As I’ve read through Iceberg Slim’s Trick Baby, I’ve picked up on the ways in which Slim relies on the rhythms, patterns, and linguistics of the oral storytelling tradition to write his novel in a way unlike the mainstream, literary norm.
The most obvious element of this lies in Slim’s use of slang and everyday language. White Folks, our protagonist and narrator, is a white-passing black man working “the con” in the southside of 1960s Chicago. Without disrupting or slowing the narrative to define terms or thoroughly contextualize them, Slim allows White Folks to speak with a vocabulary natural to the character, flowing in such a way that the narrative moves with conversational ease. Words like flue, fluff, and the phrase Trick Baby itself are presented as commonplace words because, to this narrator, they are.
The framing device of a story within a story firmly established the novel in the oral tradition. In the prologue, Iceberg Slim himself is presented as a character serving time in prison. His new cellmate, White Folks, arrives one day and the two strike up a bond. Five days before Folks’s release, he decides to tell Slim his life story, which launches us into the narrative. So, within the world of the story itself, this story is one being told orally. The reader is then primed to approach the text with this in mind.
Pacing and the structure of the writing also lend itself to elements of the oral tradition. Characters speak expositionally, with what reads as monologues taking up pages. This style is reminiscent of a speaker taking on the voice of another, providing necessary backstory and information in a way that isn’t necessarily rooted in realistic dialogue, but efficient oral storytelling.
But what does this mean for noir? It feels unflinchingly honest, which is somewhat contradictory, given in its reliance on a storytelling form that allows for embellishment. It captures a sense of fidelity that might otherwise be missing or appear in a different form within the more straightforward, “literary” texts we’ve read previously.
As we discussed a bit in class, and you said in your post, there is an undeniable element of a distinctly oral tradition in Iceberg Slim’s Trick Baby. What I find most intriguing about your post is your idea that the oral tradition in which the story is told feels “unflinchingly honest.” While I absolutely tend to agree with this idea, what strikes me even more than the honesty that it conveys is the way that it forces the reader to engage deeply with reliability. That is, while the slang and form work to make the text feel authentic/honest, they also make the reader consider their own experience with telling stories of things that happened in the past, as White Folks is. This leads to an inevitable questioning of if there is natural embellishment or forgetfulness within the story.