Read Online Mama Black Widow by Iceberg Slim - Free Book Online Page A

over, “Ah hate white folks. Oh, how Ah hate white folks.”
    I stood at the window remembering what the punishment spot looked like and cried for Junior. In the days of slavery it had been a hut where recaptured runaway slaves and troublemaking slaves had been beaten and tortured under the supervision of Mr. Wilkerson’s grandfather.
    It no longer had sides or a roof, just a rotted floor of bloodstained planking with four iron stakes in the center making a square roughly the size of a man’s spread-eagled body.
    I stood at the window until I saw people drifting down the hill to the shacks. Then I saw Papa and Junior. Junior’s chin seemed to be resting on his chest, and Papa had his arm around Junior’s waist as they came down the hill.
    I raced out of the shack and met them.
    Junior’s back was covered with ropey welts, and he kept mumbling, “Papa, don’ touch me. Papa, don’ touch me.”
    It was more than a week before Mama’s lard-based ointment tookthe soreness out of Junior’s back. It was longer than that before Papa and Junior exchanged whole sentences.
    Something sweet and important had soured and died between them. They didn’t tussle or horseplay together any more, and I’d often see Junior looking at Papa with cold eyes when Papa wasn’t noticing.
    For more than a month after Papa took Junior to the punishment spot, Mama communicated with Papa by grunts and head nods and head shaking.
    And then one night the moon filtered through the potato sack curtain and I saw Papa’s naked shadow humping and thrusting and finally quivering with Mama’s legs and arms locked around him.
    On November 1, 1936, the day I reached my eighth birthday, a miracle happened. Mama’s cousin Bunny’s husband died, and there had been enough money left from his insurance policy after funeral expenses to send Mama money for five tickets to Chicago and a furnished apartment with rent paid up two months across the hall from Cousin Bunny.
    The letter with the money said, “Please hurry, because I have lung cancer bad, and I need someone to look in on me.”
    Everybody except Papa was thrilled and excited at the prospect of going to the enchanted North. Papa hassled with Wilkerson about our cotton account and got a fabulous sixteen dollars.
    Three days after Mama got the money we were on the train wearing our hand-me-down and homemade clothes. But I didn’t give it a thought. There would be bales of money waiting for us up North and store-bought clothes by the piles.
    I remember how sad Papa’s face looked when the train crossed the Mason-Dixon line. Poor Papa couldn’t know that his brawny back and strong hands would become counterfeit as exchange in the Promised Land where cotton didn’t grow and the trade unions locked out black men.
    Papa couldn’t know that hope, self-respect, manhood and dignitywould die inside him in the brutally repressive North. How could he know that Mama would become like the man of the family and he would become like the woman?
    After what seemed like weeks, our train pulled into Chicago. It was all so shocking. The street sounds exploded like a bomb. Hordes of insane-looking people with twisted, tense faces moved at breakneck speed down the dim sidewalks, shadowed by ominous buildings that seemed to be teetering in the heavens.
    We all crowded into a taxicab. I looked at Papa on our way to the Westside. He was staring at the desolate concrete wilderness, and he had a look of fearful awe on his face that I would see many years later on the face of a white cop trapped by a mob of blacks.
    I looked at Papa’s work-scarred hands, and I felt like crying when I remembered Mama crying out to Papa’s back, “Fool, forty cents a hundred ain’t a precious gift.”

5
THE PROMISED LAND AIN’T
    T he apartment supplied by Cousin Bunny was in a six-unit building. It was located on Homan Avenue, on the