Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  I wanted to kick Dad in his ass for all the times he had beaten Carole and Margie while I was away. And I knew he had beaten them, especially Margie, because she wasn’t scared of him. Maybe he had even beaten Carole too sometimes. Margie forgot about Dad talking, or maybe she knew he wasn’t saying anything. Anyway, while Dad was still talking to me, Margie ran up to me and jumped up on me, threw her arms around my neck, and just kept screaming. Dad didn’t say anything, and I think he was thankful to Margie for getting him out of that talking that he had to do. After he stopped talking, the only thing I remembered hearing him say was, “It looks like you growed a little bit.” And I wondered what he was thinking when he said that. He was probably thinking that soon he wouldn’t be able to hit me any more.

  Carole and Margie started showing me the scars on their legs, knees, and arms that they had gotten from falling down or being pushed down by somebody they wanted me to beat up for them. I told them all about down South and the things that happened down there. Margie was the same as she used to be, and Carole was almost the same. For a while I couldn’t figure out what was different about her, but when she started laughing, I saw it. I thought, Carole has titties on her chest. Oh, shit, real titties. I asked her when and where did she get them and asked her to show them to me, but she wouldn’t. She said she couldn’t because she wasn’t supposed to. I got mad at her and started to feel sad because we weren’t as good friends as we used to be. I was real sorry I had stayed down South so long now.… Something happened and I didn’t know about it.

  That was the first time I had ever been away from Harlem for more than a month or two, and to me New York was Harlem. New York sure seemed changed. Even the people didn’t look the same. Some people were smaller than they used to be, and some people were bigger. A lot of people weren’t living on Eighth Avenue any more, and some people who weren’t living there before were living there now. Some of the stores weren’t there any more, and some of the ones still there had new owners and looked different from before. Some of the old cops were gone, but it looked like they had more than before. Some of the cops got killed for messing with people, and some of them got killed just for trying to be bad. It seemed like a whole lot of people had gotten killed or just died.

  I didn’t know what to do. Danny had moved away, and Kid and Butch were in Warwick. I could see that it wasn’t as easy to steal things as it used to be. Most of the white people up on the hill had moved away, and colored people owned the stores now. And it was hard to steal from the colored store owners, because they could run fast and were always watching you. I started looking for somebody to hang out with and was real glad to see Bucky. Bucky was hanging out with a boy named Bulldog and a boy named Knoxie. Bulldog was a nice guy. He was real dumb and would do anything I told him to do. Knoxie thought he was bad and liked to try to boss people around. The first day I met Knoxie, we got into a fight and kept fighting for a long time. One day I beat Knoxie two times. After that, Knoxie and I got to be real good friends, even better friends than Bucky and I. I started taking Knoxie downtown and to Brooklyn with me and showing him how to steal different things and how to shake down newspaper boys and stay out all night. Knoxie taught me how to dance. He taught me how to do a dance called the Applejack and a dance called the Bop. I told Knoxie what had happened to me down South with the homemade gun, and he taught me how to make a zip gun. They didn’t have zip guns before I went down South.

  I liked Knoxie because he had a lot of heart; he would do almost anything. We started a gang, and I was president and Knoxie was war counselor. Knoxie was a good war counselor because he started a lot of fights. Everywhere we went, Knoxie would find a gang to start a fight with. Some of the guys in our gang were scared to go out of our turf and rumble because they didn’t know the backyards and the roofs in other turfs. Knoxie was always ready to go anywhere to fight—and was ready to fight anybody who didn’t want to go with him. So I kept the gang together by fighting Knoxie every other week when he started picking on somebody. The other guys used to say that Knoxie didn’t care where he went to fight because he didn’t have a mother. Bugsy said Knoxie didn’t cry when he got stabbed in the face because he didn’t have a mother to feel sorry for him. Knoxie said he did have a mother and was always taking somebody home to show them his mother, but she was never home. It got to a point where a guy who was losing an argument with Knoxie would ask Knoxie if he wanted to come home with him to see his mother. Knoxie would start swinging, and some guys would start laughing. After a while, Knoxie stopped arguing with everybody. Then one day Leroy asked Knoxie if he could borrow his zip gun to take to school and shoot a teacher. Knoxie said no, and the argument led to Knoxie’s mother. When Leroy asked if he wanted to come home with him to see his mother, Knoxie said, “Who would want to see that old nasty, dirty, stinkin’ bitch but the iceman?” That was the last time I recall anybody talking about the mother Knoxie didn’t have.

  Grace was in Carole’s class, and I gave Carole a note asking Grace to be my girl friend. Grace said yes, and we were in love again. I got the feeling that Carole didn’t like Grace, because every time I asked her if she thought Grace was the prettiest girl in her class, she seemed to get mad. Carole kept telling me about a girl in her class who liked me and whose name was Sugar. I kept telling Carole that I didn’t know Sugar, didn’t want to know Sugar, and didn’t want to hear any more about Sugar. One day Carole brought Sugar home for lunch with her Sugar had buckteeth and a big mouth. I thought she was the ugliest girl I’d ever met, and I told her what I thought. I beat up Sugar the first day I met her and every day after that for a long time.

  I found out that Sugar would bring candy and pickles to class and give them to Carole, so Carole liked her and wanted me to like her too. After I got used to Sugar being ugly and having buckteeth, I didn’t mind her always hanging around, and I stopped beating her up. Sugar started coming around on the weekends, and she always had money and wanted to take me to the show. Sometimes I would go with Sugar, and sometimes I would just take her money and go with somebody else. Most of the time I would take Sugar’s money, then find Bucky and take him to the show. Sugar used to cry, but I don’t think she really minded it too much, because she knew she was ugly and had to have something to give people if she wanted them to like her. I never could get rid of Sugar. She would follow me around all day long and would keep trying to give me things, and when I didn’t take them, she would start looking real pitiful and say she didn’t want me to have it anyway. The only way I could be nice to Sugar was to take everything she had, so I started being real nice to her.

  One day I got into a fight with J.J. and didn’t know why. J.J. was saying it would be all right for somebody to have a girl friend like Sugar if he didn’t mind not kissing her, because her teeth would be in the way for kissing. He said that every time somebody wanted to kiss Sugar, he would have to let her know way ahead of time so she could start closing her mouth or whatever she did to get her teeth out of the way. That was the last thing I heard before I found my fist in J.J.’s face. After that, everybody started saying that I liked Sugar—at least everybody who could beat me or who thought they could beat me. After that, I told Sugar to stay away from me and showed her I wasn’t playing by not taking anything from her anymore.

  Sugar could fight pretty good for a girl, so when she told Grace to stay away from me, Grace did. Then I got mad at Sugar and had to see her again. She knew I would. I told Sugar that if she ever bothered Grace again, I was going to beat her ass black and blue. She said, “No you ain’t.” But I did. Then we bought some pomegranates and went to the park and talked about why I liked Grace. Sugar said she couldn’t see why I liked Grace so much, since Grace was a scaredy-cat and messed around with all the boys on their block. After a while Sugar asked me if I had ever done it to Grace. I told her that it was none of her business. Then she said I probably did, since all the other boys on the block had. I asked her how she knew about it, and she said it was none of my business, so
we stopped talking about Grace.

  I told Sugar that I liked her a little bit and that we could be friends, but she would have to stay out of my personal life. (I had heard a man say that in a picture at the Odeon about three weeks before. And I had been waiting for three weeks to say it to somebody. I liked the way it sounded when I said it. It sounded better than when the man said it in the movies.) Sugar said that was all right because she only liked me a little bit too. I told her I liked her like a sister and it wasn’t the kind of liking where you wanted to kiss somebody or do it to them. Sugar laughed and said that was just because I was young and didn’t know what was good yet. I laughed too and told her she was just as young as I was if she was that old. Sugar said she was almost thirteen and that she knew I was only ten or maybe ten and a half. I told her I didn’t believe she was twelve years old, but I knew she must have been, because she was in Carole’s class in school, and Carole was almost thirteen. That made me feel kind of bad. It seemed that all the girls I knew were older than I was. Most of the guys I knew, too. I didn’t mind the guys being older, but it seemed as if I should have been older than the girls, at least some of them. But I told myself that was all right; I was getting older, and one day I would be older than everybody. All I had to do was wait. When Sugar and I left the park, we were good friends, and she was happy about it. In fact, we were both kind of happy about it.

  Sugar started coming around every day again. Sometimes on Saturdays she would come around real early in the morning before I got out of bed and would try to slip in bed beside me without waking me up. Most of the time I would wake up before she could get all the way in and would push her out on the floor and call for Mama. Mama would never answer. She had the same nickname as Sugar, and she liked Sugar. Anything Sugar did was all right.

  Mama used to say that Grace looked like an old woman with that wire and gold in her mouth and that when I grew up, I was going to marry Sugar. Mama always knew that she would hit a number one day for a lot of money or would win a sweepstakes. She was going to buy a white house with a red top down South for me and Sugar. I would always say, “No, Mama, me and Grace.” And Mama would always say, “All right, you mark my words.”

  One day a few months after I got back from the South, I didn’t feel like staying in school, so I went looking for somebody to play hookey with. Bulldog and Toto were in the same class; and as always, Bulldog was sleeping. Toto came out and went back to get Bulldog. This took some time, because their teacher knew they were hookey partners and wouldn’t let them out of the class together. So Bulldog had to get the pass, since he couldn’t run so fast. We waited for Toto in the backyard across the street from the school. When he came, we all went downtown looking for something to steal. We didn’t steal too much that day, so we kept on looking after it got dark. Late that night, we found a good store to break into. It was at Broadway and 147th Street. There were a lot of radios and clocks and electric irons and stuff like that. And the store had a transom that didn’t seem to have a burglar alarm on it.

  Since Bulldog was slow at running and doing most things, he stayed outside and we passed the stuff out to him. When I had started filling up the third shopping bag, Toto called me to the window. He was still passing the stuff out to Bulldog. Bulldog had fallen asleep, but he was still taking the stuff that Toto was passing to him. He was taking it and passing it to two big white cops behind him.

  I thought the cops would take us to the Children’s Center on 104th Street. Instead, they took us to a place I had heard about but had never been to before, a place called the Youth House way down on East Twelfth Street.

  I remember the day I went to the Youth House because it was four days before Carole’s birthday party. Carole was going to be thirteen years old the next Sunday. Everybody was going to be at Carole’s party. Well, almost everybody, because I wasn’t going to be there now, unless we had a real softhearted judge. Bulldog wouldn’t be there either, and he would miss it; he really liked to eat, especially cake and ice cream and stuff like that. Toto couldn’t come anyway. We had been in trouble a lot of times before, and Mama wouldn’t let him come to our house. She said he was too roguish. Mama said that of all the little rogues I hung out with, Toto was the most roguish-looking one. One time Mama was telling Dad about Toto, and Dad said, “All them little rogues he hangs out wit look like they’ll steal anything that ain’t nailed down.” And Mama said, “Well, Toto is the one who looks like he’ll steal the nails and all.” But that was all right, because Toto’s mother didn’t let him hang out with me either, and she probably said the same thing about me.

  When we went to court the next day, we didn’t get a softhearted judge; we got a mean old colored lady named Judge Bolin. I had seen her picture on a magazine cover one time, that colored magazine that Jackie Robinson, Joe Louis, and Pigmeat use to have their pictures in sometimes. That lady judge looked meaner than she did on the magazine cover. She had a hard-to-hear voice, but you could hear it—everybody in the courtroom was real quiet when she said something. She had a face on her that looked like the hardest thing in the world to do with it would have been to smile. I wondered what would happen if somebody in the courtroom said something funny and she tried to smile at it. I thought that her face would probably crack up from the strain. But that wasn’t going to happen anyway, because everybody in the place seemed to be scared of her. It almost made me scared of her I started to get scared of her too until I saw what was going on. This lady judge was just like the mean old queens I had seen in sword-fighting pictures at the Odeon. She was bullying everybody in that courtroom with a low voice, even the men, who seemed like a bunch of turkeys, scared of a woman.

  Whenever she wanted to show the people there how bad she was, instead of hitting somebody or yelling at them she just looked at them or talked even softer. When she started talking softer, she was bullying everybody in the queen’s courtroom. I thought, It’s like she’s sayin’, “Goddamit, you peasants better shut up and listen to me, ‘cause I’m gonna ask you what I said, and everybody who don’t know is gonna git his head chopped off!” So the softer she talked, the quieter everybody was and the harder they listened, because their heads depended on it. When she looked at somebody, his head went on the hatchet man’s list, and there was nothing he could do but wait for the man with the black hood over his face to come and get him.

  I wondered what would happen if I yelled out, “Ain’t nobody scared-a you, you ole bitch!” I had never called a lady a bitch, but I called a big girl a bitch one time and ran real fast. I thought that if I didn’t act scared, the mean queen would get real mad and would probably send me to that place called Sing Sing. So I did the best thing—stayed real quiet and acted as if I were scared of her too. I thought, This lady judge couldn’t have a husband like Dad and be as mean as she is, ‘cause Dad would beat her ass. Or would he? Maybe this lady is too mean for anybody to beat, even Dad.

  From the minute I laid eyes on the mean queen, I knew she wasn’t going to send me home, and she didn’t. She gave me another day to come back to court and sent me back to the Youth House. Toto was sent there too, but Bulldog had to go to the Children’s Center.

  Before we left the court, Mama said, “That judge said you aon’t come back to court before January 5. Boy, do you know that’s next year? You wasn’ home for last Chistmas, and you won’t be home for this one either. And you won’t be home for Carole’s birthday party next Sunday. It’s just November 14, and you only been back in New York three months and four days. Boy, sometimes I git the feelin’ you ain’t gon never stay home no more.”

  I told Mama that I didn’t care so much about not being home and that if Bulldog had stayed awake, I would have brought Carole the biggest and best birthday present she’d ever had. All Mama did was look at me with tears in her eyes, and I knew she was thinking, Lord, what’s the matter with my child?

  When the bus was all loaded and ready to take us back to the Youth House, one of the boys in the seat behind me tapped me
on the shoulder and said, “Hey, shorty, ain’t that your mother standin’ on the court stoop?”

  “Yeah.”

  He said, “Man, she’s cryin’.”

  I said, “So what?” as if I didn’t care. But I cared; I had to care: that was the first time I had seen Mama crying like that. She was just standing there by herself, not moving, not making a sound, as if she didn’t even know it was cold out there. The sun was shining, but it was cold and there was ice on the ground. The tears just kept rolling down Mama’s face as the bus started to pull away from the curb. I had to care. Those tears shining on Mama’s face were falling for me. When the bus started down the street, I wanted to run back and say something to Mama. I didn’t know what. I thought, maybe I woulda said, “Mama, I didn’ mean what I said, ‘cause I really do care.” No, I wouldn’a said that. I woulda said, “Mama, button up your coat. It’s cold out here.” Yeah, that’s what I forgot to say to Mama.

  There was something good about being in the Youth House. It made me feel big, as if I had outgrown the Children’s Center. That was for kids. For one thing, you couldn’t get out of the Youth House. The windows had iron gates on them, and the doors were always locked. But after a while, I didn’t want to go anyway. Being in the Youth House was much better than being down South. In the Youth House, they showed movies twice a week, and you could play pool, basketball, checkers, go swimming, fight, and do a lot of other things. The Youth House was clean too. It wasn’t as clean as the Center, but it was cleaner than most of the places I had been to. What I didn’t like about the Youth House was that I had to clean my room every other day. Then they gave me a roommate I could beat, and I stopped cleaning it and started learning how to do what Danny used to call “git by.”