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

Westside. Faint indentations in the concrete facade of the weather-battered structure read: Regal Arms Apartment. Roaches crawled about even in daylight, and at night, huge rats squeaked and scampered about the flat.
    The first night I turned on the light in the kitchen and saw a large rat about the size of a squirrel on the sink drainboard staring at me with tiny malevolent eyes. He had only three feet. The stump was ragged, like a trap had backed off the foot, or perhaps the old crip had chewed it off in a valorous escape from the trap. He outstared me. I forgot I wanted a drink of water and went back to bed.
    The apartment was furnished with old but sturdy stuff moved from Cousin Bunny’s apartment a week before our arrival. She had decided to furnish her own apartment with new stuff.
    The instant water taps, the magic blue gas flames for cooking and heating and the bright odorless electric lights were exciting novelties. Only Papa was unimpressed and unhappy. He spent most of histime pacing the floor and gazing out the window at pinched-faced figures in flimsy overcoats shuddering against the blasting winds.
    At the end of our first week in Chicago a snowstorm hid the grimy bleakness beneath three feet of glamorous whiteness. Cousin Bunny made Papa smile for the first time in Chicago. She gave him a pile of winter work clothes that her dead husband had worn to work sewers and to collect city garbage for twenty years. Then she had Soldier Boy, an acquaintance of hers who was a snow scuffler, pick up Papa to help shovel snow from the sidewalks of commercial businesses for a fee.
    Mama and we kids crowded the frosty front window looking at Papa going down the walk turning to wave to us. His face was glowing with happiness, because he was going to earn some money for us.
    Papa was a slight, but sturdy, five feet nine, and he looked so comical struggling into the snow scuffler’s battered pickup truck. Cousin Bunny’s husband had been a large man, and his clothes made Papa look like a child masquerading in his father’s storm coat and boots.
    Later I followed Mama across the hall to look in on Cousin Bunny. Her door was open, and she was sitting on a purple sofa, and she sipped whiskey from a double shot glass.
    Drab patches of tarnished silver fouled her shoulder-length auburn hair. Her tiny figure was skeletal, and the big-eyed yellow face was gray tinged and saggy. A flicker of fire in the brown eyes and curves in the sexy lips were the last reminders that she had once been the belle of Vicksburg’s black sin streets.
    Mama frowned and scolded, “Bunny, why yu mixin’ cansur with hooch? Yu gonna’ die.”
    Bunny quickly drained the shot glass and said thickly, “Honey, you’re sweet to remind me. But I don’t really give a goddamn.”
    She refilled her glass from a pint bottle on a table beside her at the end of the sofa. She stared for a long moment at a paper-framed photograph of a good-looking black man on the table.
    Mama said, “Oh, Bunny, yu got nice things, an’ yu ain’t much mo’ than forty. Why yu stay down en th’ dumps? Shoot, Ah wish we git yu an’ Joe’s luck up here.”
    Bunny laughed mirthlessly and said, “Sedalia, bless your dumb little heart. Poor Joe must have flipped-flopped in his grave when you said good luck. Sedalia, I loved Joe so much. He made me respectable.
    â€œHe died in his sleep at forty-two, and the coroner, with all his knives and education, could only say that Joe died a natural death. It wasn’t a natural death for Joe. He was intelligent, ambitious and a high school graduate.
    â€œBut he was black in the white folks’ hateful world, where a nigger is like a mop head or toilet brush. The white folks used him to clean up their puking and droppings until he wears out. Then they simply press another hungry nigger into service. They never really see him or realize he is a human unless he steals