Mama Black Widow (32 page)

Authors: Iceberg Slim

I was released in 1961 and naturally went to Mama. I went back to Spiegel's to work, and Lucy was still my best friend.

The experiences with Mike and the jail sentence had calmed me considerably. I still drank and dolled up in drag occasionally and picked up some guy for a hot moment, but I didn't go hog wild anymore, and I didn't get serious about any guy.

I dated several young female employees at Spiegel's, but nothing really came of it. I guess I was slowing down at thirty-four, because most of my free time was spent visiting Lucy and at home with Mamaâuntil I had to flee her pressure.

Mama's heart and legs seldom gave her trouble now. I guess that was true because I wasn't doing anything or involved with anyone that threatened her possessive position.

Mama's profession was on the wane, but she wasn't weeping. She was well fixed.

I have often wondered about and puzzled over why and how the
six years between 1961 and 1967 evaporated as if some kindly sorcerer had cast a spell and bewitched my brain to convince me those dull dreary years never existed.

In February of 1967, I was on a streetcar going south on Cottage Grove Avenue. An old Plymouth I owned was in the shop, and I was eager to buy some wild sport shirts at a shop on Sixty-third Street and Cottage Grove Avenue.

At Fifty-first Street, I noticed a new, blue Buick staying abreast of the streetcar, and the driver, whom I couldn't see, was steadily blowing his horn.

I didn't know anybody who owned a blue Buick, so I went back to my newspaper. Several blocks farther south, the streetcar stopped for a traffic signal, and I heard the horn of the Buick blowing even more insistently beside the streetcar.

I looked down at the street, and I thought my eyes had gone haywire. A tall, powerfully built woman with an African warrior face had stepped out of the blue Buick and was pressing the horn with one hand and gesticulating wildly that I get off the streetcar.

It was Dorcas! The light turned green, and the streetcar rattled forward. I sat there staring down at the Buick doggedly keeping abreast of the streetcar.

I half rose to go and stand at the exit door so I could get off at the next stop and let Dorcas pick me up. But I sank back into the seat when I remembered the pure agony when I lost her.

I was frozen in my seat when the car reached the Fifty-eighth Street stop. And the persistent blue Buick wouldn't go away with its tantalizing horn.

At the Sixty-first Street stop, I tore myself loose from the seat and rushed to the street. Dorcas pulled to the curb, and I walked a palpitative thousand miles to the Buick.

I stuck my head in the window and said, “Hello, Mrs. Duncan.”

She frowned and said, “Hi, Doll Fella. I am no longer Mrs. Duncan. Please get in.”

I got in, and after two minutes in each other's presence we knew there was still magically sweet voltage between us.

And after we lunched, we went to Washington Park and parked in the same spot we had that first day we met. Just like then, we sat there excited and thrilled to find each other until darkness fell.

I had forgotten the jazzy sport shirts in the hypnosis of joy. And on the El train going to the Westside, I was deliciously aware of a posthypnotic suggestion that I had promised to come and stay at the funeral home with Dorcas. Her father had passed two weeks before, and she was lonely and needed my help with the business.

I broke the news to Mama, and she had the first trouble with her heart and legs that she had suffered in years.

I wasn't able to leave immediately as I had planned. It took a couple of days of Mama's doctor's placebos and soothing reassurances from me before I could move to the funeral home.

Dorcas and I slept in separate bedrooms, and she made no sexual demands. I sexed her on occasion, but always I had to visualize a homosexual experience from the past to perform successfully.

I kept Mama placated by frequent visits and even more telephone calls. I learned a great deal about the mortuary business and lost my squeamishness of the dead.

Time passed rapidly in the hectic business environment of the mortuary, and for a year I had not dated a guy.

I visited Mama in April of 1968, and she shot me through hot emotional grease about Dorcas and just unhinged me and destroyed my fine balance.

I left Mama and hit the sauce and wound up brutalized by a fruit hustler call Big Lovell. I was sick with shame and left Dorcas because I didn't want to hurt her further.

The black rebellion exploded in riot and flames on the Westside. I went back to Mama until order was restored and danger no longer threatened her.

She didn't know that I was determined to escape the neurotic
web she had spun around me through all the long years. A week after the black rebellion ended, I sat down beside Mama on the front-room sofa.

I said, “Mama, I'm going to get myself a place to stay now that I know you will be all right.”

She looked puzzled and said, “Sweet Pea, why do you need a place to stay when you have a home right here with me?”

I said calmly, “Mama, one of the thousand strangling reasons is that you just called me Sweet Pea for the trillionth time. Mama, don't press me and make me say things to hurt you.

“Just realize that with all of your good intentions, you're doing to me what no human being should be allowed to do to another human being.

“Mama, I'm intelligent and reasonably healthy. I should have amounted to something besides an aging cocksucker if you hadn't killed and smothered every instinct and striving of manhood you ever saw in me. Mama, I'm leaving in the morning. I have to know what life is like without you.”

She started weeping and had a heart seizure. She couldn't breathe, and her legs gave way. I gave her a sedative and put her to bed.

That night I packed my things to really go into the world on my own. I didn't sleep much that night. I was past forty, but Mama had so damaged me I, perhaps, had the trepidation of an adolescent thrown out to face the unknown horrors of the world for the first time.

I dressed early the next morning and took coffee and toast to Mama in bed. She smiled wanly. I went to the bedroom and got my suitcase.

I went into her bedroom and kissed her cheek and said, “Good-bye, Mama, I'll call you and write you.”

I turned and walked toward the front door. I had my hand on the knob when I heard Mama cry out, “Sweet Pea!” and then a crash.

I spun and saw Mama lying apparently unconscious with a long
scarlet gash on her forehead. I called Doctor Sykes, and because he was fond of me, he came and treated the head wound and conducted tests on Mama's legs.

He took me aside and told me she couldn't walk. She had what he called functional paralysis. I stayed with her for a while until she got a nurse and wheelchair.

Then early one May morning, I went into her bedroom and sat on the side of the bed. The nurse hadn't come. She started crying.

I said, “Mama, I'm all packed and ready to go, and nothing is going to stop me this time.”

She blubbered, “You mean you would leave me when I'm like this?”

I stood up and said, “Mama, if I don't leave I know I'll do something terrible in this flat. You have money to take care of yourself and to pay for help.”

I leaned over to kiss her good-bye. I had my lips pressed against her cheek when I heard the faintest, most dulcet metallic scrape and caught the most infinitesimal glimmer of ominous steel in the corner of my eye.

I leaped back and a streaking dazzle went past my throat. Mama's face was a replica of the mask of madness she wore the night she punched Carol's baby from her belly. Mama gripped the scissors like a dagger and glared hatred at me.

I picked up my suitcase and backed toward the hall. Then I went out the front door into the clean bright sunshine. I reached into my inside coat pocket and got Mike's sealed letter. I tore it unread into shreds and scattered the pieces in the gutter.

I didn't know where I was going or what I was going to do. But as I strode through the chaotic rubble of riot-ravaged Madison Street, I felt a peace, a surging joy I had never felt before.

I was never a religion buff, but for some mystical reason, I heard an old slave chant reverberating through my being.

Free at last! Free at last! Great God Almighty I'm free at last!

EPILOGUE

I
n the middle part of April in 1969, I received a telegram from a writer friend of mine in Chicago. The sad message of the telegram was to inform me that Otis Tilson had taken his own life by hanging in a skid row hotel in New York City.

I can't help but wonder what he expected to find there except the misery that is the heritage of his kind. Perhaps the final solution to the torture of spirit and body that he endured could only be death.