Mama black widow

A pimp who began writing in prison, Slim (Pimp: Story of My Life) filled his stories with the intricacies of pimping, drug dealing, numbers running and all manner of urban hustling, and between the mid-1960s and the mid '70s became the bestselling black novelist in American history. Now Old School Books has reissued his remarkable fictional memoir of a Chicago drag queen coming of age during the 1930s and '40s. At its core is the archetypal African American story: Otis Tilson's family moves from the rural South to the urban promised land of Chicago only to find more racism, abysmal slums and demeaning, low-paying jobs. Unable to provide for his family, Otis's father declines into alcoholism while the family founders, with Otis's doomed sisters and brother drifting into prostitution and petty crime. Meanwhile, the secret gay life that sets Otis apart from them is an endless nightmare of rapes, beatings and failed attempts at heterosexual love. It ain't pretty, but Slim's bracing ghetto melodrama and famously histrionic voice ("But she hesitated... for one hellish, destructive fragment of a pounding, torturous instant!") capture a core of unsentimental truth not just about homosexuality in the ghetto but also about the myths and travails of masculinity itself. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Like Donald Goines, an earlier author reprinted in another of the Old School Books series, Slim (a.k.a. Robert Beck) has enjoyed huge success on the chitlin circuit of black fiction--his books having sold millions in mass market editions distributed mostly in ghetto venues. They're so successful, in fact, that one suspects his publisher of allowing only this inferior example to be reprinted, and not Slim's better-known Pimp and Trick Baby. That aside, there's a documentarian's authenticity to this fictionalized account of one of Slim's underworld acquaintances, Otis Tilson, a black transvestite who, though born in the Deep South, lives out his brutal history in ""old big evil Chicago."" The clumsy writing in Otis's voice reflects the equally crude sociology that he offers in explanation of his plight. Full of self-loathing and queenish melodramatics, he narrates a tale of utter depravity, both at the hands of evil white people (especially the corrupt police) and brutal black lowlife gangsters, pimps, freaks, and junkies. Otis's only happiness--the familial love he shared with his sister and father--is shattered by the family's move to ""the promised land,"" where his father, a once-proud sharecropper, is ""niggerized"" by the city and Otis's brothers and sisters all land in jail or the grave, with his mother largely to blame. Pretty clearly, Slim holds this clichƿ of a smothering black mother responsible for the ""freak bitch"" who lives inside her son. Gruesome and full of Uncle Remus dialect, Slim's urban tale at best provides some over-the-top testimony to the city's degradations. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.