After his initial excitement, Slim surveys his surroundings and feels “betrayed” and “depressed” because the “once bright complexion was brassy and pocked hideously with an ancient smog of nicotine.
Both Opal and Slim realize this dream, but it turns out to be nothing more than a decaying facade.Īs a teenager, the suite appeared like an extravagant pad to Slim however, when he finally becomes the suite’s tenant, it turns into something grotesque. Rather than Hollywood or the courthouse, the dream became the suite at the top of the most lavish black hotel in Chi town. However, because of their situation, Opal states, “there was never even a rainbow. When they were younger, Opal had dreams of becoming an artist then possibly an actress, and Slim would think about becoming a lawyer like Clarence Darrow. Coming from a middle-class family, Slim always saw Opal as someone who would make it out of the “ghetto torture chambers,” but he comes to realize that appearances aren’t always what they seem because Opal’s mother wanted to climb the social ladder, and since her father would do anything for his wife, he turned to a life of crime to help her reach the top of the mountain. At the beginning of the story, Slim, who only has one woman in his stable, watches after the suite for Gold Streak, that is until some men bust into the suite looking for its owner.Īs the narrative progresses, the suite changing hands multiple times, and Opal, Slim’s childhood friend turned dope dealer, occupies the suite when Slim returns to Chicago. Throughout his ascendancy, Slim sees the suite as the pinnacle of success. Told in a first person point of view, the narrative chronicles Slim’s journey from “a nineteen-year-old pimp novice” to a grizzled veteran of the Game at thirty five. Beginning with a nightmarish night with a storm outside that casts “spectral shadows” on the walls, “Lonely Suite” creates an atmosphere that echos stories like Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” or the beginning of Frank Yerby’s The Foxes of Harrow. As he restlessly tosses in bed, “he moon-drenched branches of a wind-mauled tree outside the bedroom window cavorted spectral shadows about the suite” (41).
I’ve written about this imagery before in relation to Ellen Glasgow’s “Jordan’s End,” but the decaying domicile can be seen in everything from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and into contemporary literature such as Toni Morrison’s A Mercy.įrom the opening of the story, Slim plays up the Gothic elements in the descriptions of weather outside of his window. Specifically, the story uses the motif of the decaying house, in this case the hotel suite, that serves as a symbolic representation of decay and tragedy.
“Lonely Suite” relates to a long literary tradition of the Gothic in American literature. Of course, some individuals misread these cues, as Slim himself writes about in “Rappin About the Pimp Game.” Today, I want to briefly discuss one of Slim’s short stories, “Lonely Suite,” from his collection Airtight Willie and Me (1985).
As such, his stories of the urban ghettos of Chicago and the Midwest served as not just political critiques on an oppressive system but also as didactic narratives. Throughout Iceberg Slim’s literary career, he wrote to dissuade his readers away from the Life.
0 kommentar(er)
