Reading the Street: Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, and the Rise of Black Pulp Fiction by Kinohi Nishikawa Program in Literature Duke University April 1, 2010 Approved: ___________________________ Thomas Ferraro, Co-Chair ___________________________ Janice Radway, Co-Chair ___________________________ Matt Cohen ___________________________ Mark Anthony Neal ___________________________ Tomiko Yoda Dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 i v ABSTRACT Reading the Street: Iceberg Slim, Donald Goines, and the Rise of Black Pulp Fiction by Kinohi Nishikawa Program in Literature Duke University April 1, 2010 Approved: ___________________________ Thomas Ferraro, Co-Chair ___________________________ Janice Radway, Co-Chair ___________________________ Matt Cohen ___________________________ Mark Anthony Neal ___________________________ Tomiko Yoda Abstract of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Program in Literature in the Graduate School of Duke University 2010 i v Copyright by Kinohi Nishikawa 2010 ABSTRACT “Reading the Street” chronicles the rise of black pulp fiction in the post-civil rights era from the perspective of its urban readership. Black pulp fiction was originally published in the late 1960s and early 1970s; it consisted of paperback novels about tough male characters navigating the pitfalls of urban life. These novels appealed mainly to inner-city readers who felt left out of civil rights’ and Black Power’s promises of social equality. Despite the historic achievements of the civil rights movement, entrenched structural inequalities led to America’s ghettos becoming sites of concentrated poverty, rampant unemployment, and violent crime. While mainstream society seemed to turn a blind eye to how these problems were destroying inner-city communities, readers turned to black pulp fiction for the imaginative resources that would help them reflect on their social reality. In black pulp fiction, readers found confirmation that America was not on the path toward extending equal opportunities to its most vulnerable citizens, or that the rise of Black Power signaled a change in their fortunes. Yet in black pulp fiction readers also found confirmation that their lives as marginalized subjects possessed a value of its own, and that their day-to-day struggles opened up new ways of “being black” amid the blight of the inner city. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract iv List of Figures vii Note on the Text viii Note on Sources x Acknowledgments xii Introduction // After the Promised Land 1 Chapter One // Up from Domesticity 31 American Adam 39 The Allure of the Street 51 To Be Real 67 Passing for Black 85 Chapter Two // Broken Family Narratives 103 Mama’s Boys 109 Otis Tilson’s Shame 121 Whoreson and Mother-Love 139 Giving Back Sweetback 153 Chapter Three // Missing the Revolution 168 Pimping Out of Step 175 White Folks and Black Families 190 Dead on Arrival 205 Birth (and Death) of a Nation Hero 220 v Chapter Four // It’s a Man’s World 238 How Players Expanded the Game 244 Women, Race, and the Middle Class 258 Prison Sentences 272 Reading the Street 287 Epilogue // The Gangsta Rap 308 Appendix I // Holloway House and the Rise of Black Pulp Fiction: A Chronology 329 Appendix II // List of Holloway House Books, 1961-1969 331 Appendix III // List of Books Authored by Donald Goines, 1971-1975 334 Bibliography 335 Biography 358 vi LIST OF FIGURES Fig. 1 Pictorial, “Meet Sweet Sue,” Adam 1.4 (1957) 42 Fig. 2 Front cover, Sir Knight 2.1 (1960) 42 Fig. 3 Pictorial, “Hot Babe for a Hot Afternoon,” Adam 1.12 (1957) 42 Fig. 4 Front cover, Sir Knight 2.2 (1960) 42 Fig. 5 Front cover, first edition of Pimp: The Story of My Life (1967) 62 Fig. 6 Back page, first edition of The Naked Soul of Iceberg Slim (1971) 122 Fig. 7 Front cover, first edition of Whoreson (1972) 144 Fig. 8 Back cover, first edition of Whoreson (1972) 144 Fig. 9 Lobby card #2, Trick Baby (1972) 195 Fig. 10 Lobby card #5, Trick Baby (1972) 197 Fig. 11 Front cover, first edition of Death List (1974) 222 Fig. 12 Advertisement, Viceroy Cigarettes, Players May 1974 251 Fig. 13 Front cover, Players January 1974 252 Fig. 14 Front cover, Players May 1977 255 Fig. 15 Pictorial, “Conchita,” Players May 1977 255 Fig. 16 Cartoon, Players February 1977 273 vii NOTE ON THE TEXT Iceberg Slim was the pseudonym of the novelist otherwise known as Robert Beck. He was born Robert Lee Maupin, Jr., on August 4, 1918, in Chicago, but a hospital mix-up led to the baby’s name being recorded as “Robert Lee Moppins.” In 1960, when Maupin moved to California, he changed his name to Robert Beck, as his mother had married William Beck and he had not yet reconciled with his abusive father (Robert Lee Maupin, Sr.). His legal name for the remainder of his life would be Robert Maupin Beck.1 Existing scholarship on Iceberg Slim has tended to refer to the author of black pulp fiction as Robert Beck. Positing Beck as the “real” author of these texts has produced some confusing critical perspectives. On the one hand, Peter Muckley has extracted dubious biographical “facts” out of Slim’s fictional work—going so far as to claim that with the publication of his early novels, “Beck had exorcised the ghosts of his past, going further and further back to the most abused of the abused.”2 On the other hand, Justin Gifford has marshaled biographical facts (as far as we know them) from the author’s life against the fiction itself. In his analysis of the epilogue to Slim’s novel Pimp: The Story of My Life (1967), for example, Gifford glibly concludes, “A wonderful ending if any of it were true. Beck never had a son, and Catherine was the name of his common-law wife, a notorious alcoholic whom Beck left in 1967.”3 1 Peter A. Muckley, Iceberg Slim: The Life as Art (Pittsburgh: Dorrance, 2003) 3. 2 Peter A. Muckley, “Iceberg Slim: Robert Beck—A True Essay at a BioCriticism of an Ex- Outlaw Artist,” Black Scholar 26.1 (1996): 25. 3 Justin David Gifford, “Servants of Darkness: Crime Fiction and the American Working Class,” diss., University of Virginia, 2006, 73. viii In “Reading the Street” I resist the critical tendency to play the “real” Robert Beck off the authorial and narrative personas known as Iceberg Slim. Instead, I interpret Slim’s pseudonymous authorship as troubling the notion that any truth claim could be attributed to or tested against his fiction. More to the point, I advance no new knowledge in this study of the man called Robert Beck. In the variety of media through which his name circulated in the black community, it was Iceberg Slim, not Robert Beck, with whom readers and spectators identified. Even when Slim expressed wanting to live down his pimping past, he did so only with the force of his credentials as a literary street icon supporting him.4 This set of observations leads me to suggest that Robert Beck remains something of an enigma, while “Iceberg Slim” is the only name we can attach to the public persona of the Chicago hustler and pimp who became a popular author and minor celebrity. As a literary critic, I draw from textual and historical materials to reconstruct the reception of that persona. Ultimately, the narrative my research has yielded says little about Robert Beck, but it does situate Iceberg Slim at the center of one of the most important developments in the history of reading in the black community. 4 Underscoring the literariness of Slim’s iconic persona is the fact that his actual street moniker was not Iceberg Slim but Cavanaugh Slim. Neither Muckley nor Gifford acknowledges this fictional name change. Yet insofar as the name “Iceberg” is part of a history of dissembling practices/strategies, we cannot equate Slim’s work with documentary evidence of the “real” Beck’s life. ix NOTE ON SOURCES Bibliographic conventions require that magazines be cited by the month in which a given issue was published. However, the men’s magazines I analyze in Chapter 1 (Adam and Sir Knight) did not publish the month in which each issue appeared. Instead, the magazines identified each issue by its volume and issue numbers as well as its year of publication. I have chosen to cite Adam and Sir Knight in my footnotes and bibliography with this set of bibliographic information, which I also use (as is customary) when I cite a scholarly journal. Books by Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines have had very uneven publication histories. Most notably, nearly all reprints of Slim’s Pimp: The Story of My Life (1967) display 1969 as its earliest copyright date. This has led countless scholars, reviewers, and critics to cite the wrong original date of publication for Pimp. In order to eliminate some of the confusion, I have cited the original publication dates of Slim’s and Goines’s work in my footnotes and bibliography. I have also standardized their book titles by omitting subtitles that may have appeared in first editions. For example, although Goines’s Dopefiend (1971) and Whoreson (1972) featured subtitles in their original forms (“The Story of a Black Junkie” and “The Story of a Ghetto Pimp,” respectively), these subtitles have not appeared with regularity (or at all) in subsequent reprints, and so I have left them out of my citations. The exception to this rule is Pimp, which has consistently featured the subtitle “The Story of My Life” in reprints.