Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  After being in the city for a few days, I started visiting some of the guys from Wiltwyck, and they started coming around the house. Dad didn’t go for these cats coming around. He even told me to tell “all them little rogues not to come to the house,” but I never said anything to anybody. Mama used to treat all the cats real nice. She liked to get into everybody’s business, and most of the cats didn’t have a home or any relatives. Mama used to be a soft touch for cats who didn’t have a mother. And even Dad used to feel sorry for guys who didn’t have a mother or father. So after a while; I told everybody I brought to the house to say their mother was dead or their father was dead or that everybody they knew was dead. It seemed that having dead mothers and fathers made anybody look less like a rogue to Dad.

  For that whole time, I didn’t hang out with any of my old running partners. I just went around with cats from Wiltwyck, but we did the same things. We stole things, hitched bus rides, and looked for any kind of trouble to get into. When the two-week home visit was up, I just didn’t care too much. Nobody seemed to care … nobody but Sugar, and she didn’t matter much. She said I should have spent more time with her. I told her that the next time I came home, I would spend all my time with her. I don’t know why I said that, and after saying it, I was kind of sorry I had. I guess I just wanted to tell her something that would stop her from looking so sad. Sugar smiled when I said it; she even looked happy. It made me feel kind of good.

  When I got on the bus, I kept playing with Sugar out the window, and when some cats in back of me started teasing me about how ugly my girl was, it didn’t seem to matter, not even a little bit. When the bus started pulling away and Sugar was standing on tiptoe for me to kiss her, I wanted to, but I just couldn’t. I wanted to—real, real bad—but her buckteeth might have gotten in the way. Sugar ran beside the bus for a while, and her eyes had a kind of begging look in them. She stopped at the corner where the bus turned; her begging eyes had water in them … and so did mine.

  One time I came home to go to court. When I was about four or five years old, I got hit by a bus on Eighth Avenue. Everybody said I kept hollering for my shoe, even after they got me to the hospital. Every time something happened to me, it seemed that I would always lose one shoe. The bus didn’t hurt me, but while I was up at Wiltwyck, Mama and Dad were trying to get some money from the bus company. So I had to come down from Wiltwyck to go to court and see about it. That was the first time I had ever been in court with Dad. All the times I went to court for getting into trouble, Mama always went with me. I sure felt funny going to court with Dad.

  Mama never acted biggety in court, but she would bow her head only so low. But as soon as I got up that morning, I could tell that Dad was going to be a real drag. He got up with his hat in his hand and was bowing his head before we even got out of the house. He kept telling me how to act and what not to say. I pretended I was listening to him real hard, hoping he would feel kind of smart and maybe act like somebody with some sense when he got in court. But what I really wanted to tell him was, “Shit, man, I been in court before, so you better watch me and let me pull your coat about how to act in front of that judge and those other white people.” But if I had said that, he would have kicked my ass.

  I just had a real bad feeling that I was going to get fucked over in that court worse than ever before. This was the first time I was going to court and didn’t have to worry about the judge sending me away. I would have felt that I owned the court that day if Dad hadn’t acted so goddamn scarey. He kept saying we were going to get a lot of money from the bus company if I said the right things and acted the way he told me to. Dad said we were bound to get a lot of money—we had a good Jewish lawyer from way downtown. But I knew damn well we were going to need a lot more than a good Jewish lawyer that morning.

  When we got to court, the lawyer was already there. He spoke to Dad, and Dad yes-sirred him all over the place, kept looking kind of scared, and tried to make the man think he knew what he was talking about. When the lawyer came over to me and said, “Hello, Claude; how are you?” and shook my hand and smiled, I had the feeling that God had been kicked right out of heaven and the meek were lost. And when he started talking to me—not really talking to me, just saying the stupid things that white people say to little colored boys with a smile on their faces, and the little colored boys are supposed to smile too—nothing in the world could have made me believe that cat was on our side. We weren’t even people to him, so how the hell was he going to fight our fight? I wanted to ask Dad why he went and got this guy, but I knew why. He thought all Jews were smart. I could have gotten all that shit right out of his head. Anybody could see that this cat wasn’t so smart. No, he was just lucky—lucky that the world had dumb niggers like Dad in it.

  When we went into the courtroom, the lawyer went up to where the judge was sitting and started talking to him. They seemed to be friends or something. Almost everybody there seemed to be friends—the bus driver, the other lawyer, the people from the bus company. The only ones who didn’t seem to be friends with anybody was me and Dad. I wanted to act real tight with Dad and show those people that we didn’t need to be friends with them. But Dad was too scared to do anything but sit there with his hat in his hand and say yes sir. I sure hated him for that.

  The lawyer told us to sit down “over there” for a while. Dad almost ran to the seat, and I wanted to grab him by his coat, kick him in his ass real hard, and say, “Look here, you simple-actin’ nigger, you better try to be cool, ‘cause you wit me.” But I couldn’t do that and go on living, so I just went over and sat down.

  While Dad and I were sitting there waiting for something to happen, I kept thinking about the time I saw a big black man take a little pig out of his pen at hog-killing time down South. He took the pig and tied him to a post, patted him on the back a couple of times, then picked up his ax and hit the pig in the head and killed him. The pig died without giving anybody any trouble, and the big black pig killer was happy. In fact, everybody was happy, because we were all friends and part of the family. The only one there who didn’t have a friend was the pig.

  I had a feeling that something like what happened to the pig was going to happen in the courtroom and that Dad and I had already been patted on the back. I looked at the big, fat-faced judge sitting up there on the bench. He didn’t look mean or anything like that, but he didn’t look like he was a right-doing cat either. I even wished it was that old evil-looking lady judge who sent me to Wiltwyck sitting up there. She looked mean as hell, but I don’t think I would have felt so much like that pig if she had been up there. I knew she wouldn’t have been a friend of those lawyers and the people from the bus company. She looked like nobody could be her friend. And that was how it seemed that a judge should be. And she was colored too; maybe we would have been real people to her.

  When the lawyer called us up to the bench and the big, fat-faced judge looked at us like it was his first time seeing pigs like these, I had the feeling that this fool in the black gown was all set to kill something before he was sure of what it was. I couldn’t understand what the judge and the lawyers were talking about; the words they were using were too big. When I heard the judge say something about a hundred dollars, I grabbed my head and looked at Dad. He was still looking at the judge and nodding his head up and down. He didn’t even know that he had been hit in the head with an ax. I bet Mama would have known. The lawyer told Dad something about his fifty dollars, and Dad just kept nodding his head. And I used to think he was a real bad nigger. But not after that. I knew now that he was just a head nodder, and nobody could tell me any different. For a long time after that, I hated to see anybody nod his head. I sure was mad when we left that courtroom. I promised myself that when I got big enough, the first time I saw Dad nod his head at any white man, I was going to kick him dead in his ass.

  When we got on the subway to go home, Dad told me that if anybody asked me how much money we got, I was to say I didn’t know. I knew something li
ke that was going to come. He was going to go uptown and tell everybody we had gotten a thousand dollars or something like that. That was the first time I could remember looking Dad in the eye. I heard myself saying, “I guess we ain’t nothin’ or nobody, huh, Dad?” He went on talking like he didn’t even hear me, and I wasn’t listening to what he was saying either. I just wanted to get back to Wiltwyck and steal something and get into a lot of trouble. I never wanted to go back to anyplace so bad in all my life. I wanted to be around K.B. and Horse and Tito and other cats like me. We could all get together up at Wiltwyck, raise a a lot of hell, and show people that we weren’t pigs and that we couldn’t be fucked over but so much. Simms and Claiborne and Nick and Papanek and everybody else up at Wiltwyck knew I was somebody—even when I wasn’t getting into trouble. I couldn’t wait to get back to where I wasn’t a pig.

  In the winter after the summer that I moved into Aggrey, I had my old gang from Carver back together, but things were kind of different. Tito was president, K.B. was vice-president, and I was the war counselor. The gang was made up this way because that was the way I wanted it. Tito felt good being president of something. It was the first time in his life that he had ever been president of anything. And K.B. felt real great about being vice-president. I made Horse the treasurer. Nobody else counted much. No, I couldn’t be any more than what I was already, the main cat on the Wiltwyck scene. Most people didn’t know it, but when Papanek wasn’t at Wiltwyck I ran the place. Every time something happened, Stilly, Simms, or Mrs. Chase or all three of them would come running to me. Mrs. Chase was Stilly’s assistant.

  That winter, my clique was really raising a lot of hell. We were stealing everything we found, breaking into every place that had a lock on it—just about all of us could pick locks—fighting with other houses, and stomping cats we didn’t like. It was mainly J.J. and Stumpy who liked to stomp cats. J.J. liked it because he couldn’t beat anybody in a fair fight, and whenever we stomped somebody, all of us stomped him. Stumpy liked to stomp cats because he was a real bully, and it made him feel real good. His eyes used to light up when he did it. J.J. was a real nice guy, and he was one of the best liars up at Wiltwyck, maybe even better than me. J.J. was an orphan, and he had lived in and out of foster homes and places like Wiltwyck all his life. So he really knew how to make people like him, man or woman, white or colored. This made him one of the slickest cats on the Wiltwyck scene. Stumpy was a real nice guy too, but he needed somebody to kick him in his ass every now and then just to let him know how nice he was.

  One day that same winter, Simms called everybody into the living room, where we used to have our house meetings. He told us that some girls were coming to Wiltwyck soon from a place called Vassar College and that they were going to teach us things like skiing, music, painting, and stuff like that. Simms said he expected us to treat those chicks better than the guys in the other houses, since we were older than the other guys. He had that “if you don’t do right I’m gonna kick your ass” tone in his voice when he told us about the chicks from Vassar, but nobody cared much, because Simms hadn’t hit a cat in a long time.

  The first day the girls came to Wiltwyck, the cats in Aggrey swarmed all over them. In fact, everybody took to them right away. They were all white and not so hip, but most of them were real fine, so nobody cared about them being white and not being hip. It really wasn’t hard to be nice to these chicks, because they were all real sweet. They were some of the nicest girls I had ever met, and some of them knew some things too. You could talk to them, and they could understand things. Every day, they would come to Wiltwyck early in the morning and stay until evening. One day, the girls from Vassar took us to the college for a picnic. It sure was a big place, and I never saw so many pretty girls in one place before in all my life. There must have been about a million bicycles at that place. The girls said we could ride any of the bikes we wanted to, but we had to remember where we got them from and put them back when we finished. We really broke up some bikes that day. I saw Horse bring a bike back in five parts.

  J.J. caused a girl to faint. He was coming down this steep hill real fast. There was a brick wall at the bottom, and J.J. couldn’t steer too well. When J.J. hit the wall, he didn’t get hurt, but the bike was all smashed up, and J.J. went straight up into the air about fifteen feet. The girl was standing on the bridge, and when she heard the crash, she turned around just in time to see J.J. going up, and she fainted. When they woke her up, the girl said that she fainted because she thought sure the boy would be killed, but Rickets said that seeing a nigger flying through the air on the campus of Vassar College was enough to make any nice, respectable white girl faint. And sometimes Rickets knew what he was talking about.

  Cathy, my piano teacher, was a big, fine chick. She was white, but she was from China. Her father was a doctor or something in China, and she was born there and had lived there, but she was still white. She just came over here to go to Vassar College. She didn’t speak Chinese or anything. As a matter of fact, she spoke real good English, and she was a sweet person, real big and real fine. Cathy ran over to J.J., who was lying there on the ground playing dead, and kneeled down beside him. She raised his head and put it in her lap and started screaming all over the place for somebody to get a doctor. I knew if she kept that up for long, they would never get J.J. up from there.

  J.J. sneaked one eye open, looked up at those big breasts right over in his face, and started snuggling. I wanted to say, “Poor Cathy.” She just shouldn’t have done that. Somebody should have pulled her coat. I would have, but J.J. was a friend of mine, so I couldn’t do that. After a while, she saw this cat opening one eye and getting closer, and I think she felt kind of foolish. So she threw his head off her lap and told him to get up. He laughed and got up. And everybody thought it was pretty funny.

  But that wasn’t the funniest thing that happened that day. The funniest thing was when we were in the music room and another girl screamed. We turned around to see what it was, and this girl was trying to jump up off a piano stool, because while she was playing the piano, somebody was under there playing with her legs. That was dear old Rickets. That’s the way he was.

  We had a lot of fun at Vassar College, and the girls were really something wonderful. I never would have thought that white girls could be so nice. Cats could look all up under their dresses and everything, and all they did was laugh.

  We got along real fine with the girls until the day J.J. got lost in a snowstorm with the skiing teacher. They had searching parties out for them, lots of searching parties, all day long. But J.J. and the skiing teacher were lost in a blizzard for about four hours. Everybody in the world was wondering where they could be. But nobody found them. After the snowing was over, J.J. and the teacher came back, with smiles on their faces. They were happy, and I suppose everybody was happy—that is, everybody but Stilly and the rest of the staff. They were a little peeved. They wondered where in the world a nigger could be in a snowstorm with some pretty little Norwegian skiing teacher. That’s not supposed to happen to people from poor Negro backgrounds.

  J.J. said he and the teacher had to stop in some barn for four hours to get out of the storm. All the cats up there envied J.J. that day. I kind of wished I had been caught in that storm too, because that teacher sure was something sweet … cute accent too.

  After a while, I think they found out that it wasn’t working. The guys got used to the girls, and they started treating them like mothers and sisters and that sort of thing. These were guys who cursed out mothers and sisters, and when they started treating these chicks like mothers and sisters, they were cursing them out too. One cat, Baldy, even had enough nerve to slap one of those girls. Now, everybody knew that perhaps you could curse them out or scream at them, but they also knew that no niggers were supposed to be slapping any girls from Vassar College. I guess we were supposed to be glad to even be able to say hello to them.

  Then there was the Mac thing. Mac used to operate the movie camera for
us on Thursday and Sunday nights. One day, while the girls from Vassar were at Wiltwyck, Mac got locked up in the movie booth with that same skiing teacher, and they had a lot of fun, I suppose, because they stayed in there a long time. Everybody started looking for Mac. He was supposed to be getting the cameras ready. They banged on the doors, they did everything, but nobody could find them. When Mac finally came out and they asked him where he’d been, he said, “In the movie booth.” Somebody said, “Lawd, it’s time to git these girls outta here.”

  They were all seniors in college, and when graduation time came around, they had to go. I think, in spite of everything, we missed them, and maybe they missed us too. That was the first time we’d ever known any Vassar girls, but I suppose that was the first time they’d ever known any poor little colored boys.

  The summer after the girls from Vassar College left was pretty much the same as the other two summers I’d spent up at Wiltwyck. Only now I’d been at Wiltwyck two years, and there was nothing new about the place. We did the same things. In the summer, we played softball, went fishing; we just ran around and acted crazy in general and waited for fall to come around so we could steal the apples out of Farmer Greene’s orchard … things like that. We went to Mrs. Roosevelt’s house in June for the annual picnic and all that sort of nonsense. To me, Wiltwyck now seemed like a babyish sort of place.

  They let me go home that summer for a long visit. And it was good. It was a real good visit. I saw people I hadn’t seen in a long time. Kid and Butch were out of Warwick; Danny was home on a visit from Warwick the same time I was there. I sure was glad to see all those guys. We had all been home on visits before, but it seemed that we were never in the city at the same time. And now, here we all were. I felt I was getting a part of my life back that I’d been missing for a long time. It sure was good to see these cats and to find out the new things. All the time I was hanging out with those young guys at Wiltwyck, I was beginning to feel young. But now all my old friends were here, the people I felt I was just as old as, and I felt good.