Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  We started hanging out again. I was thirteen, so now it was okay for me to hang out. Nobody squawked. Butch and Danny used to take me to a place called the Lounge, and we’d dance. It was a cellar. It was dark in there, and we used to listen to records by the Orioles. We would dance the Grind, a dance that anybody could do. All you had to do was stand still and move a little bit.

  Then I started staying out real late at night. Sometimes I’d come in at two or three o’clock in the morning, but Mama and Dad wouldn’t squawk. They started treating me like I was old now, so whenever I was home, I didn’t mind being there. But something else happened that summer—something that made things change, that made Harlem change.

  When I came home, Kid and Butch and Danny weren’t smoking reefers any more. I’d have a smoke, but they were doing other things. And the first thing that Danny told me was that they were using something that they called “horse.” I remember Danny saying, “If I ever catch you messin’ wit horse, I’ll kill you.” I had the feeling that he meant it, but it made me curious about horse. It seemed that they were saying this was something I wasn’t old enough for. But I wanted to do the same things they were doing; I wanted to be as old as they were. All the older cats were using horse. The younger cats were still smoking reefers, drinking wine, and stuff like that. But I didn’t want to be young. I wanted to be old. And the first time Danny spoke to me about it, I knew I was going to get some horse somehow, somewhere—soon.

  Horse was a new thing, not only in our neighborhood but in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and everyplace I went, uptown and downtown. It was like horse had just taken over. Everybody was talking about it. All the hip people were using it and snorting it and getting this new high. To know what was going on and to be in on things, you had to do that. And the only way I felt I could come out of Wiltwyck and be up to date, the only way to take up where I had left off and be the same hip guy I was before I went to Wiltwyck, was to get in on the hippest thing, and the hippest thing was horse. It wasn’t like the other time I came home and heard that the Orioles were singing at the Apollo and that guys were going around singing in little goups and trying to imitate them. These things had happened before. The first time I came home, it was still the gang fights. If you were in a gang, you were somebody, and you were doing things. The summer before this one, the Grind was the thing that was going on. But things kept changing, and I’d always been able to change with them and keep up with the neighborhood.

  When I left New York that summer and went back to Wiltwyck, the thing I still wanted most was horse. I had been smoking reefers and had gotten high a lot of times, but I had the feeling that this horse was something that was out of this world. Back at Wiltwyck, I started telling everybody about horse. I told K.B. about horse; I told Tito about horse; I told Horse about horse. We just had to get some somehow. We knew that it was medicine and that you could get high off it and that it was better than reefers, but that was about all we knew.

  For about six months or more, the guys in Aggrey House used to try to get high by taking a cigarette and sticking the teeth of a comb into it. All it did was stink when you smoked it. It didn’t really get cats high, but you could make believe if you had enough imagination. Then I think it was Stumpy who came up with putting camera film into a cigarette. We tried this, and a lot of cats got sick, got headaches, and got everything else, but I don’t think anybody ever really got high. When we heard about this horse thing, every cat who knew about it wanted to try some. I’d gotten some guys high off reefers when I took them home with me or when they came to visit me. Now we wanted to get some highs off horse.

  K.B. had told me that this was something real big in Brownsville too. I wanted to turn him on before he could turn me on. He thought he was as hip as I was and was into as many things as I was, but I knew he wasn’t. If he was the first one to come up with some horse, I would feel bad about that, so I really had to get some horse somehow. I wanted to turn K.B. and everybody else on and show them that I really knew how to get high. I started scheming and thinking that maybe we could steal some from the infirmary. But I didn’t know what it was. All I knew was that it was medicine, that it was white, and that for a dollar, in the streets, you could get a capsule. But I didn’t know what to look for if I went into the infirmary. So for some time, I had a lot of guys stealing all kinds of caps with white powder in them out of the infirmary. We got some of everything but horse.

  Cats were getting sick around there from some of the stuff they were snorting in those white caps. We’d always get a guinea pig, and the guinea pig was usually Teddy D. He’d snort just about anything. He was from Harlem, too, and he’d heard a lot about horse. He was ready to try something new because it was time to move on. I think everybody up there had the feeling it was time to move on. It was time to stop smoking reefers and stop drinking wine; it was time to start really getting high. The old guys out on the streets were really getting high. They were snorting this horse, and this horse was making them bend; it was making them itch and nod and talk in heavier voices. It made you sound like a real gangster or like a real old cat. And everybody wanted to sound old.

  I heard somebody talking about horse one night, but I didn’t know it. It was Mr. Johnson. Mr. Johnson was one of the counselors, and he had heard some of the guys in our house talking about horse. He came in and told us that it was heroin and that heroin could kill you. He said that when he was going to college, he knew a boy who liked to use this horse. He said that they called it “snow” then but that the real name of it was heroin. And this heroin was something that you take a little bit of for a while, and then you would take more and more and more, and soon you have to take so much that you couldn’t take anything else. You couldn’t eat, you couldn’t drink any water, and after a while, guys just dried up and died. And it was so expensive that you had to steal and rob and do a whole lot of other stuff. What Mr. Johnson was telling us about heroin really sounded frightening, but I knew that horse wasn’t heroin; I knew that it was something altogether different. But Mr. Johnson sure scared the hell out of me.

  The guys I had seen using it, like Butch and Danny and the others, had just started, of course, but it wasn’t doing anything bad to them. It wasn’t drying them up. They seemed to feel good. That’s what really made me want to use it. Those guys seemed to feel like they were flying, like they were way up in the air; they felt a way that they’d never felt before. And to see so many people going around on those streets feeling so good—I just knew I was missing out on something really big. It would be a drag for someone to come up to you and say, “Man, you ever snort any horse?” and you would have to say, “No.” Hell, I wanted to be able to say, “Yeah, man.”

  I’d forgotten about everything but horse when I went back to Wiltwyck, but then something terrible happened. When I came back to Wiltwyck from that visit in 1950, I found out that K.B. was going home. I couldn’t believe that. I panicked. I said, “No, man. You must be jokin’.”

  He said, “No, man, Stilly told me.”

  I ran to the office. I looked for Papanek. He wasn’t around. I found Stilly. I said, “Stilly, I wanna go home. I gotta go home. If they don’ let me outta this place, I’m gonna go crazy. I’m gon tear the place down.”

  “Don’t get excited,” Stilly said. “Didn’t I promise you a year ago that you would be going home before I left?”

  “Yeah,” I said, but I had never paid too much attention to Stilly.

  He said, “Look, I’m leaving here in a couple of months. I won’t be here when school starts, and you won’t be here either. Do you believe that?”

  I said, “Yeah, man, I believe you.” I did, but I still wanted to talk to Papanek. I wanted to scream and let everybody know how I felt about still being at that place after two years—two years and about four months. I had to get out of there.

  But Papanek wasn’t there, and nobody else was there, and after ranting and raving for a little while, I got used to the idea of being there and not having m
y old sidekick any more. It was okay when K.B. left. We made plans to see each other when I got out. And we kept those plans. K.B. told me to come to Brownsville when I got out and he would have some horse for me—all the horse I wanted.

  I believed him. I knew K.B. would try damn hard and would probably succeed. He had a lot of older brothers, and they were hip guys. Most of them knew things. They’d been in the old gangs in Brooklyn—the Nits and the Robins and the Green Avenue Stompers, the real hip gangs. I couldn’t wait. I kept dreaming about that horse that was waiting for me when I got out of Wiltwyck.

  4

  FOR TWO weeks I had been counting the days, and it seemed that the nineteenth of August would never come. But one beautiful morning, it finally came around. I didn’t feel too sad about leaving Wiltwyck. I kind of thought I would. Maybe it was because I had been there so long, two and a half years.

  I remember waving good-bye to everybody, happily, trying hard to smile. I guess I felt a little sad, but I wanted to get to New York and to all the new things that were waiting for me there—the new girls I’d met on visits home, the new highs, the horse that K.B. was going to have for me. I’d be running with Danny and Butch and Kid again, and I’d be doing the same old things, but I’d be doing them better because I was older and bigger and hipper now. I thought, Oh, Lord, Harlem, let me git to you! It was an exciting feeling—going home.

  It was exciting being home for the first few days, the first few weeks. Then I don’t know what happened, but suddenly it just seemed to be gone. Harlem had changed a lot. Everybody had changed. I had changed too, but in a different way. I was moving away from things. There was no place for me. I felt lonelier in Harlem than I’d felt when I first went to Wiltwyck. I couldn’t go back to Wiltwyck—I had been trying to get away from there for years to get back to this. Now it seemed as though “this” wasn’t there any more. It really was confusing for a while.

  It seemed as though Butch and Danny and Kid weren’t doing the things we used to do, and they didn’t want to do the things that I wanted to do. All they wanted to do was get high off some horse and nod, go to dances and things like that, and maybe shoot somebody occasionally if they had been messed with. But they said that bebopping was gone, it was out of style, it was for kids. And since I was one of them, I had to say it was for kids too, and I had to put it down.

  After a while, I decided I wasn’t going to hang out with Butch and Kid any more. I liked hanging out with the guys I had been at Wiltwyck with better. They were all coming around, and these were the guys I felt more like, so I had to be with them. We had to do the same old things, or we had to find our own new things to do. We couldn’t gang fight anymore. We were all kind of lost. Nobody knew what to do. All we knew was that we had to find it, whatever it was, and do it together.

  When I first came home, I went over to Brooklyn to see K.B. and to get some horse and to see what this beautiful black bitch by the name of Linda looked like. Linda turned out to be everything K.B. had said she was. She was pretty, with long hair and real white teeth. Linda was the darkest girl I had ever seen, even darker than Jackie. But the thing that moved me most was her long hair. I had never seen a girl so dark with hair so long and pretty, not nappy. I wondered what her parents looked like.

  But K.B. couldn’t get any drugs. His brothers and all the older cats were into horse, but they wouldn’t let him mess with it. They wouldn’t let him do anything more than smoke reefers, so that was all he had. We’d been smoking pot before, and this was no big thing. After that first time, I didn’t go over there much any more. I couldn’t see going way over there to Brownsville just to smoke some pot. So I just stayed in Harlem. I knew I’d get some one day.

  I didn’t know Johnny D. before I went to Wiltwyck, but he was about the hippest cat on Eighth Avenue, the slickest nigger in the neighborhood. Johnny D. lived in the same building I lived in, but on the top floor. I had met him when I came down on visits from Wiltwyck, but I didn’t know the cat real good. All I knew was that he lived in the building, and that he was kind of old. He was a man, anyway, twenty-one. His mother seemed too young to have a son as old as he was. I knew his mother had been living in the building for a few years, but I’d never seen him before. It turned out that Johnny D. had been in jail since he was seventeen, and during that time his mother moved into our building. He got out while I was up at Wiltwyck.

  My new gang, the cats from Wiltwyck, used to steal a lot of stuff and sell it to Johnny. Johnny did everything. He used to sell all the horse in the neighborhood. In fact, he seemed to have been the one who brought it into the neighborhood. But, then, Johnny was fast and way ahead of everybody else anyway, so he was expected to do all those things. He was a pimp. He had all kinds of chicks hustling for him. He even had a Chinese girl hustling for him, and that was some shit that nobody else in Harlem had ever done. He sold guns. He had chicks sleeping with cats in nice cribs downtown, and while a chick was sleeping with a cat—or while the cat was sleeping after she’d knocked him off—she’d steal his keys and give them to Johnny. Johnny would give them to Butch or Kid or Danny or some of the older thieves in the neighborhood, and they’d go down there and loot the cat’s crib. He was into just about everything.

  After I’d been out of Wiltwyck for about six weeks, a guy named Dunny and Tito and I stole some cigarettes from a grocery store’s warehouse. We had something like a hundred cartons of cigarettes. We took them to Johnny, but he didn’t want to give us too much money. Anyway, that’s how he put it. He said, “Why don’t I give you cats fifty dollars—and some of the best horse you ever tasted in your life?”

  Everybody’s eyes perked up. This was the first time anybody had ever offered us any horse, and we had been dying and trying so goddamn hard to get some horse, it was almost like a dream coming true. I don’t think any of us even heard about the fifty dollars. We just heard the word “horse.”

  Dunny looked at me, and I looked at Tito, and we all looked at Johnny. We didn’t want to seem too anxious. Maybe he would just give us a little bit of horse and take back twenty-five dollars. So I hesitated.

  I said, “Man, I don’ know.”

  Johnny said, “That’s some good horse, Sonny.” And he took up one of the bags and shook it.

  I had never seen horse in bags before, and it seemed like a whole lot. All I’d ever seen was caps; that’s what everybody was snorting back then. They were buying dollar caps; they’d snort half a cap, get high, and save half a cap for some other time. You could stay messed up all day long. All you did was nod; you didn’t want to eat anything, you didn’t want to do anything. I wanted some horse so bad I could taste it. I’d been tasting it for months.

  So we said, “Okay, okay, man,” after we had waited a while, long enough not to seem like we wanted it real bad. We said, “Okay, man, we’ll take that.”

  We went up on the roof, and I picked up a matchbook. Everybody was crowding real close, and I said, “Like, be still, man; you don’t want to waste this stuff, ‘cause this stuff cost a whole lotta money.” We didn’t know it at the time, but Johnny had only given us a five-dollar bag. He had said that it was twenty-five dollars worth of horse. We didn’t know that much about horse. All we knew was that it was good and that it was expensive. And since we were going to get to snort some, we didn’t care anyway. We just wanted to get high off some horse, and here it was.

  Tito said, “Give me some first.”

  Dunny said, “Let me.… Look man, let me get that. Man, it’s gon spill.” And everybody was grabbing.

  I said, “Look man, here; here, you cats, just take it, man, and take what you want.” This was how I used to always calm these cats down. I’d say, “Here,” and walk away, and they’d start acting like some niggers with some sense.

  Everybody cooled down then, and they said, “No, you go on, Sonny. You get straight, man. Here, you take some first.”

  I knew this was what had to come. Everybody looked at me. I scooped a little bit out of the bag int
o a piece of matchbook cover the way I’d seen Kid do it so many times. He always looked like he’d hit the ceiling and gone right into another world after a snort. I was anxious. I almost wasted it, I was trying so hard. My hands were shaking because I was trying to do it too fast. And when I put it up to my nose, I couldn’t believe it was really happening. I almost wanted to break out and laugh for joy, but I held it back, and I snorted.

  Something hit me right in the top of the head. It felt like a little spray of pepper on my brain. But I didn’t pay too much attention to it just then. I took some more and put it in the other nostril. The other cats were looking; they were real quiet, everything was real quiet.

  Dunny grabbed me and said, “Sonny, give me some,” and Tito did the same thing. And I just dropped it; I forgot about them. It seemed like I had left them. Everything was getting rosy, beautiful. The sun got brighter in the sky, and the whole day lit up and was twice as bright as it was before. It looked like Tito and Dunny were arguing and scrambling, trying to get some stuff, but they weren’t in the same world I was in. I could reach out and touch them, but everything slowed down so much.

  Everything was so slo-o-o-w. And then my head started. My head seemed to stretch, and I thought my brain was going to burst. It was like a headache taking place all over the head at once and trying to break its way out. And then it seemed to get hot and hot and hot. And I was so slow; I was trying to grab my head, but I couldn’t feel it. I tried to get up, but my legs were like weights. I got scared. I’d never felt this way in my life before. I wanted to fall down on my knees and say, “Oh, Mama, Mama, help me.”