Free Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim Page A

topped with kinky whipped cream. She was an ex-slave from Georgia. She admitted to ninety-five years of life. Allowing for the certain female shrinkage in this painful area, she was possibly well past the century mark.
    In any case, except for cataracted vision and a hobbled pair of feet brutally bunioned by sheer mileage, she was a marvel of physical preservation and mental clarity.
    During slavery, as a girl, she had been taught to read and write by a mulatto house Nigger. After slavery, she had gone to Ohioand married. She and her husband built a rough cabin in the wilderness.
    Over the years, it was there that she taught hundreds of poor, ignorant freed slaves her magic secrets of reading and writing. The tuition? Hogs, poultry, grain and other currency of the soil.
    Phala had brought her home when lame Grandma Annie was fired from one of the cabaret kitchens on Vine Street. She slept in my bedroom. I slept on the sofa.
    Less than a month after she came, she had started me to read. She prepared a large chart upon which she’d printed a legend in tall letters. It read, “My name is Johnny O’Brien. I am not a baby. I am a boy. Babies cry. I will try not to cry when Mommy goes to work.”
    I clung desperately to the sweet miracle of Grandma Annie. My crying stopped. My loneliness vanished into the fairyland of Mother Goose, Pinocchio, and all the other adventures related nightly to me by Annie.
    I followed constantly in the crisp, whispery wake of her starched, old-fashioned, bustled skirts, hemlined below her ankles. Annie was also a good influence for Phala. No more loud-mouth white men with bottles came to call.
    It was Nineteen Twenty-nine, the year of the great stock-market crash and I was six years old. That year my brief shelter of contentment collapsed.
    Grandma Annie had been helping me with my school lessons. I fell asleep. She had been sitting in an easy chair beside the sofa. I woke up hours later to go to the bathroom. There was Annie, still sitting stiffly erect in the chair with her eyes open.
    I’ll never forget my panic when I called her name. She didn’t move. She just sat there like a black zombie, silently staring through me.
    I touched her knee. It was cold and hard through her skirt. I jumped up screaming her name. I shook her. She tumbled to the carpet. Her frail body lay there, open eyed, in the same frozen sittingposition it had had in the chair. Her soft kindly chimpanzee face was harsh in death.
    I cried myself dry of tears. She was still stiff dead there on the floor when Phala got home at eight that morning. I was asleep beside my Grandma Annie, the kindest friend I’ve ever known. Phala couldn’t afford to bury her. The city disposed of the body.

7
THE BIG CRUEL WINDY
    T he time until we moved to Chicago is a dismal, tearful blur. We moved into a furnished ten-unit slum apartment building. It was at Thirty-ninth Street and Cottage Grove Avenue on the Southside. I was eight years old. Our apartment had running rats and water.
    It had a bedroom and a bathroom. The kitchen we shared with legions of cockroaches. At that we were blessed. Hundreds in Chicago had no place to live.
    Every Saturday night some guy in the building would beat his woman. The screams were awful. Many times on the morning after, I’d notice dried blood in the hallways and on the stairs.
    Phala scrubbed every inch of our apartment with a solution of raw lye. Still, a rank odor clung to it. I don’t think anything can kill the singular stink of an old slum apartment. Its everlasting fixatives perhaps are in the decayed urine in the kitchen-sink pipes.
    Perhaps the very pores of the walls have held the sharp stenches of cancer pus and tubercular phlegm from the rotted lungs of perpetual paupers who have perished there, unnoticed, unmourned.
    A tidal wave of poverty had flooded the country. Phala took a job as a domestic in River Forest, Illinois, a plush white suburb of Chicago.
    There were