Pimp: The Story of My Life

As Slim’s lifestyle develops over the course of a few years, his personality and self-perception change, and he becomes deeply engrossed in the life of a pimp and less connected to the person he used to be. As Slim disconnects further and further from his emotions, it becomes clear that this deleterious process is the result of his increasingly violent ways and his need to prevent himself from feeling guilt. His detachment also stems from his heavy use of cocaine, which numbs his emotions and allows him to constantly feel powerful and alert. All of these factors enable Slim to be cruel to his women without feeling guilt or shame, though he is really just covering up these feelings rather than ridding himself of them entirely. The complexities of his suppressed emotions can be seen during the graphically violent scene in which he mercilessly whips Phyllis with a coat hanger. Afterward, he feels a vestige of guilt that is soon eclipsed by his satisfaction that his brutality has resulted in the obedience he desires.

Slim’s attempts at pimping succeed for the first several years, as he acquires more workers and more wealth. He starts to refer to his women collectively as a “stable,” as though they are work horses without minds or motivations of their own and must therefore be corralled and controlled. Ophelia comes from a background filled with trauma, as does Chris, and Slim takes advantage of The Relationship Between Crime and Trauma to convince these women to work for him. Slim also finds himself in a perfectly placed opportunity when he sees Chris’s husband violently beating an innocent man. When Slim takes Chris with him, he makes himself a target for her husband’s revenge, and this decision foreshadows Chris’s reappearance later in the autobiography, during Slim’s final experience in prison.

When Sweet Jones describes his perception of the history of pimping and where it started, his comments reflect the realities of Systemic Racism in the 20th Century, especially when he tells Slim that “the cities was like the plantations down south” (176). His explanation highlights the grim fact that although Black people were no longer technically enslaved, they were still oppressed by the many manifestations of systemic racism that prevented them from building better lives or pursuing varied careers. Sweet explains that Black men realized that white men of the time, who often sought to take back their social power, would fetishize Black women, so some Black men decided to capitalize on this trend by becoming pimps. In many ways, the inclusion of Sweet’s perspective sheds light upon Slim’s own actions, for Sweet also believes that pimping is one of the only ways for a Black man in the US to attain a measure of wealth and status. While pimping was not invented by Black men in the post-abolition era, it nonetheless became a prominent aspect of the community during an age when a decent life was rarely possible. However, it is also important to note that Sweet’s personal justifications for his actions are presented as his own, rather than as a general justification of pimping or the sex industry.