Trick Baby

The Slickest Hustler Chicago Has Ever Seen

Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim is a cult classic that was made into a 1972 Blaxploitation film.

A brutal account of Chicago street life in the 1960s.

Synopsis

Johnny O’Brien is the son of a beautiful black dancer and a white Irish drummer. By a quirk of genetic fate, his skin is white. When his father abandons them, and his mother moves to a black ghetto in Chicago, the other kids refuse to play with Johnny. As far as they are concerned, he is a nasty ‘trick baby’ — the daughter of a black whore turning tricks with white men.

After his mother is gang-raped and confined to an institution, the grifter, Blue Howard, takes Johnny in. He rechristens him White Folks and teaches him the secrets of the con. Over the following twenty years, White Folks matures to become one of the slickest nigger hustlers Chicago has ever seen. Until the day he picks out the wrong mark.

Review

Slim wrote novels about what he knew — hustling on the unforgiving streets of Chicago. He recounts the bleak story of a man born with few opportunities, striving to make the best of what he has.

In Trick Baby, Iceberg Slim gives us plenty of criminal activity, though you might be better pegging it as urban literature, not crime fiction. It is an enlightening but depressing insight into the lives of the poor, black, criminal underclass of mid-20th century America.

Slim shone a painfully honest light on the truths that most people would rather not see. Most shocking is his portrayal of racism between the privileged white suburbanites and the blacks they relied on to do their domestic chores. That racism was just as malicious for a mixed-race child growing up in a black ghetto. His take on sexist activity is little better.

This is not a feel-good book nor an easy read. Slim’s stories are brutally edifying if a slice of domestic history is of interest.

Excerpt

I slugged my fist into the side of his jaw. I heard a flat crack like a bat against a baseball. I felt the shuddery shock of it to my elbow. He fell backwards and bounced hard. He lay flat on his back moaning. A snake of mustard vomit wiggled across his cheek.

Through a red haze of fury, I went to the wall rack for a cue stick. He had driven me out of my mind with his wisecrack about Phala.

I stood over him and raise the lead-loaded butt of the cue stick high over my head. I was going to crush his ugly face into a blob of black jelly. I drew a deep breath for the downward slam.

Then something knocked my upraised arms down to the sides of my head. I felt myself pulled away from the terrified eyes on the floor.

There wasn’t a sound in the crowded pool room. I half twisted my head around. It was One Pocket holding me. That Irish in me was raging. I was screaming, ‘Let me go! I’m going to murder that signifying sonuvabitch.’

Trick Baby by Iceberg Slim