the black man‘s masculinity. Four years later, the black hustler and other associated characters became prominent figures in the pulp fiction novels and autobiographical works of Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck) and Donald Goines; two years later, this character, in films such as Shaft (1971), Super Fly (1972), The Mack (1973) and a slew of other films made between 1971 and 1975, saved an economically failing film industry. As Donald Bogle argues in Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies & Bucks: An Interpretation History of Blacks in American Films (2001), many studios had spent a large part of the sixties producing expensive epic films like Cleopatra (1963) that were financial failures that left them scrambling to avoid bankruptcy. The introduction of the black hustler in Melvin Van Peebles independently-produced and financially-successful Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) and Blaxploitation films proved profitable because the films were cheap to produce and studios took advantage of a black urban audience that they had previously ignored. The black hustler has moved from being a folk hero to government scapegoat to a cheapened commodity in Blaxploitation films. Chapter Two, —Claude Brown, ”Pusher Man‘ in the Promised Land,“ contends that Brown utilizes hustler masculinity as a coping mechanism in Manchild in the Promised Land (1965).9 Hustler masculinity allows Brown to create a sense of community and identity by relying on the re-articulation of an African American folk hero, the badman, in a poor black urban milieu and later leads him to rely on a similar re-articulation of the badman‘s resistance to create and maintain an alternative black masculinity that relies on the communal properties of music. Migration is an important aspect of this chapter because it forces him to search for a fully realized masculinity, which his father does not possess. Brown represents the first generation of Southern blacks to be born, raised, and reared in the

9 The title of Chapter Two refers to Curtis Mayfield‘s —Pusher Man“ from the album and the soundtrack of Super Fly (1972).

North. The narrative revises the slave narrative trope of northward movement and its association with benevolence by revealing the inadequacy of Southern socialization in the North and how it has been revised and reproduced to make sense of a new social space. Beyond focusing on the issue of migration and the problems that it creates for the first generation born in the urban North, it also demonstrates how issues concerning class make hustler masculinity a necessary choice for Brown because his parents choose ineffective coping mechanisms or solutions. Chapter Three, —”Don‘t Believe the Hype‘: Malcolm X‘s Journey from Hustler to Black Leader of the Diaspora,“ reveals how a masculinity, which is bred from the murder of his father and his inability to join white middle-class culture as a youth, forces him to reject notions of all middle-class culture and grasp for hustler masculinity in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965).10 Malcolm X passes through two distinct hustler phases, both of which influence his repositioning in his later adult life as an emerging Pan-Africanist and as an Orthodox Muslim and are phases that critics such as David Dudley and Lawrence B. Goodheart ignore as they argue that the autobiography is a conversion narrative. Although it can be read as such, this chapter argues that Malcolm X‘s performance as a hustler bears more weight on the direction of his life than his conversion and guides him towards his final spiritual and political transformation. The first phase as a zoot suiter, a phrase used to describe a World War II black and Latino oppositional youth culture, gives Malcolm early lessons in resistance through its apparent defiance of middle-class culture. The second phase as —Red“ allows him to place himself in the world by defining his identity rather than allowing it to be defined for him. Malcolm does not realize the value of these two phases until the Nation of Islam and Elijah Muhammad hustle him by silencing him in 1963 as a response to his questioning of Muhammad‘s hypocrisies and his authoritarianism. Malcolm‘s journey towards black masculinity begins with his rejection of the Nation of Islam in the spring of 1964 and his pilgrimage to Mecca shortly after his break from the organization. The pilgrimage gives him the foresight to see himself as a part of a larger Muslim world as he accepts Sunni Islam. With this realization, Malcolm also understands that he is a part of a larger black world and part of a larger black political movement and places himself within it through the founding of the Organization of Afro-American Unity, in the summer of 1964. Malcolm rearticulates black masculinity as masculinity rooted in spirituality and politics.

10 Chapter Three uses the title of the Public Enemy song of same name from their album, It Takes a ation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1989).

Chapter Four, —”Ladies‘ First?‘: Elaine Brown the Black Panther Party,“ focuses on Black liberation politics inspired by Malcolm X‘s example in the late 1960s and the early 1970s and argues that the male members in the Black Panther Party are performing as black hustlers, which becomes detrimental to these men and the organization because they never transcend hegemonic masculinity in Elaine Brown‘s A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (1992).11 Unlike the other chapters, this one privileges the voice of a black woman and demonstrates how Brown becomes a victim of hustler masculinity even as she and other women transformed the public perception of the organization and expanded its political reach and influence. Brown becomes a victim because she eroticizes male power in general and hustler masculinity specifically, which is Margo Perkin‘s main argument in Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties (2000), a book-length study of Angela Davis‘s, Assata Shakur‘s, and Brown‘s autobiographies. It is the main expression of power within the Black Panther Party. Even as she takes control of the Party because she has eroticized power and none of the men are held accountable for their actions as leaders and sexual partners, Brown is nothing more than Huey P. Newton‘s, and by extension the Party‘s, powerless figurehead. Beyond demonstrating how the performances of hustler masculinity within the Black Panther Party re-inscribed black woman‘s oppression, the male members inability to transcend hustler masculinity as they strong-arm local pimps and other hustlers to assume their position also signifies a shift in the function of the black hustler. The figure no longer functioned as a catalyst for the building and maintenance of a self-reflective community that rejected the ideals associated with hegemonic masculinity while affirming its members. This shift coincides with both the shift in the approach to achieving equality as the Civil Rights movement transitions to the Black Power movement and the black male response within the movement to the Moynihan Report. Neither of these occurrences is coincidental; each influenced how men functioned in its wake in black liberation organizations because the male members and leaders of these organizations were reacting to them in their political approach within the organizations and in public responses to racism. Chapter Five, —”The (Big) Payback‘: The Black Hustler from Hero to Commodity,“ shows how Iceberg Slim utilizes hustler masculinity to guide his transformation into a critical member of the middle class and a popular culture icon. Slim utilizes hustler masculinity as a tool to achieve hegemonic

11 The chapter bears the same name as Queen Latifah‘s —Ladies First,“ featuring Monie Love, which appeared on her debut album, All Hail the Queen (1989). Beyond sharing titles, the chapter also borrows Queen Latifah‘s black feminist tone in the song where she challenges what is expected of a woman.

11 masculinity as he understands it.12 Unlike either Brown or Malcolm X, Slim is not searching for an alternative nor does he reject notions of dominant masculinity. Instead, Slim opts to use hustler masculinity to place himself within the definition that inherently excludes him due to his race and class. Slim‘s understanding of hustler masculinity provides him with an understanding of dominant masculinity, which relies on many of the same markers of successful masculine achievement. It is this understanding that is fostered in Slim‘s hustler years as a pimp in Chicago and other parts of the Midwest from 1937 until he is incarcerated in 1960 that allows him to ascend into a version of hegemonic masculinity without rejecting either. Slim comes to understand that they are the same, suggesting that the confessional tone in which he introduces his narrative is a ploy to criticize America‘s double standard. Slim transforms his experiences as a hustler into his new hustle as a writer by transforming his lived experiences and the experiences of other hustlers into the subject of novels. His hustler narrative allows him to profit from his criminality without returning to hustling and to play to the middle class‘s curiosity of the black ghetto and the pimp, while seeming to be contrite in the tradition of Christian conversion narratives and confessions. Slim does not offer an alternative masculinity because his experiences as a pimp allow him to fit himself within the confines of hegemonic masculinity. This chapter also contends that Iceberg Slim‘s popularity as a writer prompts Donald Goines to write less literary pulp novels of black hustlers and the environments and people that bred them. Goines published 16 novels between 1971 and 1975, two of which were posthumously published as he was murdered in October of 1974. This simplifying of the pulp fiction novels coincidentally coincided with the oversimplification of the black hustler in Blaxploitation films cheaply mass produced by Hollywood from about 1971 to 1975. It is these two developments that contributed to the total commodification and bastardization of hustler masculinity because it is transformed into merely a tool for profit rather than the tool of self-definition and a critique of hegemonic masculinity that it had previously been. The epilogue, —”Bridging the Gap‘: The New Generation Hustling,“ shows how hip hop and hiphop artists have begun to reclaim and redefine hustler masculinity so that it performs as a mainstream commodity that is profitable to both the artists and the record companies, and possibly has the ability to critique and act as a conduit of social and economic change within urban, black and Latino communities.13 Artists such as Ice Cube, 50 Cent, Tupac, Ice T, Lupe Fiasco and Jay-Z have put the

12 The chapter refers to James Brown‘s —The Payback“ from his 1974 album of the same name. 13 —Bridging the Gap“ was the first single from Nas‘ seventh studio album, Street Disciple (2004). On the song, Nas performs with is father, blues/jazz musician Olu Dara, bridging the artistic and cultural gap that seemingly exist between blues and hip hop.

12 accoutrements and signs of hustler masculinity on display, playing to the desires of the record company executives and A&R‘s while also slyly critiquing the wider capitalist culture that it mimics through exaggeration and that necessitated its creation and maintenance. Although they illustrate that hustler masculinity has retrieved it transformative qualities to serve its performers and viewers in various ways as it also continues to participate successfully in the market economy it was introduced to in the 1970s through Blaxploitation films, does the complete commodification of hustler masculinity in hip hop complicate how it is understood and is that complication detrimental to the community, nationally and internationally? This dissertation contends that America‘s disregard for black men has necessitated the appearance of hustler masculinity, which gave birth to the hustler narrative. These narratives give their authors the power and the voice to assert themselves as former hustlers and their followers that speak for their respective communities. Through the process of recounting their own narratives, autobiographical and fictional, they demonstrate how a community can and should function in the growth and nurturing of black masculine identities, regardless of socioeconomic level. They reveal to their black male audience viable alternatives to hegemonic masculinity and place the reconstruction, or maintenance, of self-reflective communities at the center of this identity formation. As Frantz Fanon recounts in Black Skin, White Masks (1967), When it was I who had every reason to hate, to despise, I was rejected? When I should have been begged, implored, I was denied the slightest recognition? I resolved, since it was impossible for me to get away from an inborn complex, to assert myself as a BLACK MAN. Since the other hesitated to recognize me, there remained only one solution: to make myself known. [italics in original] (115) Each of the narrator/protagonists undergoes such a realization after they have each exploded to —shatter the hellish cycle“ (Fanon 140).

CHAPTER OE

AD SHIE SWAM O: FROM THE PLATATIO TO THE SILVER

SCREE

Today, the black hustler has become a staple in American popular culture in ways that eclipse his presence in Blaxploitation films in the early 1970s. The figure of the black hustler is ever-present in mainstream, big-budget Hollywood films and on primetime television. Artists such as Too Short, Ice-T, and N.W.A. (Niggaz With Attitude) and their inception of gangsta rap in the 1980s have made the figure synonymous with rap music. This permeation of the black hustler figure throughout American mainstream popular culture suggests that it is a much larger commodity than it was in the 1970s; it is not only being sold to urban African Americans but to America at large. Although these are the main images of the black hustler figure made available to the public, the figure does not originate with present-day rappers or in the 1970s through black cinema. The black hustler, as he exists today, is a superficial reproduction of the African American folk hero, the badman, from which he was developed. Understanding the badman is key to gaining full insight into the function of the black hustler figures or characters such as Shaft, Sweetback, Iceberg Slim, Ice-T, or 50 Cent. In short, the African American badman gave birth to the figure of the black hustler and performs the same social critique of black urban underclass culture, but as a result of the political upheaval and change of the 1960s, the black hustler figure was transformed into a two-dimensional facsimile when the federal government and film industry interpreted and reproduced this figure as a response to the historical moment. The African American folk hero, the badman, was developed after the end of slavery as a reaction to the racism and other societal barriers the newly freed slaves encountered. The badman responded with blatant belligerence and aggressiveness that these new black citizens could not perform without risking being lynched. According to Lawrence W. Levine in Black Culture and Black Consciousness: AfroAmerican Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (1977), —The crucial change marking black folklore after emancipation was the development of a group of heroes who confronted power and authority directly, without guile and tricks, and who functioned on a secular level“ (385-6). African American folklore no longer revolved around animal tricksters or other masked religious subversives. As Levine further states, often these heroes grew out of the lived experiences and exploits

14 of real people: —Black folk created secular, human figures who could contravene the established mores and standards of the society; figures who could pursue an independent course and look within for the necessary strength“ (407). According to H.C. Brearly in —Ba-ad Nigger,“ the badman or bad nigger began to appear in African American folk songs in the rural South during the 1880s and 1890s and was likely not present in the folklore during slavery because the masters and overseers would not have been able to accept his abrasive, confrontational nature. The badman represented the hope of freedom and survival for African Americans, who lived in a world that violated their sanity, bodies, and spirits. As John W. Roberts states, Folk heroic creation occurs because groups, at critical moments in time, recognize in the actions of certain figures, which may already be known to them, qualities or behaviors that they have reason to believe would enhance culture-building (that is, their ability to protect the identity and values of the group in the face of a threat to them). (From Trickster to Badman 5) The badman was developed as an extension of the slave heroes who —played an important role in [the] tradition of resistance … [and] lived long after the institution that had helped to mold them was abolished–and they lived on for the same reasons: because they continued to mirror the plight and reflect the needs of Afro-Americans“ (Levine Black Culture 389). The heroic slave was a trickster figure that took on heroic qualities as tales of feats, real and exaggerated, were passed down from generation to generation. The heroic slave can be found in Frederick Douglass‘s arrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). There are many instances in the narrative in which Douglass utilizes trickery to attain both literacy and his freedom; he would not have been able to possess either under most other circumstances. The two-hour tussle with slave-breaker Edward Covey also stands out because it is a physical demonstration of resistance. Presenting this exaggerated physical scene allows Douglass to express his desire as a black man to define himself outside of the oppressive confines of white masculinity, to which Douglass and other black men fall victim to as slaves. A more resistant black hero, the badman or black bandit, grew from the slave trickster. Roberts describes the badman as a combination of the trickster and conjurer in the African American folk tradition (From Trickster 200). The badman is essentially a black man who defies whites and blacks alike and victimizes both as well. Roberts also states that —in the badman folk heroic tradition, those individuals who served as a focus for folk heroic creation were not the professional criminals, but rather their victims who responded to victimization with violence“ (206). This idea means that the badman was

15 not a criminal although he could easily be described as such; the badman responds violently when he is provoked. He is the epitome of black resistance. According to William L. Van Deburg, —To a degree greater than many have realized, both the villianization of blacks and the valorization of black villains are to blame for our inability to alter the status quo in racial relationships“ (217). The demonization of blackness by whites as inferior created the badman figure in folklore and in American society, and blacks took pride in these characters and individuals because they operated oblivious to racial limitations and physically fought the oppressor in ways that the average African American would not dare. The badman took the form of characters such as Stagolee, Railroad Bill, Shine and numerous others who have been created on the urban street corners, in poolrooms, and behind jailhouse bars. These characters first appeared in ballads but later inhabited toasts. According to folklorists, toasts are oral epic poems, where content and performance are equally important. The badman or some relative of the badman character often inhabits them. Narrative-driven hip hop or gangsta‘ rap is a contemporary example of the toast. According to Abraham D. Rogers in Deep Down in the Jungle, The poems are created to excite the emotions, by their sound, by their direction, by their breath-taking, and by their subject matter. The emotions they primarily call forth are amusement and amazement. The subject treated is freedom of the body through superhuman feats and of the spirit through acts that are free of restrictive social mores (or in direct violation of them), especially in respect to crime and violence. The heroes of most of these stories are hard men, criminals, men capable of prodigious sexual feats, bad men, and very clever men (or animals) who have the amorality of the trickster. The diction of the toasts does everything to heighten the effect of these characters. The values of iconoclasm are strongly echoed in the abundance of forceful and obscene words. Such words show the performer to be the kind of strong man that the hero of the tale is. (107) As much as there is a sense of heroism that the audience and presenter gather from the toasts, the performers also become heroic through their performances because successful delivery makes the performer as large as the badman in it. Of the numerous pimps, confidence men, and other hustlers that live eternally in the toasts, Stagger Lee (also known as Stackolee, Stack Lee, Stagolee, and a few other variations) is the most popular, often cited, and readily recognizable badman. Stagger Lee has lived a long folk life, and as folklorists have recorded his exploits, they have demonstrated how the details in the toasts change with each recitation. These changes are indicative of the improvisational nature of performing the toasts and

16 illustrate how each version is responding to a different set of cultural and historical circumstances. As Cecil Brown states in Stagolee Shot Billy, —Although the ballad of Stagolee is about one black man killing another, it also evokes the world of segregation and rejection. The singers of Stagolee used the ballad to depict white brutality, and fantasized how Stagolee would escape their injustice“ (42). Brown cites a portion of a version of the toast printed in American Ballads and Folk Songs (1934) in which Stagger Lee is hanged for his crime but his neck never breaks and he is removed from the scaffold alive. Beyond responding to racial injustice, the toasts are also responding to the specific historical period and/or a specific physical location in the country. The largest and arguably most significant periods in African American history and culture that embodies both a change in time and physical location would be the Great Migration. African Americans began moving westward and northward after Emancipation. It was not until around 1890 when most of the Reconstruction gains were lost that African Americans began to move away from the South in large numbers and did not slow down until around 1930. From a literature perspective, Lawrence R. Rodgers states in Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration ovel (1997), This mass internal migration, the largest in American history, is the most important African-American event after slavery. It has had as much effect in shaping the aspirations, attitudes, and life-styles of urban black America as anything following slavery. Far more than simply a geographic relocation, the Great Migration transformed a rural farm folk to an industrial city folk. It reshaped a culture from one that measured time by the sun and seasons, counting its successes and failures in inches of rain and bales of cotton, into a northern labor force sounding off the beat of its day to the slow and steady tick of the factory time clock. (11) Just as the people changed as a response to their new environments, the toasts and the characters in them transformed as well. When the black migrants arrived, they did not find the Promised Land that they had hoped to find but a reinterpretation of their lives in the South where they were confined to ill-suited parts of the city. The badman became an adequate response to the conditions of the city. The character provided the men with an image of black masculinity they could revise and emulate within the context of their lives. The toast, as Dennis Wepman, Ronald B. Newman, and Murray B. Binderman state in The Life: The Lore and Folk Poetry of the Black Hustler (1974), is a black expression born out of the black urban experience (5). As such, the toasts and the characters in them, especially Stagger Lee, are responding to a distinct urban environment. As Richard Wright writes in 12 Million Black Voices

(1941), —Northern racism, like the Southern strain, had its subtle symptoms. Black people were crucified en masse on a Cross of Gold–segregated into high-priced run-down ghettos by landlords, preyed upon by cynical businessmen, black as well as white“ (x). In addition to the racism that migrants experienced in the North, Wright also states, —Still the migrants flowed North, full of hope … Their hope was that the vast prosperity of the nation would trickle down, that unionization in industry would change things. Prosperity failed them“ (xi). Because they were excluded from industry and unionized jobs, African Americans developed ways to cope and respond as they had in the South. The toast and its cast of characters were created or altered to respond to the assaults African Americans received from the Northern, urban industrial terrain. It is this function that complicates Bruce Jackson‘s argument. According to Jackson in Get Your Ass in the Water and Swim Like Me: African American arrative Poetry from Oral Tradition, —Even though he [the badman] is dangerous to everyone, his gratuitous freedom bestows some measure of freedom on everyone else“ (32). Jackson argues that Stagger Lee functions as a checks-and-balance system because he shows a complete disregard for public opinion or rules and operates accordingly, opening spaces in which other black men can perform but also becoming both heroes and martyrs in what seems to be an unintentional process. Although Jackson contends that Stagger Lee is an example of undirected teenage rebellion, Stagger Lee is a product of his environment and is a reaction to that environment. As such, each of his obviously violent actions and reactions are indicative of the urban space and how poor young black men define their masculinity. It is not coincidental that in some version of the toast, Stagger Lee is an average everyday man, —I had a fucked-up deck of cards and I didn‘t know what to do./My woman was leavin‘, she was putting me out in the cold“ (Jackson 46); a hustler, —I had a sawed-off shotgun and a marked deck of cards./I had a faded blue suit and a slouch down hat,/I had a T-model ford and no payments on that“ (Jackson 48); or a pimp, —Had a pin-striped suit, old fucked-up hat,/And a T-model Ford, not a payment on that./I had a cute little whore“ (Abrahams 138-39). Each of these descriptions of Stagger Lee suggests how the performers and the community that hold this character as a hero understand him. The idea that he is the average black man links him directly to the members in the community that he has come to represent and the hustler and pimp are indicative of the ways in which one functions in the poor urban environment. The use of the pronoun —I“ allows the performer and the audience to become Stagger Lee. In different variations of the toast, Stagger Lee reacts to what could be interpreted as disrespect and not bullying as Jackson has suggested. For example, in many of the variants, Stagger Lee kills the barkeep. He kills him for two different reasons. In one instance, he shoots the barkeep for

18 blatant disrespect, —Barkeep said, ”Yeah, I heard your name down the way,/But I kick motherfucking asses like you every day‘“ (Wepman et al 49). Stagger Lee shoots him. In another version, the barkeep serves Stagger Lee dirty and bad meat, and he kills the barkeep. This response should not be read as bullying but as representative of the conditions the audience deals with and understands as how they would like to respond. Like Stagger Lee, —Shine“ is another example of a badman or badman-like character that functions as a response to the environment and not simply as a black man being intentionally violent and/or aggressive, but unlike Stagger Lee, Shine is responding to moneyed white people. In the toast, the Titanic sinks and Shine swims to New York. On his way, he passes various characters, representing the elite and the upper class who were on the ship. Each character offers something he or she thinks Shine would want like money and sex in an effort to persuade him to save them to which Shine returns with a witty rejection. This particular toast can function as a template to follow; Shine demonstrates overtly how a black man can exert his masculinity without succumbing to dominant masculinity. He relies on himself, and swims back to his community to share his experiences and stories with it. It is not clear if the badman or the black hustler appeared in America first. As Cecil Brown contends, Stagger Lee was a real person, and the toast is based on him. This suggests that there is no specific demarcation between what is in the toasts and what are real, lived experiences. The hustler, like the badman, seeks to retrieve the masculinity that was stripped from him and does so by acting outside of the confines set by those entities that he views as the enemy. Although hustler masculinity functioned as a coping mechanism and assisted in the formation of poor, urban black male identity, sociologist would later interpret it as a pathology and as evidence of failure within the family structure, completely demonizing it. Although many of the badmen seem to have appeared around the turn of the twentieth century and during the early part of the twentieth century, they still inhabited toasts being performed in black urban neighborhoods well into the 1960s and 1970s. The survival of these characters suggests that they still had influence on later generations of listeners and performers and that their function was still relevant. Folklorists recorded many of the toasts in urban communities and in prisons in the 1960s and 1970s. This survival is not coincidental because the badman had been making appearances outside of the folk performances since the 1930s. In literature, he took the shape of characters like Tea Cake in Zora Neale Hurston‘s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), Bigger Thomas in Richard Wright‘s ative Son (1940), Ras the Exhorter and Rhinehart in Ralph Ellison‘s Invisible Man (1953), multiple

19 characters in the fiction of Chester Himes, and later in the pulp fiction novels of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines.14 The figure of the badman also became very real in many communities with the appearance of individuals like Ellsworth —Bumpy“ Johnson in the 1920s and 1930s, the pimps and other hustlers that influence Claude Brown, Malcolm X and Iceberg Slim in the 1940s and 1950s, and Jeff Fort and the Blackstone Rangers in Chicago in the 1960s. The badman had grown beyond the oral culture that gave birth to him and been transformed into the hustler or a variation of the hustler. In the 1960s, the sociological community took notice of young, urban black men‘s performances of hustler masculinity and attempted to deconstruct it in an effort to understand or locate the source of urban black poverty. In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan‘s controversial and much-debated Labor Department report, —The Negro Family: the Case for National Action,“ which is infamously known as the —Moynihan Report“ maligned the structure of the black family and demonized (masculinized) the black woman and pathologized the black man in terms akin to those used to describe the badman or hustler. It was a compilation of what many of the sociologists had said and were saying. The report is organized in five chapters: Chapter 1-The Negro American Revolution; Chapter 2-The Negro American Family; Chapter 3-The Roots of the Problem; Chapter 4-The Tangle of Pathology; and Chapter 5-The Case for National Action. In what functions as an introduction of sorts for the report, Moynihan writes, —The United States is approaching a new crisis in race relations“ (i). His reference is to the Civil Rights movement or rather the gains of the movement and what African Americans will expect as a result: equality. Although Moynihan says that it would be the national governments mission to ensure that African Americans achieve equality, which he defines later in the report, it would not occur for generations because racism and the problem that African Americans‘ history in the United States has created. According to Moynihan, The fundamental problem, in which this is clearly the case, is that of family structure. The evidence–not final, but powerfully persuasive–is that the Negro family in the urban ghettos is crumbling. A middle-class group has managed to save itself, but for the vast numbers of unskilled, poorly educated city working class the fabric of conventional social relationships has all but disintegrated. There are indications that the situation may have been arrested in the past few years, but the general post-war trend is unmistakable.

14 For a more detailed discussion of the development and portrayal of the badman in African American literature, see Jerry h. Bryant‘s “Born in a Mighty Bad Land”: the Violent Man in African American Folklore and Fiction.

So long as this situation persists, the cycle of poverty and disadvantage will continue to repeat itself. (i) Moynihan believes that —the establishment of a stable Negro family structure“ is the solution to moving African Americans towards gaining equality (i). As such, a major part of the report focuses on the structure of the urban black family and compares it to structure of the white family or relies on the conception of the nuclear family as a point of reference. The title suggests that the focus of the report is on the African American family, but Moynihan is clearly focused on the role of black men in the urban community and within the family as an answer to achieving social equality. Moynihan begins his report by detailing the efforts and successes of the Civil Rights Movement, or what he terms the Negro American Revolution, to appeal to the sensibilities of Americans in general by aligning it with the American Revolution. Moynihan does this to draw attention to the goal of the movement: social equality. He writes, —The principal challenge of the next phase of the Negro revolution is to make certain that equality of results will now follow“ (3). The only way to do this, according to Moynihan, is to assess the black community in general. He concludes, That being the case, it has been said that there is a considerable body of evidence to support the conclusion that egro social structure, in particular the egro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble. While many young egroes are moving ahead to unprecedented levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind [italics in the original]. (4) Moynihan argues, throughout the report, that the instability of the black family is not the result of racism or socioeconomic disadvantages but more so do to the absence of the father and husband in the house. He begins Chapter 2, —At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family“ (5). He goes on to say, —It [Negro family structure] is the fundamental source of weakness of the Negro community“ (5). This chapter consists of an interpretation of statistics that suggests that the rates of divorce, male desertion, children born out of wedlock, female-headed households, and welfare dependency are higher among African Americans than whites. Interestingly, according to Moynihan, —The statistics in this paper refer to Negroes. However, certain data series are available only in terms of the white population. Where this is the case, the nonwhite data have been used as if they referred only to Negroes. This introduces me to some inaccuracies but it does not appear to produce any significant distortions“ (50). But he follows this portion of the report with what he refers to

21 as the roots of the problem. Moynihan initially draws links between slavery and current conditions but only to express how brutal it was and to compare it to Nazi concentration camps. He relies heavily on the works of sociologists E. Franklin Frazier and Edward W. Bakke that focus on the urbanization of the black family and the —effects of unemployment on the family“ respectively to buttress his argument. Moynihan essentially argues that African Americans in urban settings are failing because the family structure has failed or fallen apart. As Lee Rainwater and William L. Yancey state in The Moynihan Report and the Politics of Controversy (1967), His [Moynihan‘s] concern was to have adopted at the highest level of the administration the view that family welfare provided a central point of reference in evaluating the effectiveness of programs to deal with disadvantaged groups. He sought to achieve a basic redefinition of the civil rights problem at the highest level of the administration as a preliminary to a broader redefinition by the government as a whole. (26) Rainwater and Yancey‘s explanation make it clear what Moynihan‘s intent was but they do not focus on his criminalization of black men. For example, Moynihan states, —[T]he Negro community has been forced into a matriarchal structure which, because it is so out of line with the rest of the American society, seriously retards the progress of the group as a whole, and imposes a crushing burden on the Negro male and, in consequence, on a great many Negro women as well“ (29). For Moynihan, black men fail because black women hold and wield too much power economically, educationally, and domestically. This failure translates into failed families and a failed or below-average existence because the man is not the breadwinner as men are supposed to be in America. Moynihan utilizes a traditional family structure that informs socialization in the white middle- class household to interpret the structure of the black family. He does not allow a space for alternative family structures or differing constructions of alternative masculinities. Beyond linking the structure of urban African American family to their inability to achieve equality, Moynihan places blame on the supposedly ill-structured black family and the black man. According to Rainwater and Yancey, Moynihan sought to present a sharply focused argument leading to the conclusion that the government‘s economic and social welfare programs, existing and prospective ones, should be systematically designed to encourage the stability of the Negro family. He sought to show, first, that the Negro family was highly unstable (female-headed households produced by marital breakup and illegitimacy). This instability resulted from

the systemic weakening of the position of the Negro male. Slavery, reconstruction, urbanization, and unemployment had produced a problem as old as America and as new as the April unemployment rate. This problem of unstable families in turn was a central feature of the tangle of pathology of the urban ghetto, involving problems of delinquency, crime, school dropouts, unemployment, and poverty. Finally, Moynihan wanted the administration to understand that some evidence supported the conclusion that these problems fed on themselves and that matters were rapidly getting worse. (27-8) Though Moynihan‘s intent may have been focused on developing social programs to improve the state of the black, urban family and social equality, the report only succeeds in focusing on the supposed emasculation of the black man and arguing that this is the source of African Americans inability to achieve socioeconomic equality. Many found fault with the report, disagreeing with the notion of black matriarchy in a society where the black woman was the least valued of its subjects. Columnist James Farmer states in his December 18, 1965, column, —The Controversial Moynihan Report,“ On the surface, this would seem to be a fair-minded exercise in the Life Sciences but in fact the Moynihan Report, which seems to have been given a good deal of currency by the present administration, is another one of those academic efforts to get our eyes off the prize [civil rights]. By laying the primary blame for present-day inequalities on the pathological condition of the Negro family and community, Moynihan has provided a massive academic cop-out for the white conscience and clearly implied that Negroes in this nation will never secure a substantial measure of freedom until we learn to behave ourselves and stop buying Cadillacs instead of bread. (410) Farmer claims that the report is a diversion that seeks to distract the efforts of the Civil Rights Movement and to ease white guilt. Instead of being critical of the institutions that assisted in creating or forging this inequality, Moynihan is critical of the black family and blames it for the recurring problems in socioeconomic status that exist in the black community and for the lack of opportunity for African Americans in urban settings. Harvard psychologist William Ryan agrees and states, [I]t [—Moynihan Report“] draws dangerously inexact conclusions from weak and insufficient data; encourages (no doubt unintentionally) a new form of subtle racism that might be termed ”Savage Discovery,‘ and seduces the reader into believing that it is not

racism and discrimination but the weaknesses and defects of the Negro himself that account for the present status of inequality between Negro and white. (458) Ryan asserts that the report itself is inaccurate because the data does not correlate with his conclusions as strongly as they should, suggesting that he has ulterior motives for making the claims that he makes. Farmer and Ryan‘s views coincide with many others that were not given the platform to speak as they had. Moynihan relied on statistical information to make his argument, though most of his information was aimed at attracting attention to the point that he was attempting to illustrate rather than to present the urban environment and racial relations with any critical accuracy. The report was also a preoccupation with what Philip Brian Harper states was the —perennial ”crisis‘ of black masculinity whose imagined solution is a proper affirmation of black male authority“ (x). It may seem to have been an attempt to participate in the discourse occurring in the country as a part of the ensuing black political movement. Moynihan seems to focus on the supposed emasculation of black men within the family to relegate the issue of racial equality to a trivial position and replace it with class. As bell hooks declares in We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (2004), —[T]he discourse of emasculation shifted from white supremacy and accountability for black male oppression to blaming black women. … Significantly, Moynihan‘s report came just in time to reinforce the notion that it was important for black males to fight in imperialist wars“ (12). The environment in which these ill-suited males are born is presented as the cause rather than as a reaction to the inability of black males to achieve white middle- class masculinity and as their refusal to participate in —wage slavery“ (hooks 21). They refuse to work as minimum-waged, unskilled laborers, who work hard for very little. The appearance of the report in 1965 maligning black men is suspicious because simultaneously, African Americans were demanding equal rights and job opportunities from the government. Moynihan‘s report seems to be an attempt to distract focus from the fight for civil rights and place blame on the alleged victim, who in this case is the black man. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the film industry did not involve itself in studying the figure or making a case against it as sociologists and the government had. Film studios also turned to the badman or hustler to exploit a black urban audience, which they had ignored previously, to raise revenue and save a failing industry. The badman or the black hustler became a commodity. Traditionally in Hollywood cinema, black men have been presented in well-defined roles that lessened their humanity. Since the late 1960s when hustler masculinity appeared on the silver screen, the presentation of black

24 men was overwhelmingly dehumanizing. It was and is interpreted as the —big, baadddd niggers, over- sexed and savage, violent and frenzied“ (Bogle 14). It is what Earl Ofari Hutchinson terms the —malevolent black male“ in The Assassination of the Black Male Image (1996). As Hutchinson states, —the image of the malevolent black male is based on a durable and time-resistant bedrock of myths, half- truths, and lies“ (14). Although this may be a historical truth in regards to American mass media, especially news media, William L. Van Deburg states that it is the image or myth of the malevolent black male upon which the —bandits“ of Blaxploitation films such as Sweet, Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song (1971), Shaft (1972), and Superfly (1972) were built. Accordingly, they were presented as men with —standards“ and —specific behavioral guidelines“ (Van Deburg 121). He also states that —they also were well advised to avoid marks who stuttered, were cross-eyed, or were returning from a funeral. None of the outlaw guilds knowingly accepted rapists, hypocrites, or warmongers into membership. All believed their own value system superior to that of white underworld counterparts“ (Van Deburg 121). This description is not an attempt to say that they were completely devoid of what Van Deburg terms villainy, but it does show that they were not as ruthless and inhumane as the presentations have made them seem. Van Deburg‘s analysis of Blaxploitation films is similar to Julius Hudson‘s description of actual hustlers. As Hudson writes, —Hustlers were quick to point out that their games do not represent crimes of violence against individuals. Rather they are tactful circumventions of the law, and in most cases success is facilitated by cooperation from police and judicial officials“ (413). Regardless of how ruthless and inhumane the hustler may seem to be, there is an existing code of conduct that negates the idea that they are inhumane, ruthless, and not concerned for the individual. The individual just happens to be the entity that the hustler has to violate in order to carve out spaces for himself. As Hudson later states, —the hustlers conceived of their activities as one form of economic black power“ (413), which aligns theoretically with the Hollywood presentation of hustlers in the 1970s. This is not to say that the conception of hustler masculinity does not conflict with its actual performance, which victimizes the community in which it functions by creating prostitutes and drug addicts and by stealing from individuals. Hustler masculinity appeared in the character of the black buck in films. The black buck returned to film in 1967 via actor/athlete Jim Brown (Bogle 221). Donald Bogle contends that D. W. Griffith in Birth of a ation (1915) perfected the presentation of the black buck in film. The characters that Jim Brown played became reincarnations of the black buck, but unlike those previous images, his —strength was always used to work with the dominant culture rather than against it“ (Bogle 222). As for Brown,

Bogle claims that the audience was drawn in by his strength because he —was always a bold man, decisive, anxious for action, and completely confident of his own power“ (221). Bogle asserts, Males relished the situation in which he was cast and his skill getting out of them while keeping his cool. Young black children in the ghetto liked him because he was a black man who could shove back to whitey the violence whitey had originally dealt out. … The blackness of his skin and his sheer physicality took audiences back to the myth of the black man as a pure creature of astounding sexual prowess. (220-2) The appearance of Brown on the silver screen was a sign of the times, times that shunned the presentation of black masculinity provided by Sidney Poitier, the death of nonviolent protest, and the birth of black power, which raised blackness upon a pedestal and —said that violence was as natural in America as apple pie“ (219). For the black community, Brown‘s characters represented a newly articulated black masculinity, expressed the political transition from the Civil Rights Movement to the Black Power movement that had taken place, and introduced a characterization of black masculinity that would gain prominence in the following decade. The film industry took interests in the black buck-like character when they realized that the presentation of the character in film would be profitable. In 1971, independent filmmaker, Melvin Van Peebles, gave America Sweet Sweetback’s Baad Asssss Song, which he claimed was a —victorious film, a film where niggers could walk out standing tall instead of avoiding each other‘s eyes, looking once and again like they‘d had it“ (Van Peebles qtd. in Guerrero 88). Referring to Van Peebles film and its reception by a large segment of the black community, Bogle concludes: During that time, in rejecting the black bourgeoisie, which had seemingly often aided and abetted White America through attempts at cultural assimilation, the new militant separatist black classes sometimes came to identify blackness with the trappings of the ghetto--the tenements as well as the talk, the mannerisms, and the sophistication of the streets-- all of which appeared to mark a life lived close to one‘s black roots. … With the glamorization of the ghetto, however, came also the elevation of the pimp/outlaw/rebel as folk hero. Van Peebles played up to this sensibility, and his film was the first to glorify the pimp. It failed, however, to explain the social conditions that made the pimp such an important figure. (236) Van Peebles‘ film redefined blackness, extracting it from the middle-class sensibilities that informed earlier film presentations. It gave the black urban underclass community a character to which they could

26 relate because the characters‘ lives were affected by race and class in the same way that theirs were. The influence of this film and other similar films could be seen in these communities as dashikis and afros were replaced with the flashy, colorful, and extravagant garb and straightened hair of the street hustlers and pimps (Geurro 96-7). This suggests that the films had bearing on the lives of its urban black audience, who saw value in the examples of resistance the presentations of hustler masculinity provided as they watched these characters dupe —the man.“ The film industry understood this aspect of the films but was more interested in the money that could be made from similar films since it was nearing bankruptcy during that period (Bogle 238). Van Peebles‘ film cost $500 thousand to make and grossed over $10 million dollars without the help of a studio or distributor. The film industry went into overhaul producing numerous versions of similar films between 1971 and 1974 (Bogle 241). Essentially, it produced white-backed films such as Superfly, Shaft, and many others to take advantage of black dollars to save a failing industry. As Donald Bogle states, —Shaft also appeared in 1971. This little picture, which its studio, MGM, thought might make a little money, instead made a mint--some $12 million within a year in North America alone–single-handedly saved MGM from financial ruin“ (238). The film industry exploited the fact that many African Americans, particularly those in urban centers, were going through a post-Civil-Rights transition that involved reconsidering modes for gaining political freedom and acknowledging and articulating identities that conveyed how they wanted to be acknowledged, respected, and freed economically. For the most part, the protagonists or antiheroes that the films were about were poorly conceived black hustlers. They had all the markings but were stripped of the ability to critique dominant masculinity and to transcend being badmen or hustlers. The government and the film industry made use of hustler masculinity as a scapegoat and as a commodity respectively. In both cases, the figure of the black hustler or badman was oversimplified and was utilized so that it was beneficial to the institutions. The figure was presented devoid of any attributes that were representative of its function or of the community from which it grew. The hustler is an important transitional figure because although he is a destructive character, he is also one of resistance. He teaches these young men how to correct themselves and commence to changing their communities by giving them firsthand experience with a performance of masculinity that is detrimental to themselves and the community and shows them what it takes to become contributing members to and leaders in their urban communities.

CHAPTER TWO

CLAUDE BROW, “PUSHER MA” I THE PROMISED LAD

Claude Brown‘s Manchild in the Promised Land is an autobiography detailing Brown‘s journey from boyhood to manhood. The narrative participates in an autobiographical tradition that extends back to early slave narratives, but unlike those early narratives, Brown‘s is not set in the South. It is set in the urban North, Harlem, and Brown writes against the established tropes of slave narratives. Harlem is not the Promised Land that descriptions of the North in slave narratives would have one believe.15 Brown presents Harlem as being similar to the South but without the distinct racial borders and the blatant racism that inform social relations, socioeconomic status, and the racial separation of communities in the South. Though these markers are not as overt in the North as they are in the South, they are still present. As a result, Brown utilizes the strategic aspects of hustler masculinity to maneuver through Harlem and to negotiate his masculinity in the new urban space. That is, hustler masculinity functions as a tool Brown uses to acclimate himself to the North as a part of the first generation of his family not born in the South and as a solution to his inability to locate an applicable source of masculinity within his home. For Brown, hustler masculinity counters the subservient form of masculinity his father was socialized into in the South and mimics hegemonic masculinity, but as Brown performs hustler masculinity, it highlights the inadequacies of American male culture and is inherently inadequate because it reflects the paradigms of this culture. It forces him to define black masculinity for himself in a way that places him in the community as a black man of substance. In short, this chapter argues that in Manchild hustler masculinity defies the more common, submissive forms of black masculinity, yet is critical of hegemonic masculinity as hustler masculinity hyperbolically mimics it; Brown‘s performance as a hustler forces him to be critical of this mode of black masculinity and to progress towards a non-

15 In the arrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass uses the trope of northern movement. With each step he takes northward, white people become nicer. Harriet Jacobs‘ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, on the other hand, complicates this trope in her narrative, positing that her sex renders her quasi-free in the North. Harriet E. Wilson does the same in Our ig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859). In —Hear My Voice, Ye Careless Daughters,“ Hazel Carby refers to the narrative as an —allegory of a slave narrative, a ”slave‘ narrative set in the ”free‘ North“ (43). For Wilson, white benevolence toward her as a human being does not improve until she begins to move southward and comes in contact with self-reflective, gendered communities.

28 white, non-patriarchal form of black masculinity, which he finds as a jazz musician because the community he creates with other musicians is affirming. As much as Manchild is an autobiography, it is also a migration narrative, which is an aspect of the autobiography that bears quite a bit of weight. A large part of Brown‘s transition from boyhood to manhood relies on his ability to negotiate personal space and identity in the North. This negotiation is somewhat in line with what Houston A. Baker, Jr. states in —The Environment as Enemy in a Black Autobiography: Manchild in the Promised Land.“ Baker maintains, —An examination of the struggle presented in the work, therefore, will reveal not only how Brown‘s use of the environment as enemy constitutes a modification of a literary convention, but also will show what the work tells about the struggle of blacks in a recent epoch“ (53-4). Although Baker‘s reading is relevant to this study, it fails to consider that the problem is not with the environment itself but with the fact that Brown does not have the tools to acclimate himself properly to the North. His parents are migrants and therefore —ignorant.“ Reading the text as a modification of a naturalist text, as Baker does, though, only considers part of the text and reading it as a migration narrative opens up the text so that Brown‘s actions and reactions are a response to the environment and also to his parents‘ ignorance of the environment. In Canaan Bound: The African American Great Migration ovel (1997), Lawrence Rodgers defines the migration narrative as —one in which real--or, less frequently, a symbolic-- journey from south to north, occurring either in the novel or figuring prominently in the narrative‘s recent past, strongly informs the protagonist‘s psychological constitution and his or her responses to the external environment“ (3). In the narrative, Brown has to deal with the fact that he is a native of Harlem and does not have a template of life to follow or a guide to assist him in maneuvering the terrain because his parents are transplants from the South. They traveled to the North for the alleged opportunities and to escape the weighty oppressiveness of the South as many others did. When they reached the North as part of the —5.5 million African Americans that migrated from the South to Northern cities between 1910 and 1950“ (Bennett 344), they were confronted by a different set of problems that complicated the goal of attaining freedom. Brown‘s narrative is situated in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, making his parents very much a part of this group of Africans Americans who migrated North before and during World War II. As Rodgers notes, —The urban initiate views his or her migration as a movement from low-caste status towards a wholeness manifested in a vision of the North as the biblically inspired Promised Land“ (31). This idea is made most apparent in Brown‘s forward as he recounts the surprise of

29 his parents and others like them who found something less than what they had expected to find. Brown writes: It seems that Cousin Willie, in his lying haste, had neglected to tell the folks down home about one of the most important aspects of the promised land; it was a slum ghetto. There was a tremendous difference in the way life was lived up North. There were too many people full of hate and bitterness crowded into a dirty, stinky, uncared-for closet section of a great city. Before the soreness of the cotton fields had left Mama‘s back, her knees were getting sore from scrubbing ”Goldberg‘s‘ floor. Nevertheless, she was better off; she had gone from the fire to the frying pan. (7-8) The implication here is that the area of the city into which the migrants were ushered created what Brown comes to know as his youth. Harlem becomes a delusion and an area of disillusion for the Southern migrants. Brown believes that the way of life that he is exposed to is the way of life to which he must succumb, and thus, he comes to reject it. Brown‘s narrative details a single personal journey towards manhood that is representative of a collective narrative. His voice is one speaking for and to many who are also the children of migrants lost in the Promised Land. The previously quoted passage from the foreword suggests that migrants went North with the expectation of fulfilling wishful dreams of escaping from the South and being led to a land of opportunity and freedom. Brown states that they left the South singing joy-filled spirituals that echoed their desires and their hopes for freedom. He also writes, —One no longer had to wait to get to heaven to lay his burden down; burdens could be laid down in New York“ (7). They had hoped to find the Promised Land without the forty-year march that the Israelites had to take. In the end, they were disillusioned and fell back into modes of living that were similar to those which they had left behind in the South. They were forced to live within borders that they did not realize existed in the North until they encountered a new environment. They became inhabitants of the tenements in the slums and were confined to them because of racism, socioeconomic status, and sheer ignorance of power and movement in the North. The migrants‘ idealized understanding of the North eventually dissipated as they came to realize that the opportunities that they had left the South for were nearly non-existent, though many could argue that they had improved their lot. Their idealism faded because according to Rodgers, —the migrant assume[d] a second-class citizenship in the North that resemble[d] more familiar race, caste, and class

30 exclusion in the South“ (31). The North began to resemble the South because the poverty and segregated neighborhoods that they thought they had left there followed them. As a result, the hope that once filled them was bled from their souls, and their children were left to cope with this absence, this emptiness. Brown describes the effects of this emptiness that consumed the migrants and their children as he describes the nature of his narrative. In the foreword, he writes: I want to talk about the first Northern urban generation of Negroes. I want to talk about the experiences of a misplaced generation, of a misplaced people in an extremely complex, confused society. This is a story of their rebellions, and their dreams, their sorrows, their small and futile rebellions, and their endless battle to establish their own place in America‘s greatest metropolis--and in America itself. (7) Brown chooses to emphasize the idea that the narrative is one of resistance by using the term —rebellions“ twice in the same sentence that underscores the —endless battle“ that confront them. The terms imply what Brown and others like him are rebelling against. They sandwich —their dreams“ and —their sorrows,“ suggesting that they are rebelling against the hopelessness this progression had created in their parents. Like the opening of the book, the closing of the forward leads the reader directly to the text and hints at the nature of the narrative without giving specific details. Brown writes: —The children of these disillusioned colored pioneers inherited the total lot of their parents--the disappointments, the anger. To add to their misery, they had little hope of deliverance. For where does one run to when he‘s already in the promised land?“ (8) Although Brown closes with a rhetorical question that begs to be answered, it works as a partial answer to the questions one is led to ask after reading the opening. Brown and others are rebelling against their parents and their hopelessness and complacency as well as the larger city itself and the limits it has placed upon them. And to answer the closing question, Brown offers his own narrative, taking the reader through the processes of self-awareness, self-discovery, and understanding one‘s place within a much wider community as he grows from black boy to black man within the context of Harlem. The migrants have been forced to live within prescribed boundaries that not only influence their living situations but also their entire lives and strip them of their hope. In —Who Set You Flowin’?“: The AfricanAmerican Migration arrative (1995), Farah Jasmine Griffin writes, —In the context of the migration narrative, urban spaces--kitchenettes, workplaces, street corners, prisons, and theaters--are some of the sites where migrants, white power holders, and the Northern black middle class vie for control“ (102). Griffin defines further, —Urban power separates and categorizes individuals. The ghetto

31 dwellers are enclosed within neighborhoods and kitchenettes. They are not allowed beyond certain borders. Urban power sustains a discourse around race, sex, and desire which confines the black migrant … Finally urban power will also resort to the use of force and repression when necessary“ (102).16 It is this —urban power,“ which has controlled Brown‘s parents, which will be explained in detail later. As a result, Brown attempts to resist by utilizing —the very structures and ideologies that repress them as a means of enabling [his] agency“ (Griffin 102). Brown desires to transform the urban space so that he acquires the power to define himself and not become defined by essentialized definitions of black masculinity that are demeaning or emasculating. He chooses hustler masculinity as a method of resisting essentializing definitions of black masculinity and to avoid becoming victimized like his parents. Much like Richard Wright”s ative Son, Brown‘s text begins with a startling if not brutal scene that is focused in the urban space and on his negotiation within it. And like Wright‘s social realist novel, it also sets the tone for the rest of the narrative. ative Son opens in a kitchenette on Chicago‘s Southside with a fatherless family (a mother, her daughter, and her two sons) proceeding through early morning rituals, which are interrupted by the entrance of the black rat and the chase and execution that ensues. After the rat has been killed, Wright writes, —The two brothers stood over the dead rat and spoke in tones of awed admiration“ (6). They comment on the size of the rat and speculate on how he got so big. The scene comes to a close with the mother questioning Bigger‘s, the protagonist‘s, masculinity. This scene sets the tone of the novel in several ways. First the black rat is Bigger Thomas, whose own narrative mirrors the vignette with the black rat, and Bigger, like the rat, seeks to attain success in the same manner by attempting to survive and succeed in what Wright probably viewed as a trash heap, the poor black urban space. Throughout the narrative, Bigger is also confined to the urban spaces that Griffin defines. The scene is also representative of how Bigger sees the world in which he lives. Bigger‘s permanence in the foundation of Chicago‘s Southside is signified by the blood stain that the dead rat leaves on the wooden floor of the kitchenette and the residues that are presumably left behind at the end of the novel as a naturalistic world of struggle and bestiality. Although Manchild does not start with a symbolic scene in which a rodent or similar animal is representative of the protagonist, its opening scene does set the tone for the rest of the narrative. It contains a hysterical woman and a chase

16 Griffin provides further attributions of urban power. As she puts it, —This power also seeks to educate migrants and to create in them a desire for those things available in the dominant society. Education is the task of a segment within black middle class who quell dissatisfaction and help transform the migrant into efficient workers and citizens“ (102).

32 in which the protagonist is involved. The difference in Brown‘s text is that he is chased and is nearly executed. This leads to a stay in the hospital, thoughts of dying, and admiration from his peers, but it is what happens during this scene that is most important. As Brown lies on the floor bleeding from his abdomen, he has a dream, which is one of a few. Brown writes: As the screams began to die out--Mama‘s and the boy‘s--I began to think about the dilapidated old tenement building that I lived in, the one that still had the words —pussy“ and —fuck you“ on the walls where I had scribbled them years ago. … This was the building where Mr. Lawson had killed a man for peeing in the hall. I remembered being afraid to go downstairs the morning after Mr. Lawson had busted that man‘s head open with a baseball bat. I could still see blood all over the hall. This was the building where somebody was always shooting out the windows in the hall. They were usually shooting at Johnny D., and they usually missed. This was the building that I loved more that anyplace else in the world. The thought that I would never see this building again scared the hell out of me. (12) Like the scene in ative Son, this particular scene or dream that occurs at the beginning of the narrative is indicative of the tone of the narrative and how Brown places it within the context of Harlem. The tone that the opening scene sets is at once one of distress and yearning. Brown is fearful for his life in Harlem, but there is also something about Harlem that he cannot let go simply because he is a part of it. Brown is a permanent part of Harlem. He has bled on the streets and stood on the corners; he has operated within and negotiated his own space within the designated urban space, a space in which —urban power“ is seized from him. Along with the idea that the dream represents Brown‘s place in Harlem, it also embodies his perception of the environment. Brown views himself and others like him as woven into the fabric or foundation of Harlem. Writing allows him to negotiate a space in the environment because it affixes him to something that is concrete and permanent. The idea is that the tenement has and will always be there and as long as it is there, he will always be there affixed to that particular space. Writing, as performed by ex-slaves and slaves, acted as verification of humanity, functioned as a subversive form of criticism of America and the institution of slavery, and gave the writer a voice and audience that did not exist prior to writing. Writing encompasses all of this for Brown especially because in his case it is an instance of defacement. Although he does not plainly state this, his dream contains an instance of writing and also the feeling that he cannot see himself outside of or without Harlem. For Brown, the

33 tenement building in which he and his family live represents Harlem. It is the urban space in which he is trying to assert his urban power. By writing on the walls, he is establishing his voice as a native resident and uses profanities as a method to gain attention so that his voice will be heard. The writing and the nature of the writing also reveal that he has been written into the landscape but in a sacrilegious way. Brown is supposed to be the inheritor of good fortune because he is born in the North, the Promised Land, but he is not because the North is anything but the Promised Land. As a result, he was in somewhat of a damned situation where he has to wander the terrain to learn how to maneuver it. He is on a mission to be seen and heard as he presumes men are. Brown‘s goal as a Harlem resident in the late 1940s and the 1950s is to define himself so that his identity is completely disconnected from his migrant parents and the South. He desires to become a possessor of urban power rather than a victim of the —post-South“ America for black migrants in the North that his parents have come to be. But he is not sure how to negotiate successfully such a transfer of power because both of his parents have unsuccessfully attempted to do the same. They were not unsuccessful because of the ineffectiveness of their methods but because of their ignorance of the urban space and their inability to negotiate their place within it. Brown must also define himself against the South because, through his perception of his parents, he believes that anything of a Southern nature would be ineffective in his mission to capture a sense of black masculinity that is not demeaning, belittling, or weak. Both of Brown‘s parents attempt to negotiate personal space in Harlem, but they utilize different methods. Brown‘s mother relies on church as a site of resistance, but it does not develop into such because according to Brown, the church becomes another place from which people are hustled. In the church, the hustler is typically the leader; a woman preacher named Mrs. Rogers led the church Brown‘s mother attended. Brown writes: To me, a church was a church-apartment where somebody lined up a lot of kitchen chairs in a few rows, a preacher did a lot of shouting about the Lord, people jumped up and down until they got knocked down by the spirit, and Mrs. Rogers put bowls of money on a kitchen table and kept pointing to it and asking for more. It was a place where I had to stand up until I couldn”t stand anymore and then had to sit down on hard wooden chairs. (27) The black church is typically a site of resistance in which an urban Northerner could negotiate personal space and power because it is a community-centered institution that allows a congregation of like-

34 minded individuals, in this case Southern migrants, an opportunity to create bonds that carry the same weight as those created in the South around church and community. But the church that Brown is introduced to is devoid of any of these properties. In this instance, Brown presents the black church as a kind of hustle. As Mary Pattillo-McCoy states in —Church as a Strategy of Action in the Black Community,“ —The church acts simultaneously as a school, a bank, a benevolent society, a political organization, a party hall, and a spiritual base. As one of the few institutions owned and operated by African Americans, the church is often the center of activity in black communities“ (769). The black church is therefore an all-encompassing institution that creates a safe place for its members as the pillar of the community. In addition, Pattillo-McCoy states: The collective orientation of black Christian rhetoric and ritual is the key to understanding why these [the call-and-response style and the preacher and the congregation] are appropriate tools for conducting social action in the black community … Practices such as holding hands during prayer, participating through antiphonal calls of agreement or dissent, and singing, clapping, and swaying to music all enact the collective goals expressed in the content of social action. Repeating biblical excerpts that illustrate God‘s concrete interventions on behalf of the faithful and singing together the refrain —Jesus on the main line, tell him what you want,“ serve similar purposes in mustering activist fervor and optimistic determination. (770) Patillo-McCoy‘s illustration reveals not only the function of rhetoric and ritual of the black Christian experience but also how they are tools that can be utilized to build self-affirming communities. These communities assist in creating congregations of people who are no longer simply victims of urban powers but individuals and a collective group that possess the tools to negotiate their own personal space. The church house that Brown‘s mother attends possesses the rhetoric and ritual but does not possess the power to create a community because the preacher does not see beyond her pocket. It becomes an institution of familiarity. It resembles a black church in its processes but functions with one goal in mind, namely as a profitable enterprise that placated the ease and confusion that followed the migrants. Brown presents an institution that functions as an anesthetic and further accentuates the point by juxtaposing it with drunkenness. Specifically, Brown aligns his mother‘s spiritual drunkenness with his father‘s literal drunkenness. Brown‘s father couples drinking alcohol and singing spirituals. Brown writes:

Even though Dad didn‘t care for preachers and churches, he had a lot of religion in his own way. Most of the time, his religion didn‘t show. But on Saturday night, those who didn‘t see it heard it. Sometimes Dad would get religious on Friday nights too. But Saturday night was a must. Because it always took liquor to start Dad to singing spirituals and talking about the Lord, I thought for years that this lordly feeling was something in a bottle of whiskey. … You drink it and the next thing you know, you‘re doing things. To me, it was like castor oil or black draught. You drink it and the next thing you know, you‘re doing things. (27) His drinking provides relief or escape from the work week; it is reserved for the weekends just as church is. Brown introduces this revelation by juxtaposing scenes of his father‘s alcoholism with scenes of Mrs. Rogers. Just as the black church became a salve, the community building and sustaining properties of the spiritual are drenched in alcohol and are just as ineffective as Mrs. Rogers‘ version of the black church. As Charsee Charlotte Lawrence-McIntyre argues in —The Double Meaning of the Spirituals,“ —The music of Black Americans serve as a microcosm of the black experience in America. … the word spirituals can be substituted by other survival techniques of oppressed people“ (399). Further, according to Langston Hughes, —The Spirituals are group songs … are religious songs, born in camp meetings and remote plantation districts …are escape songs, looking toward heaven, tomorrow, and God“ (43). They are as John Lovell, Jr. states —a folk group‘s answer to life“ (638). Brown‘s father‘s use of the spirituals is devoid of any of the redemptive qualities. They functioned as tools that assisted in father/son bonding and his own answer to Northern urban life. Brown‘s father‘s consumption of alcohol extricates the past work week and all of its difficulties from his memory just as castor oil would cleanse the bowels. It allows him to live numb to the realities of Harlem just as the incarnation of the black church that occurs in Mrs. Roger‘s apartment utilizes rhetoric to make the physical reality of Harlem seem irrelevant since Heaven is the goal. Brown further exemplifies the role anesthetics and blinders play in Harlem by describing the typical Sunday morning scene. He writes: It was Sunday morning. Kids were coming from church with their mothers and fathers, and some people were sick and vomiting on the street. Most of the people were dressed up, and vomit was all over the street near the beer gardens. There was a lot of blood near the beer gardens and all over the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue. This was real Sunday morning--a lot of blood and vomit and people all dressed up going to church. Some of

them were all dressed up and sleeping on the sidewalk or sleeping on building stoops. (51) In the scene, urban reality is exposed, and like the juxtaposition of Brown‘s father and Mrs. Rogers, the black church and Saturday night‘s leftovers move in tandem, suggesting that, even beyond Mrs. Rogers and his father, they serve the same purpose of numbing inhabitants of Harlem from the reality of their lives and surroundings. Brown‘s mother searched for the familiar black church of the South in the North, but Brown‘s father attempted to acclimate himself to the North by consuming the culture as it is informed by hustler masculinity. He becomes a small time street hustler using a game similar to three-card Monte that uses nutshells and a pea instead. Brown never states that his father was a hustler or that he even attempted to be one, but he infers the idea when his father slyly gives Brown advice just before he was to leave to go to a juvenile detention center. Brown writes: When I came back with the pea, Dad had set up the table and was sitting at it with three half nutshells in front of him. I gave him the pea, and Dad started switching the shells around the way Mr. Jimmy used to do. It looked like Dad was doing it real slow, and I was sure I knew where the pea was all the time. I never knew that Dad could do that trick, and even then I was sure he was doing it too slow.… Ten times I picked up the wrong shell. After I made that last wrong pick, Dad looked at me and just kept shaking his head for a little while. Then he said, —That‘s jis what you been doin‘ all your life, lookin‘ for a pea that ain‘t there. And I‘m mighty ”fraid that‘s how you gon end your whole life, lookin‘ for that pea. (71) There is no indication as to why Brown‘s father failed at hustling or chose not to, and the previous quote indicates that it was not just something that he had casually learned. He knew what he was doing and convinces Brown to the point that he compares his father to Mr. Jimmy, who —was the slickest cat on Eighth Ave … knew how to ”git by‘ in the streets so well that he had never had a job since he left Alabama twenty years before … [and] changed cars every year, dressed up with shining shoes every day of the week, always had plenty of money, always had a pretty woman with him, and kept his hair slick back“ (68). Brown obviously idolizes Mr. Jimmy as does all his friends and seemingly included his father in his ranks. His reading of his son is most telling about his own experience. He is essentially saying that he had resolved to hopelessness after realizing that he had been searching for something that

37 was not there. To fill the void left by this hopelessness, Brown‘s father was abusive towards his children, and he drank. Brown‘s reaction lies in his acquisition of hustler masculinity because it allows him to recreate family and community and works against his parents‘ Southernness. It allows him to negotiate a personal space that gives him power to define himself rather than to be defined as his parents have allowed themselves to be. Their attempts to recreate community have failed them, and it becomes Brown‘s task to rectify some form of community for himself. According to Keith Clark in Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest Gaines, and August Wilson (2002), Baldwin, Gaines, and Wilson each create a protagonist, —who comes to realize the empowering effects of immersing oneself in his own community--a place with like minded, black native sons and daughters“ and functions as an alternative to the —worlds where chaos and, predictably, self-erasure were natural outcomes“ (15). Although Clark‘s argument is built upon the fictive worlds created by black male authors, it also applies to the environment described in Brown‘s narrative. Hustler masculinity functions as a connector that brings together a group of males who have a shared experience. They rely on the goading and approval of each other to attain a personal space that is not informed by the limiting or degrading borders that define the spaces to which their parents and other adults have allowed themselves to be relegated. Baker suggests that the growth that Brown undergoes by assuming hustler masculinity and participating in the culture is vertical, suggesting that Brown is allowing the environment to define the parameters of his identity and that he is only acting out against the environment.17 Contrary to what Baker suggests, however, this early growth within hustler masculinity is horizontal. Essentially, hustler masculinity by definition is a form of black masculinity that extends itself beyond the borders to identify and acquire masculinity. This horizontal extension beyond the ghetto becomes the model for his later growth and redefinition of self within Harlem because of the aforementioned qualities that hustler masculinity encompasses. In order to build their own communities, these young black males pass through a rite of passage. By passing figuratively from boyhood to manhood as a rite of passage suggests, these males create

17 With regard to the movements that occur throughout the text, Baker writes, —The expansion has been simply vertical as the protagonist has become more deeply involved in the life of crime. Now, at the age of seventeen, the first horizontal expansion of the book occurs as the narrator moves to Greenwich Village. In effect, the movement is equal to a movement from the colony to the mainland; the narrator starts on the road to development outside the ghetto. The horizontal expansion is not only defined in terms of the physical move, but also in terms of the narrator‘s point of view toward life“ (57).

38 bonds that are used to build and sustain the male-centered community hustler masculinity enables. It creates such bonds because it establishes a set of linked lived experiences that allow them to relate to one another on a personal basis. In The Ritual Process (1969), Victor W. Turner defines rites of passage as the following:18 All rites of passage or ”transitions‘ are marked by three phases: separation, margin (or limen, signifying ”threshold‘ in Latin), and aggregation. The first phase (of separation) comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group either from an earlier fixed point in the social structure, from a set of cultural conditions (a ”state‘), or from both. During the intervening ”liminal‘ period, the characteristics of the ritual subject (the ”passenger‘) are ambiguous; he passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state. In the third phase (reaggregation or reincorporation), the passage is consummated. The ritual subject, individual or corporate, is in a relatively stable state once more and, by virtue of this, has rights and obligations vis-à-vis others of a clearly defined and ”structural‘ type; he is expected to behave in accordance with certain norms and ethical standards binding on incumbents of social position in a system of such positions. (95) Brown passes through the separation phase early realizing that neither of his parents have the ability to provide him with models of living that give him the power to define himself. They have not succeeded in building or joining reflective communities. They have allowed themselves to be isolated. As a result, Brown rejects both. He then passes through a period during which he is simply trying on the persona of hustler. He learns how to perform various scams, but it is not until he actually begins to dress like a man,

18 Turner‘s study is based on Arnold van Gennep‘s theory on rites of passage and is focused on ritual in Central Africa with a majority of the fieldwork done in the Ndemdu of northwestern Zambia. He is concerned with ritual processes in tribes and villages. Although he does not focus on ritual in urban areas, he does state: —The Ndembu belong to a great congeries of West and Central African cultures“ (4). Studies such as Newbell Puckett‘s Folk Beliefs of the Southern egro (1926), Carter G. Woodson and W.E.B. Du Bois‘s The African Background Outlined (1936), Guy Johnson‘s Drum and Shadow (1940) Richard Price‘s An Anthropological Approach to the AfroAmerican Past: A Caribbean Perspective (1976), Peter Wood‘s Black Majority (1974), Winifred Vass‘s The Bantu Speaking Heritage of the United States (1979), Margaret Washington‘s “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and CommunityCulture among the Gullahs (1988), and the collection Africanisms in American Culture (1991), edited by Joseph E. Holloway, argue that aspects of West and Central African culture were retained in aspects of African American culture and gives credence to the concept of applying the ideas expressed in Turner‘s study to this particular study.

39 when he begins to wear pants instead of short pants, that he begins to function as a hustler. His hustler phase is guided by Johnny D., a young hustler whom Brown admirers. Hustler masculinity allows young black males to function in their communities among each other similar to white middle-class men who function in the industries and markets that they constructed. Unlike the upwardly mobile white men, these black boys do not rely on their own definitions but rely upon those that they attain from watching these men. Brown builds a community that reiterates this idea. He writes, —I had to stay straight with these cats I knew because I didn‘t have anybody else, and didn‘t have anyplace else to go, unless I hung out over in Brooklyn, and in Brooklyn it was the same thing“ (122). For Brown the camaraderie that hustler masculinity has allowed him to create, amongst him and his male friends, functions as an answer to the inadequacies that he sees in his own family. He replaces his family with these boys because they have a shared belief about the environment in which they live and understand their place in that environment. It is through the assumption of hustler masculinity that they come together. Of course, hustler masculinity proves to be inadequate for various reasons. Hustler masculinity is built upon a folk character-type that is in and of itself inadequate. What has been described as a hustler or as hustler masculinity, Brown terms —bad nigger“ (122). According to Brown, —the only thing in life a bad nigger was scared of was living too long. This just meant that if you were going to be respected in Harlem, you had to be a bad nigger; and if you were going to be a bad nigger, you had to be ready to die“ (122). Brown‘s description of the bad nigger coincides with John W. Roberts‘ description of the folklore character-type in From Trickster to Badman: the Black Folk Hero in Slavery and Freedom (1989). As Roberts defines them, bad niggers were individuals [who] characteristically adopted aggressive behaviors in the slave system and refused to accept either the masters‘ physical powers as a match for their own physical powers, or to accept the values of the black community as binding on them. They sought through open defiance, violence, and confrontation to improve their lot regardless of the consequences of their actions for their owner or the slave community‘s welfare. (176) After slavery, they were conceptualized as heroes and —became ”men‘ and ”women‘ in the eyes of black people and provided a model of aggressive action for achieving the dreams of freedom through political action“ (Roberts 177). It is evident in Brown‘s text that the bad nigger of slavery lived well beyond slavery. Brown first encounters the character-type in human form when he is sent to the South for a year. Brown states, —The best songs were sung at the funerals for the ”bad niggers.‘ I learned that a bad nigger

40 was a nigger who ”didn‘t take no shit from nobody‘ and that even the ”crackers‘ didn‘t mess with him. Because a bad nigger raised so much hell in life, people couldn‘t just put him in the ground and forget him“ (47). Here the reader learns that the actions and reactions of the —bad nigger“ are without direction and that he is indiscriminately violent and confrontational. This makes the hustlers‘ ability to sustain any kind of male-centered or recuperative community impossible because, although they see themselves as similar, they are also solely concerned with the survival of self, even if it is at the expense of a comrade‘s life or well being. Although the idea of the bad nigger seems to be far removed from Brown in terms of time and distance, the bad nigger is very much alive in the North in the form of the hustler. Johnny D. typifies this character-type and is in essence the evolution, or the transformation, of the character-type once he crosses the Mason/Dixon Line. He has multiple hustles and is held in high regards within the community, especially by the young black males, while also being feared and, to a certain extent, despised by the very community in which he operates. The violence and confrontational nature of the character-type is reapplied in the North and confined to the poor black sections of the city. In the case of Brown‘s narrative, the reworking of the bad nigger is confined to Harlem and other similarly confined and controlled boroughs and neighborhoods. Within these neighborhoods, young black boys become the apprentices of the hustlers that they admire and begin to transform themselves completely so that they are no longer small-time hoodlums or delinquents but hustlers. The problem with the assumption of hustler masculinity is that the fraternal relationships and male-centered communities that it creates rely on notions of masculinity that champion individuality and competition, which make it difficult to maintain any real community, so like the hustler himself, the community in which he involves himself becomes a façade of sorts. It is also a way of life that relies on narcotics as an escape from the reality of both life as a hustler and the poverty that exists in the portion of the city that they are exploiting. Hustler masculinity, then, because it champions individuality and competition, lacks trust and the ability to sustain any real homosocial relationships, negating any semblance of an effective male-centered community. Brown, though he has been taught how to hustle effectively by Johnny D., comes to realize the harm that hustler masculinity has done to him and to the people around him. The picture of Harlem in the 1940s and 1950s was a grim one. As Eric C. Schneider writes in Smack: Heroin and the American City, Neighborhood boys hustled money for heroin, while girls took their place in the hooker‘s lineup on 125th Street. If jazz musicians, hustlers, and white hipsters formed a cultural

elite of sorts, the same cannot be said of the largely poor adolescents who made up the vast majority of new heroin users in the years after 1945. They were socially and economically marginal, limited by a color line to the oldest neighborhoods, shabbiest schools, and worst jobs. Heroin offered a way to identify with the hipsters, the —cool cats“ in the neighborhood, rather than the working squares–their parents whose dreams of a promised land had soured. … Candy stores, pool halls, rooftops, parks, basement clubs– the institutions of an urban adolescence–were the social settings in which youngsters learned about heroin. (35) It is through the mass introduction of heroin in Harlem that the crude nature of hustler masculinity is exposed to him as he witnesses many with whom he grew up succumb to an addiction that dictates their function within Harlem and among each other. They hustle to feed their habits, just as they once hustled to feed their identities and later their egos. Although hustler masculinity is problematic, it also assists as a catalyst towards a more communal-oriented black masculinity. Regardless of the fact that it builds false masculinities and counterfeit male-centered communities, they are still communities. Of course, these male-centered communities that are built around hustler masculinity fail to come to such an end. As he attempts to exist in this environment adulterated by the heroin haze that hangs in Harlem, Brown comes to understand that hustler masculinity is nothing more than a mask worn as a reaction that seeks to set the parameters of this definition of black masculinity. They use hustler masculinity as a weapon that proves to be ineffective because the risks and consequences outweigh the immediate benefits. The only other option available to Brown is running. Running does not refer to the running and hiding that occurs in the —Flight“ section of Wright‘s ative Son. Here, running simply means moving oneself to another environment so that the previous environment can be analyzed from the outside. Brown‘s running equates to searching for other options. It begins with returning to school and moving out of Harlem without actually releasing hustler masculinity or allowing Harlem to release its hold on him. He moves to Greenwich Village where he allows himself to explore and experience other options. As Clark states, —Space functions metaphorically, signifying a psychic and spiritual freeing of oneself from enshackling definitions of self, whether from inside or outside one‘s cultural milieu“ (21). The space that this newly removed environment creates allows Brown to shed away the mask slowly so that he can begin a negotiation for power and masculinity within the confines the urban environment created. Outside of Harlem, Brown gives himself permission to search for an alternative mode of living.

One of these options lies in his response to music, specifically jazz. Years before, while Brown is in a youth detention center, he is introduced to jazz. Jazz, like other forms of African American music, —inevitably reflects the social consciousness of the African-American musician during any time period“ (Bakersville The Impact 2). According to John D. Bakersville in The Impact of Black ationalist Ideology on American Jazz Music of the 1960s and 1970s (2003), —African-American musical endeavors are influenced by these various interrelated contexts [cultural, political, social, and economic position] because the musician draws from his/her life experiences for artistic inspiration“ (2). As LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) also states in Blues People: egro Music in White America (1963), —The Negro music that developed in the forties had more than an accidental implication of social upheaval associated with it. To a certain extent, this music resulted from conscious attempts to remove it from the danger of mainstream dilution or even understanding“ (188). Jones also contends that the —musicians of the forties, however, understood the frustration of American society proposed for the Negro, i.e., that the only assimilation that society provided was toward the disappearance of the most important things that the black man possessed, without even the political and economic reimbursement afforded that white American“ (Jones Blues People 186). Charlie —Yardbird“ Parker‘s Charlie Parker with Strings is the first recording with which Brown falls in love. He is particularly drawn to Parker‘s interpretation of Ira and George Gershwin‘s —Summertime“ from the folk opera, Porgy and Bess. —Summertime“ is important for Brown‘s own growth because it is an example of what he must do to achieve a form of masculinity that transcends white middle-class masculinity. Parker‘s —Summertime“ is a Northern and urban interpretation of a song that was written as a Southern song, and this is what Brown has to do. He has to learn to do what his parents have not been able to do. He has to create a way of living in the North in which he can maintain himself as his parents were presumably able to do in the South. Bebop is Brown‘s answer because as Guthrie P. Ramsey, Jr. states, —Bebop worked in a self-conscious way to dispel the stereotypical image of shuffling, smiling Negro entertainers, who provided danceable beat and recognizable melodies for segregated audiences. Bebop musicians seemed to symbolize a new order. Unwilling to accept the limits placed on black jazz musicians by the white-dominated music business, they took a stance that helped give their music a sharp and, to many, an uncomfortable edge“ (Race Music 106). It is not until later as a young adult that he reintroduces himself to the music through his interest in piano. Piano functions first as simply a hobby for Brown and is reflective of all of the other changes that have occurred in Brown‘s life, but it does not extend beyond that as long as he practices and learns

43 outside of Harlem. Brown does not experience the communal aspects of composing music because he practices in a vacuum of sorts since his teacher is Jewish and is the only person that he is in contact with when he is playing. Jazz is a communal art that relies on the performers‘ abilities to respond to each other as if they are having a conversation. It is not until he returns to Harlem and places himself in the company of other musicians, who are also at similar stages in their own life that he is able to realize this communal aspect of the art. Brown describes his new cohorts: They didn‘t want to be a part of street life. Some of them had just awakened to this fact. They were the same cats who had lived according to the code of the street. Now they were the only young people in the community who were doing anything worthwhile. They were married, they had good jobs, and they were always dressed presentably. They had to stand out, because most of the young people in the community were junkies. Anybody who wasn‘t a junkie stood out. They became a new class, the young elite of the Harlem community. (354) Brown comments later, —I felt that this was a new Harlem“ (355). This is the Harlem that Brown rejoins. And as a member of this new Harlem, Brown becomes an affirming member not only of the male- centered community as a musician but an affirming member of the wider Harlem community. As he states, —It was as though I had found my place and Harlem had found its place. We were suited for each other now“ (360). He becomes a help rather than a hindrance to the community. It also gives him the ability to see that the church is of value within the community. After meeting and conversing with Reverend James, he writes, Reverend James seemed to know a lot about street life that I never expected any minister to know. It‘s not something that you read in the papers or that sort of thing. He just knew people. He understood human nature, and he knew the kind of people who became involved in street life. When he talked about them, he talked about them as people, not as things, fallen souls, or that sort of nonsense. He seemed to be a person, somebody who knew what was really going on. As a matter of fact, as first I suspected him of being an ex-hustler or something like that; but after talking to him, I knew that this couldn‘t be the case. (381) Reverend James revises Brown‘s feelings about preachers and religion. Brown proves this by later enlisting the assistance of Reverend James to guide his brother Pimp away from the hustling and addiction in which he was once entrenched. Brown‘s ability to trust that Reverend James can assist in

44 helping his brother is significant because it shows that Brown has resolved his personal feelings with religion and the church. Although it takes an exit from and a re-entrance into Harlem for Brown to realize a self and community affirming black masculinity, they are inevitable. Through hustler masculinity, Brown learns and understands how America operates and how it correlates with hustler masculinity. It also teaches him that he will never be recognized as part of the wider American culture regardless of how much his lifestyle is reflective of it. He must renegotiate his space by changing the nature of the space altogether and by legally operating outside the confines placed on Harlem. For that reason, hustler masculinity is a catalyst because it places its subject into two worlds of convention and rejection simultaneously, providing the foundation for future existence within a reliable source of masculinity that is self- reflective, self-defining, and self-sustaining. Manchild in the Promised Land demonstrates how hustler masculinity creates a space for young black men who find the available, more agreeable forms of masculinity less than agreeable. It gives them the opportunity to perform a skewed version of hegemonic masculinity and also to be critical of how it affects the people around them and of how their communities are affected. Its revealed inadequacies, such as unstable communities and the promise of a short life, forces them to grasp a masculinity that is affirming but also allows them to be contributing members to their communities that they fully rejoin.

CHAPTER THREE

“DO’T BELIEVE THE HYPE”: MALCOLM X’S JOUREY FROM HUSTLER

TO BLACK LEADER OF THE DIASPORA

Like the preceding narrative, The Autobiography of Malcolm X is a narrative search for identity from boyhood to manhood that relies heavily on the establishment of male-centered communities, self- determination, and self-definition that comprise a hustler masculinity used to achieve this end. Previous studies of Malcolm X‘s autobiography have failed to consider fully the impact that Malcolm X‘s acquaintance with hustler masculinity had on his life and how it influenced his later worldview, which could be called an emerging Pan-Africanist worldview. Though many critics have analyzed Malcolm X‘s narrative along with his speeches, many have failed to explain his life in its entirety. In —X Marks the Spot: A Critical Reading of Malcolm X‘s Readers,“ Michael Eric Dyson writes: Much of writing about Malcolm has either lost its way in the murky waters of psychology dissolved from history or simply substituted--given racial politics in the United States-- defensive praise for critical appraisal. At times, insights on Malcolm have been tarnished by insular ideological arguments that neither illuminate nor surprise. Malcolm X was too formidable a historic figure--the movements he led too variable and contradictory, the passion and intelligence too extraordinary and disconcerting--to be viewed through a narrow cultural prism. (262-3) Simply put, most critics who come to Malcolm X‘s autobiography approach this well-known work with their own preconceived notions and biases and do not allow the text, the speeches, or the man to speak. In most cases, many critics fail to recognize the significance and possible meaning of the last stage of his life when he becomes El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz.19 This chapter shows how hustler masculinity influenced Malcolm X‘s transformation into El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. Malcolm X‘s transition to El-

19 Beyond critics and reviewers misrepresenting or misinterpreting Malcolm X, his portrayal in film presents similar issues. In Spike Lee‘s Malcolm X, Lee does not seem to consider the possible importance of Malcolm‘s later life. Although his film is based on the book, he does not offer an in depth presentation of Malcolm X‘s transition to Sunni Islam or his transforming political and racial views to broaden the understanding of Malcolm.

Hajj Malik El-Shabazz can be described as a spiritual conversion and a political rebirth. Neither is possible without the methods of self-definition through resistance to racist notions of an essentialized black masculinity that Malcolm X learns as a result of performing hustler masculinity. This study argues that Malcolm X‘s socialization into poor, urban black culture through hustler masculinity materializes into his final spiritual conversion and his political rebirth as an emerging Pan-Africanist because it provides him with a space for self-definition and self-determination and teaches him the importance of being a part of a larger community. Although there are numerous studies on Malcolm X‘s narrative, most have not attempted to make sense of —hustler Malcolm X.“ Previous studies of The Autobiography (which will be discussed shortly) have chosen to read the narrative in ways that highlight the conversion aspect while negating or ignoring Malcolm X‘s hustler phase as part of the continuum towards his conversion in a need to shape the trajectory of Malcolm X‘s life without properly addressing the contradictions that form the whole of his life. This academic tendency is problematic because such analyses fail to account for the period that bears a considerable amount of weight on the rest of his life. Dyson states, —I have identified at least four Malcolm Xs who emerge in the intellectual investigations of his life and career: Malcolm X as hero and saint, Malcolm X as public moralist, Malcolm X as victim and vehicle of psycho-historical forces, and Malcolm X as revolutionary figure by his career trajectory from nationalist to alleged socialist“ (263). He later asserts, —The writings make up an intellectual universe riddled with philosophical blindness and ideological constraints, filled with problematic interpretation, and sometimes brimming with brilliant insights“ (263). Critics such as David Dudley, Lawrence B. Goodheart, Shirley K. Rose, Warner Bertoff, and John D. Groppe, among other scholars, read Malcolm X‘s narrative within narrow frameworks that do not attempt to gauge the impact Malcolm X‘s young adult years had on his last years. For instance, Dudley and Goodheart choose to utilize psychological frameworks to engage in the analysis of the narrative. In —Out from the Shadow: Malcolm X,“ Dudley utilizes conventions of the conversion narrative and Harold Bloom‘s interpretation of Freud‘s —Oedipal Complex“ to guide his reading of the narrative. Dudley states, —First intended as a paean to Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X‘s ”savior,‘ The Autobiography of Malcolm X in its final form records Malcolm X‘s fight for intellectual and emotional independence--his quest to think for himself and to be himself“ [italics in the original] (167). Essentially, Malcolm X‘s mission in the creation of himself in the text is to create a self that is separate from Elijah Muhammad, who functions as his surrogate father. As a result, the hustler phase of Malcolm X‘s life is simply referred to and judged in purely moral and criminal terms that have little

47 relevance other than to shed light on Malcolm X‘s later relationship to Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam. On the other hand, in —The Odyssey of Malcolm X: An Eriksonian Interpretation,“ Goodheart contributes a similar reading but suggests that Malcolm X only realizes a —meaningful black identity … partially“ (48). Goodheart utilizes Erik H. Erikson‘s identity model as defined in —The Concept of Identity in Race Relations: Notes and Queries“ to mark the different stages of Malcolm X‘s identity development in his narrative, but like Dudley, he also labels Malcolm X‘s young adult life as a hustler based on outside perception. He calls it a —”negative identity‘“ (Erikson qtd. 48). Although both Dudley and Goodheart‘s readings are problematic, they are valuable because they provide lenses through which the text can be read, and they also critically engage the hustler phase of Malcolm X‘s life. Dudley states, —It [The Autobiography of Malcolm X] exemplifies in a striking way a central theme in all autobiography, the creation of a free, autobiographical ”I‘ that is identified with, yet distinct from, the writer“ (167). Dudley reasons that the author is recreating himself with a retrospective gaze that separates the two. This explanation is important because it suggests that in the creation of the narrative, the author is editing his identity as he writes so that it logically progresses to a desired end. Goodheart focuses on the re-creation of self in an attempt to gain the power of self-definition. Combining Dudley and Goodheart reveals how hustler masculinity is an attempt to define the self, one that pushes Malcolm X towards what may have been his final definition of self as an emerging Pan- Africanist. Beyond Dudley and Goodheart‘s theories, The Autobiography is and was intended to be an autobiography and conversion narrative and as a result is shaped within specific conventions. The creation of this autobiographical —I“ involves more than posturing of self and re-conceptualization of oneself in light of the sum of one‘s combined experiences. It relies on the author‘s ability to narrate his/her life retrospectively through the filter of the author‘s ideological bent, generating a level of self- criticism and knowing that would otherwise be lacking. For the Autobiography, this means Malcolm X is looking back over his life as an emerging Pan-Africanist and categorizing the different phases of his life in relation to that lens, and thus, hustler masculinity is a direct influence on how Malcolm X reaches this autobiographical —I“ because it recapitulates and defines the search for community theme that is present throughout the narrative. His narrative is one in which he is rejected from one community and spends the rest of the narrative joining, mastering, and departing or being expelled from communities. It is during the two hustler phases of his narrative that Malcolm X successfully joins a community.

In other words, Malcolm X (re)creates a version of himself that is in search of identity and community as they are defined within the Pan-African Movement. In —The Semiotics of Salvation: Malcolm X and the Autobiographical Self,“ Bashir M. El-Beshti argues against readings that separate El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz from the previous incarnations of Malcolm X because it does not fit into the conventional definition of autobiography as a genre, which reads like a Bildüngsroman where the author is writing about himself retrospectively and commenting on his life with a mature voice. El-Beshti writes, quoting Betty Shabazz, —”a lot of people say that Malcolm X changes after the trip (to Mecca), but they never look at the totality and see that the man‘s entire scope had been broadened. They look at every individual change and say that Malcolm X had changed from one thing to another‘“ (Shabazz qtd. 363). In other words, the changes were part of a continuum in which the previous identity greatly influences the succeeding identity. Although Malcolm X begins dictating his narrative to Alex Haley before his break with the Nation of Islam, he is already thinking within a framework that extends far beyond the Nation of Islam‘s rhetoric. Comments that he makes in —Message to the Grass Roots“ to the Detroit Council for Human Rights on November 10, 1963, several weeks before his silencing by the Nation of Islam, which led to his separation, reveal a Malcolm X who is thinking in terms that are not exclusively nationalist. He is thinking beyond blackness and beyond the United States. He states: The white man knows what a revolution is. He knows that the black revolution is worldwide in scope and in nature. The black revolution is sweeping Asia, is sweeping Africa, is rearing its head in Latin America. The Cuban Revolution--that‘s a revolution. They overturned the system. Revolution is in Asia, revolution is in Africa, and the white man is screaming because he sees revolution in Latin America. (X, Malcolm 9) Malcolm X is referring to the black man‘s struggle in the United States as part of a larger struggle that links non-Westerners as a cooperative group reacting against Western domination. Although Malcolm X never labels what he is speaking of as Pan-Africanism and because he looks beyond Africa to other non- Western territories, it fits within the framework of Pan-Africanism, and Malcolm X‘s last phase of life was too short to determine how far beyond Pan-Africanism he would have shifted politically. In —The Pan-African Movement: the Search for Organization and Community,“ Charles F. Andrain states, —The Pan-African movement exemplifies the contemporary African search for organization and community. The Pan-Africanists stress the community of interests and experiences of Africans and thereby call attention to the political and social issues which transcend the various territorial nationalist movements“ (5). In this definition of Pan-Africanism, the focus is on points of intersection of interests and

49 experiences of people within the African Diaspora. It is creating or re-creating political links among people of African descent around the globe. For example, in April of 1964 in —Black Revolution,“ Malcolm X asserts: What happens to a black man in America today happens to a black man in Africa. What happens to a black man in America and Africa happens to a black man in Asia and to the man down in Latin America. What happens to one of us today happens to all of us. And when this is realized, I think that the whites–who are intelligent even if they aren‘t moral or aren‘t just and aren‘t impressed by legalities–those who are intelligent will realize that when they touch this one, they are touching all of them, and this in itself will have a tendency to be a checking factor. (48) Malcolm X aligns the struggles of persons of African-descent globally, arguing that their experiences link them together. Beyond the idea that he is linking the Diaspora, Malcolm X is also placing himself sternly in the center of a global community, making the goals of African Americans international. Malcolm X creates an identity that is in search of a community. Beyond placing himself in a community, Malcolm X also makes language an important aspect of his journey. As he transforms himself numerous times, he must also master the relevant localized lexicon. Malcolm X has to learn the language of the community into which he steps and take command of it. It is through the command of language that Malcolm X gains the power of self-definition, when the language is working for him. As Rose argues, —Those who represent the theme that learning to read and write has allowed them [Malcolm included] to participate in a particular social group demonstrate that participation in the act of writing“ (4). Instead of learning to read and write, Malcolm X learns the power of language and when a speaker has full control of it, he can define himself and define others as well. Although Malcolm X‘s narrative is one of resistance and Malcolm X‘s early life does not fit within the framework of resistance, it is important to understanding Malcolm X as —Homeboy,“ —Red,“ —Detroit Red,“ and —Satan.“ Malcolm X as —Mascot“ is the furthest away from an identity of resistance. It is an identity of assimilation or emulation. Malcolm is placed in the care of whites after his father is allegedly murdered and his family is dismantled by the state. His early life is marked by violence and disruption. His parents constantly argued, and a violent racist response to his father‘s Pan-Africanist preaching caused the disruption of his family.20 As —Mascot,“ Malcolm is attempting to place himself

20 Malcolm writes: —I can remember hearing of ”Adam driven out of the garden into the caves of Europe,‘ ”Africa for the Africans,‘ ”Ethiopians, Awake!‘ And my father would talk about how it would not be much longer before Africa

50 within a community without being critical of his place in the community or the community‘s reluctance to accept him. He was their mascot, an oddity. Malcolm X states, —I was unique in my class, like a pink poodle“ (37). He also says, —As the ”nigger‘ of my class, I was in fact a novelty. I was in demand, I had top priority“ (34). In the household of Mrs. Swerlin, Malcolm is repetitively called —nigger“ and listens to her say things like —niggers are just that way“ (32). None of this deters Malcolm from trying to become a part of the community of whites in which he lives. Most of them, as he demonstrates in the text, disrespect him and are only interested in him because he is the sole black among a community of whites. The turning point occurs when Malcolm realizes that white Lansing is not his only option. Malcolm X states that in the summer of 1940, he went to Boston to visit his sister Ella. There, for the first time since the destruction of his family, Malcolm is in the presence of a black community. In Boston, he witnessed a variety of black people as he had never seen in Lansing. After returning to Lansing, Malcolm X writes, —I continued to think constantly about all that I had seen in Boston, and about the way I had felt there. I know now that it was the sense of being a real part of a mass of my own kind, for the first time“ (42). Prior to his visit to Boston, Malcolm X had essentially stripped himself of all those qualities that he associated with his father in an effort to gain entrance into the white community. His reaction to the disrespect of whites is opposite of how his father would react. At this point in his life, the goals of a Pan-Africanist are not viable to Malcolm X‘s desire to integrate himself into Lansing‘s white community. Malcolm X demonstrates how the inability to locate oneself in a self- reflective community can distort that individual‘s view of himself. Throughout the —Mascot“ portion of the narrative, Malcolm X communicates directly with integrationists, using his own story as a warning. Malcolm X‘s return to Lansing marks a change in his identity and a new understanding of his socialization in Lansing. According to Rose: At this time, however, the actual acquisition of literacy skills is secondary to his socialization to the values of a literate society. Malcolm Little, the only black student in the class, was so popular among his classmates that he was asked to join numerous extracurricular organizations. But the acceptance he enjoyed was an acceptance based on his difference from his classmates, not on his equality with them. (5)

would be completely run by Negroes‘--”by black men,‘ was the phrase used. ”No one knows when the hour of Africa‘s redemption cometh. It is in the wind. It is coming. One day, like a storm, it will be here.‘ I remember seeing the big, shiny photographs of Marcus Garvey that were passed from hand to hand…. the meetings always closed with my father saying, several times, and the people chanting after him, ”Up, you mighty race, you can accomplish what you will!‘“ (9)

While in Lansing, Malcolm acquires the language but exchanges it for what he perceives is acceptance. Malcolm Little begins to use and transform the language he has learned. If Malcolm X had not discovered the importance of community, he would probably still be in Lansing as a carpenter, as his English teacher Mr. Ostrowski had suggested, but he does not remain there. Malcolm allows himself to comprehend the meaning of the word —nigger“ (43) and comments concerning the limits of black people‘s abilities. That comprehension forces Malcolm to realize that he would never be able to join the white community because he would never be more than their mascot and end up embracing a form of black masculinity that he would later see as degrading. Malcolm X writes, It was then that I began to change--inside. I drew away from white people. I came to class, and I answered when called upon. It became a physical strain to sit in Mr. Ostrowski‘s class. Where —nigger“ had slipped off my back before, wherever I heard it now, I stopped and looked at whoever said it. And they looked surprised that I did. I quit hearing so much —nigger“ and —What‘s wrong?“--which was the way I wanted it. Nobody, including the teachers, could decide what had come over me. I knew I was being discussed. (44) In response, Goodheart states, —The encounter with Ostrowski marked an identity crisis, a racist preemption of young Malcolm‘s self-perception. … Knowing that his efforts to aspire to white standards were futile, Malcolm fatalistically responded to Ostrowski‘s pronouncement. He fled“ (51). Although this may be one way of reading this episode, read in Pan-Africanist terms, Malcolm realized that there was no hope of achieving —a sense of community solidarity“ (Andrain 6). Malcolm flees Lansing, not as a reaction, but in search of a community, and he heads for Boston because he knows that he will be able find a self-reflective community there. Malcolm journeys towards self-definition when he runs from Lansing, Michigan, to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1941, and becomes known as —Homeboy.“ Although this title may seem random, it is a reference to his status in Roxbury at his arrival. To paraphrase Malcolm X, he looked the epitome of the rural Negro with ill-fitted clothing and kinky, poorly trimmed hair. This is how he introduces himself to urban life. Therefore, —Homeboy“ is a reference to his ignorance of black urban life and the fact that he is not that far removed from his previous way of thinking. He is enthralled by the throngs of blacks in the city, a sight that was unavailable to him in Lansing. Although there were blacks in Lansing, after his family is dismantled, Malcolm is placed and socialized within a white community. He is also critical of

52 the blacks in Lansing, whom he identifies as Christians and the middle class, because they do not attempt to assist his family after his father‘s death. Malcolm has the opportunity to live among other blacks and also positively affirm his own identity, which he could not do in Lansing. His flight to Boston is a rebirth and (re)socialization. As a result, Malcolm has returned to a symbolic infancy. He has to (re)learn all that he has accepted in terms of his blackness and how it relates to his position in society. His sister, Ella, whom he lives with, was aware of this aspect of Malcolm‘s relocation to the Roxbury section of Boston and advises him accordingly. Malcolm X writes: About my second day there in Roxbury, Ella told me that she didn‘t want me to start hunting for a job right away, like most newcomer Negroes did. She said that she had told all those she‘d brought North to take their time, to walk around, to travel the buses and the subway, and get the feel of Boston, before they tied themselves down working somewhere, because they would never again have time to really see and get to know anything about the city they were living in. (47-8) This passage expresses several ideas that relate to Malcolm‘s later move towards hustler masculinity. Hustler masculinity is about avoiding work. One has others do his work for him. If Malcolm attains a job and begins to function in a way that resembles the individuals who live around Ella in Roxbury, he can be nothing more than an unskilled worker or menial laborer, whose sole purpose for working is to survive and to live within the delusion that he will receive a piece of the American pie, that middle-class success can be his. Beyond being concerned with Malcolm exploring Boston, Ella also hints at the idea that work will soon become the focus of his life as it presumably is for many of the people who live in the section of Roxbury in which Ella resides. Malcolm himself comes to understand what she means in his own life but more so as he begins to examine and compare the lives of the blacks in the upper-class section of Roxbury. Malcolm X asserts: What I thought I was seeing there in Roxbury were high-class, educated, important Negroes, living well, working in big jobs and positions. … These Negroes walked along the sidewalks looking haughty and dignified, on their way to work, to shop, to visit, to church. I know now, of course, that what I was really seeing was only a big-city version of those ”successful‘ Negro bootblacks and janitors back in Lansing. … They prided themselves on being incomparably more ”cultured,‘ ”cultivated,‘ ”dignified,‘ and better off than their black brethren down in the ghetto, which was no further away than you

could throw a rock. Under the pitiful misapprehension that it would make them ”better,‘ these Hill Negroes were breaking their backs trying to imitate white people. (48) Malcolm does not identify with this culture because for him this community remains entrapped in the idea that they can achieve white, middle-class success. These middle-class blacks in Roxbury, who call themselves the —”Four Hundred‘“ (48), were delusional to their actual positions in society because most of them had menial or unskilled jobs yet carried themselves and dressed as if they were upper class. They imitated the upwardly mobile white middle class as Malcolm had tried to do to no avail in Lansing. His disdain for this black middle class culture forces him out of this section of Roxbury and to a more violent milieu that he views as authentic because he does not see black people attempting to emulate white people. As —Homeboy“ and tourist of Boston black communities, Malcolm is nothing more than a spectator. He has not joined a community. He does not begin to join a community until he meets Shorty, who introduces him to an alternative culture of resistance, zoot suiter culture. Malcolm begins his movement towards becoming a hustler. The transition from —Homeboy“ to —Red“ is slow. Unlike Brown, Malcolm is not a native of the area in which he is attempting to lay out a place for himself. He is the migrant, like Brown‘s parents, and must figure out how to negotiate a space in the black urban milieu without falling into the same trap as that of many Roxbury middle-class blacks. As a result, Malcolm —began going down into the ghetto section. That world of grocery stores, walk-up flats, cheap restaurants, poolrooms, bars, storefront churches, and pawnshops [that] seemed to hold a natural lure for [him]“ (51). The lure for him is that this community is the opposite of what he saw and experienced in Lansing, and it in no way resembles black, middle-class Roxbury. It is during these excursions into the poor black parts of the city that Malcolm is introduced to physical manifestations of hustler masculinity. Malcolm X writes, —I spent the first few months in town with my mouth hanging open. The sharp- dressed young ”cats‘ who hung on the corners and in the poolrooms, bars and restaurants, and who obviously didn‘t work anywhere, completely entranced me“ (51). This is all he sees of the hustler: the posturing. He is not exposed to it in its entirety until he starts the process of trying to emulate the figure. Beyond the image, Malcolm is also entranced by the language that is used in the community. Although Malcolm X does not make it clear in this portion of the narrative, language and one‘s ability to control and manipulate language are important arcs in the narrative. Language moves him through the different phases of his life. Here, urban black vernacular places him firmly in a community with which he chooses to identify. The urban space to which he is confined is not the urban space in which he lives.

Malcolm‘s choice to remove himself from middle-class Roxbury and to acclimate himself to lower-class Roxbury is a decision to remove himself from an environment that gauges itself by the construction of whiteness and place himself in an environment that weighs itself against itself. Cornel West terms this —psychic conversion“ in his criticism of Malcolm X (136). According to West, —Malcolm X‘s notion of psychic conversion holds that black people must no longer view themselves through white lenses. He claims that black people will never value themselves as long as they subscribe to a standard of valuation that devalues them“ (137). One has to be able to look at one‘s self as the standard of valuation and not outside of one‘s self or one‘s cultural milieu. Malcolm‘s discovery of Roxbury‘s under-class culture initializes his movement towards hustler masculinity. According to Rose, The new identity which Malcolm X assumed for himself when he left Michigan to live with his older half-sister, Ella, was that of a —Homeboy,“ the name given to him by his first friend in Boston. The author notes that this marked his real introduction to and immersion in black culture and the beginning of his street education, his socialization into a culture that would allow his participation. (6) Malcolm essentially saw himself as part of a wider black community that did not seem to be exclusionary, and Roxbury‘s black middle-class community appeared to be exclusionary. Malcolm X states, —Not only was this [the lower class] part of Roxbury much more exciting, but I felt more relaxed among Negroes who were being their natural selves and not putting on airs. Even though I did live on the Hill, my instincts were never--and still aren‘t--to feel myself better than any other Negro“ (51). Malcolm does not take to his (re)education alone. He has a guide. The guide formally introduces Malcolm to underclass Roxbury and completes his rebirth. Malcolm‘s guide is Shorty, a musician gigging with other established musicians. He works or —slaves“ in the pool hall. He renames Malcolm —Homeboy“ and gives him his first conk, which is a painful, straightening process that makes use of lye and potatoes to straighten curly and kinky hair. He also gets him his first job as a shoeshine boy. The homosocial relationship that these two create introduces Malcolm to the self-determination and self- definition that can be gained within a male-centered community and are related to the identity he garners when he begins to transform into a hustler. This relationship only straddles the line of becoming a male- centered community without crossing the line because Shorty takes on the temporary role of father- figure and does not possess all the qualities of a hustler; he is not fully a hustler. He participates in illicit

55 economies as a small time marijuana dealer and dons the garb and uses slang. He introduces Malcolm to zoot suit culture,21 which is a first step to becoming a hustler. Malcolm‘s formal introduction to hustler masculinity does not occur until after he separates himself slightly from the mentorship of Shorty. This introduction occurs when Malcolm meets Freddy– the shoeshine boy he would be replacing--the first night that Malcolm works as a shoeshine boy at the Roseland State Ballroom. He states that most of the dances that are held there were for whites, but this does not limit his exposure to hustlers. He learns that he is to function as a smalltime hustler at these dances by providing illicit drugs, condoms, and access to prostitutes for those who desired them. It is also here that he learns the mantra that will guide him throughout the course of his life. He is also taught how to read people, how to read who is a cop. Freddie, the shoeshine boy who is teaching him the trade and hustle, says, —”The main thing you got to remember is that everything in the world is a hustle‘“ (58). Malcolm learns that succeeding in this world is dependent on one‘s ability to read others, learn their language, and use their language to get from them what one desires. Language and the ability to read that language function as tools of power. Language gives those who understand it the ability to move in and about cultures and to negotiate their own space within these cultures as Malcolm does when he moves to Harlem. Language is important in the hustler‘s world because it is one of the tools he uses to manipulate others and situations to his favor. Although zoot suit culture is a youth culture of resistance, understanding zoot suit culture is integral to comprehending Malcolm X‘s hustler phases because it informs them. He evolves into a new stage of hustler masculinity. As Robin D. G. Kelley states, —Malcolm X‘s narrative of his teenage years should also be read as a literary construction, a cliché that obscures more than it reveals. The story is tragically dehistoricized, torn from the sociopolitical context that rendered the zoot suit, the conk, the lindy hop, and the language of the ”hep cat‘ signifiers of a culture of opposition among black, mostly male youth“ (162). Malcolm X states, in reference to his conk (one of the markers of zoot suiters), —This

21 A zoot suit consists of a long suit coat, —baggy punjab pants tapered to the ankles, … matching hat, gold watch chain, and monogrammed belt.“ (Kelley 165) Zoot suit culture is a culture of resistance that consisted of young black males and Latino males during World War II. Kelley‘s study of zoot suiters is specifically focused on Malcolm and his autobiography but there are other sources that describe the culture in detail, relay its relation to World War II, and include the experiences of the Latino zoot suiters. See Stuart Cosgrove‘s —The Zoot-Suit and Style Wars“ in Looking for America: The Visual Production of ation and People (2005), Ardis Cameron editor; Eduardo Obregón Pagán Murder at the Sleepy: Zoot Suits, Race, and Riot in Wartime (2003); Mauricio Mazón‘s The ZootSuit Riots: The Psychology of Symbolic Annihilation (1984); and Luis Valdez‘s Zoot Suit and Other Plays (1992).

56 was the first step toward self-degradation when I endured all this pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man‘s hair. I joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that black people are ”inferior‘“ (64). For mature Malcolm X, zoot suit culture can be equated with self-hatred and self-degradation. But according to Kelley, mature Malcolm X is misreading his participation in zoot suit culture. Kelley states, For Malcolm X, the zoot suit, the lindy hop, and the distinctive lingo of the hep cat simultaneously embodied these class, racial, and cultural tensions. This unique subculture enabled him to negotiate an identity that resisted the hegemonic culture and its attendant racism and patriotism, the rural folkways (for many, the ”parent culture‘) which still survived in most black urban households, and the class-conscious, integrationist attitudes of middle-class blacks. (165) Zoot suit culture becomes a foundation for Malcolm X‘s later identity as a hustler. Kelley describes the intricacies of the culture as such: While the suit itself was not meant as a direct political statement, the social context in which it was created and worn rendered it so. The language and culture of zoot suiters represented a subversive refusal to be subservient. Young black males created a fast paced, improvisational language which sharply contrasted with the passive stereotype of the stuttering, tongue-tied Sambo; in a world where whites commonly addressed them as boy, zoot suiters made a fetish of calling each other ”man.‘ Moreover, within months of Malcolm X‘s first zoot suit, the political and social context of war had added an explicit dimension to the implicit oppositional meaning of the suit; it had become an explicitly un-American style. (166) Zoot suit culture, like hustler masculinity, resists essentialized, racist, stereotypical definitions of black masculinity. It was a negotiation of space and definition. And like hustler masculinity, it is also a culture built on exploitation of others and violence. According to Kelley, —The zoot suiters, many of whom participated in the looting and acts of random violence, were also victims of, or witnesses to, acts of outright police brutality“ (167). Zoot suit culture functions in similar manner to hustler masculinity and operate as a link to it. Like the zoot suiter, the hustler refuses to be subservient and overtly performs hypermasculinity as a response. Although being a zoot suiter in Roxbury would offer a partial understanding of hustler masculinity, it is not until Malcolm moves to Harlem and changes his name to Detroit Red and later Red

57 that he understands that a hustler functions through more than image and language. Upon entering Harlem, Malcolm witnesses the presence of a different kind of black masculinity that is representative of the Harlem underclass, but is also reminiscent of Roxbury‘s black middle class. Malcolm X writes, —Every Negro I‘d ever known had made a point of flashing whatever money he had. But these Harlem Negroes quietly laid a bill on the bar. They drank. They nonchalantly nodded to the bartenders, smooth as any of the customers, kept making change from the money at the bar“ (85). Malcolm is witnessing a subversive form of resistance. Although they participate and control the illegal gambling system, rejecting employment as menial labor, they are also strangely part of the middle-class that Malcolm had despised in Roxbury and Lansing. They are not acting pretentious. They have learned to resist without rejecting the values of middle-class society as the zoot suiters had; they exaggerate those values. Before joining the Harlem ranks, Malcolm learns that blatant rejection is not always a good way to resist. On the train where Malcolm works as a waiter, one of the inebriated white passengers begins to taunt him. Rather than lash out at him, Malcolm tricks the man into stripping naked. Malcolm simply utilizes language skills, which allow him to negotiate his own space on the train. He learns to use language the way a hustler uses language. Hustlers use language as a tool of power with which they persuade and trick as Malcolm does on the train. Like Brown, Malcolm was also warned about the hustler‘s world by individuals who had lived the life in their youth. Hustlers did not see old age and those who did became living examples of the short-lived lives of hustlers. Beyond encompassing an adept use of language and trickery, hustler masculinity also promotes the establishment of male-centered communities. Narrator Malcolm X is aware of this. He states: Many times since, I have thought about it [hustling], and what it really meant. In one sense, we are huddled in there, bonded together in seeking security and warmth and comfort from each other and we didn‘t know it. All of us--who might have probed space, or cured cancer, or built industries--were, instead, black victims of the white man‘s American social system. (104) Hustlers construct and sustain male-centered communities, which are important in one‘s journey towards self-definition. Community is also an aspect that Malcolm X stresses in his later life, but it is on a much broader scale. It is transnational and transcontinental. The community of hustlers is not stable as he comes to discover. Distrust exists between individuals, who are concerned solely with self- preservation and will go to any lengths to maintain their hustler masculinity. Malcolm does not recognize the distrust that exists within the community until he has to confront his mentor, West Indian

Archie. Malcolm runs from the community to Roxbury. In Roxbury, his hustler masculinity earns him a prison sentence because he participates in a hustle in which the risks are exponentially increased. In 1946, he organizes a burglary ring and is sent to prison and serves six and half years when he is caught. Remaining within the construction of hustler masculinity, which is a re-articulation of the African American folk character-type, the badman, as we have seen, Malcolm X chooses to treat prison as Hell, and he and the other inmates refer to him as —Satan.“ He is called Satan because he attacks Christianity whenever he has the opportunity. This is a continued rejection of middle-class respectability that is built upon Christian morality. Unlike his transformation from Homeboy to Detroit Red to Red, the transformation that occurs in prison shows Malcolm returning to a transitional identity that functions in much the same way that his Homeboy identity functioned. He discards his previous identities as a hustler and assumes the new one, rejecting the possibility that the previous identities could influence his understanding of this later identity. Like his transformation into a zoot suiter and later as a hustler, Malcolm‘s transformation into this new identity rests on his interest in language. While Malcolm is in prison and going through heroin withdrawal, Bimbi, a prisoner and member of the Nation of Islam under the leadership of the Honorable Elijah Muhammad, makes his presence known to Malcolm and begins to impress him with his demeanor and ability to communicate effectively in proper English. Malcolm X states, —What fascinated me with him [Bimbi] most of all was that he was the first man I had ever seen command total respect … with words“ (178). He feels this way about both Bimbi and Elijah Muhammad because neither of them uses subversive, street language. They utilize and have a command of Standard English. Malcolm starts his process of re-education. First he takes to learning the lexicon by devouring the dictionary page by page and then he re-appropriates history in an effort to claim an identity that is defined by Elijah Muhammad. Elijah Muhammad provides him with Yacub‘s History, which is a demonization of the entire white race and teaches black supremacy. This was appealing to Malcolm because as he claims —that among all Negroes the black convict is the most preconditioned to hear the words, ”the white man is the devil‘“ (211). He later comments, Here is a black man caged behind bars, probably for years, put there by the white man. Usually the convict comes from among those bottom-of-the-pile Negroes, the Negroes who through their entire lives have been kicked about, treated like children--Negroes who never have met one white man who didn‘t either take something from them or do something to them. (211)

Elijah Muhammad became that individual he wanted to emulate, so once again, Malcolm discards his last name and takes the —X“ to represent the idea that he does not know his real family name, the name that connects him to a particular tribe in West Africa, the name untainted by the violations of the white man. Although this may appear to be his own action, it is actually Elijah Muhammad providing him with an identity. In Inside the ation of Islam: A Historical and Personal Testimony by a Black Muslim (2001), Vibert L. White, Jr. states, —During the tenure of Elijah Muhammad individuals who wished to become members of the group had to write a ”Savior‘s Letter,‘ which asked Fard Muhammad‘s (Allah) permission to join the Nation and to receive a holy name… Usually, after several years of dedicated service to the Nation, Elijah Muhammad created a special name for the person“ (72). Malcolm‘s discarding of his name and portions of his knowledge is a rejection of his own history. Malcolm only retains that which is valuable as proof of Elijah Muhammad‘s teachings. The Nation of Islam functions as a community that is stable when members remain cooperative or obedient. Malcolm is cooperative and obedient for several years. Upon learning the lexicon, he becomes a fountainhead that spouts out the rhetoric of Elijah Muhammad. Malcolm lacks his own voice and is functioning as a puppet. When he does begin to express his own ideas, it becomes a problem with the other members and finally with Elijah Muhammad. As a result, his position within the community is thrown into chaos when Muhammad silences him in 1963; Malcolm did not recognize that he was being hustled and did not remember that —all the world is a hustle“ until he was silenced. He focused on finding a self-reflective community, which he finds in the Nation of Islam. The Nation of Islam comes to function as a re-articulation of hustler masculinity by broadening its terms in regards to legality. Just as the hustler functions, the Nation of Islam operates outside of society‘s defined lines, has its own language, possesses its garb, and relies heavily on a posturing that exudes strength. Malcolm‘s departure from the Nation of Islam sends his life into limbo. It is at this point that he reclaims his history and (re)gains the ability to read the Nation as a re-articulation of hustler masculinity, which has duped him by using language and a re-appropriation of history to lure him. Ultimately, this leads Malcolm on the hajj to Mecca to re-articulate his identity by rediscovering Islam and by undergoing a rebirth through the process of (re)naming himself. The pilgrimage also places Malcolm firmly in the world and begins his association with what could be called an emerging Pan-Africanism. Malcolm borrows directly from the brand that is associated with W. E. B. Du Bois. According to Tunde Adekele, —Malcolm X saw Pan-Africanism as a means of injecting strength and vitality into a movement that was becoming increasingly localized and subverted within the United States. For Malcolm X, unity

60 between Africa and black America was needed for the mutual enlistment and redemption of both“ (—Black Americans and Africa“ 515). Within hustler masculinity and the Nation of Islam, Malcolm was in search of a stable self-affirming and self-reflective community. It may have been possible with Pan- Africanism. According to Clarence G. Contee in —The ”Statuts‘ of the Pan-African Association of 1921: A Document,“ Du Bois wanted to create a united front and recreate the African community by conjoining the African diaspora. Malcolm X‘s objects were similar to Du Bois‘s, which were … the study and realization of all that can be instrumental in improving the conditions of the Black Race all over the world. In order to attain to this end, the Association proposes to increase the economic, political, intellectual and moral capacities of the race. Politically, it shall strive to call the attention of the competent authorities of the various Powers entrusted with destiny of the Race, to the need of maintaining friendly relations with it, and of allowing and granting to it the same rights as those accorded to their other citizens or subjects. From the economic standpoint, it aims to increase the productive faculties of the Race through a sound organization of its economic power, to teach the individuals of the Race the virtue of cooperation and association, and to lead them to concerted action in both the economic and the political struggle. From the intellectual and moral standpoints, it being evident that the spiritual forces of a country influence its economic forces and form its most undoubted assets, the Association favors the spread of culture, the creation of an ”elite‘ in large numbers and the development of leaders with high ideals.22 (412-3) Malcolm‘s methods were also very similar.23 He becomes the defiant man who defines himself and is the self-determined man that he wanted to be and become. This is how he envisioned manhood as an

22 Clarence G. Contee laid out the objectives of the Pan-African Congress of 1921 in —The ”Statuts‘ of the Pan-African Association on 1921: A Document.“

23 The methods of the Pan-African Congress of 1921 were as follows: —The Pan-African Association is an organ of research and action uniting without in the least impairing their autonomy Societies and persons belonging to, connected or associated with the Black Race, so as to unite their efforts and coordinate their labors within the limits set by these rules. It collects information and receives propositions which it studies with the object of employing them to practical ends.

African American. He can finally define himself in what he presumes is a stable community of like- minded individuals whose frame of thinking is completely non- Western. Perhaps, the ability to create a self identity that extended beyond Western boundaries was Malcolm‘s goal and not simply within African terms. Many of his later speeches and his association with other non-Western nations suggest that his new identity was completely transnational. In —Prospect for Freedom in 1965,“ which he delivered at Palm Gardens in New York on January 7, 1965, Malcolm X states, In 1964, oppressed people all over the world, in Africa, in Asia and Latin America, in the Caribbean, made some progress. Northern Rhodesia threw off the yoke of colonialism and became Zambia, and was accepted into the United Nations, the society of independent governments. Nyasaland became Malawi and also was accepted into the UN, in the family of independent governments. Zanzibar had a revolution, threw out the colonialists and their lackeys and then united with Tanganyika into what is now known as the Republic o Tanzania–which is progress indeed …. Also in 1964, the oppressed people of South Vietnam, and in that entire Southeast Asia area, were successful in fighting off the agents of imperialism. All the king‘s horses and all the king‘s men haven‘t enabled them to put North and South Vietnam together again. Little rice farmers, peasants, with a rifle–up against all the highly-mechanized weapons of warfare–jets, napalm, battleships, everything else, and they can‘t put those rice farmers back where they want them. Somebody‘s waking up. In the Congo, the People‘s Republic of the Congo, headquartered at Stanleyville, fought a war for freedom against Tshombe, who is an agent for Western imperialism–and by Western I mean which is headquartered in the United States, in the State Department. In 1964 this government, subsiding Tshombe, the murderer of Lumumba, and Tshombe‘s mercenaries, hired killers from South Africa, along with former colonial power, Belgium, dropped paratroopers on the people of the Congo, used Cubans, that

It works by common and united action in the common interest without interfering in the political affairs of any state. To this end it makes investigations where needful, encourages the creation of local branches, promotes new organizations which tend to facilitate the progress of the Race and concludes such arrangements as may be favorable to the cause. It appeals to public opinion and may seek the aid of the press and of all societies of a nature kindred of itself. Finally, it counts on that international fellowship and sympathy which prevails among all members of the Negro Race“ (Contee —The ”Statuts‘“ 413).

they had trained, to drop bombs on the people of the Congo with American-made planes–to no avail. The struggle is still going on, and America‘s man, Tshombe, is still losing. (148-9) In the above excerpt, Malcolm X is asserting to a room of mostly white people that there is a connection between current efforts in the black liberation and liberation efforts that are or have taken place worldwide. He focuses a majority of his time on the continent of Africa and the transitions that have taken place in a number of the countries there. He is suggesting that it is only a matter of time before African Americans do the same, using these other countries as examples of what will occur in the United States. Malcolm X foresees a physical incursion taking place that is connected to these other global sites because they not only share a common experience in terms of oppression but because they are also fighting against similar if not the same power. The transformation from hustler to Pan-Africanist is a natural one for Malcolm. It is through hustler masculinity that Malcolm first places himself in a community. The instability of this community forces him to search elsewhere. He turns to the Nation of Islam and denies the significance of his previous identities. As Malcolm reclaims these previous identities, he regains the ability to see that the Nation is a re-articulation of the unstable community that exists among hustlers and to see that Elijah Muhannad was not following his own teachings as he carried on extramarital affairs with young women that result in out of wedlock children. It is his ability to read as a hustler that allows him to break away and find a community that does not rely solely on rhetoric and revisionist history to rebuild and sustain a self-reflective community, and he places himself in a global spiritual community after his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964 to participate in the Hajj and receives a fuller understanding of Islam that is not influenced by racial politics. Malcolm X also places himself in the African Diaspora when he establishes the Organization of African American Unity later that same year. In this instance, hustler masculinity is not simply a tool of critique but also a mode of masculine performance that greatly influences how one positions himself after he is no longer a hustler. In the case of Malcolm, hustler masculinity gives him the ability to know when he is being hustled and how to respond, and Malcolm X rejects what he has been taught and revises how he sees the world and his place in it.

CHAPTER FOUR

“LADIES FIRST?”:

ELAIE BROW VYIG FOR POWER I THE BLACK PATHER PARTY

I was left to concentrate on the meeting I would have with Suzanne de Passe, and on the songs I would present to her. As I thought about those songs, all my songs, it occurred to me that most of them had been written to men and for men. That realization made me wonder what exactly there was in my life that had me come to rely so on the power of men. I began to wonder if that was why I was really in the Black Panther Party, with its men and guns. Elaine Brown, A Taste of Power

The word power is an important, if not the most important, word in the above quote. Power refers to both men and the Black Panther Party in which Elaine Brown was a member and the chairperson from 1974 to 1977. In A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story (1992), Brown conceives of power through her interactions with men. Most of these men, including Huey P. Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, are members of and leaders the Black Panther Party. In writing her autobiography, Brown utilizes her relationships with men to define power as it relates to her position as a woman in the party. Through these relationships, she demonstrates that the performance of hustler masculinity in the Black Panther Party was detrimental to the political objective of the organization because it created instability in the organization in which women continued to be the victims of marginalization. Little critical attention has been devoted to this particular text or to other texts written by women in the Black Panther Party. Margo Perkins‘ Autobiography as Activism: Three Black Women of the Sixties (2000) is one of the only critical studies that concentrate on Brown‘s as well as Angela Davis‘ and Assata Shakur‘s autobiographies. In her study, she argues that the autobiographies are political and that these three women form their identities around their activism. Perkins focuses on how these writers revise how the Black Panther Party and the Black Power movement have been reconstructed to account for issues related to gender and sexuality. This chapter is an extension of Perkins‘ study. It argues that

64 although the overall objective of the Black Panther Party was to transform the perception and caste position of African Americans, Brown demonstrates that, from 1968 to 1977, many of the male members‘ performances of hustler masculinity rendered black women in the party powerless. These men re-inscribed black women‘s oppression and undermined the Party‘s objectives to transform the perception of African Americans and to improve their sociopolitical status. As a part of this study, Brown‘s narrative contributes to the overall understanding of hustler masculinity within a political context and accentuates its inherent ills. It demonstrates how black men in the Black Panther Party relate to black women and how these relationships participate in the construction of black masculinity that is partly defined in sexual terms. Devoting a section of this study to the analysis of Brown‘s narrative may seem counterproductive because it is a narrative of a woman‘s experience rather than an analysis of black male writing. Her autobiography, however, shows that when hustler masculinity functions as the source of power and the ultimate definition of masculinity, it maintains racial and class oppression associated with white male domination because hustler masculinity emulates it. Brown‘s text also provides an unvarnished view of the Black Panther Party, complicating how we understand men in the organization. It shows how hustler masculinity becomes a detrimental part of the theoretical foundation of an organization whose intent is to rebuild and nurture the surrounding urban black community, specifically in Oakland, California, when Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale established the party in 1968. In the ten-point platform, —What We Want What We Believe,“ founding members, Newton and Seale, state: We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United ationssupervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate, for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny [emphasis in original]. (Black Panther Speaks 3-4) Appropriately, Brown titles her narrative A Taste of Power, which is most likely a reference to her time as the chairman of the Black Panther Party when Huey P. Newton fled the country in 1974 to avoid murder charges. Hence, she states at the beginning of the narrative, —Here I was, a woman, proclaiming supreme power over the most militant organization in America“ (3). Although Brown may have been writing about her journey towards and her fall from leadership, the term —taste” suggests that her time in power was short-lived; it also serves several other purposes that assist in defining the narrative as a whole. Throughout the narrative, Brown connects herself to men such as Newton, Cleaver,

Jay Kennedy, and David Hilliard sexually, all of whom she perceives as having power or who have power over her. Brown‘s choice of title is also a reference to her sexual conquests or imagined transfers of power that occur through her sexual encounters. It is through sex and the eroticization of power that Brown becomes complicit in how masculinity functions in the organization. According to Perkins, —What is most compelling about Brown‘s treatment of sexuality in A Taste, however, is the way power (often expressed as violence) is eroticized. For Brown, having and exercising power (i.e., the capacity to have one‘s communicated intentions met with acquiescence) is sensual“ (122). This idea can be gleaned within the first few pages of the narrative. In the first chapter, Brown recounts standing in front of Party leaders from various cities as she tells them that she is the new chairperson of the party. Then she flashes back a few days before Huey made her leader of the Party in 1974. In the flashback, Huey disciplines a male party member who has been allegedly stealing from the party. As she enters his penthouse, Brown writes: I ignored the bloodied face of the thief, as I had learned to do. I had become hardened to such things … I noticed only how cold the apartment was. The cold made me ponder the reason why Huey always kept the windows and sliding glass doors of his twenty-fifth- floor penthouse wide open. Sometimes I had the chilling sense that those windows and doors meant somebody would be tossed off one of the apartment‘s many balconies. Recently, it had occurred to me more than once that one day it could be me. (9) In this passage, Brown‘s detachment from the brutal scene indicates that it is a regular occurrence and that it goes unchallenged as it would on the street. Her thoughts concerning the windows suggest that the violence is erratic and impending. She continues: Huey stopped interrogating the thief to talk to me. Typically, he was wearing only a pair of pants, no shirt. His body glistened with the sweat of cocaine abuse. He had probably been up for the last forty-eight hours. His strength shone through, nevertheless, still stunning. Perhaps I loved him too much, I thought. (9) And only moments later, —He raised his hand suddenly and smacked me across the face. Then clenching my jaw with one hand, he pulled me near him with his other, our noses almost touching“ (Brown 9). Brown senses the impending danger as she enters the apartment, but Huey‘s naked torso distracts her. She describes him as being covered in —the sweat of cocaine abuse,“ which sounds like the description of a pimp. Although the assault comes as a shock to her, it reads as an act of intimacy, where the lines between violence and sensuality are blurred. A few days after this incident, Huey flees the country and

66 passes Brown the position of chair person. This initial blurring of violence and sensuality indicates how hustler masculinity functions in the Black Panther Party, how women are or become complicit in it, and how power, or the semblance of power, is directly connected to sex and violence. Describing masculinity as hustler masculinity in the Black Panther Party is significant in terms of the entirety of the Black Power movement. The Black Power movement officially began in June of 1966 when Stokely Carmichael chanted —Black Power“ at the end of a march through Mississippi. As Jeffrey O. G. Ogbar states in Black Power: Radical Politics and African American Identity, James Meredith, who had integrated the University of Mississippi, —chose to conduct a one-man march against fear through the state of Mississippi to encourage black citizens to assert their right to vote. Two days into his march he was shot by a sniper“ (61). Civil Rights leaders such as Roy Wilkins, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Stokely Carmichael completed the march, and at the closing at the state capitol in Jackson, —King resurrected his dream of the March on Washington, affirming the notion that someday justice would become a reality for all Mississippians. Carmichael … told the eleven to fifteen thousand people in attendance that blacks should build a power base so strong that ”we will bring [whites] to their knees every time they mess with us,‘“ signifying a change in methodology and a transference of power (ew Day in Babylon 33). The march across Mississippi marked the transition to the Black Power movement and the movement‘s goal was to re-establish black identity within America by connecting it to black African identity, culture, and history and by separating and accentuating the qualities of black identity that enhanced American culture and set the black community apart from American society at large. Largely, they were taking cues from the final year of Malcolm X‘s life when he placed himself within a global African community. As William L. Van DeBurg states in ew Day in Babylon: The Black Power Movement and American Culture, 19651975 (1992), —Black Power was a freshly minted variant of the traditional Afro-American freedom agenda. It was ”people getting together to accomplish things for the group,‘ obtaining jobs and respect, and thereby forcing whites to realize their importance and worth“ (22). Reclaiming, re-centering, and rebuilding the black community were its primary objectives. They wanted to create solidarity in the African American community in an effort to instill pride, self- determination, and self-reliance. In —An Advocate of Black Power Defines It,“ Charles V. Hamilton writes, —Black Power must be seen first as an attempt to instill a sense of identity and pride in the black people“ (155). He later states that —Black Power must (1) deal with the obviously growing alienation of black people and their distrust of the institutions of this society; (2) work to create new values and to

67 build a new sense of community and of belonging; and (3) work to establish legitimate new institutions that make participants, not recipients, out of people traditionally excluded from the fundamentally racist processes of this country“ (156). Although the movement was concerned with the formation or redefinition of an African American identity, it also had its share of problems. The rhetoric in both areas was seemingly concentrated on the definition of black masculinity and the overall perception of black men. For example, Stokely Carmichael became infamous for saying as a response to a position paper on the position of women in Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that —the position of women in SNCC is prone.“ In I Am a Man: Race, Manhood, and the Civil Rights Movement (2005), Steve Estes suggests that though some female members argued that it was a joke that it also trivialized the necessity of women to position themselves within the movement as more than secretaries, office managers, and followers (83). In From Black Power to Hip Hop: Racism, ationalism, and Feminism (2006), Patricia Hill Collins writes: In some versions, the phrase —the Black Man“ stands as proxy for —Black People.“ However, in far too many cases, the phrase —the Black Man“ really refers to men, suggesting that the experiences of Black men adequately represent those of African Americans overall. This approach both renders the distinctive experiences of African American women invisible and reinforces the notion that, if Black women are not explicitly discussed, then the discourse itself lacks a gendered analysis. (113) Brown demonstrates how male members in the Party render black women invisible. Her autobiography reveals the gendered nature of the movement while she is a member and later a leader of the Black Panther Party. Brown remembers and writes from a position that aligns fear and awe with sex and violence. Men are at the center of her text and not as oppressors but as lovers, leaders, and comrades, as men who are desired and men to desire. She oscillates between being awestruck by the presence and image of the men with whom she comes in contact and is also struck by fear of the physical power men like Alprentice —Bunchy“ Carter, Eldridge Cleaver, and Huey P. Newton wield over her. The men in the party stun Brown. As she notes, the Black Panther Party is made up of mostly black urban male youth. It is important to make it clear that this is not the only population of African Americans that constitute the membership. As Charles E. Jones and Judson L. Jeffries make clear in —”Don‘t Believe the Hype‘: Debunking the Panther Mythology,“ —The Party drew members from a broad cross-section of the African American community,“ citing high school and college students and

68 educators as examples (45). Jones and Jeffries argue that the party has been described erroneously as an example of an organization consisting primarily of a Marxist lumpen proletariat, which is described as the volatile class of people in a society who work and survive by means outside of the legal or established economy. Brown supports this claim and defines the membership of the party as the —black lumpen proletariat“: The black lumpen proletariat … had absolutely no stake in industrial America. They existed at the bottom level of society in America, outside the capitalist system that was the basis for the oppression of black people. They were the millions of black domestics and porters, nurses‘ aides and maintenance men, laundresses and cooks, sharecroppers, unprotected ghetto dwellers, welfare mothers and street hustlers. At their lowest level, they were the gang members and the gangsters, the pimps and the prostitutes, the drug users and dealers, the common thieves and murders. (136) The lumpen proletariat that Brown describes does not consist of society‘s miscreants and undesirables only but also the working class, Marx‘s proletariat and also members of the middle class or petite bourgeoisie–college students and educators, among others. Brown‘s and the Party‘s conception of the lumpen proletariat was more a combination of classes because the important term in their conception is the word black. The party relied on leadership, participation, and influence of members from a variety of class backgrounds; however, the membership in the party, particularly in Oakland, California, was overwhelmingly from the underclass. They were members of the working class and the underclass who could not fit themselves into the American conception of success. The early posturing of the party reflected an obvious effort to recover black masculinity through physical presentations. Black men within the urban environment are absented from America‘s ascribed model of masculinity and lack the opportunity to work successfully within the capitalist structure.24 According to Trayce Matthews in —”No One Ever Asks, What a Man‘s Place in the Revolution Is‘: Gender and Politics in the Black Panther Party 1966-1971,“ —In many ways this posturing was an attempt to counter the racist and anti-working-class brutes, and irresponsible, incapable, and emasculated patriarchs“ (278). The party‘s imaging appealed to men as a response to the debilitating and pathologized descriptions of black masculinity and to those men who had attempted to attain masculinity

24 See Huey P. Newton, —Fear and Doubt: May 15, 1967,“ To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. ewton, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Readers and Writers, 1972), 112-47.

69 as participants in illegal activities. The black pants, combat boots, powder blue shirts, leather jackets, and visible guns were stark symbols of a black masculinity. Their initial appearance in California State Capitol to protest an anti-gun bill is indicative of this posturing. According to Ogbar, On May 2, 1967, thirty Panthers and sympathizers from the Afro-American Association left Oakland for Sacramento to protest the gun bill … The gun bill was intended to prohibit the armed Panther patrols of the police. The group was composed of six women and twenty-four men, twenty of whom were armed with shotguns, rifles, and hand guns. (87) Ogbar later explains: The Panthers decided early in their development to adhere to keen principles and policies for garnering publicity. The Panthers conspicuously created a media image that, in some ways, relied on a symbiotic relationship with certain elements in the mainstream media who focused on the Panthers as the militants many whites loved to hate. Images of bold, brash, gun-toting, profanity-spewing blacks with clenched fists garnered an array of emotions from the public and sensational news. … The Panthers‘ style suggested an unraveling of traditional modes of ethnic pluralism and protest, while simultaneously evoking the most inveterate racist fears of black manhood and racial etiquette breaches. (87) Beyond posturing and costuming, Daniel Patrick Moynihan‘s description of black masculinity in The egro Family: the Case for ational Action (1965), a study sponsored by the national government‘s Department of Labor, had a bearing on how they presented themselves and as an extension also influenced how they acted towards women. —The Moynihan Report“ argued that the major crisis in the country is not that African Americans are quasi-citizens but that they attempted to acclimate themselves into a society from within a failed or disrupted family structure. Essentially, women wielded too much power as both breadwinners and rulers of the hearth, disallowing black men the space and opportunity to be the men that they desired to be. Black men were defined as failures and matriarchy created by what Moynihan termed pathology. Of course, there is no evidence that any party members actually read the report or even took notice of it. Brown does not cite it, and there are few, if any, references to the report in any of the party documents, newspapers, or biographies, but as Matthews states, —Direct reference to the Moynihan report in BPP literature are few. However, engagements of its major theses can be found

70 in writings by Panthers on Black family, slavery, and the sexual politics of Black and White relations“ (276). As examples of such, Matthews cites Huey P. Newton‘s —Fear and Doubt.“ Newton writes: As a child he had no permanent male figure with whom to identify; as a man, he sees nothing in society with which he can identify as an extension of himself. His life is built on mistrust, shame, doubt, guilt, inferiority, role confusion, isolation and despair. He feels that he is less that a man … In a society where a man is valued according to occupation and material possessions, he is without possessions … Often his wife (who is able to secure a job as a maid, cleaning for white people) is the breadwinner. He is, therefore, viewed as quite worthless by his wife and children. He is ineffectual both in and out of his home. He cannot provide for, or protect his family. He is invisible, a nonentity. Society will not acknowledge him as a man. He is a consumer and not a producer. (81) According to Matthews, Newton reiterates points that Moynihan raises in his report, but, unlike Moynihan who only makes connections between history of enslavement of African Americans and the almost hypothetically pathological state of the black family and the black man in the urban setting, Newton draws other connections that are just as relevant if not more so. Newton‘s conception of American society in the preceding quote is strictly framed in capitalist terms. He directly connects masculinity to the ability to acquire and collect capital. Moynihan hints at this idea in his report by defining the black man as abnormal or less than a man because he is not the breadwinner as the man is defined within the bounds of the traditional family structure. As Michael S. Kimmel contends in Manhood in America: a Cultural History (2006), —It‘s [masculinity] socially constructed. … it is in our culture. … What it means to be a man in America depends heavily on one‘s class, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, region of the country“ (3-4). In reference to the Black Panther Party, Kimmel asserts, The Black Panther party made black manhood a centerpiece of its appeal to young blacks. In the works of such Black Panther leaders as Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Eldridge Cleaver, there was a growing preoccupation with proving a manhood long suppressed and denied by racism … The sight of hundreds of angry black men in military formation, carrying machine guns, preparing to fight for their rights, was a stirring sight to all who observed the Black Panthers–no doubt … an inspiring sight to many young black men facing the crippling realities of racism, unemployment, and inner-city poverty. (179-80)

Although Kimmel clearly illustrates that young black men were the participants and those who were drawn to the Black Panthers, women were also drawn to the men and their militant presentations of black masculinity. Brown does not discuss black masculinity in connection with her youth and adolescence in Philadelphia. She begins to build a definition of black masculinity after she makes contact with black leftist radicals. Brown writes, —I had heard of black men–men who were loving fathers and caring husbands and strong protectors. I had not really known any“ (105). Brown‘s definition or recognition of black masculinity rests solely on the shoulders of black male radicals. Of course, there are exceptions such as Ron —Maulana“ Karenga, the founder and leader of United Slaves, who she and other women ridicule because of his misogyny and the elaborate costuming in African garb, bald heads, and dark shades that many felt created a disconnect between the organization and the community that it sought to serve. Like the young men who joined the Black Panther Party, the party‘s appearance of strength and militant masculinity impressed Brown. First their style–their movements, apparel, speech, and ability to command attention–attracted Brown. Ogbar refers to their style as —militant chic … [which] made one appear cool, brave, and strong“ (108). Style is the first attribute that Brown mentions upon meeting men before she joins the party and afterwards. Upon witnessing Black Panther member Earl Anthony interrupt a Black Congress Executive Committee meeting to announce that Huey P. Newton had been arrested and to solicit support for the Huey P. Newton Defense Fund, she first mentions his dress and later states, —I was charmed by the Black Panther stuff; and Earl had style“ (114). She later states that she becomes his —entourage of one“ and eventually has sex with him upon his chiding and criticism. Brown also describes —Bunchy“ upon first meeting him. She meets him in late 1967 in Los Angeles at the apartment of two University of California Black Student Alliance members after an Alliance meeting. Unlike her brief description of Earl, she utilizes sensual term to describe him: His face was black alabaster; his eyes, black diamonds, set off by carved and distinct black eyelashes. His skin was as smooth as melted chocolate, unflawed, with reddish gloss. He was the vision of Revelations, a head of soft black wool refined to an African crown. He stroked his rich mustache as he spoke, head back, feet apart, an olive-green leather coat tossed over his strong shoulders. (118) Brown‘s description of —Bunchy“ is that of a lover or a future lover. Unlike the other men she describes in similar terms, Brown does not mention having a sexual relationship with —Bunchy“ although their relationship seems to be moving in that direction before he is killed.

In —Bunchy,“ Brown recognizes something familiar, something from her past. He is like the boys that she knew when she was poor in Philadelphia. Of —Bunchy,“ she writes: I knew this man —Bunchy“. He was the Crump brothers and all the other Brothers from the Avenue and Norris Street and Camac and Diamond, style transformed, rage directed, spirit defined by ghetto streets and raised to a revolutionary level. He was a conscious and articulate member of the black proletariat, up from the industrial ghetto. He was different from the patient, agrarian Negro of the South, different even from the new black militants and Black Power brokers. He was an angry black man who had survived with a conscious understanding of the ruthless Northern urban centers that had forgotten what to do with —niggers“ after the Civil War was over. I knew this man, and I wanted to know him. (119) Brown is drawn to that essence that made him valuable in the black urban space as a gang leader in Los Angeles. This essence could be described as hustler masculinity. Young black men have taken cues from the construction of white male domination in America to inform their own definition of black masculinity. They rely on similar markers of capitalist success in an almost exaggerated form to express their masculinity and also use media-defined definitions of masculinity as presented in Hollywood cinema to define their strength and sexuality. As an observer and a woman, Brown is participating in this process of self-definition that is taking place around her by admiring this reconstructed identity in the form of Black Panther Party men. Brown‘s first introduction to Cleaver and his thinking is through his personal narrative, Soul on Ice (1968), which she and a friend read after meeting —Bunchy“ Carter towards the end of 1967 and just before meeting Eldridge Cleaver in February of 1968 at a —Free Huey“ rally in Los Angeles. They devoured the book. As Brown states, We went through the entire book together the next night, each of us reading alternative chapters aloud, analyzing and praising each sentence and drinking two bottles of wine. It was an incisive autobiographical excursion into the mind of a black man driven by racism to rape … When we finished the book, we vowed we would meet him: the minister of information of the Black Panther Party, Eldridge Cleaver. … I stayed up to write a poem for him. My mother … thought I was insane. (121) Brown‘s praise of Cleaver‘s Soul on Ice (1968) reveals how she participates in the re-articulation of black masculinity that occurs within the party. In her reading of Cleaver‘s narrative, Brown understands

73 that Cleaver blames the institution of slavery for creating the present-day degradation of black male identity. For instance, Cleaver writes: —The chip on the Supermasculine Menial‘s shoulder is the fact that he has been robbed of his mind. The products of his mind, unless they are very closely associated with his social function on Brute Power, are resented and held in contempt by society as a whole“ (216). Cleaver argues that the institution of slavery confined black masculinity to the body because the master, his owner, relies on the male slave‘s physical strength and stamina and his genitals which are the master‘s means to economic advancement. Brown fails to recognize where she as a black woman is positioned in Cleaver‘s description of the struggle for black masculinity. She also seems to ignore the fact that Cleaver justifies raping black women as practice to commit —an insurrectionary act“ against white men and law by raping white women (Cleaver 33). Cleaver conceives black women as worthless. As Michelle Wallace states Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (1979), —Although Cleaver was able to stand back a little from the prevailing mythology and see how black women and men were manipulated against one another, some combination of male ego and disdain for the black woman superseded his reasoning abilities. She was only useful to him to the extent that she illustrated his own oppression“ (118). Brown seems to be oblivious to her placement as a black woman in Cleaver‘s conception of black masculinity in his narrative, but she is unconsciously aware of it within the party. Brown‘s awareness of how young black men in the party attempt to assert their masculinity at her expense comes from her experiences in the projects of North Philadelphia in the late 1950s and early 1960s where she lived with her mother. Brown relays North Philadelphia as a poverty-ridden and dangerous place: Its darkness and its smells of industrial dirt and poverty permeated and overwhelmed everything. There were always piles of trash and garbage in the street that never moved except by force of wind, and then only from one side of the street to the other … As the dark approached each night, houses were sealed tight in fear and York Street became overwhelmed by the quiet, a silent voodoo drum, presaging nightly danger, a gang fight, a stabbing, a fire. (18-19) It is in this environment that these boys are socialized; one that they have helped to create and maintain. Brown describes the boys in North Philadelphia: …the members of the Avenue sauntered into my place wearing their —do-rags,“ scarves wrapped about their heads to hold their processed hairdos in place. They concealed half- drunk bottles of white port wine and lemon juice concoction under their coats. Each

fellow carried himself with one hand stuffed into his pant pocket, pulling his sharply pressed khaki pants above his ankles. His other hand remaining free to swing back and forth as he walked, leaning to one side. They all wore black nylon —pimp“ socks and black leather, ankle-high shoes called —old men‘s forts.“ To me the fellows were, in a word, —cool.“ (37) These boys were all members of the Avenue gang, and Brown holds them in a kind of reverence. She seems proud in her rendering of them, regardless of how complicated their relationship with her and the community may have been. The gangs treated girls in their neighborhoods or —turf“ as property, and violation of their women was the same as violating the parameters that they had marked as their territory. Brown illustrates this relationship: It was a violation of gang territorial laws to have any dealings whatsoever with gang members from other territories … we were all Avenue girls. It was important to understand the nuances of north Philly gang life. It was critical to one‘s survival–a concept that was my standing priority. First of all, gang members were boys. Although there were a few rough groups of girls who might claim to be a gang, girls were, at best, support groups for boys‘ gangs or, at least, girlfriends of gang members. (40) Brown‘s interactions with boys in North Philadelphia make her familiar with the expression of black masculinity that is present in the Black Panther party. She states a number of times that some of the male members of the party were from the streets. When she first introduces Alprentice Carter, she writes: —He was a lion from the streets of L.A., the former head of the Slauson gang, five thousand strong, originator of its feared hardcore, the Slauson Renegades“ (118). Later, Brown asserts: —Bunchy was, in fact, the model for most of the Brothers on the ghetto streets of Los Angeles. They knew his swagger, his speaking style, his poems. Virtually illiterate Brothers could recite the poems of Bunchy Carter“ (139). This observation and the passages that follow suggest that a number of the Party‘s members were former gang members. Their hyper-masculine identities as gang members followed them when they transformed themselves into revolutionaries and informed their performances in the party. Men within the party sought to counter developed scripts of black masculinity, but they also relied on the same gender roles that inform hustler masculinity. Men in the party position women as property. Women are tools. The first duty of women in the party is to produce revolutionaries for the struggle. As an unwritten rule in the party, methods of birth control were discouraged completely. In Survival Pending Revolution: The History of the Black Panther Party (2007), Paul Alkebulan asserts:

—Sexual relations and family life within the BPP [Black Panther Party] were complex matters. For instance, Lu Hudson recalled that ”it was difficult to convince men to abstain or have protected sex to avoid spreading venereal diseases or other infections among the women‘“ (111). Alkebulan later argues: —The issue was further complicated because at that time there was a widespread belief in the black community that birth control was a genocidal plot to limit population growth among people of color“ (111). The sexual policies and construction of male/female relationships in the party suggest that women were not in control of their bodies. In reference to sexual relationships in the party, Brown writes: The party‘s position about such relationships was being revolutionized. Indeed, it was promoting a line that the primary relationship between men and women in the party was as comrades. That included love and sex. To define another party member as one‘s own–—my“ man, —my“ woman–was not merely taking a step backward, clinging to a bourgeois socialization. It was taking a step in the wrong direction, to support the most fundamental principle of capitalism, the private possession of property, chattel. That socialization had to be rooted out of us, as did all the other ways, if we were to follow a revolutionary road. (259) This particular conception of male/female relationships suggests that such partnerships are built upon equality, and it also suggests that they were nonexistent in the party. Men and women do not couple with each other in the traditional sense. Because these men only perpetuated the patriarchal ideals which they were trying to resist, within such a conception of male/female relationships, women are at the complete disposal of their male comrades. Women were not in control of their bodies as members of the party, but they were responsible for their bodies and what their bodies produced. In March 1970, Brown gave birth to her daughter Ericka Brown, who Masai Hewitt, minister of education, fathered. Masai is not present for most of the pregnancy because he is married and is not allowed at the birth because he and Brown are not married. Although Brown‘s narrative focuses on her activities in relationship to the party, there are a few moments in the text when she talks about her daughter, and there is no indication that any kind of relationship is established or maintained between her daughter and Masai. As a matter of fact, Brown goes overseas for three months with Eldridge Cleaver to do party work and she leaves her daughter with Gwen Fontaine, Huey Newton‘s girlfriend at the time and later his wife, instead of with Masai. When women became pregnant and had children, many of them were the sole providers and caretakers. The men who fathered the children were not required to take care of the children. There were no rules

76 regarding the abandonment of children by men in the party. Alkebulan contends that women such as Audrea Jones, a party leader from Boston, attempted to address the issue of child abandonment by proposing a policy in 1972 that would make the mother and father equally responsible for deciding on the pregnancy and a postnatal period; the policy —was never implemented“ (111-12).The party held strictly to the idea that men and women could be no more than comrades. While the policy may have stated that marriage was prohibited or frowned upon, many of the men had wives, who had not been —stripped of the pretty things, the Bourgeois sweetness“ as party women had (Brown 260). Through this conception of sexual relationships, Brown and women like her had become participants in the maintenance of hustler masculinity in the party and its victims. Although guns and uniforms are physical expressions of their masculinity, it is through sexual contact with women that they define themselves as militant black men within the party. Young black women are sexually attracted to the image that these men have created. As an adverse effect, the women become victims of hustler masculinity because these men came to be perceived as saviors, black men that these women had never known. After one of Brown‘s first sexual encounters with a party member, she states, —He had actually told me that a true sister would be happy to sleep with a revolutionary Brother“ (115). This statement suggests that men in the party relied on the compliance of the women, whom they persuaded by attacking them with revolutionary rhetoric that rendered non-compliance counterrevolutionary. Brown‘s recollection of this particular encounter suggests that she and possibly other women were very much aware of sexual politics of the Black Panther Party but that she ignores or complies with it in an effort to assist in forging change. Like many of the women, the image the men in party have constructed sexually attracts Brown, and she becomes trapped in a matrix of sex, power, and liberation. Brown associates sex with power and each sexual encounter Brown is involved in after moving to California either informs her about power relations or provides her with an opportunity to taste power. As Dr. Ruth K. Westheimer states in Power: the Ultimate Aphrodisiac (2001), —[M]ale power is an aphrodisiac“ (xiii). For Brown, this aphrodisiac is first her motivation; she has the desire to be in the presence of someone whom she perceives as having power. Brown relates power to sex in connection with her experiences in the party, but her earliest encounters with power in sexual relationships with men in California occur with white men. The first is her introduction to sadomasochism. In an effort to acquire money for survival, Brown accepts an offer to be a prostitute, which requires her to act as a dominatrix. She does not have to have sexual intercourse

77 with her customer. She has to help him achieve orgasm. Of course, as Perkins has argued, Brown‘s practice as a dominatrix is illusory because she fails as a prostitute. She fails to collect the money. After performing her service as a dominatrix, her customer leaves without paying as she stands watching it unfold but not aware of what has occurred to her until after he does not return to the hotel room. Perkins states, —Brown‘s naïve participation as a Dominatrix is a sadomasochistic ritual becomes a symbolic trying of power“ (122). The scene is emblematic and establishes an association between sex and power that runs throughout the text. It does not simply set the stage for her later role as quasi-leader of the party. It also accentuates a notion of sex and power that can describe most of Brown‘s sexual encounters prior to this experience and each one after by utilizing prostitution and sadomasochism to illustrate how her naiveté does not provide her with the ability to discern that she is being duped and has been duped. In essence, Brown perceives sexual relations with men as opportunities to attain power, which is the case in this particular instance. In this particular instance, Brown performs as a dominatrix not to attain power but to make money. After her first week in Los Angeles, she had not found a job and did not have enough money to pay the following weeks rent, and this onetime job paid four hundred dollars. What she cannot see is that she entangles herself into the binaries of race and sex in an attempt to maintain her autonomy from her mother and her religious aunt who lives in California, and as a black woman, she is left powerless because, in both instances, she is that entity against whom maleness and whiteness are defined, positioning her in a much lower status and perpetuating the established order of the status quo. Brown‘s first relationship in California mimics her brief and unsuccessful stint as a dominatrix. Upon meeting Jay Kennedy, Brown is taken on a journey of self-discovery led by Jay, a successful white writer and friend of Frank Sinatra. A few months after the dominatrix incidence, she finds a job at the Pink pussycat, where she works as a cocktail waitress and meets Jay. Brown has a relationship with Jay, which resembles that of a father and daughter or a teacher and a student. As Brown makes clear in her narrative, she and Newton are involved from the fall of 1965 to the fall of 1967. After being humiliated and reminded of her race in a Las Vegas hotel beauty salon, Brown describes Jay‘s reaction to her in paternal terms. Brown writes: I dried my tears and smiled at him, a comforted child. It was a subject we had exhausted already–the difference in our ages meant, that father-daughter aspect of love. It did not characterize or interfere with our love, we had declared. It did not define us. For now, though, I was happy as a child. (88)

Brown‘s relationship with Jay is a paternalistic one that she fully accepts. For the entirety of her relationship with Jay, Brown‘s life resembles that of a female child sitting at a window awaiting the return of her absent father. She writes: —My life was beginning to open and close like a seasonal flower on his comings and goings between Los Angeles and New York. When he was in Los Angeles, I breathed for him. When he was in New York, I held my breath“ (83). When Jay returns to her life, to California from New York or Connecticut, the world in which Brown had been subsisting ceases to exist, and Jay becomes her world. She ignores the fact that he is thirty-three years older than she is and is married, in the same manner that a child forgives her father‘s faults, disappointments, and unfulfilled promises because his presence in that moment makes her believe that she is all that matters to him. In this paternalistic relationship, Brown functions as a kind of social project, and Jay has deemed it his duty to inform this naïve black girl. Jay teaches Brown about Communism, the black liberation movement, and Marxism. He even teaches her to appreciate her beauty as a black woman by telling her, —”To me, my darling, your firm and regal behind is one of your most beautiful physical attributes, one of your few parts saved from the bastardization of slavery‘“ (94). According to Perkins, who describes Brown as a masochist at this stage in her autobiographical life, —Brown admits to a dependence on and need for validation from others to escape feelings of emptiness, learned self-hatred, and non-existence“ (124). Perkins overstates her case by suggesting that Brown is attempting to escape —self-hatred.“ This term implies that Brown is in complete denial of her racial identity, which at best is a noticeable amalgam of races rather than a single one. Brown‘s relationship with Jay as a student does not read as her need for or desire to receive validation. Indeed, Brown admits that Jay —taught [her] to begin to appreciate [herself] as a black woman“ (93). She complicates and negates this idea by describing what she means. Jay has an appreciation for Brown that rest solely on her sexuality as a black woman. Brown is nothing more that a sexual object and her use of the terms appreciate suggests that she begins to see herself as a sexual object to be used by men. Beyond validating Brown through his use of sexual imagery, Jay also introduces her to and teaches her politics and political concepts, which she passively consumes and initiate her departure from Jay. Brown writes: A collage of data and concepts was being impressed upon me. It was all so fast, so intense, so global, I had neither the time nor the tools to digest or evaluate most of it. I was the perfect student, however. I was willing and capable, attentive and worshipful. I could listen to Jay with ears that were receptive, unthreatening guardians of his seemingly

secret treasure trove of information. I never questioned what he knew or how he knew what he told me. I simply believed him. (91) This absent, compliant reaction to men of power and what they say influences her subsequent romantic and sexual relationships with men. She simply believes in what they say regardless of the fact that their actions are oppressive and limiting because they rely on an expression of masculinity that mimics those expressed by Jay and the trickery of the masochist. Similar to her experience as a prostitute, Jay dupes Brown. He tricks her into believing that he will leave his wife for her. Her return to a neighborhood that is similar to the one she grew up in prompts her to reevaluate this situation and come to an understanding of their relationship. Brown‘s trip to Watts‘ Jordan Downs Projects in the summer of 1967 to teach piano at a community center does not return her to her blackness but forces her to realize that she had not been running away from her race; she was trying to escape from the conditions in which she had lived as a result of her class, race, and gender. Brown realizes that economics is the separating factor that made her different from her Jewish classmates in Philadelphia and assisted in demonizing her racial identity, and she has developed this understanding as a result of Jay‘s political teachings. Brown also realizes that Jay is part of the problem. Brown comments, —I told him [Jay] it did not matter anymore, because there was no place for me in his world and he did not belong in mine“ (103). Later using the concepts of race and class that she learns from Jay, Brown states, —”My pain is not unique. Others, like me, are suffering. There is only one, ultimate source of our suffering–the white man and his greed. The white man has stolen everything from us‘“ (103). She also follows, saying, —”Our Father is not in heaven … He is on earth and on the dollar bill, in whom we‘d better trust … And he‘s white–like you‘“ (103). Through this argument, Brown makes it clear that achieving whiteness was not her desire but that it was material wealth, which is also a desire to have a relationship with her absent father who is white. Brown‘s sexual relationships with men in the Black Panther Party are similar to her previous sexual relationships with men, but unlike those previous encounters, her active participation in these latter relationships is obligatory. The men in the party do not force her to have sex with them, but during each occurrence, Brown has sex with a party man out of a sense of obligation and dedication. She is one of the sources upon which they continue to build and express black masculinity. The men respond to these encounters as expected occurrences. Having sex with these men is the unexpressed duty of the women in the party. Within the party, this attitude towards sex and Brown‘s acquiescence to the obligation are both part of the expression of masculinity. Although the men were not hustlers, they used

80 sex as one of the means to express their masculinity in the same manner that a hustler, specifically a pimp, would. In Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender, and the ew Racism (2004), Patricia Hill Collins states, —Being tough and having street smarts is an important component of Black masculinity. When joined to understandings of booty as sexuality, especially raw, uncivilized sexuality, women‘s sexuality becomes the actual spoils of war. In this context, sexual prowess grows in importance as a marker of Black masculinity“ (151). Collins‘ statement may read like an oversimplified, essentialist rendering of black masculinity, but it is not. Collins refers to the media-controlled and media-inspired images of black masculinity that have had an effect on how present-day young black men see themselves. It is useful in reference to the Black Panther Party because as Collins states, black women become victims or objects when men express masculinity through limited constructions that rely on sexuality as a source of this expression. In the Black Panther Party, the men rely on sexual expression as a source of masculinity. Brown becomes a participant and victim because she allows herself to be objectified in an effort to assist in the validation of politically radical black masculinity. Brown renders herself a participant in and victim of the party men, yet she does not submit herself to either position without questioning or resisting them. Resistance arrives in the form of —the clique“ in 1969. —The clique“ was a group of women in the party in Los Angeles who refused to quietly submit to the male chauvinism that characterized Black Nationalist organizations. Brown states: Unlike the new feminists, we were not going to take a position against our men. Our men did not have to —change or die,“ as the most radical of the feminist were saying. Black men were our Brothers in the struggle for black liberation. We had no intention, however, of allowing Panther men to assign us an inferior role in our revolution. Joan [Kelley] and Ericka [Huggins] and Evon Carter and Gwen Goodloe and I concluded that they better not try to fuck with us. We would not be rewarding any Brother with our bodies, in the bedroom or the kitchen. [author‘s emphasis] (192) This collective of Panther women comes together after Brown has had numerous sexual encounters with leaders in the party. In each of the previous encounters, Brown recollects how unpleasant they were by focusing her descriptions on the uncleanliness of the room she was having sex in, by questioning why she even allowed the encounter to occur, or by describing the sex as forceful. Most men responded negatively to these women in —the clique.“ According to Brown, the male response from chapters throughout the country was that —”Smart Bitches‘ like us, they were saying, needed to be silenced“ (192).

Brown‘s membership in the collective removes her from the role of one of the party‘s prostitutes, but the development of relationships with Masia Hewitt and Huey P. Newton, the minister of education and her daughter‘s father, and the founder and leader of the party respectively, sweep her back into the complicated, sexualized position of black women in the party through. Masai surfaces from —Bunchy“‘s underground to make funeral arrangements for —Bunchy“ after he is murdered at UCLA. According to Brown, Masai approaches her numerous of times with sexual advances, but she ignores him, stating that she was not thinking about sex at a time when Panthers all over the country were being arrested and assassinated. Of Masai, Brown writes: What he offered was not love, he said eventually. We had, he said, faced marauding pigs and narrow nationalists together, written press statements together, treated the wounded and studied revolutionary philosophy together, all because we believed and loved people, black people. There was already love. It was part of each of us. —The true revolutionary is guided by great feelings of love,“ we acknowledged, quoting Che Guevara. (195) Brown and Masai articulate their equality as comrades, and as such Masai persuades Brown into believing that a sexual encounter between them would be different from her previous interactions with men. This is significant because she states earlier in the narrative that Masai was one of the few male members who supported the formation of —the clique.“ As a result, Brown writes: We needed each other. We would die soon. It was a forgone conclusion. He laughed. We made love, all night, into the morning. Our love making was not desperate. It was a drink of water, a passionate moment of gratitude for a moment of living. He was the first man with whom I had made love since the assassination. (195) This sexual encounter occurs as an obvious response to the death and violence taking place around them. Brown writes, —”It‘s been six months, twelve shootings, and six funerals since we met, since January seventeenth,‘ he [Masai] continued. ”I‘ve known you were the right woman since then“ (119). Unlike previous encounters, Brown views this sexual experience differently because, for the first time, she employs sensual language to describe the act with a party member. She also calls it love making. Her relationship with Jay and the encounter with Eldridge are the others. Similar to her relationship with Jay, Masai dupes Brown into believing that they had acted out of love and from equal footing as comrades. Masai complicates her feelings toward him. Masai marries another woman while Brown is four months pregnant. Brown says that she tells David Hilliard, chief of

82 staff of the party in Oakland, how she plans to leave the party after Masai marries another woman; Brown recounts David‘s response: How could I seriously allow the —subjective“ to supersede the —objective,“ David had asked me angrily, when I told him over the telephone. That Masai had suddenly, without notice, married Shirley Neeley in Oakland when I was in my fourth month of pregnancy with his child should not turn me from the struggle. If I were a true revolutionary, David scolded me over the telephone, my commitment to the freedom of our people could not be swayed by —dick“ and —pussy“ problems [emphasis in original]. (199) The male response to her anger with Masai‘s actions is that she did not have a claim or rights to Masai and that such concerns were counterrevolutionary. The relationship Brown develops with Huey, from 1970 to 1977, mimics the construction of male/female relationships in the context of pimping. Huey is the pimp, and Brown is his —bottom woman.“ Brown and Huey‘s relationship functions as such when he is present and when he escapes to Cuba in 1974 to avoid murder charges. Brown‘s relationship with Huey is the most defined relationship she has with any man in the Black Panther Party. Brown does not recognize the parameters of the relationship or the manifestation of hustler masculinity in Huey until it is too late to attempt to transform the relationship. When Brown first meets Huey in late summer to early fall of 1970 after returning from a political tour of North Korea, Russia, Vietnam, China, and Algeria with Eldridge, whom she had grown deathly afraid of, she describes Huey with a familiarity with which she has not described anyone else. Brown writes: He was certainly not the poster. He was certainly not the picture Eldridge had painted. His face gleamed with beauty and sensitivity, and his smile was familiar, in a haunting way. His body was built up, apparently from prison exercise. Behind the rimless glasses he was wearing, I could see eyes that were large dark almonds. His face was angular, chiseled. He wore a fastidiously groomed Afro hairstyle, and had beautiful teeth and flawless skin, the color of honey. He sort of bowed to me, and I felt a loss of energy, like finishing a foot race or reaching climax. (239) She describes him in very sensual terms even when his actions do not call for such descriptions. Brown‘s perception of Huey blinds her to the man that he is. Like many of the party members, Brown

83 designates Huey as a savior, but he was not. Huey, like a pimp, isolates himself and exists in a drug induced haze. When Huey is forced to leave the country in response to murder charges, Brown takes over the party. She becomes leader per Huey‘s request and acts completely on his behalf. She even travels to Cuba after losing her second run for city council in 1975 to get further orders from Huey and visits with him and his wife Gwen Fontaine. Although she does act on Huey‘s behalf in his absence, she also puts other women in leadership positions, establishes beneficial relationships with the local, state and national government officials, and of her own in the interest of the party. Brown transforms the overall image of the party as a community organization and also makes it more conducive to and accepting of female participation and identities. She also focuses the party‘s energy on the survival programs. Joan Kelley gathered funds for the organization. Phyllis Jackson oversaw political campaigns and various other projects. Norma Armour acted as treasurer or funds manager (411). Regina Davis ran the school; she —managed the teachers, cooks, maintenance people, and other personnel at the school. Regina planned the children‘s daily activities, weekly field trips, health check ups…”She is the fucking school‘“ (Brown 444). These programs transformed how masculinity functioned in the party because as Perkins suggests, these programs can be perceived as what has been traditionally viewed as women‘s work. They fed and educated children, provided clothing and the like for those who could not afford them. Huey‘s return to Oakland from Cuba, in July 1977, negates any forward progress. He concede to the request of men, who believe that their position as men have been belittled by the leadership of women. Brown recounts; —I looked at Bob and Larry, hearing echoes of the men‘s accusations that Huey had let some bitch run their shit, intrude upon their world, where aggression and violence defined manhood“ (440). Brown also writes, —Nobody said it, but it was understood that the Panther was a man“ (441). Huey‘s return from Cuba marks a return to hustler masculinity, which is detrimental to Brown‘s positive modification of the Black Panther Party‘s public image. According to Brown, —He returned to the familiar ghetto instinct. I had watched him rely on that instinct more and more in the past several weeks. And I had begun to realize I was losing him to a world he himself knew was self destructive“ (438). Hustler masculinity also thrives off of the suppression of female identities because these identities are viewed as weakness because females especially black women exists at the bottom of the hierarchy when it comes to power. As Brown contends, They wanted so little from our revolution, they had lost sight of it. Too many of them seemed satisfied to appropriate for themselves the power the party was gaining, measured

by the shiny illusion of cars and clothes and guns. They were even willing to cash in their revolutionary principles for a self-serving —Mafia.“ If a mafia was what they wanted, I would not be a part of it. (444) Brown‘s narrative, which is one of the few autobiographies of the Black Power Movement written by a woman, reveals how sex and politics made the survival of the Black Panther Party impossible because the contributions and roles of women were undermined. She states: The women were feeling the change, I noted. The beating of Regina would be taken as a clear signal that the words —Panther“ and —comrade“ had taken on gender connotations, denoting and inferiority in the female half of us. Something awful was not only driving a dangerous wedge between Sisters and Brothers, it was attacking the very foundation of the party. (445) Women were rendered as objects that black men in the party, especially those in leadership positions, use to express their masculinity, which rests on the man‘s sexual virility. Hustler masculinity as it functioned in the party was an attempt to resist the popular culture presentations of urban black masculinity. Although this particular narrative is relevant to the sixties and seventies, it is useful because it provides a clearer understanding of black male/female relationships and performances of black masculinity in the post-Civil Right era from a black woman‘s point of view, and it demonstrates how hustler masculinity, even as it is being performed in a political organization, can destroy the performer and those around him if it is not used to critique white male domination and as a catalyst towards a male identity that champions community building and accepts various marginalized black identities.

CHAPTER FIVE

“THE (BIG) PAYBACK”:

THE BLACK HUSTLER FROM HERO TO COLOR-CODED COMMODITY

Iceberg Slim‘s Pimp: the Story of My Life extends the African American autobiography tradition though it is neither explicitly political nor religious. The narrative concentrates on the black hustler figure of the pimp who has been largely ignored by critics due to his alleged gross immorality and criminality. Although it is a narrative that focuses on the life of a pimp, as the blurb on the back of the 1987 edition of the Holloway House paperback states, Slim is —America‘s most read black author.“25 Not only is the book still widely read, but also it has greatly influenced many generations that have followed. Slim extended the limits of a genre of African American writing concentrating on black urban underclass communities. He made —the life“ popular and spawned the birth of similar writers and Blaxploitation films that coincided with the production of his narrative. His influence extends itself into contemporary popular culture as rappers Ice-T, Ice Cube, 50 cent, Scarface and others gave birth to and sustained the gangsta rap genre of music, wrapping themselves in the personas, names, mythologies, and culture that his narratives have celebrated. The general population has maintained a love/hate relationship with the character that has come to mesmerize them. Slim does not simply reach his large and diverse audience through simple portraitures of the black urban environment and the people that exist there. His narrative privileges the street life to create the illusion that the audience is being given entrance into his previous lifestyle. Slim uses language to criticize hegemonic masculinity and restructures it so that he can define himself within it, and in doing so, also assists in giving birth to the pulp novels of Donald Goines and Blaxploitation films, both of which are simplified reproductions of his work. Iceberg Slim does not attempt to distance himself from hegemonic masculinity, but he alters its parameters so that he can fit into it as a black pulp fiction author. According to Connor in What Is

25 In —Prison, Perversion, and Pimps: The White Temptress in The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Iceberg Slim‘s Pimp,“ Terri Hume Oliver states, —At the time of his death, Iceberg Slim was the best selling African American writer of all time, having sold six million copies of his seven books“ (148). His books are still popular.

Cool?: Understanding Black Manhood in America, —America, a nation devoted to capitalism, defines manhood through achievement, money, possessions“ (9). Slim‘s understanding of masculinity remains constant and never does he attempt to strip it of its Americanness. Indeed, he accentuates or exaggerates this aspect in the form of hustler masculinity that he performs. The narrative also participates in late 1960s politics, specifically those associated with the Black Panther Party. In December 1969, Slim visits the party‘s main office which had been attacked by the Los Angeles police department. While there, he meets a few male party members and is awestricken by them and surprised at their response to him. He recounts: He stepped forward abruptly and with curly-lipped contempt said, —Nigger, you kicked black women in the ass for bread. How many you got now?“ I was stunned, instantly furious, and my first impulse was to chop him down with still- remembered masterworks of pimp profanity. But I responded with love and understanding. Is there any other response for an old nigger surrounded by Black panthers? I alibied that when I was young there were no reasonably dependable and available sources of big money and a sense of importance for a slum kid except as a hoodlum dope peddler or pimp. He wouldn‘t accept it and attacked my suspected criminal moral attitude with renewed ferocity. (aked Soul 153-4) Although Slim writes his narrative prior to this particular incident, the way in which he writes about the Black Panthers as he approaches the building suggests that he has an awareness of them before meeting them. The politics of the Black Panther Party should not be read into his narrative but do influence how the reader should understand it. The text is a cautionary tale of sorts and as such is attempting to provide the same message to black young males that these Black Panther have given to him. Slim is not an exception but one of many in the black underclass who went to the city with hope but lost it. It is an issue that guides Richard Wright‘s 12 Million Black Voices (1941) and an idea that Cornel West terms —nihilism“ in Race Matters (1993). West cites a love ethic as the solution to this absence of hope or nihilism that has grown out of capitalism upon which American culture is built. According to West, —Self-love and love of others are both modes toward increasing self-valuation and encouraging political resistance in one‘s community“ (29). To give himself value in a nation that does not value him and to resist the overall effects of being raised in an environment that is devoid of the proper tools to attain a respectable masculine identity, Slim chooses the life of the pimp because it is the

87 only existence for black men within the black underclass that seems to allow black boys to become men in the way that middle-class white boys become men. The pimp persona hyperbolically encapsulates those qualities that define American masculinity as the accumulation of material wealth. Although he has been demonized on moral and legal grounds, the black pimp is strangely American as Slim seems to highlight constantly in his own narrative. As Slim states in The aked Soul of Iceberg Slim: Robert Beck’s Real Story (1971), —In the cold-blooded academy of ghetto streets I was taught early that suffering is inevitable and necessary for an aspiring pimp, pickpocket or con man and even just a nigger compelled to become a four-way whore for the Establishment“ (17-8). Essentially, the same conditions that create poverty in the United States give birth to the pimp and to other similar characters. The necessity to evolve into such a persona is predicated upon the inability to attain and maintain a recognized masculine identity in the ghetto, the history of black folk in the United States as it relates to white folk, and an understanding of American paradigms and guiding principles. There are specific qualities that make one a pimp and extend beyond the façade that this character create as proof of his success in this particular hustle, trade, and profession. The pimp is the progenitor of cool. He symbolically stands as a symbol for survival, machismo, and success. He denies the notion that black men cannot function as men as it is defined by male domination. Rather than searching for other alternatives or relying solely on the idea of cool-- an idea that defines black men in need of —guidelines concerning maturity that incorporated the strange challenges of street life, of life without the tools of traditional American manhood, and of a life where life itself is the only thing you possess that‘s of any value“ (Connor 20)--to define masculinity for himself, he embraces America‘s definition of success. The pimp wraps himself around the ideas that inform capitalism and transforms them so that they can also be applied to black manhood in the urban space. This transformation becomes a negotiation of power, which as a black man he lacks economically and racially. He re-commodifies the black woman‘s body and reverses the master/slave dichotomy, building his empire by fashioning it after the American model and the slave system upon which it was built.26 In Slim‘s words, —”a pimp is really

26 Throughout Pimp, Slim presents the black female body as a commodity as it was in slavery. The terms of commerce describe it. The master/slave relationship is its nadir, and it is not a unique idea. Gayl Jones expresses a similar idea in her novel, Corregidora. She inscribes her female protagonist, a blues singer, with the same terms of commerce, making female genitalia a source of production because it is inscribed with the historical commodification of the black female body and the rape, incest, and the instance of retribution on the slave woman‘s part that occurred on the Corregidora plantation.

88 a whore who has reversed the game on whores“ (Pimp 15). Nikki Giovanni also articulates this idea in her review of Nathan Heard‘s Howard Street (1968).27 Giovanni states: It‘s so easy to condemn a prostitute for selling her body, but who doesn‘t? What is it but prostitution when we sit somewhere for eight hours a day and make the proper responses to people and things that have no meaning for us? We are placing ourselves at the hands of the same whoremonger as she; only she has the whoremonger‘s disdain while we have his praise. And of the two, we are the most likely to contract his social diseases. (Giovanni qtd. in Hogue 188) The pimp avoids becoming a whore in the working man‘s world. He becomes an entrepreneur and chief executive officer like a successful businessman. In —Pimp Notes on Autonomy,“ Beth Coleman describes the pimp‘s businessman mentality as a —parody of propriety“ (71), but this explanation seems a bit simplistic because the pimp represents all that is masculine. So, as Coleman states later, —The magic trick of pimping is to make something from nothing. He is a student of power, a classic trickster. The pimp sees an impossible situation, then finds a way to maximize it“ (72). Black men did not create the pimp. According to Coleman, —America did not invent pimping, but it did invent the famous black pimp … In the Americas, due to the devilry of slave culture, he was made manifest“ (73). The black pimp was created from circumstances that have persisted since the emancipation of the enslaved. Slim relays a similar idea in his narrative that is part of the education or mentorship that he receives from Sweet, a well-known, successful pimp in Chicago. According to Slim, Sweet says, —… The truth is that book [pimp book] was written in the skulls of proud slick Niggers freed from slavery. They wasn‘t lazy. They was puking sick of picking white man‘s cotton and kissing his nasty ass. The slave days stuck in their skulls. They went to the cities. They got hip fast. —The conning bastard white man hadn‘t freed the Niggers. The cities was like the plantations down South. Jeffing Uncle Toms still did all the white man‘s hard and filthy work.

27 W. Lawrence Hogue devotes a chapter of The African American Male, Writing, and Difference: a Polycentric Approach to African American Literature, Criticism, and History. Based on his reading, it is a fictional text that focuses on the lives of individuals who live in the ghetto. They are not upwardly mobile, Christian, or middle class nor are they guided in their daily lives by the paradigms and values that guide lives of black individuals who represent these groups to which they do not belong.

—Those slick Nigger heroes bawled like crumb crushers. They saw the white man just like on the plantations still ramming it into the finest black broads. … —Those first Nigger pimps started hipping the dumb bitches to the gold mines between their legs. They hipped them to stick their mitts [hands] out for white man‘s scratch [money]. The first Nigger pimps and sure-shot gamblers was the only Nigger big shots in the country.“ (Pimp 194-5) Slim learns the origins of pimping in the United States and what one needs to pimp from Sweet. Sweet‘s unadulterated narration of the creation of the black pimp coincides with Coleman‘s appropriation of history to account for the creation of the black pimp. Coleman states: … For him to be the master is a local revolution unto itself, for him to trade in a localized zone of human labor is the twist of the screw to the point of giddiness. The irony is that if he does his job well, in order to become a free agent, he must reproduce a peculiarly limited mode of bondage. For, of course, the commodity of pimping is sex. It is a commodity rendered lifestyle by the pimp, formatted across much the same blueprint as the plantation system. One might say pimps are simply repeating a scene of mastery dear to the history of Western culture. (73) Black men who became pimps essentially watched their white masters in slavery peddle black flesh. Masters on plantations transformed black sex into a commodity through actual forms of pimping and through the degradation of the enslaved as chattel whose copulation profited the masters as they sold and bought the slaves and their children. The pimp reverses this dichotomy of power and becomes the master. He peddles black flesh and white flesh, when he can attain it. As a creation of America, the pimp does more than reverse the slave/master dichotomy or simply emulates the peculiar institution of slavery; the pimp emulates the middle-class. The material possessions that the pimp attains as markers of success hold the same value as those possessions that the middle class cherish. In a way, they replace those middle-class markers of success. Slim writes of himself, … Everybody was calling me —Iceberg,“ even —Sweet.“ Only I and several peddlers I copped from knew that my icy front was really backed by the freezing cocaine I snorted and banged everyday.

I pimped strictly by the book for the next three years. I traded in a —Hog“ [Cadillac] each year. I never had less than five girls in the family. I moved out of —Top‘s“ building and let the family stay there. I took a suite in a swank midtown hotel. I had the privacy, the jewelry, and all the flash and glamour of a successful pimp. (Pimp 224) In this passage, Slim emphasizes the markers of success: material wealth, privacy, recognition, and family. He takes pride in attaining and maintaining the markers of success that are also the same signs in which the middle-class man takes pride. The pimp manipulates the terms that the middle-class man utilizes to define himself. Through this manipulation, the pimp fits into hegemonic masculinity, which the pimp derives from his understanding of white men within the discourse of slavery concerning the master/slave dialectic. The white man‘s presence in the pimp‘s eyes remains constant in that they rely on the labor of others to define themselves and to accumulate the wealth that they use as indicators of their identities. The pimp takes his cue from both the slave master and the businessman, who appear to be one and the same. The pimp fashioning his lifestyle and existence after that of middle-class men and businessmen is a negotiation of power in which the pimp assumes the position of power. Instead of answering to these individuals as a janitor or the numerous other unskilled, low paying professions that a black man without professional education and training could attain at the time, Slim‘s assumption of the pimp persona is a masquerade of sorts. It is an attempt to attain the material markers of success and actualized masculinity. Pimping concerns attaining, maintaining, and wielding power, which is associated with the accumulation of material wealth. The pimp puts on the mask of the master and performs accordingly. In Black Skin, White Masks, Frantz Fanon states, —If there is an inferiority complex, it is the outcome of a double process:--primarily, economic;--subsequently, the internalization–or, better, the epidernalization–of this inferiority“ (11). Whiteness and economic power become synonymous for black men. Black men are in a constant struggle to attain the accoutrements of whiteness, which also determine the extent of one‘s humanity, ability to define one‘s identity, and the ability of one man to force his will upon another. They also seek to replace whiteness with an alternative to attaining a sense of masculinity. It is a struggle to define one‘s self identity and to attain, maintain, define, and control the definition of others. They fail to realize that the accumulation of material wealth does not and cannot stand in as a substitute for race or class; material does not change one‘s race or, in the case of hustlers, place in a different economic class. It only makes these exaggerated performances possible.

The pimp, as Slim produces him, succeeds in attaining the powers of self-definition because he utilizes street language over which he has control. For instance, the name Iceberg Slim is indicative of how the pimp uses language. The name is bestowed on Slim when he sits coldly through a gun fight in a bar during which his hat is shot. After the scene has settled, Slim is still sitting in the bar; he swallows that last of his drink and puts his hat back on his head and walks out of the bar to the disbelief of his friend, —Top.“ To the scene that seems to mimic the Stagolee toast, —Top“ responds, —”Kid, you were cold in there, icy; icy, like an iceberg. Kid, I got it. You‘re getting to be a good young pimp. All good pimps got monickers I‘m gonna hang one on you‘“ (220-1). Slim receives his name from this occurrence, which he responds to as he does because he is high on cocaine. Through manipulation, the pimp succeeds in becoming a hero within the urban space in which he operates. This heroism that is afforded the black pimp lured Slim‘s readership and won the hearts and minds of young black males who desired to become pimps after reading Slim‘s narrative. Slim states that a young man tells him that he has read Pimp and that he is quitting his job at the aircraft plant and moving to Chicago to pimp. Slim responds, —”You read and memorized Pimp, the story of my life, and you didn‘t get your coat pulled that pimping is for dudes who are suckers for jail cells and smack dealers? You think pimping is a beauty contest? You think you can fuck? … I wouldn‘t even lay a two- bit bet you won‘t wind up a puddle of shit and blood in some alley‘“ (aked Soul 56). The publication of Pimp in 1969 seemed to anticipate the birth, success, and popularity of Blaxploitation era films and his literary progeny, Donald Goines. In the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s, the black criminal was the hero because he presumably reversed black/white relations as they are informed by the master/slave dichotomy and showed black men winning by —any means necessary.“ According to Ed Guerro in Framing Blackness: the African American Image in Film (1993), —Clearly, beyond the mid-1960s, lower-class blacks were increasingly dissatisfied with the exhausted black bourgeois paradigm of upward mobility through assimilation and started to identify the black experience with the defiant images and culture of the ”ghetto‘ and its hustling street life“ (89). The production of black Hollywood films was a reflection of this disdain for black middle-class morale. The underrepresented blacks of the urban underclass were in search of images and narratives that seemed to speak directly to them. Although Guerro states that the films were the products of white studio executives, blacks were attracted to these films because —the cool, counter white, underworld perspective of the black gangster or outsider has enjoyed much attention in African American popular literature, most notably in the novels of Robert Beck (a.k.a. Ice Berg Slim), as well as the more polished literary works of Chester Himes, and Donald

Goines, all of whose novels inspired many film scripts“ (94). The films were essentially a reflection of the lives many underclass blacks understood as their own, and the narratives that influenced the production of these films were their own stories. Pimp, like the first film of the blaxploitation genre, Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971), was business-oriented from its inception but became the inspiration for later narratives such as the works of Donald Goines that were also produced solely for their economic value. As Slim corroborates in an open letter found in aked Soul, —Brother, I live in the ghetto and have no desire to break its bonds, for I am after all a street nigger learning to write, who is incidentally being blessed with an increasing audience for his efforts. Materially, I dream at the moment of more space and less wobbly furniture. I experience and view the ghetto as a savagely familiar place of spiritual warmth rich in the writers treasure of pathos, conflict and struggle“ (217). Clearly, Slim is a pulp writer, though he presents himself as a novice and highlights his new economic potential of his new career at the beginning of the letter Slim, like the characters in the film, presents himself as a man in the fashion and language that the community in which he is operating is most accustomed to hearing and seeing. He becomes a hero because he makes their lives relevant. But as Slim also makes clear, —He [the pimp] is feared, hated, despised and walks a greased wire with the penitentiary on one side and his death on the other from other pimps, his victims, or their parents or relatives“ (aked Soul 60). He is a modern-day badman. His story has the makings of a badman toast. Iceberg Slim‘s name is indicative of this. He got his name because he sat calmly through a gun fight during which his hat was shot. After the gun fight, Slim drinks the last of his drink and retrieves his hat to the astonishment of his friend —Top.“ This story is very similar to Stagolee‘s toast. As much the pimp is a hero, he is also feared like the badman. The pimp is not only a contradictory hero, but he is also a protector of sorts. According to Slim in The aked Soul of Iceberg Slim, —The practical reasons are that the whore needs the pimp to protect her, to advise her, and to keep her out of jail“ (58). With his overall role in the wider society included in the idea, the pimp is also the protector of his community. Though this may sound perverse because he also exploits that community, his protection is like that of a businessman built upon the exploitation of labor. The pimp‘s business is ghetto commerce. Ghetto commerce is essentially physical and abstract (i.e., language or information) capital that holds value in the urban environment and can also be proffered for the accumulation of material wealth. The products of ghetto commerce include but are not limited to women, drugs, stolen goods, and language. Slim‘s products are his women, but his women

93 also serve multiple functions. His main or first woman brings him more women for his stable, and the individual women also have other skills from which he profits. For instance, Slim writes, I copped a young whore that was a whiz in the street and was hip to boosting…She‘d go downtown and come home with shopping bags loaded with fine dresses and underclothes for herself and her sisters [the other prostitutes]. Later she hipped Chris to boosting…They filled my closet with beautiful vines. (Pimp 223) In other words, his women also shoplifted and kept him and themselves well-dressed. As the perceived sole controller of ghetto commerce, he guards his empire. As Slim states to a new prostitute, —I‘ll protect you with my last drop of blood. If any mother-fucker in those streets out there, stud or bitch, hurts you, or threatens you, come to me. He will have to cut my throat first, shoot me first. I take an oath to protect you for as long as you are my woman“ (Pimp 219). Overall, the pimp lifestyle is advantageous in the journey toward a black masculinity conducive to community building. He attains a sense of masculinity through emulation and manipulation rather than searching for a new definition into which he can fit himself. Although it is not real control or power, it affords him the opportunity to pretend that he does own such a sense of control and power. It also allows him to place the same accoutrements of white male domination in his environment. It is also a reversal of power relations in which the pimp seizes upon the opportunity to reclaim history as it concerns retrieving his masculine identity. The pimp gains the material accoutrements at the cost of his sanity, the ability to trust others, and his freedom and lives. In both Pimp and aked Soul, Slim regards hatred as a quality one needs to become a pimp. Throughout the narrative, Slim expresses an explicit hatred for white people and for one‘s mother. Of Sweet, he writes, —”He sure hates white folks. He pimps awful tough on white whores. When he puts his foot in their asses he‘s really doing it to the white man“ (Pimp 134). The hatred of whites is not necessarily the hate of actual white people but more so a disdain for what whiteness means and the privileges that it affords. Slim also states, —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 women“ (aked 95). This hatred is preferably one for women, which stems from a hatred for his mother. The pimp is also alone, a fact that Slim repeats numerous times throughout the narrative. Slim simply writes, —A good pimp is always alone“ (Pimp 197), indicating that there is no trust amongst pimps. This state of being occurs because their trust has been broken early, and

94 it was never restored. So as a result, they isolate and dissociate themselves from their feelings. This isolation becomes his downfall because he allows his distrust to control the way that he lives. The pimp‘s isolation also functions as a warning that hegemonic masculinity is not livable or functional, especially since it is partly founded on the idea of the self-made man and American individualism. The pimp also builds his identity upon the subjugation of another, the black woman. His emulation of middle-class culture and business culture becomes a perpetuation of labor exploitation and the harsh realities that were visited upon the bodies of black females during slavery. He has only replaced the master rather than inverting the master/slave dichotomy. The pimp rejects Christianity, yet he is very similar to the Christian in the black ghetto as presented in Brown‘s narrative. James Baldwin raises a similar point in The Fire ext Time (1963). Baldwin recollects, —My friend took me into the back room to meet his pastor–a woman... My friend was about to introduce me and she smiled and said, ”Whose little boy are you?‘ Now this, unbelievably, was precisely the phrase used by pimps and racketeers on the Avenue when they suggested, both humorously and intensely, that I ”hang out‘ with them“ (28). He later states, —Perhaps we were, all of us- -pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children-- bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar risks we had run“ (41). The black Christian grasps onto religion as an answer to problems that urban existence presents. It does not offer any applicable answer, so it becomes an anesthetic to numb them to their environment. The pimp also searches for an anesthetic but calls it partying or fun. The constant reliance on chemicals to operate on a daily basis reveals that they have an unmet need that is similar to that of anesthetized Christians. Baldwin suggests that both are —gimmick[s]“ (24). They are all in search of a way to fill the spiritual void the environment has created within them. The pimp unconsciously surges toward his own demise. Like the badman, he has a short life span. His pimping life results in death, imprisonment, or vagrancy and substance addiction; each represents the death of the pimp and not necessarily the person. The pimp expected to go to prison or to die. The latter is somewhat expected due to how the pimp lives, yet it is the one consequence to which the pimps operates obliviously. Slim embarks on a career as a pimp after being expelled from Tuskegee Institute in the mid-1930s during his sophomore year for selling moonshine on campus. His first acquaintance is a pimp named Weeping Shorty, who he encounters after he is released from Wisconsin Green Bay State Reformatory when he is eighteen in late 1936 or early 1937 as implied in chapter four of Pimp. Weeping Shorty, a 55-year-old pimp, taught Slim what he had not learned prior to being sentenced to reformatory for pimping. Slim learned how to be

95 cold and how to avoid getting caught from Weeping Shorty, but an ex-pimp from Slim‘s youth would reveal to him one of the outcomes of pimping. Preston is a drug-addicted, homeless ex-pimp, who Slim watched pimp when he was younger. Remembering him, Slim writes: I thought, —Could this really be the same ”dandy?‘ What had happened to him?“ I said, —Preston, I know you. I‘m the kid who used to shine your ”Stacy‘s‘ back on Main Street. Remember me? I‘m pimping myself now. You sure pimped up a storm when I was kid. What happened? Why are you steering for this craps joint?“ He had a dreamy, far-away look in his dull brown eyes. He was probably remembering his long ago flashy pimp days. (Pimp 94) Addiction and vagrancy fall on him as a result of how he lived life as a pimp constantly under the influence of alcohol, cocaine, and/or heroine and as a result of the distrust that exists between pimps. As Slim learns early, —”Horse‘ (heroine) is what puts the ice in a pimp‘s game“ (131). Slim becomes dependent on cocaine and later on heroine; both function as an anesthetic, giving

Slim his cold demeanor. By 1944, when Slim is 27, he has been in prison twice, making the shortness of the hustler lifestyle a reality. In 1960, he goes to prison for the last time and is placed in solitary confinement for ten months for escaping from the same jail 13 years before. Before falling victim to the lifestyle, Slim decides to quit pimping in prison at the age of 43 (Pimp 305). Beyond the power that the pimp wields through the manipulation and exploitation of others and the illusory power that he attains through his emulation of the white male dominance, the pimp also holds a source of urban power, which Slim uses as the protagonist of the narrative and as the narrator/author. In the text and the pimping world, language is a source of power. With a mastery of language, the pimp is able to manipulate others in the manner that he does. He exposes himself and the culture to the reader while also acting as a gate keeper to his identity and to the culture, allowing only what he wants exposed to be demystified. As Michel Foucault states in Discipline & Punish: the Birth of the Prison (1977), We should admit rather that power produces knowledge (and not simply by encouraging it because it serves power or by applying it because it is useful); that power and knowledge directly imply one another; that there is no power relation without the correlative constitution of a field of knowledge, nor any knowledge that does not presuppose and constitute at the same time power relations. … it is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power,

but power-knowledge, the process and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge. (27-8) Essentially, power and knowledge are inseparable and the individual or entity that is in power controls the dispersal of knowledge. By privileging urban language, Slim controls the terms, parameters, and distribution of the urban underclass culture that he exploits. Precisely because he does control the language, he also controls what becomes public and what remains hidden in the urban environment and in his book. Slim distributes and withholds knowledge as a mechanism that can be used to control the subject. He does this with his use of language. In the narrative, he privileges the urban vernacular to allow the community to speak and to communicate with the community, which the language used in the text reflects. Slim attains power and allows the community itself to attain a sense of power, control, and the ability to define itself. As readers outside of the community and outside of the narrative attempt to participate in this new discourse, they realize that they are no longer in control because the language is foreign to them. They are forced to turn to the glossary that Slim provides at the end of narrative with definitions of words and phrases such as —chili pimp (small-time one-whore pimp),“ —lip (lawyer),“ —mitt man (a hustler who uses religion and prophecy to con his victims, usually the victims are women),“ and —mucky mucks (a sumptuous term applied to the rich and privileged by the poor)“ (314- 5). The glossary helps the readers understand some of the language but does not allow them to participate in the discourse on black masculinity in the urban environment because Slim does not define all of the vernacular terms that he uses. They become the observers that the community once was, allowing the community or Slim to subvert the power between the two through the text. In the glossary, Slim replaces the terms that he uses in the text with those that readers outside of the black urban community would use, but he does not unload any of the terms. This means that he does not explain in any way how these particular terms may have come into being. For example, Slim uses the term Hog instead of Cadillac; he writes, —Dawn was breaking as the big Hog scooted through the streets“ (Pimp 11). Slim refers to the American-made vehicle, which has traditionally been a signifier of one‘s success, as a farm animal. In terms of the animal, Hog also connotes greed, girth, and filth. When the term is unloaded in this manner, one may assume rightfully that it refers to the traits of the car, but the term is also a covert criticism of American capitalism in general. This is the case because Slim criticizes American slavery, the environment in which he and numerous others have been forced to live

97 and survive, and the rights that are denied to his community because of race and/or class. In a 1972 interview with Helen Koblin for the Los Angeles Free Press, Slim says: After you have been a pimp, and it's the bedrock of all male aspiration, if only in fantasy. For really what is the bedrock of all male aspiration if it isn't cunt and money? Now here the pimp, what has he got? All kinds of beautiful girls, who bring him cunt and money. Kiss and suck and love him.... on the surface of course, because beneath they really pray for his ruin. So you see how utterly poisoning and trapping it all is. Once anybody has pimped he is in trouble because this is what the male aspiration is.... whether he is the president of a white corporation, of General Motors for example. It all boils down to the same thing.... Power. Here, Slim parallels pimping to being a business man. He uses such terms to signify that he understands the workings of America and that his assumption of said attributions is not his approval of them but his understanding that to survive he must participate in the game and use the established rules of that game. Iceberg Slim writes as Robert Beck as a sign that he is no longer a pimp, but to the contrary, Robert Beck is still Iceberg Slim and simply transforms the game rather than discarding it as he claims. In the preface to Pimp, Slim writes: In this book I will take you the reader with me in the secret inner world of the pimp. I will lay bare my life and thoughts as a pimp. The account of my brutality and cunning as a pimp will fill many of you with revulsion, however if one intelligent valuable young man or woman can be saved from the destructive slime then the displeasure I have given will have been outweighed by that individual‘s use of his potential in a socially destructive manner. (17) He later says, —Perhaps my remorse for my ghastly life will diminish to the degree that within this one book I have been allowed to purge myself. Perhaps one day I can win respect as a constructive human being“ (17). Beyond the preface, he states the facts as they are and also criticizes and even compares his middle-class existence in the epilogue to his life as a pimp. His production of the narrative and the publicity that follows its publication are indications that he is up to his old games. Through his use of language and a quasi-confessional tone, Slim succeeds in manipulating the reader and the general public into believing that he is an ex-pimp.

Slim‘s privileging of black ghetto language allows him to manipulate his audience into believing that he has actually rejected all notions of pimping. His language allows him to criticize white male dominance and market capitalism, both of which inform the pimp lifestyle, and to grasp onto the qualities of the two entities he criticizes without making anyone privy to what he is doing. Throughout the narrative, Slim manipulates the audience into believing one thing by going into explicit detail about different games or hustles, which would take nothing from the narrative if they were not present. Of the many games that he explains, the —Murphy“ has the most bearing because the process he describes is the same one that is guiding his narrative. As Slim states in the beginning of the description, —Real ”Murphy‘ players use great finesse to separate a mark from his scratch. The most adept of them prefer that a trick ”hit on‘ them. It puts the ”Murphy‘ player in a position to force the sucker to ”qualify‘ himself and to trim the mark not only for all of his scratch, but for his jewelry as well“ (Pimp 38). This is the nature of all of the games in which Slim involves himself. His use of language in the text and the text itself functions the same way. His choice of language forces his reader to come to him, and attempt to learn but they will never be able to comprehend it completely. It is through the narrative that they come into contact with Slim. The narrative is the tool that he uses to take their —scratch,“ their money. His book is his new whore and the readers and media outlets that vowed for his appearance and interview are his —johns.“ He has manipulated them into wanting to know about his past lifestyle, yet he is using that lifestyle to manipulate readers. He also gives the reader the ability to experience his former world vicariously without feeling guilty. Slim only writes his story after he feels that the black psychologist he meets while selling pesticides door-to-door in Los Angeles in 1964 or 1965 after he is released from prison for the final time and moves to California to be with his mother during her final six months of life (Pimp 309-10). In aked Soul, Slim writes: —He [the psychologist] got the obsession to write my life story and during the next several weeks I recounted on his tape recorder the material to be used in the projected ”pimp‘ book. I grew to like him and to admire his superior intellectual gifts and writing experience. There were many things about him that showed he was dangerously flawed“ (140). He realizes this last point until the psychologist tries to swindle Slim out of assisting in writing the book and out of any possible profits from the book. It is the interest of the public as exhibited in the psychologist interest in his story that allows Slim to cross the borders from the underclass to the middle class and become a part of American mainstream popular culture. Slim does not only utilize language of games to manipulate his reader or to get the —trick to hit on“ him; he also draws sympathy by using a quasi-confessional tone. The tone is quasi-confessional

99 because Slim is no way confessing in the traditional sense, but he does seem to be repenting by acknowledging his supposed sins in an alleged autobiography. Slim paints his life as a pimp as a descent into a Dante-like Hell and is guided through its depths by a young hustler. He also utilizes dreams that are focused simultaneously on religion, sexuality, and his mother, all of which imply he feels guilty for his actions. Additionally, Slim‘s descriptions of the games are, in a sense, confessions, but he slyly negates this quality by comparing the games to the American capitalist tradition upon which they have been built. Iceberg Slim is able to attain and maintain his masculinity as Robert Beck. As Frantz Fanon states, —Man is only human to the extent to which he tries to impose his existence on another man in order to be recognized by him“ (216). The key word here is that he is recognized. He is no longer a part of the unrecognized middle class. He is recognized within middle-class culture and is able to make a smooth transition because as a former pimp, he understands what made middle-class men middle-class men. It was a way of living that he emulated through his acquisition of the pimp persona and desired to achieve although there was a constant insistence that he does not allow himself to become a slave in the working man‘s world. His knowledge functions as the key to his success, and as a result, he avoids becoming a slave. He essentially uses this knowledge as the basis for his own narrative, a narrative of pimping and capitalism. To achieve this masculine identity, Slim creates a new space in which he can be a man. It does not articulate itself as clearly as previously discussed because it does not seem as revolutionary or resistant as theirs. Slim has simply taken the ideals of masculinity that are used to gauge degrees of his pathology and dysfunction, and he emulates them. Then he uses these ideals to manipulate the middle- class community that has denied him the ability to achieve a sense of strong masculinity. He also shows the black urban community how it can also achieve what he has achieved, yet his intensions are misinterpreted. The largest sign that they have been misinterpreted is that, since the publication of the book, black males have been more impressed by the pimps in the narrative rather than by the production and result of the narrative. His heirs are rappers, who seem to understand the function of his narrative, but are misinterpreted just the same. The popularity of Slim‘s novel ushered in similar pulp novels and Blaxploitation films. Donald Goines is the most popular of the pulp fiction authors; he published 16 novels in five years under the same imprint as Iceberg Slim and the blurb on his books much like Slim‘s read, —America‘s #1 Best Selling Black Author.“ Goines‘ texts, unlike Slim‘s, do not offer full critiques of hegemonic

100 masculinity, the black ghetto, or the conditions that forged the creation of the communities and the characters that inhabit them. Goines‘ novels are not as complicated as Slim‘s as they are inspired by Slim‘s, and consequently, they read more like simplified reproductions. The main characters, though they may experience difficulty or hardship, fail to positively or negatively change by the end of the narratives. For example, in Whoreson Goines‘s novel, which he writes after reading Pimp, the main character, Whoreson Jones, is arrested for being deceptive to his bottom woman, and while he is in jail, Janet visits him. He has learned that he has to do five years in prison, which he accepts as part of —the game,“ and explains or lies about the situation to Janet when she ask. Her response is to tell him that she is pregnant and that they can quietly get married. As Goines concludes: As I watched her leave, it didn‘t disturb me any longer that I was on my way back to prison. That was the way the cookie crumbled. I had played the game and now I had to pay the dues. There were no more tears of frustration in the back of my eyes, because I knew I would not do this time alone. I had a woman who would be there right with me, writing and visiting until I came home. And I knew there would be a real home somewhere in my future, a house full of love. … Maybe I didn‘t know when I‘d get out, but whenever I did, there would be another way of life waiting on me. One I didn‘t know anything about, except that there would be truthfulness between me and my woman, and deceit would be a thing of the past. I smiled at the thought. I had a lot to learn, but I had a lot of time to learn it in. I glanced at three young boys huddled together on the bench. They were young and wild, and life had been unkind to them. Maybe one of them would find his way while in prison to a life away from vice and corruption, and most of all, away from the streets of broken dreams. (295- 7) This excerpt reads as a moment of realization and may have been intended to be understood as such. It is problematic because it follows a list wrongs that he has committed against Janet over the course of their relationship. Janet‘s pregnancy is the result of the rape he committed, and Whoreson is with her for value as a legal commodity because Janet Wilson is a popular singer. Whoreson wants the reader to believe that he sees the error of his ways because he is now loved. But he also determines much earlier in the novel that Jesse, Whoreson‘s mother, also loved him, which she showed him by attempting to keep him away from —the life“ that she lived as a whore, which she did to support him. Also, the awareness that Whoreson exhibits here is not new. Much earlier in the narrative, Whoreson seems very

101 aware in his speech about his condition which he delivers to Janet when he is in prison the first time. Whoreson contends: —Many people think we‘re sick … but it‘s not really a sickness. As I now see it, it is not the eccentricity of a single individual but the sickness of the times themselves, the neurosis of our generation. Not because we are worthless individuals, either, rather because we are products of the slums. Faced with poverty on one side, ignorance on the other, we exploit those who are nearest to us.“ (187) Goines continues, —This had been the first time I‘d been able to try out my new vocabulary on anyone other than cons or guards. … If you used good diction, you could con a bee out of honey“ (187) and goes on to say that she is naïve and that it is amusing to him. This scene suggests that the final one should be interpreted similarly and that that final admission is not about finding love or even needing love but more about finding the next woman to financially support him. Goines‘ characters do not change towards the end of the narratives in the way that Slim‘s does. In Goines‘ novels, whiteness is the ultimate evil; it functions as the source of any trauma, trouble or violence his characters typically experience. This understanding of whiteness may function as a critique of white male dominance, especially since in each case a white male authority figure represents whiteness, but this critique proves less effective than Slim‘s, which is performed through his use of language rather than being located in any specific character type. Each time Whoreson meets physical trauma or is arrested, someone white is involved. Because Goines blames whiteness, the protagonist never takes ownership of his role in the direction of his life. Goines‘ protagonist never experiences suffering or interprets it in the way that Slim‘s does. Slim constantly references his loneliness, mentions his drug use as a symptom of —the life,“ and understands his role in the direction of his life. Goines‘ Whoreson is born to a prostitute and is treated for the most part like a prince of sorts; he thinks of himself as such throughout the novel. Goines as a writer and pimp is very similar to Slim in that he has a similar objective: to pimp his story. Slim‘s narratives enter the discourses of the pimp and the street hustler that exist concerning the black urban underclass, the performances of black masculinity that sprout in these environments, and the external institutions that study and critique the environment and its inhabitants. On the other hand, Goines focuses on literally pimping his story and those of the people around him regardless of how unrealistic the narratives may sound. Goines is not alone in his oversimplification of the issues or his

102 approach to the stories or characters that inhabit them. Many of the Blaxploitation films, which are possibly inspired by and take many of there narrative cues from Goines novels, are just as simplistic. Blaxploitation films were created to save a financially failing film industry and to appeal to black urban movie goers, an untapped market at the time. As stated in chapter one, they were the film industry‘s solution to the financial woes it was experiencing, and for the first time, film studios considered that there was an urban black audience from which they could profit. They complemented the times. According to Ed Guerrero in Framing Blackness: the African American Image in Film, —The new black political activism called not only for more human and complex representation of blacks on screen but also for a fair share of jobs and training of blacks in the film industry on all levels“ (84). Van Peebles‘s independently produced and distributed Sweet Sweetback Baadassssss Song and Gordon Parks‘ Shaft were the filmic progenitors of the genre. Van Peebles‘s film makes the film industry take notice because it is a big success, and although many of the markers attached to the Blaxploitation film appear in his, it is an ill-fated attempt at creating a black political movie. The movie is a about a —bad nigger“ who grew up in a whorehouse where he earns the name Sweetback and performs in sex shows in South Central Los Angeles. Sweetback is taken in as a stand in a suspect for a murder and while he is on his way to the police station with the two cops, they pick up a local black revolutionary, whom they brutalize. Sweetback beats the cops with his handcuffed hands to save the revolutionary. This incident initiates his foot journey as he uses his penis to save himself, using it sexually and using urine to heal his wounds. As Guerrero states, —Sweetback brought to the surface of African American discourse the subtle fissures and crack of class tension, ideological conflict, and aesthetic arguments that had been simmering in the black social formation since the winding down of the civil rights movement“ (87). The film was also controversial and was praised and condemned it alike.28 But it establishes many of the features of the genre, especially the use of the badman lore. Shaft, on the other hand, refines what Sweetback establishes, making it appealing to both white and black audiences. It was a studio-backed film that proved to be just as financially successful as Sweetback. But unlike Sweetback, Shaft is set in Harlem and is about private eye John Shaft, who is an alteration of the badman because he is effective at traversing the society as a whole. It is the typical detective movie with sex, violence, and a black man as the detective. Both white and black critics lauded

28 See Huey P. Newton, —He Won‘t Bleed Me: A Revolutionary Analysis of Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song June 19, 1971, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. ewton, ed. Toni Morrison (New York: Readers and Writers, 1972) 112-47. and Lerone Bennett, Jr., —the Emancipation Orgasm: Sweetback in Wonderland,“ Ebony 26 (September 1971): 106-16.

103 it as a success and —as a breakthrough production in terms of expanding black representation in commercial cinema“ (Guerrero 93). This film was followed by Superfly, which set the standard for the genre. It tells the story of Harlem drug dealer Youngblood Priest, who has decided to make his last big score and leave —the game“ forever. Priest is light-skinned and slim and has long, permed hair; in each scene from the audiences‘ initial introduction to him, he wears slim-waisted coats with wide, high collars and wide-brimmed hats. He also drives a big, shiny Cadillac El Dorado. It is as if Priest stepped from the pages of a Goines or Slim novel because he fits the descriptions of the protagonists in both Pimp and Whoreson. He supplies cocaine and has a main woman and other women that he has sex with including a white woman who also works for him. His enemy, the establishment, the man, is represented by white police officers who make Priest and his partner, Eddie, their drug dealers. Priest is double-crossed by Eddie with the police but in the fashion of Goines‘ protagonists, Priest escapes with his girlfriend and his share of the money and dupes the cops and Eddie‘s deceit. In Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film, Paula J. Massood states, —Ironically, Superfly enjoys a contradictory status as both the genre‘s zenith and its nadir. The film is a ”pure‘ example of the conventions of blaxploitation, at the same time that these very characteristics sparked a critical backlash from African American groups protesting the film‘s images and stereotypes“ (102). The film is both the high point and the low point in the genre because not only does it glorify a hypersexual, hyper-masculine drug dealer who is the ideal of what it means to be cool but also because it relies on the same kinds of uncritical characters and narrative as Goines‘ pulp novels. Goines‘ novels and the Blaxploitation films completely commodify hustler masculinity. These presentations fail to critique the social structures or the characters themselves in the ways that Slim‘s narrative does. This oversimplification and commodification bleeds into the later incarnations of hustler masculinity in film and music, specifically hip hop. In many cases, present-day performances of hustler masculinity perturb the audience as to the function of these characters. This is due the fact that the oversimplified and commodified presentation of hustler masculinity of the early 1970s informs the present-day performances of it, and the present-day image of the black hustler leaves the viewer and listener wondering if socio-political statements are being made or if these are simply products (re)created simply to be bought and sold.

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EPILOGUE

BRIDGIG THE GAP:

THE EW GEERATIO HUSTLIG

So while you imitating Al Capone, I be Nina Simone and defecating on your microphone Lauryn Hill —Ready or Not“

The figure of the black male hustler remains a prominent character in American popular culture since his introduction to American cinema in the 1970s. He has become a staple on primetime television, in big-budget Hollywood films, and in music. White suburban youth mimic the figure‘s language, attire, and posturing. The figure has evolved into a popular culture icon, but nowhere is he more visibly present than in hip hop. Hip hop‘s evolution as a vehicle through which hustler masculinity thrived on the popular stage assisted in making him the cultural icon and the large scale commodity that he has become today. The omnipresence of the black male hustler figure in hip hop complicates his function as a critique of white male dominance and as a conduit to an alternative black masculinity because he has been completely commodified by the performers and the controlling record companies. In hip hop, he perpetuates the gross materialism and nihilism that have come to be almost synonymous with him. Each of the preceding chapters has discussed hustler masculinity as it relates to American politics, folk culture, and popular culture from the emancipation of slavery to the mid-to-late 1970s and analyzes how he has been transformed over time. Any discussion about the black male hustler figure is incomplete if it does not include a discussion of the figure‘s function since the Civil Rights, Black Power, and Women‘s Liberation movements and the Sexual Revolution. Each social movement changed how individuals and groups understand and express race, gender and sexuality. Since its inception more than 40 years ago, hip hop has moved from the fringes of society to the mainstream. African American and Latino youth birthed hip hop as a music that gave them a voice in an

105 environment and socioeconomic caste system which left them voiceless. As George Nelson declares in Hip Hop America (2005), It [hip hop] chronicles a generation coming of age at a moment of extreme racial confusion–in these years since the official apartheid was legislated out of existence and de facto segregation grew–that has been grappling with what equality means during the worst economic conditions for the underclass since the Depression. Hip Hop … is a spawn of many things. But, most profoundly, it is a product of schizophrenic, post-civil rights movement America. (xiii-xiv) Hip hop has moved to the center of American popular culture as the definition of a generation and of a culture. It has expanded from a musical and vocal outgrowth of the black liberation movement of the 1960s and 1970s and from a marginalized speaker box to a widely bought commodity. The commodification of hip hop has created a generation that consumes the materialistic, misogynist, hypermasculine, and hyper-sexual lyrics and images to assist in the maintenance of market capitalism. As Tricia Rose contends in The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop (2008), —The trinity of commercial hip hop–the black gangsta, pimp, and ho–has been promoted and accepted to the point where it now dominates the genre‘s storytelling worldview“ (4). In other words, commercial hip hop or hip hop that has gold to multi-platinum album sales, large concert box office returns, and heavy rotation on the radio and music video channels perpetuate hustler masculinity and results in the current generation, the hip hop generation˙ that mimics their performances without being critical of them. This negatively effects how the hip hop generation functions in the world and how the world, nationally and internationally, understands it. Hip hop‘s most adamant critics–government officials, media representatives, members of the Civil Rights generation, cultural critics and others–blame the creation and proliferation of gangsta rap for this aspect of hip hop and argue that it is emblematic of all hip hop. Gangsta rap is the once controversial genre of hip hop, which focuses on the construction of urban black masculinity and often features explicit descriptions of those locations. According to Robin D. G. Kelley in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class, —gangsta rap is … a window into, and critique of, the criminalization of black youth“ (185). Pimps, drug dealers, and other hustlers inhabit the world that many of the artists exposed on their albums and in their videos. Many of the artists use these characters to create spaces for redefinition of the self. Institutional definitions of underclass black masculinity described it as pathological and were concerned almost exclusively with criminality. Gangsta rappers

106 used these existing definitions as points of entry into the conversations to demonstrate how their recorded performances are hyperbolic re-articulations of white male dominance. And as such, misogyny, homophobia, senseless violence (such as rape and murder), profanity, materialism, racism, and the criminal justices system amongst other things were prominent features of the subgenre. Although gangsta rap may function as a critique of the environment in which such narratives and characters are allowed to grow and conditions that create these milieus, the listener determines what it means, and that is not usually a critique of society. The listener hears an almost glamorization of the hustler lifestyle. Rappers and rap groups such as Ice T, Too Short, and N.W.A. (Niggas With Attitudes) gave birth to and popularized gangsta rap in the late 1980s, and later in the 1990s Snoop Doggy Dog, Dr. Dre, Scarface, The Wu-Tang Clan, Master P, and Juvenile, to name a few, had all but taken over radio airwaves and music video channels. By the early 1990s, the hallmarks of the hip hop subgenre had bled into many of the other subgenres. Hustler masculinity is ever-present in all aspects of hip hop and in early 1990s black Hollywood films such as Boyz n the Hood, Menace to Society, Juice, South Central, ew Jack City, Set It Off, and Poetic Justice to name a few. Initially, this presence of the black male hustler figure becomes most apparent in popular mainstream artists such as Ice Cube, Tupac, and Nas in the early to the mid-1990s. Each of the aforementioned artists performs from a contradictory persona that was at once very self-aware and socially conscious and simultaneously expressed the negative hallmarks of hustler masculinity. Each at once engages the figure of the black male hustler to build his musical and performance persona. Hustler masculinity influences his imaging, posturing, voice, and subject matter. Simultaneously, an air of political consciousness also inhabits this stage persona. For instance, Ice Cube, a former member of N.W.A., became a solo artist in 1990. As a member of the group and as a solo artist, Ice Cube presented himself as the 1990s version of the black male hustler. On his album, Predator (1992), Ice cube rests on hustler masculinity, but also injects it with political awareness. The album was recorded during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, rioting that took place for six days beginning April 29th in Los Angeles after four Los Angeles police officers were acquitted in the videotaped beating of Rodney King and the shooting death of Latasha Harlins by a Korean American store owner. It was released in November after the riots, and many of the songs referenced them. For example, on the first song, Ice Cube raps on the —Wicked,“ —April 29 was power to the people and we might just see a sequel,“ a direct reference to the riots. In other album tracks like —First Day of School“ (intro), —It was a Good Day,“ —We had to Tear this Motherfucka Up,“ and —Who Got the Camera?,“ he illustrates the black urban ghetto as an environment that prepares black men for prison and as one in

107 which the police brutalize them. Other songs like —Dirty Mack“ and —Now I Gotta Wet‘Cha“ are steeped in gun violence and sexual conquest that are characteristic of gangsta rap and hustler masculinity. This contradictory stance is not exclusive to Ice Cube but can also be found on other albums such as Tupac‘s Me Against the World (1995) and Nas‘ It Was Written (1996). Beyond the figure of the black male hustler running through mainstream hip hop, the figure is also very present in politically and socially conscious hip hop. For example, —A Film Called Pimp“ appears on Common‘s Like Water for Chocolate (2000). The song is duet between Common and MC Lyte, a popular female hip hop artist from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Common is a pimp, trying to persuade MC Lyte to be one of his prostitutes. MC Lyte responds by suggesting that the old way of pimping does not work for her, and the only way that it would work for her is if Common were her prostitute. Although this duet is supposed to be friendly lyrical back-and-forth between the two artists, it demonstrates how much hustler masculinity permeates hip hop. Common is not the only artist. The figure of the black male hustler can also be found in songs by Talib Kweli who constantly tries to blur the lines in an attempt avoid being recognized as a conscious rapper, Mos Def who slips into the character on some of his songs, and Lupe Fiasco who often talks about being a drug dealer before becoming a rapper. The existence of hustler masculinity in politically conscious hip hop suggests that it is present in more than gangsta rap and commercially successful hip hop and that the posturing of the black male hustler figure is necessary to be successful. As Iceberg Slim and Elaine Brown‘s narratives demonstrate, women suffer in the wake of hustler masculinity. In hip hop, this suffering means fewer female performers because they are confined to sexist images and performance. The more successful women in hip hop are those who perform in over- sexualized, materialistic stage personas. Lil Kim and Foxy Brown are two such female hip hop artists. Rapper LL Cool J introduced the world to Foxy Brown on the remix of his —I Shot Ya“ from his album, Mr. Smith (1995). On the song, Foxy Brown raps, —Gucci sweaters and Armani leathers/ Flossin rocks like the size of Fort Knox/ Four carats, the ice rocks, pussy bangin like Versace locs pops [what the deal]/ Want ta the creep, on the light raw ass cheeks/ I'm sexin raw dog without protection, disease infested.“ Her identity rests in the sexuality and ability to accumulate material. Foxy Brown relies on this construction of her identity throughout her hip hop career, which has waned due to her performing from a rounder performance persona than from the previous. Like Foxy Brown, Lil Kim‘s introduction to the world was very sexualized on her debut album Hardcore (1996). On —Jump Off“ from La Bella Mafia (2003), Lil Kim raps, —Don't he know Queen Bee got the ill deep throat?/ Uh! Let me show you

108 what I'm all about/ How I make a Sprite can disappear in my mouth.“ Beyond gloating about her sexual abilities, she also brags about the designer clothes she has and declares, —You know what we about, sex, drugs and cash.“ Both Foxy Brown and Lil Kim also rap about the mafia. Women such as Rah Digga and Jean Grae who do not rap exclusively about sex but also rap about subject matter reserved for male performers like politics and about female empowerment are rendered invisible. Lauryn Hill and Missy Elliot are the exceptions; these artists effectively blended genres and were not restricted to the materialistic and over-sexualized roles. Lauryn Hill stands out because, as the epigraph suggests, she rejects hustler masculinity and hence, she expresses a preference to imitate Nina Simone, a politically conscious, feminist soul singer and cultural icon, rather than Al Capone. Both the performer and the record company and other companies that endorse the artist collect large profits from the proliferation of hustler masculinity in hip hop. As Tricia Rose states, hip hop sales in 2005 made up 12 to 13 percent of all music sales in the United States (4). It is clear that artists are profiting from the music, and in cases where the artists invest in their communities through nonprofit organizations, their communities also benefit. It also raises many questions. It has yet to be determined how detrimental hustler masculinity is to the community. How is it affecting how black and women relate to each other? How do the nation and other nations view African Americans if their predominant presentations of African Americans come from hip hop? Because hustler masculinity in hip hop is a commodity, does it still serve the function that it has served prior to the 1970s, and has it reconciled the change that the commodification of black male hustler figure had created in the 1970s? What does it mean that the preoccupation with hustler masculinity in hip hop seems to silence or negate black non- hustler or black gay male identities? Although it is not clear if the presence of hustler masculinity will prove to be detrimental or beneficial to the hip hop generation, it is clear that Brown, Malcolm X, and Slim‘s narratives all show how it hyperbolically emulates, critiques and rejects hegemonic masculinity and offer alternatives to what can be called America‘s planned attack on black men. They articulate options available to black men who desire to express their masculinity without oppressing another and to avoid becoming victims of a capitalist system that continues to exploit them or that threatens their morale. Elaine Brown and Donald Goines are examples of what may be problematic with hustler masculinity because they demonstrate how it can be an ineffective mode to self transformation when it is used as a means to accessing power or capital.

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These are not the only books that articulate such ideas. There are a number of others, autobiographical and fictional, that rely on alternative ideologies to articulate black masculinities. Hustler narratives have been largely ignored because they reject the ideas of capitalism and ignore notions of upward mobility. And even when they are studied, they are not read as hustler narratives. Many similar texts were written when these particular texts were written and are being written today. Including these texts in the study of African American literature and black masculinity could assist in opening the gamut of acceptable alternative black masculinities that bell hooks suggests are missing from the discourse on black masculinity, which is necessary for us to interrogate more fully in order to create and maintain affirmative, self-sustaining communities.

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Audio Recordings

2pac. Me Against the World. Priority, 1995.

Brown, James. —The Payback.“ The Payback. Rec. 1973. Polydor, 1992.

Common and MC Lyte.—A Film Called (Pimp).“ Like Water for Chocolate. Geffen, 2000.

Devaughn, William. —Be Thankful for What You Got.“ Be Thankful for What You Got. Rec. 1974. Collectibles, 1993.

Fugees. —Ready or Not.“ Perf. Wyclef Jean, Lauryn Hill, and Pras. The Score. Sony, 1996.

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Ice Cube. The Predator. Rec. 1992. Priority, 2003.

Jay Z. —Can‘t Knock the Hustle.“ Reasonable Doubt. Rock-A-Fella, 1996.

LL Cool J. —I Shot Ya (Remix).“ Perf. Keith Murray, Prodigy, Fat Joe, Foxy Brown, and LL Cool J. Mr. Smith. Def Jam, 1995.

Lil Kim. —The Jumpoff.“ Perf. Lil Kim and Mr. Cheeks. La Bella Mafia. Atlantic/WEA, 2003.

Mayfield, Curtis. —Pusherman.“ Superfly: The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (Deluxe 25th Anniversary Ed.). Rec. 1972. Rhino, 1997.

Nas. It Was Written. Columbia, 1996.

Public Enemy. —Don‘t Believe the Hype.“ It Takes a ation of Millions to Hold Us Back. Rec. 1988. Def Jam, 1995.

Queen Latifah and Monie Love. —Ladies First.“ All Hail the Queen. Rec. 1989. Collector‘s Choice, 2007.

Filmography

Boyz the Hood.Dir. John Singleton. Perf. Ice Cube, Laurence Fishburne, Cuba Gooding Jr., Nia Long, and Angela Bassett. 1991. DVD. Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment, 2003.

Juice. Dir. Ernest R. Dickerson. Tupac Shakur, Omar Epps, Jermaine Hopkins and Khalil Kain. 1992. DVD. Paramount, 2001.

The Mack. Dir. Michal Campus. Perf. Max Julien, Don Gordon, Richard Pryor, Carol Speed, and Roger E. Mosley. 1973. DVD. New Line Home Video, 2002.

Menace II Society. Dir. Albert Hughes and Allen Hughes. Perf. Lorenze Tate, Charles Dutton, Tyrin Turner, Jada Pinkett, and Glenn Plummer. 1993. DVD. New Line Home Video, 1997.

ew Jack City. Dir. Mario Van Peebles. Perf. Wesley Snipes, Ice T, Allen Payne, and Chris Rock. 1991. DVD. Warner Home Video, 1998.

Poetic Justice. Dir. John Singleton. Perf. Tupac Shakur. Janet Jackson, Regina King, and Joe Torry. 1993. DVD. Sony Pictures, 1999.

Set It Off. Dir. F. Gary Gray. Perf. Jada Pinkett, Vivica A. Fox, Queen Latifah, and Kimberly Elise. 1996. DVD. New Line Home Video. 1999.

Shaft. Dir. Gordon Parks. Perf. Richard Roundtree, Moses Gunn. Charles Cioffi, and

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Christopher St. John. 1971. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2000.

South Central. Dir. Stephen Milburn Anderson. Perf. Glenn Plummer, Byron Minns, and Lexie Bigham. 1992. DVD. Warner Home Video, 1999.

Super Fly. Dir. Gordon Parks Jr. Perf. Ron O'Neal, Carl Lee, Sheila Frazier, Julius Harris, and Charles McGregor. 1972. DVD. Warner Home Video, 2004.

Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. Dir. Melvin Van Peebles. Perf. Melvin Van Peebles, John Amos, Michael Augustus, and Simon Chuckster. 1971. DVD. Cinemation Industries, 2003.

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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Lamar Garnes was born, raised, and reared in Tampa. He holds a Ph.D. in English from Florida State University (2009), MA in English from Florida State University (2005), and a BA in creative writing (fiction) from the University of South Florida (2003). He received a McKnight Doctoral Fellow from 2003 to 2009. His areas of interests include 20th century African American, 20th century American, cultural, gender, and performance studies, as well fiction writing. He currently holds a Visiting Assistant Professor position in the English department at Florida A&M University and is revising portions of his dissertation, “Can’t Knock the Hustle”: Hustler Masculinity in African American Culture, for publication.

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