129 128 Nelson George Gangsters-Real and Unreal 14. Boot and Salewicz, p. 33. Billboard and as a columnist for the Village Voice, His books in- 15. Boot and Salewicz, p. 33. clude The Michael Jackson Story (1984) as well as the critically ac- 16. Personal interview with the author, Atlanta, February 1997. claimed The Death of Rhythm and Blues and Hip Hop America, 17. Chris Potash, ed., The Jim; Hendrix Companion (New from which the following is an excerpt. Schirmer, 1996), p. 165. 18. Boot and Sa1ewicz, p. 234. Getting Started 19. Boot and Salewicz, p. 73. 20. Carner, p. 292. Before you read this selection, think about the tenn "gangsta 21. Carner, p. 293. rap". How do you define this genre? Which artists do you think 22. Carner, p. 384. of? What do you know about the history of gangsta rap? 23. Potash, p. 97. 24. Potash, p. 97. + 25. Potash, p. 103. Questions People are usually the product of where they come from. The bonds that you made, the codes that were there, all have an in- 1. Inparagraph2,Wemer writes"Togeth ,the three UamesBrown,MilesDavis, fluence on you later in life. You can reject them. You can say and JimiHendrix]affirmEllison'sse e that blacknesscan mean everythingor "Okay, those codes don't exist for me, because I'm not of that nothing at all."Whatspecificexa lesdoesWemer use to illustratehisthesis? world anymore." But the reason for those codes~why people 2. Explainwhat Wemer means b he "jazz impulse"(paragraph 1). live that way-are very strong lessons. The most important rea- 3, Considerthe organization 0 the material. Inwhat order does Werner pres- son is survival. It comes down to that. That struggle of the hu- ent the information? Isth re a logic?Asa writer,would you have organized man form, the corporal, the flesh, to survive-anything to sur- the material in the sam sequence? Also,consider which of the three musi- vive. I think those things you carry with you the rest of your life. cians Uames Brown, les Davis,and JimiHendrix)Inthis comparison essay Martin Scorsese, Rolling Stone, 1990 is portrayed most f orably.Considerwhich section is dear and engaging.Is there a section y feel is not clear or engaging? Explainyour response with n the wake of the Civil Rights Movement black middle-class support from t text. I families, and many working-class families, finally had the free- 4, Write an ess about a musician who has had similar success in "blending dom to live wherever they could afford. Of course racism still 'black' and hite' traditions" (paragraph 2). Inyour response, select a musi- kept them out of certain areas, but a lot of people up and down cian and lustrate the type of music he or she performs or writes.What tra- the economic ladder got enough capital-and guts-to finally dition are used? Why do you characterize this musician as being successful get out of the old, embattled neighborhoods. Not just doctors in b nding blackand white traditions? and lawyers moved out of these black neighborhoods. So did 5, D you agree with Werner's opinion about "what drivesso many jazz men bus drivers, teachers, and bureaucrats with new gigs in munici- d women to drugs" (paragraph 22)? Is his theory accurate? What else do pal governments. Ironically, the enhanced mobility of black you believecould account for drug use? wage earners left the old neighborhoods wide open to increased crime, which led to an increase in white flight. White mer- chants, vilified as exploiters by many of their African-American Gangsters-Real and Unreal customers, were either burned out by urban riots or chased out by crime. NELSON GEORGE And the majority of that crime was instigated by drugs. As was tellingly illustrated by Allen and Albert Hughes in Dead Afncan-American popular culture critic, journalist, novelist, screen- Presidents, the change happened with a lethal quickness. In their writer, mzd author Nelson George has wril/en numerous articles for film, a black GI leaves for Vietnam from a tough, yet still hoper ell publications and has worked as an editor for Record World and neighborhood and returns to a meaner, more desperate and 130 Nelson George Gangsters-Real and Unreal 131 heroin-saturated ghetto. In fact, GIs contributed to this tragic man who can, through business savvy, sexual prowess, under- change both as victims and predators. standing of human psychology, and yes, violence, get others to In 1971, the U.S. Army estimated that 10 percent of our sol- perform the most intimate sexual acts and give him the money diers used heroin while in 'Nam and that 5 percent were hard- titillates many at some undeniably base leve1. core junkies. Some black GIs, returning home to an uncertain fu- In a warped and unhealthy way the pimp's ability to control his ture, brought heroin back with them as a hedge against environment (i.e., his stable of women) has always been viewed as unemployment. In so doing they participated in inaugurating a a rare example of black male authority over his domain. Despite new wave of black criminal entrepreneurship-a street-corner re- decades of moral censure from church leaders and those incensed sponse to President Nixon's rhetoric encouraging black capital- by his exploitation of women, the pimp endures as an antihero ism in lieu of government aid. among young black males. The pimp's garb, slang, and persona in- The heroin invasion, while partially orchestrated by the fluences the culture to this day and shows no signs of abating. Mafia and other established crime syndicates, brought new forces In contrast to the potent, romanticized pimp, the wino was into American crime (Asian and South American traffickers) and the precursor to the heroin addict as the embodiment of urban empowered a new, vicious kind of black gangster. Heroin embold- tragedy. Heroin junkies weren't new to the black community in ened the black criminal class, which had been clustered in num- the '60s. It's just that, in the rarified world of jazz and music, they bers running, prostitution, fencing, and robbery, to expand and w..re more isolated, while the victims of cheap wine and alcohol become more predatory. had haunted street corners since African-Americans moved 5 Prior to heroin's mass marketing in the late '60s, the prototyp- North. The sale of Ripple, Wild Irish Rose, and other juice-fla- f ical black criminal was the numbers runner, a creature of the vored poisons in poor and black neighborhoods foreshadowed northern ghettos with a pedigree that went back to the '30s. the target marketing of malt liquor in the '80s and '90s. i Numbers runners were viewed as a necessary evil who, in the Through black pop culture of the '60s and '70s one can experi- 10 ,i best-case scenario, acted as community bankers, processing daily ence the evolution in black criminal culture. In Richard Pryor's clas- investments from their customers. Less romantically, numbers sic routine "The Wino and the Junkie," from his That Nigger's Crazy I I I runners were also unreliable liars who skimmed profits from win- album, the great comedian depicts the wino as a city-living country f I ners and conveniently disappeared when someone hit big, though wit and the junkie as a wasted young urban zombie. The split is sig- too much inconsistency in payment endangered his or her liveli- nificant in that Pryor, an artist/cocaine addict himself, provided nu- 1I hood (and life). As drug dealers would later, the numbers runners ance to the difference between addiction to heroin and alcohol and I profited off the community's poorest. They sold dreams and, in to how it would eventually affect the entire black community. I dribs and drabs, drained money out of black America. The Holloway House novels of Iceberg Slim and Donald I Of course running numbers wasn't selling an inherently lethal Goines, published throughout the '60s and '70s, memorably docu- product-just elusive big money dreams, the same as horse rac- mented the transition in black crime from pimping, numbers ing and other games of chance. Numbers running employed peo- running, and grifting to selling smack. Slim (Robert Beck), a fair- I ple in a network of criminal activity that was condoned by the skinned con man who often passed for white, wrote lovingly of I country-bred hustlers who traveled to the big cities employing I community and the police because it provided hope and, on occa- sion, large sums of money to its customers. Numbers were, in various psychological gambits to get women to prostitute them- I fact, part of the glue that held together many poor African- selves (as in Pimp: The Story of My Life) and to swindle men out of American neighborhoods, a shared enthusiasm that sustained their hard-earned cash (as in Trick Baby). Goines, who succeeded ,I daily life at the same time it undercut it. Slim as essential black barbersbop reading, was a longtime Alongside the numbers runner in the pantheon of preheroin heroin addict gunned down in 1974, along with his wife, appar- black criminality were the pimp and the wino. While obviously an ently while at his typewriter. During his tortured thirty-nine years I on earth, Goines ground out sixteen novels about lost, mentally I exploiter of women and male sexual desire, the pimp has been, in . the mind of many men and more women than would admit it, a diseased people existing in squalid conditions, in blunt, brutal figure of fascination, a certain awe, and suppressed respect.