Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  I went looking for Papanek. I had to talk to him and find out about him. I saw him coming out of the dining room, talking with a couple of kids. He had his arm around their shoulders, and a lot of guys were crowding around him and walking with him. I wondered if he thought he was Jesus or some fucking body like that. Papanek stopped and started answering questions asked by some of the cats crowding around him. He was leaning forward with his neck stuck out and his hands folded behind his back. I used to be afraid of people who kept their hands behind their backs, because I once had a teacher who used to slap me right after she put her hands behind her back.

  When I came up to Papanek and his crowd, I just stood on the outside and listened for a while. I don’t know if I was scared or just wanted to get a better idea of what I was up against before I declared war. Floyd Saks was telling Papanek about all his ills and troubles. Papanek was listening, but he seemed to know that Floyd was a little crazy and just liked to fuck with people by talking a lot of nonsense for a long time. Papanek knew Floyd had him, but he didn’t seem to know how to get away. He kept looking over the crowd and all around him, as if hoping to see somebody who would call him and save him from Floyd. Every time Papanek would look away, Floyd would call his name and make him pay attention to what he was saying, crazy though it was. I think too many people were trying to pick Papanek’s pocket at the same time, so nobody was getting anything. But it didn’t really matter, because they would have just given whatever they took back to him. They liked this cat.

  I didn’t say anything to Papanek that first day, but after he took over, we were warring until I went home for good. After I got to know Papanek, I found out how to really bother him; but I had to keep finding new ways, because the cat was slicker than anybody else at Wiltwyck. It was hard to bother him the same way twice. Papanek brought a whole new way of doing things to Wiltwyck. He made a rule that boys were not to be beaten or even slapped by counselors any more. I expected Stilly to leave the day that Papanek passed that rule, but he didn’t. He stayed on for nearly a year. Then I guess he just couldn’t take it any more.

  Papanek might have been a little crazy, but he meant all the crazy things he said to the boys and counselors. This was one of the things that made Papanek so hard to fight. I could never catch him in a lie, and he would never hit anybody. And as time went by, nobody could make him mad. At least he never showed it. He would look real sad sometimes, but he wouldn’t get mad. But you could always tell when he got excited, because his accent would get stronger but his words would be real clear. I had never met anybody before who never got mad, and I had never met anybody who was always telling the truth like Papanek. But that’s the way he was. If you asked him the hard Wiltwyck questions like, “When am I going home?” or, “Why are you keeping me here so long?” and Papanek couldn’t tell you, he wouldn’t lie about it. He would tell you something that left you knowing no more than before you asked him the question, but you would feel kind of satisfied about it. Sometimes he would have you talking about something else altogether different from what you asked him, and most of the time you would never know it. He was smarter than social workers, that was for sure, because he knew how to answer the hard questions without lying. So nobody could ever be mad at him for lying to them. And even though cats up at Wiltwyck lied a whole lot, like me, we didn’t like grown-ups to lie to us about important things like the hard questions. Sometimes I used to get real tired of all that damn truth Papanek was telling, but I couldn’t get mad at him for it.

  For the next year or more, I tried to make life real sad for Papanek. This became harder and harder as time went by, because I grew to like him more and more, just like everybody else.

  A few months after I moved into Aggrey House, a lady moved in. She was a white lady with white hair. She was kind of old, but her hair wasn’t white because she was old, and it wasn’t dyed white. It looked like it was supposed to be white and always had been. I was standing with some other guys around the quadrangle post at the end of the walk leading to Aggrey House on the afternoon the lady moved in. It was a hard thing to understand, a lady moving into Aggrey House. At first we thought that she was going to be living there but not working there. Some of the guys were helping her take her stuff up to the third floor, where most of the counselors lived. This lady had a real hard-looking face, and she smoked a cigarette without putting her hands on it and talked while she was smoking. I had never seen a white lady do that before.

  K.B. was pulling on me to come with him and get a dime. The lady was giving out dimes to all the guys who had helped her take her things upstairs. K.B. hadn’t carried a thing upstairs, but he said the lady didn’t know who had. He said he had gotten one dime, gone in the house through the back way, come to the front, gone up to the lady with his hand out, and had gotten another dime. He was all set to go for a third one, but he wanted me to come with him because this was too good to miss.

  K.B. said, for about the third time, “C’mon, Claudie.”

  I said, “Man, I’ll bet she smokes a lotta cigarettes.”

  K.B. said that she talked funny and must be from another country.

  Horse said, “Man, they must be crazy puttin’ her in here wit us.”

  Jake Adams said, “Why, Horse? What you gonna do to her?”

  Somebody said they should have put her in Robeson House with the little guys. But it looked as though she was going to be a counselor in Aggrey House. All the cats were betting that she wouldn’t stay more than two weeks. But I wasn’t so quick to bet. I had never seen a lady who smoked cigarettes like this lady. She looked like she knew something.

  The lady who lived in Aggrey House was Mrs. Meitner. She was from Germany and sounded like it. Mrs. Meitner once had a big house in Germany, and her family use to grow a lot of grapes and make a lot of wine. I guess she was kind of rich. When Hitler took over the country, he took Mrs. Meitner’s house, put her in a concentration camp, killed her husband and most of her friends. She told me and some more cats about it one day, real fast, smiled, and started talking about something else. That was the only time I ever heard her talk about it.

  Mrs. Meitner was not out of place in Aggrey House. The first week she was there, she showed us a lot of judo and won a whole lot of friends. Guys tried to make her leave by walking past the stairs naked when they heard her coming down, but that didn’t work either. Mrs. Meitner would just stop whoever it was and make him stand there and talk to her. The cat who was naked would get embarrassed long before she did. After a while, people just stopped messing with Mrs. Meitner and faced the fact that she was there to stay. Little by little, everybody started liking Mrs. Meitner. She was real smart and could do a lot of things. I started liking her more than anybody else at Wiltwyck.

  Every day I saw Mrs. Meitner, I liked her more and more. One day we were sitting on the wall near the shrine, just me and Mrs. Meitner, and I asked her how old she was. She wouldn’t tell me, not even when I said I was in love with her and wanted to know if she was too old for me. She just smiled and said she was too young for me. I told her I wasn’t playing, that I was really in love with her. She told me she had a grown son who was an architect. After she told me that, she looked at me for a long time. I guess I was supposed to say I was sorry or something like that. But I didn’t. I told her again that I was in love with her. She kept smiling, just looking at me and smiling. I said, “You think nobody can be in love with you just ‘cause you got a grown son who is an architect.… Damn, that’s crazy.” She got up and walked away—didn’t say a thing, just walked away.

  When it was time to go to bed, I hadn’t seen Mrs. Meitner for a couple of hours, and I started looking for her to find out if she was mad at me. Her door wasn’t locked, but I knocked on it so she would say something and so I could tell by the way her voice sounded if she was mad or not. She was sitting in a chair facing the window when I came in, and she didn’t turn around for a long time; but I was sure that she knew it was me when she heard the knock on the
door. It seemed like she came to life when she turned around. She looked at me and said, “Yes?”—in a real lively sort of way. I said I was sorry if I had said the wrong thing, that I had meant to tell it to her in another way but that it just hadn’t come out the way I wanted it to. Mrs. Meitner got up from the straw rocking chair and walked over to me. She didn’t look at me yet; she just reached behind me and closed the door. Then she told me to go over and sit in the rocking chair.

  The sun was going down, and what was left of it was shining through the window; that was the only light in the room, just a little bit of sunlight. Mrs. Meitner was wearing slacks when I came into the room. She went behind a screen and came out in a housecoat. She sat down on the far end of the couch. I turned the chair around to face her when she asked me if I wanted a cigarette. I said no thanks. Even though I was surprised when she offered me the cigarette, I said no thanks real calm. She had offered it to me in a real calm voice. That’s how I knew she meant it. If I had said yes, I know she would have given me the cigarette, even though the boys at Wiltwyck were not allowed to smoke.

  Mrs. Meitner just sat there looking at me for a while … looking at me and smoking on her strong cigarettes. I knew they were strong—I had stolen one and smoked it once. I didn’t think she knew about that, but maybe she did. Maybe that’s why she offered me the cigarette.

  After a while, I said, “Well, are you?”

  She said, “Am I what?”

  “Are you mad at me?”

  She got up and said, “Of course not. Why should I be?” She walked over to the hot plate in the corner, poured two cups of coffee, and gave one to me. Then she went back to the couch, sat down, crossed her legs, and started drinking the coffee.

  I took a sip of coffee, mostly because I thought I was supposed to. Mrs. Meitner’s housecoat was kind of open near the top, and I could see part of her breasts. The part I saw was kind of wrinkled, and at first it sort of scared me. I started thinking she must be real, real old. After a while, I told myself that it didn’t matter—and I meant it. When I asked her what her house in Germany looked like, she smiled and said it was odd that I should ask about it, because she had just been thinking about it. I could tell she wasn’t lying. She had her real smile on, her happy smile. Whenever somebody said something that made her happy, Mrs. Meitner would smile real big, and her eyes would light up and seem to get deeper and fill up with happiness. She smiled for real.

  I smiled now too. Everything I had said before asking about the house didn’t matter. I kept looking at her happy face as she reached under the small table near the couch and pulled out a picture album. She brought it over to where I was sitting and put it in my lap and started telling me about her house and turning the pages at the same time. I kept watching her eyes and her face and she looked like a little girl, a very pretty, happy little girl. I was sorry I didn’t know her when she was about my age, because I knew she must have been real pretty … and happy.

  Before I looked at the album, I told her that if a picture of her husband was in it, I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t tell her, but I hated her husband and thought it was good that the Germans had killed him. All I knew about him was that he used to be her husband and was the father of her architect, and that was enough to hate him for. He might have been a real nice guy, but I still hated him for being her husband. And I hated myself for not being her husband and for being so young.

  She put her arm around my shoulder, and we turned the pages together. I smiled at and liked the pictures that seemed to make her happy. But the more pictures we looked at, the more I hated myself for not being older and bigger than I was. And I hated myself for never having been to all the places she had been to and for missing out on so much of her life. After listening to the songs from South Pacific and looking at pictures of Mrs. Meitner’s life, I felt kind of silly for having said what I did to her. So I said I was sorry and all. She gave me a sort of pat-on-the-head smile, said we were still friends, and shook my hand, and I left.

  Lying in my bed thinking about it that night, I felt that I had done something crazy—I had fallen in love with the nicest lady I knew, and for no reason. I decided that I didn’t hate Mrs. Meitner’s husband, and I wished that the Germans hadn’t killed him. But I still wished that I had been married to her for all those years and that her architect was our architect. I just knew her eyes used to have a brighter light and were even deeper then.… No, I didn’t hate her husband. I couldn’t, because he had been part of her happiness. I hated Hitler for not letting her stay happy.

  I kept thinking about Mrs. Meitner holding the album real tight … just standing there and holding on to the memories of her happy times … real tight. If I had seen those pictures before, I don’t think I would have said what I did to her earlier that evening. But I knew I liked her a lot and wanted to be her friend more than before. I decided to do something for her. I knew she liked to paint and make costumes, so I, who had never painted before, spent a whole day watching Floyd Saks paint. That night, I kept going over in my mind what I had seen Floyd do that day. The next day, I painted a portrait of Felix the Cat and a wicked sorcerer and gave them to Mrs. Meitner. That was the first time I had ever painted anything, and it was the last time too. Both paintings were so good that nobody but the guys who saw me painting them believed that I had done it. But Mrs. Meitner knew I had painted them, and she liked them. That was all that mattered.

  When I went home for a visit from Wiltwyck, it seemed like the whole city had changed. I had forgotten all about roaches until I went back home. I had been to that nice old rich white lady’s house up in Hyde Park, which wasn’t too far from Wiltwyck. She had a big old house that seemed like a whole lot of houses bunched together. The cats who had been up there before said that she used to invite all the cats from Wiltwyck to her house every year and that everybody used to eat until he got sick or just tired of eating. This lady had a real big house; and the first time I went into it, I couldn’t understand why she didn’t have any roaches in a house that big. I thought they just might have been hiding all the time I was there, but it wasn’t like roaches to hide when there were a lot of people around eating food and stuff. That’s why Mama didn’t like roaches—they were always coming out and showing off when company came.

  I had seen this old rich lady hanging around Wiltwyck a couple of times. I spoke to her the first time I saw her, and she said she was a member of some board or something like that. She started asking me a lot of stupid questions like did I like it up there and things like that. After that, I never had anything to say to her. I knew she was a nice lady, but she seemed to be a little crazy or something, and her voice didn’t sound real. It sounded like one of those ladies in the movies. But that was all right, because she wasn’t around too much, just once in a while.

  I knew that her name was Mrs. Roosevelt and that she used to be married to a cat who was President of the United States. It sure seemed funny to me that the President of the United States would have had time to bother with that crazy-acting old lady. I figured that Dad was right about white people. He would read the paper and say, “White people sure do some damned fool things.” I thought that the lady named Mrs. Roosevelt didn’t have any roaches in her house because the President used to live there. Roaches didn’t want to mess with the President. I said to myself, I bet they come chargin’ in here as soon as they find out he’s gone.… Yeah, they’re just waitin’ to git the news. Roaches are slick like that.

  On that first visit home, the bus from Wiltwyck stopped at Mt. Olivet Baptist Church on 120th Street and Lenox Avenue. A lot of cats’ mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and foster fathers and foster mothers and aunts and uncles had come to meet them. Most of the people who met the bus were smiling or laughing. A few were crying, but they weren’t looking sad.

  Carole and Sugar came to meet me. I was glad to see Carole, but I was kind of mad at her for bringing Sugar with her. I decided to get out of there in a hurry before anybody else
asked me who Sugar was. Mr. Moore, my social worker, had already asked me if Sugar was my sister. I was real quick to say, “No, she ain’t nothin’-a mine.” Then I introduced him to Carole and told him that Sugar was a friend of Carole’s. After that, we left in a hurry.

  Sugar was all right, but she was just too ugly to be introduced to anybody as anybody else’s anything. Carole had to go and pay the gas and light bill on 125th Street. Sugar and I rode the bus uptown together. We didn’t say anything until it was almost time to get off.

  Sugar said, “Why didn’ you write?”

  I said, “For what?”

  She didn’t say anything else after that, and I was surprised. But Sugar had changed, just like everything else in Harlem. She was still ugly and all that, but she acted kind of different. She didn’t say much; she just kept looking at me like she wanted me to say something to her. Sugar had changed a lot. She was growing up. She was nice—and almost as much fun to be with as some of the cats I knew.

  It seemed that everybody I used to hang out with before I went to Wiltwyck was in Warwick or someplace like it. Nobody seemed to be out on the street. Knoxie had moved downtown, and everybody was saying that he had turned “good boy” on us. They said the cat stopped stealing and started going to school and stuff like that. At first, I didn’t believe that kind of talk about Knoxie. But after everybody kept saying it, I sure wanted to see that cat and find out for myself. I knew I could make him steal something. But I didn’t find out on that visit, because I didn’t see Knoxie.