New author tries taking it to the streets

In the late '60s, a self-proclaimed former "pimp" writing under the name Iceberg Slim achieved an underground reputation for novels such as Pimp, Trick Baby and Mama Black Widow. A few years later, Donald Goines followed suit with his own brand of "street" realism - tales full of hustlers, pushers and angry Black men that large audiences found faithful to inner-city reality. Other readers dismissed both writers as purveyors of trash.

Slim, Goines and their imitators occupy the underside of African American fiction. Such writers are faithfully read - read in particular by social groups not regarded as particularly interested in books.

Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Zora Neale Hurston are critiqued by professors, students and middle-class literati, while Slim and Goines are largely devoured by the male underclass; their books are traded back and forth in prisons and homeless shelters. Their novels have "street" legitimacy. Both writers were a seminal influence on early gangsta rap. The popular rap sobriquet "Ice" is in tribute to Iceberg Slim.

Author Y. Blak Moore models himself after Goines, whose novels he devoured (and stole from the local library, he says) growing up in Chicago housing projects.

Moore, who is 31, describes himself as having spent numerous years "gang-banging." he told The New York Times he wrote Triple Take, his first novel, "between drug sales on a Brother word processor he traded for four bags of crack." Moore sold the book with the help of a National Public Radio producer who had worked on a documentary in his neighborhood. The producer read it, was impressed and began sending Moore's manuscript around to New York City agents and editors. After a year, Random House bit.

Triple Take tells the story of JC Collins, incarcerated after he is snitched on by his partners in an armed robbery. His cronies escape jail time; he receives 10 years. When JC is released, the name of the game is payback. If he has his way, then "Three guys that were once on top of things would all end up on the bottom, looking up at him a triple take," hence the book's title.

By and large, the novel is a sophomoric literary effort. Despite Moore's "street cred," readers looking for a realistic depiction of ghetto life, prison, or drug culture should look elsewhere. Triple Take is a hoodlum fantasy in the tradition of rap music yarns about "living large."

The heroes are stereotypically handsome; the villains conveniently one-dimensional. JC Collins has a smile that reminds casual onlookers "of an international model." His girlfriend, Champagne, is big-breasted and beautiful "with a body no amount of clothing could conceal." JC Collins gets his revenge, gets the girl and the money, too. The story is contrived and the writing is rife with cliches.

Moore's characters gloat over fancy cars and watches and expensive condominiums. These interests reflect the author's juvenile world view. Moore's humor is also routinely puerile and homophobic, uncritically exhibiting the same qualities of arrested adolescence that drive gang violence.

What makes Triple Take sadder still is that the real experience of the underclass is one of the great mysteries of America. It is a subject on which insufficient light is thrown, though it sorely needs illumination. America's urban ghettos are not often evoked without gratuitous sensationalism, nor are ghetto inhabitants often portrayed with psychological depth. In recent years the poor have become a subject of afternoon comedy on TV programs like The Jerry Springer Show and Judge Mathis that reinforce the stereotype of a shallow, shiftless underclass, whose lives have no spiritually redeeming qualities, who think of nothing but violence and babies.

It may be that the sociological significance of the "street" genre has been too little studied by literary critics. But Triple Take in no way improves on the work of its forebearers. Rather than aspiring to bring a harsh reality to the forefront of American consciousness - as Slim and Goines did with arguable success - Triple Take seems to aspire to become a made-for-TV movie. All in all, it's a silly novel that contributes to the stereotyping of urban America.

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington writes for Washington Post Book World and The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, among other publications.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated May/Jun 2003
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved