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

backhand and brought his muscular arm back and slammed the blue steel against the side of the cop’s head.
    The vicious blow landed with a hollow crunching sound. A spatter of scarlet dotted the giant’s shirtfront. The cop’s legs gave way, and he slipped to the asphalt.
    Black fingers clawed at the blue cloth and shredded it. The white figure moaned as the mob kicked at it. Finally, they moved away from the insensible heap lying in the glare of the cruiser’s headlights.
    The silver badge, a worthless charm, glittered inches away from a ghost white hand.
    As I drove away toward Mama I began to feel bad. I couldn’t get it out of my mind that he hadn’t been born a cop, so maybe he had once been a human being. He could have a wife, children and a mother who cared about him, even though he was a treacherous cop.
    I just couldn’t stand the thought that he was lying there helpless and without medical aid, so I stopped at a phone booth and called the district police station. I pointed out that the cop was unconscious and the odds were that some black passerby he had brutalized was certain to come along and cut his throat or blow his brains out if they didn’t hurry to him.
    Homan Avenue was quiet except for shadowy figures darting down the sidewalk heavily laden with booty. I parked in front of Mama’s building and hurried down the walk carrying my suitcase.
    Mama met me in the vestibule, spidery arms crushing the hell out of me as usual and with a radiant smile of welcome like I had just gotten back from Viet Nam. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I hadn’t come home to stay permanently.

4
FORTY CENTS A HUNDRED AIN’T A PRECIOUS GIFT
    I lay alone in the dark rear bedroom remembering Frank, Carol and Bessie, my older brother and sisters, and how we all shared the bedroom until deadly forces within the family and in the treacherous streets cut them down.
    I listened to the radio rundown on the savage rioting, and for some strange reason, I couldn’t forget that fearful awe on the cop’s face before he had been smashed to the ground.
    That expression on his face was somehow familiar. But I couldn’t remember why.
    My thoughts swung to Papa and the smelly one-room sharecropper’s shack in Mississippi with the foul holes in the floor that the tenants before us had used as toilets. Papa had built a privy a hundred yards from the shack and dumped quicklime or something down the holes and sealed them. But the rotten stench seemed to come back with full power in hot weather.
    Papa and Mama had a battered old bed. Papa couldn’t get his hands on lumber to build beds for us. Many steamy nights I’d lie sleepless on the rough pine floor. I’d hear and smell Mama and Papakissing and sexing behind a potato sack curtain in the corner of the room. I’d get a peculiar excited feeling.
    I would crawl across my sleeping brother and sisters and tiptoe from the shack. I’d stand there gulping the fresh air that rippled the stark white sea of cotton plants.
    I’d often gaze at the alabaster house of the plantation owner gleaming in the sapphire starlight and wonder how much cotton would a sharecropper have to pick at forty cents a hundred to own a house like it.
    At the flash of dawn we would eat a breakfast of biscuits, fat back, grits and gravy before going to the fields. At supper we’d have hog maws and turnip greens or maybe black-eyed peas with hot water cornbread.
    It was a hard life and coarse food, but we were never hungry because Papa could always get supplies from Mr. Wilkerson, the plantation owner, on tab against the cotton money our family earned.
    Our family never had more than a few dollars in cold cash, but Papa had a big pride in knowing he was all-man, one of the best pickers on the plantation. We loved and respected Papa back there in the South, and Papa respected himself.
    It was a huge plantation in the country outside Meridian,