Reddit mentions of Mama Black Widow

Only black female authors deserve acclaim, in the mass media, apparently.

I'm not black, but I highly appreciate the education that reading loads of black American lit gave me, with no professors to spoil any of it.
Male black authors often went deep into the family and dating structures in black society and their particular aspects. Quite deep. Thousands of written pages ruminating on the topic.

Authors of note.
Ralph Ellison, C. Eric Lincoln, John Edgar Wideman, Ishmael Reed, Gordon Parks, Iceberg Slim, and Amiri Baraka[Leroi Jones].

None perfect, but all very educational.

''Ishmael Reed's electrifying first novel zooms readers off to the crazy, ominous kingdom of HARRY SAM-a miserable and dangerous place ruled for thirty years by Harry Sam, a former used car salesman who wields his power from his bathroom throne. In a land of a thousand contradictions peopled by cops and beatniks, black nationalists and white liberals, the crusading Bukka Doopeyduk leads a rebellion against the corrupt Sam in a wildly uproarious and scathing satire, earning the author the right to be dubbed "the brightest contributor to American satire since Mark Twain.
(The Nation)



1967

https://www.amazon.com/Free-Lance-Pallbearers-Novel-Ishmael-Reed/dp/1564782255


''Otis Tilson, a drag queen, recalls his life as a child on a Southern cotton plantation and of his families move in 1936 to the supposed Utopia of Chicago. His domineering and controlling Mama, who forced the move to Chicago,aids and abets the destruction of her family as much as the cruel and unforgiving ghetto they live in.....
This is realism at its most brutal ; it hits you full on, but there is also huge depth to this novel. The disintegration of a family and humanity; the destruction of an honest father who wants no more than to provide for his family are every bit as powerful as Steinbeck's depiction of the collapse of the Joads in 'Grapes of Wrath' (though the Mama's were of a different type !) And all portrayed against the realism of a corrupt police force (one that has been well recorded since) and the denial of any hope simply due to being black, and the festering wound that this left and leaves.
The book opens and ends in 1968/9 where Otis learns of Martin Luther Kings murder ; where evil once again triumphs over innocence and peaceful human ways of finding justice are destroyed.
I found 'Mama Black Widow' far more powerful and real than James Baldwin's 'Another Country' , which gets far more recognition-and follows broadly similar themes- than Iceberg Slim's novel. I would go as far as to say that 'Mama Black Widow' is the novel James Baldwin tried to write when he wrote 'Another Country'.
A brutal and sympathetic book that deserves far more widespread recognition and reading.''
https://www.amazon.com/Mama-Black-Widow-Iceberg-Slim/dp/1936399199