sweetman n.
1. (US black, also sweetie-man) a male lover.
![[US]](/static/img/flags/us.png "United States") | ‘Rolling Log Blues’ 🎵 I’ve got the blues for my sweet man in jail. | |
| ‘Gorilla Girl’ in Gun Molls Oct. 🌐 Evidently your sweet man has not been spending much on you. | |
| Gangster Girl 62: Is my honey-baby sore at her rough sweetie-man? | |
![[UK]](/static/img/flags/uk.png "United Kingdom") | Let Me Breathe Thunder (1940) 225: I was the best sweetman this side of the Rockies in my day. | |
| Book of Negro Folklore 337: A woman down in Georgia / Got her two sweet-men confused. / One knocked on the front do’, / One knocked on the back. | |
| Sensualists (1961) 84: She’d been out with her sweetie-man. | |
| ‘Yet Princes Follow’ in Black! (1996) 262: Twenty-five bucks! Is that all? Your sweet-man’ll blow that in ten minutes with one of his women! |
2. (UK/US Und.) a pimp.
| Home to Harlem 40: ‘If you’ll be mah man always, you won’t have to work,’ she said. ‘Me? [...] I’ve never been a sweetman yet. Never lived off no womens and never will.’. | |
| ‘Vocab. of the Amer. Negro’ in AS VII:1 31: sweetman. M. n. Pimp. | |
| & al. Color & Human Nature 156: ‘Then I found me another sweet man who was so mean to me. He even knocked my teeth out. [...] So I left and went East. I made plenty of money there’. | |
| Cast the First Stone 19: They happen to be connected with the same pimp, sweet man to them. | |
| Reinhart in Love (1963) 122: Sweet man, mah feet hurt god-awful. | |
| ‘Shoe-shine on 63rd’ in Kochman Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out 211: That’s some real cruel shit, suggesting a sweet man [pimp] be iced. | |
| Signs of Crime 203: Sweetman Man living on the earnings of one prostitute. A prostitute’s regular ‘man’. | |
| Lowspeak. |
3. (W.I.) a (married) woman’s lover, to whom she gives money and presents.
| Home to Harlem 82: To be the adored of a Negro lady of means, or of a pseudo grass-widow whose husband worked on the railroad, or of a hard-working laundress or cook. It was much more respectable and enviable to be sweet—to belong to the exotic aristocracy of sweetmen. | |
![[WI]](/static/img/flags/wi.png "West Indies") | ‘Ballad’ Summer Lightning 130: Jiveman was a real sweetman because he didnt work and all the time he down Mass Curly shop playing domino and dancing and giving jive talk. [...] This Jiveman live with Miss Rilla for about two year and Miss Rilla is the one who have to sell coffee and chocolate to make money to buy things for them. |