From H. Bruce Franklin’s Prison Literature in America: The Victim as Criminal and Artist.

The sexual problems characteristic of each stage of our history have been analyzed most keenly in literature by Afro-American “criminals.” There is an unbroken line of development from Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Linda Brent, whose crime was refusing to submit to the perverted sexuality of her master, through that turn-of-the-century Georgia peon whose wife was taken away to service the sexual needs of his masters, through Malcolm X, who worked as a pimp in Harlem, guiding wealthy old white men to ogle and participate in their most diseased sado-masochistic fantasies with Black women and men, to Eldridge Cleaver’s own sexual aberrations, which led, in Soul On Ice, to his incisive exploration of the psychopathology inherent in the stereotyped sexual roles imposed by American culture on the Black man, the white woman, the white man, and the Black woman.