Mama Black Widow by Iceberg Slim Page B

told them they would almost certainly have to enroll in the fourth and fifth grade in grammar school instead of high school.
    Carol ran from the living room. Bessie and Junior just sat dumbly on the floor. Mama and Papa darted glances at each other, and then quickly dropped their eyes away.
    I felt like crying when I imagined how pitifully comical the buxom twins and strapping Junior would look in grammar school with little kids like me.
    I played a lot in the hallways of our building with Mrs. Greene’s younger children. Several times we sneaked into the large shed in the backyard. Connie used it to store the shabby almost worthless goods she had impounded that had belonged to tenants who had fallen hopelessly behind in rent payments.
    Connie had a big brass padlock on the front of the shed, but she didn’t know about the rotted boards fallen away in the rear of the shed. We’d slip through the opening and prowl the musty gloom.
    Lopsided floor lamps, a headless dressmaker’s type dummy and a tall rough carving of a tobacco store Indian cast spookyshadows across the clutter of mildewed clothing and dusty old chairs and sofas.
    When Connie, the landlady, snooped around, we’d have to stay inside and suffer the dreary winter days.
    Junior spent most of his time with Railhead Cox. He was a tall husky guy about eighteen who lived on the second floor just above Bunny’s apartment. He lived there with his parents and a skinny older brother called Rajah fresh out of Joliet prison for dope peddling. He had a normal length head and a sharp featured tan face.
    Railhead had dark brown skin and thick blurry features and a horribly long head. He also had a fancy prancy hip walk. He was the image of Mrs. Cox, his brawny mother.
    She suppressed poor Mr. Cox and her sons with her stentorian voice and inventive profanity. Haggard Mr. Cox, a graduate of a Southern agricultural college, had put in twenty years of stoop labor as a bootblack in a Loop hotel barbershop. He was a drunk who moved about with glazed eyes and a slow shuffle like a withered zombie.
    Mama started to get the “country” out of herself that first winter in Chicago. Bunny taught her some slick makeup tricks. She gave Mama some dressy clothes that no longer fit Bunny’s wasted frame.
    Mrs. Greene pressed and curled Mama’s hair. In those early years Mama was sexy and beautiful when she got herself together. Satiny black skin stretched tautly across her bold African features and fine body.
    Several Sundays when Bunny felt like it, Bunny, Mama and I and sometimes Carol would walk the three blocks to Bunny’s independent church. Papa was unshakably Baptist, so he stayed at home and read his Bible on Sunday. The goo on Mama’s face really distressed him. He’d look at her sternly and turn his face away from her good-bye kiss.
    The preacher at Bunny’s church was a dapper slick-haired guy with gem quality false teeth and a debauched yellow face that had once been pretty.
    One of the deacons that sat behind the preacher on the pulpit platform was a chubby black guy about forty with a wide drooly mouth, pug nose and slanted eyes that gave his comical face a harlequin look. He was the guy that lived in the third-floor apartment above Railhead ’s flat. His was the same apartment that the little black guy got his head caved in about.
    Across the hall from the deacon lived an old man and his son who looked at least seventy years old. Bunny told us she had seen the old man just once, and he was at least a hundred and had been a slave. The son was a cook in a Loop restaurant.
    The preacher’s congregation for the most part consisted of broken-down ex-whores, old snuff-dipping crones and a goodly number of that tired army of mop heads and toilet brushes who kept the white folks’ world free of funk and stink.
    A seedy mob of starving fornicators winked and grinned at the cow-eyed sisters to latch onto a cinch source of