The Legacy of GHETTO PULP FICTION - Critical Essay

Black Issues Book Review, Sept, 2001 by Gwendolyn Osborne

The hustler heroes in the novels by the late Donald Goines and Robert Beck--a.k.a. Iceberg Slim--appeal to an eclectic mix of new readers

Hip-hop music, college courses, prison literacy programs, the Internet and upcoming film projects have fueled a burgeoning interest in writings by Donald Goines and Iceberg Slim (born Robert Beck). Their works, tales of the urban underground and the world of larger-than-life hustlers who lived--and often died--by their wits, continue to attract a huge readership.

Donald Goines produced sixteen novels in a five-year period before he was gunned down at his typewriter in Highland Park, Michigan in 1974. He was in his mid-thirties at the time of his death. Robert Beck, who wrote as Iceberg Slim, published seven books, both fiction and nonfiction, before his death in 1992 at the age of 73. Their devotees include Ice-T and Ice Cube (whose adopted rap handles are a play on Iceberg Slim's moniker), mystery writer Gary Phillips, New Orleans Saints'quarterback Aaron Brooks and righteous rapper Talib Kweli.

Books by Goines and Beck, along with more literary novels by Chester Himes and Ishmael Reed, have become required reading for many members of the hip-hop generation. These authors have struck a chord with young urban males between the ages of 16 and 25. It is a large audience but one that rarely reads for pleasure. For many, these books cover familiar ground. Gangster rap lyrics often replicate the themes and tone found here. (See "Why Hip-Hop Heads Love Donald Goines," page 53.) Even Rainbow Flava, a San Francisco-based gay hip-hop group, direct those who question their participation in the music form to Iceberg Slim's Mama Black Widow, the story of a gay transvestite.

The Original "Old School" Audience

Some things have changed dramatically since the late sixties and early seventies when George Samuels was growing up in St. Louis. Pimp: The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim and Whoreson: The Story of a Ghetto Pimp by Donald Goines were his "guilty pleasures." They were all the more exciting to read because they were often hard to come by. "You couldn't just walk into a bookstore and ask for these books. Back in the day, they were sold in the neighborhood barbershops, liquor stores and pool halls," says Samuels. "When someone in my class at school got a hold of one of them, the guys passed it around until we'd all read it."

Such works have been called black pulp fiction, ghetto literature, underground literature, post-prison writings and a number of not-so-polite names. Iceberg Slim's and Goines's books now share shelf space in black bookstores and national chains with works by Chester Himes, Richard Wright, Malcolm X and others who presented their own versions of urban life. Their books have been embraced by would-be Rhodes scholars and "road scholars" alike, and now are often found on college reading lists. For example, Pimp was once taught as part of a Harvard course in "Rogue Literature."

Why are these stories still popular after more than three decades? What can be learned from them? Sterling Plumpp, a professor of English and African American studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago says, "Books by both [Iceberg Slim] and Goines emerge from a lifestyle many young urban blacks know only too well. They come from the gritty underbelly of society where one has to be tough in order to survive. It is a place in which one has to be a genius, of sorts, in order to thrive. The Stagger Lees and Malcolm Littles were once denizens of the worlds portrayed in their novels."

Plumpp readily admits academia's focus would prefer interest in more highbrow and middlebrow authors. "The ideal would be to get the world and characters Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines wrote about presented from the virtuoso literary perspective of an Ishmael Reed, Leon Forrest or Toni Morrison. Not all blacks know their history and can appreciate what Morrison's Beloved or Alice Walker's The Color Purple or Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man does with it," he says.

"Many readers of this genre are barely literate, but have Ph.D's from the school of hard knocks and seek a better understanding of the world in which they live. And these writers provide them with characters and episodes they know and can identify with from their daily living. It is not always beautiful and neatly packaged, but it pulsates with the rhythms of a beating heart pumping blood through veins."

Author TaRessa Stovall (A Love Supreme: Real Life Stories of Black Love, Warner, 2000) concurs. As a teen in Seattle, Stovall says, "I was drawn into the raw power of Goines's writing and the harsh truths and insights he revealed. While my peers were reading Shakespeare and other `classics' I studied Iceberg Slim, hoping to learn more about some of the more predatory males in my world."

The Prison Connection

Plumpp, Stovall and others agree it is important that young black males are reading books they have chosen to read. In the late 1980s, the California legislature recognized a link between reading, writing and rehabilitation, and passed the Prisoner Literacy Act. The law mandates literacy programs for a majority of adult inmates who read below the ninth-grade level. Titles by Goines, Slim and other Holloway House authors are among the most popular. Independent black booksellers James Fugate of Eso Won Books in Los Angeles, Gwen Daye Richardson of Cushcity.com in Houston and Lloyd Hart Jr. of The Black Library in Roxbury, Mass. all report respectable sales to correctional facilities.