Trick Baby: an introduction
Ice T wrote an introduction to Trick Baby in 1986, and it’s been published in Canongate’s 2009 edition.
If the role of the artist is to tell you what he sees, then Iceberg Slim is a true artist. In all his works, Iceberg – as a junkie and a pimp – takes you through the reality of a hustler’s world. In blatant, uncompromising language, he takes you out into America’s ghetto streets and shows you the real deal. He doesn’t take the easy way out – merely glamorizing the lifestyle to make himself look good. No, he’s a true player. He shows you the unglamorous dark side to the hustling life, the side that leaves you strung out, messed up and dying inside.
While Pimp – one of his most definitive books – is about the pimping game, in Trick Baby, he takes you a step further. Although all his books reveal a world that was practically invisible outside of the ghetto before he took to the page, Trick Baby shows you the real deal of being black in America, no matter which shade you happen to be.
White Folks, the main character in Trick Baby, has such a light complexion, he can pass for white. That’s one of the reasons why they call him Trick Baby, because he can go inside and infiltrate situations another black man could never get into. This extra edge leads him one step closer to the game. Written in 1967, but set in an earlier era, Trick Baby’s all about the con. Trick Baby offers a pretty bleak portrayal of American society because skin color is such a determining issue. Some people will argue with this viewpoint, but his words strike a chord with me.
I, too, see life as being hard for a black person. Although I also try to tell people to overstep these hardships, I truly believe that everything I’m doing and every struggle I deal with would not be so hard if I weren’t black. That’s just part of the game. I see white artists come out and do something almost identical to a black artist, but make far more money and be accepted more broadly. Maybe one day that will change. But if the key to a good artist is telling it like they see it, you can’t criticise them for showing you the ugliness under the surface. Certain black artists don’t want to go there, they see things differently because they come from a different place or economic situation. Iceberg and I came from the bottom, and I know what he’s writing about is for real.
It’s almost thirty years since he wrote Trick Baby, but his words remain fresh to the game. The language may be a little different, the players might dress a little differently, and some of the commodities that are traded have changed, but what he calls ‘The Life’ is still the same rollercoaster ride it’s always been.
It’s the honest portrayal of his situation that makes his books so dynamic, especially to young black kids. They hear the truth in his words, and that’s the attraction. The fact that he wrote these stories at all after what he lived through is what ultimately counts. That he had the ability to turn himself around and become a writer, gave me the courage to say, ‘Yo, I can get out of this and I can make something of myself.’
He did, and that’s the greatest inspiration of all.
Ice T
Los Angeles, February 1996
