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

Mississippi, that worked many families like ours beneath the blistering sun.
    I was frail and prone to sunstroke. I collapsed a half-dozen times in the two years I worked the cotton. When I was eight years old I started staying at the shack, helping Mama sew and wash our clothes when she didn’t go to the fields.
    The big cast-iron tub Mama used to wash our clothes in was also our bathtub. I’d watch Papa strip off his sweaty clothes when he came in from the fields. I’d admire his muscles that writhed like golden snakes when he bathed.
    In the off months of cotton my brother and sisters and I went toa one-room schoolhouse two miles away. Carol and I would often take our reading and writing to a patch of moonlight on the floor after the kerosene lamp had been blown out and Frank Jr. and Bessie were sound asleep.
    Papa and my older brother, Frank Jr., and I were real buddies down South. We’d go fishing and hiking together. Papa and Frank Jr. would wrestle each other until they panted. Frank Jr. was taller than Papa and almost as big, but he was no match for Papa’s wiry strength.
    Sunday afternoon Papa would deck himself out in starched and creased overalls and gleaming brogans ordered from a Sears and Roebuck catalogue. He’d preach beneath a clump of cottonwood trees to his amening congregation. He sure stood proud and beautiful out there giving Satan hell with his booming rich voice.
    Papa had some importance and a sense of worth down South, even though living conditions were subhuman. Up North, poor Papa would become a zero, unimportant to everyone, even to his wife and children.
    Mama wasn’t a bit fire and brimstone like Papa. And when she went to church I could feel that she didn’t go because she was religious. Mama and Papa were completely different from each other in habit and desires and morals. But Papa tried because he was a good man and he loved her and his children. I really doubt that Mama ever loved Papa. Small wonder that the Tilsons were doomed to tears and sorrow.
    Mama had an obsession to escape the South and go to Chicago where her cousin Bunny lived like white folks with running water, in-the-house privy and a sitting room and electric lights.
    Papa was content in the South and would just sit silently with a worried look on his face when Mama read Bunny’s letters and got all excited and starry eyed about the wondrous North.
    Mama and Papa were unlike peas in a pod in other ways too. They met and married in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1919. Papa wastwenty-eight and had come in from the country with his father on a Saturday night to bring the gospel to the grog heads, whoremongers and craps shooters.
    Papa was taking his preaching turn on a sinful street corner when Mama and cousin Bunny passed him, and then came back for a second long look at the extremely handsome high yellow preacher.
    Mama told us she had lived with cousin Bunny since she was ten years old. She was mysterious and vague about her parents and her life before she lived with Bunny. I found out why one terrible day years later.
    I found out from arguments between Mama and Papa that cousin Bunny had been a fast twenty-five-year-old hustler who was operating a blind pig and poker trap in Vicksburg’s sin district that night that Mama saw Papa for the first time.
    I don’t know whether Bunny had used bright-eyed, curvaceous Mama as a shill, or worse, in her joint. But I’ll always believe that Mama was hurt morally by those years with Bunny in her blind pig. And perhaps what Mama revealed when Bessie left home to whore could explain the cold-blooded things Mama did up North.
    Papa rescued Mama from Bunny’s den of iniquity and took her for better or for worse a month after they met. Papa took her to Meridian, Mississippi, shortly after that, perhaps to escape cousin Bunny’s scarlet charisma and the outraged condemnation of Grandpa Tilson.
    Papa shoed horses and mules in Meridian and