Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  Her sister, Jackie, I’d never seen before. I probably would have paid no attention to her a few years earlier. She probably used to be a funny-looking black girl with nappy hair and knock-knees. You wouldn’t want to do anything but pull on her hair or punch her in the mouth or something like that. But the first time I saw Jackie, I didn’t know how I’d missed it.

  Jackie was almost as hip as Trixie was, and she was only thirteen. She started doing things for me; I guess she liked me. A lot of guys used to come up there, but she used to give me stuff and do a lot of crazy things for me and to me; and when I came up to her house, she never talked to other guys. She always wanted to come around me and play; and if I wanted some money to get some reefers or something like that, she would always run out and get it.

  Turk used to always be trying to get some pants from Jackie, but Jackie didn’t like him too much. She always told him that he couldn’t do anything and that he should take some lessons from me about what to do with a girl in bed. That used to make Turk mad, real mad, because Turk was a big cat, and I was a little cat.

  Jackie could always get some money from somebody, so I stayed tight with her. I wanted to stay tight with her, so I didn’t treat her too bad. I used to go up there, spend the night. Her mother wouldn’t say anything. A lot of cats had come up there to spend the night. It was that kind of place.

  Jackie was the first girl I tried some of the things with that I’d learned from Johnny. Just about every time this cat told me something new that you could do with a girl, I tried it out on Jackie. And if it could work on Jackie, I knew what it could do to most of the girls around there. Jackie had had a lot of things done to her, and she’d been to bed with a lot of grown men. That’s how she got her money. She was a big girl. But I didn’t mind that too much, because she was nice. She liked me, and I liked her. We got along. We were more good friends than anything else, and maybe we just jugged because good friends were supposed to do that sort of thing. Anyway, I liked doing it with her, and I guess she liked doing it with me too, because we just kept doing it. She knew a lot of the older prostitutes in the neighborhood, and I suppose they used to teach her things. She knew a whole lot. As a matter of fact, she taught me a whole lot of things. She was the first girl who ever put her tongue in my ear, and I couldn’t take that feeling for a long time. It took me about two weeks to get used to it. At first, it seemed kind of dirty for someone to be putting her tongue in your ear, but after a while, it just felt good.

  If you were a cat who could come into Jackie’s and make one of the sisters just forget about whatever she was doing and give all her attention to you, you were somebody. It made cats who didn’t know you wonder about you and who you were. It made the cats from downtown respect you right away. It had a whole lot of advantages, being good friends with Jackie.

  I guess she had her advantages too, because I was known everyplace and respected in most. When she went to school and told the other girls that she was my girl, it made her somebody. Most of the people in the neighborhood knew that I’d been in trouble most of my life and that I’d been in what they thought was a reform school. They thought I was a bad cat. People who didn’t even know me had heard about me, and they had a whole lot of respect for me. If Jackie could tell people she was my girl, they would respect her too. Everybody but Sugar. She should never have told Sugar. Sugar used to call Jackie the Black Spanish Girl. I think she called her that one time because she had some big earrings on. She got all her friends in school to call Jackie the Black Señorita and to tease her about the way she dressed.

  Jackie couldn’t dress as well as Sugar because Jackie’s mother didn’t care about her. Sugar was an only child, although there were a couple of cousins living in the house with her. Her mother cared about her a whole lot, about how she dressed, what she ate, and whether she did well in school. Sugar could afford to look down on Jackie, since Jackie’s mother didn’t give a damn whether she even went to school. Half the time she was just lying around the house with some guy and didn’t know whether the kids were alive or dead, full or starving. She didn’t care.

  I used to feel sorry for Jackie, and I used to tell Sugar I was going to kick her ass if she kept messing with Jackie. But Sugar didn’t believe it. She knew I’d never bother her for Jackie. I guess she would have been real surprised if I had. I would have too, because Sugar had become somebody close to me. I liked her a whole lot. I wasn’t talking about love or anything like that to her, and I never would say anything that would give her any ideas that I was in love with her. But if she came around the house, I wouldn’t mistreat her. I don’t know what it was, but she meant something to me, a whole lot. So I just let her give Jackie a hard time.

  I think after a while Jackie just learned to fight. That’s the only way she could stop those girls from calling her those names and talking about her. She started dressing. She started letting Trixie buy her clothes. And she started trying to imitate Trixie and look the way she did. When she really put her mind to it, she looked real good. I didn’t mind her telling people she was my girl friend.

  All this time, we had been just stealing and messing around with Trixie and other bitches who were fast like that. After a while, we met a whole lot of them all over Harlem. Just like that. They wanted to do some of everything.

  I stopped seeing Danny, Butch, and Kid and started concentrating on my new friends and the things we were doing. And that went on just fine for a long while, but one day we got busted stealing. We were breaking into an A & P and the cops ran up on us and caught everybody. I ran up on a roof, and that crazy Alley Bush was running in front of everybody and falling down and blocking the staircase so nobody else could get up. A cop was down at the bottom yelling “Stop! Stop! Or I’ll shoot!” Niggers were climbing all over one another trying not to be the last one out in case the cop shot. Alley Bush was lying down hollering, “He gon shoot me! He gon shoot me!” Everybody just ran right over the cat and paid him no mind.

  I went over the roof and down the staircase two buildings away. At the bottom, I saw the cops, so I ran behind the steps and started pissing, like I had just gone in there to take a leak.

  But the white cop said, “C’mon, fella,” and snatched me by my shoulder. “C’mon, let’s go.”

  I said, “Man, what’s wrong wit you; other people piss in this hallway.”

  The cop said, “C’mon, don’t be a wise guy now.”

  He took me on out and threw me in one of the cars. They had everybody there—Mac, Bucky, Turk, Tito, and Dunny. In a little while, they brought out Alley Bush and Earl, Bucky’s older brother.

  They took us all down to the police station, but they let us go that night. We had to go to court the next morning. I remember that night because it was the first time Dad had beat me since I had come home from Wiltwyck. It was the last time he ever beat me without a fight.

  This was about the worst time I’d had since I’d been home. Mama came down to get me that night, the same way she used to before I went to Wiltwyck. Everybody else’s mother came down to get them. When I got home, Dad was awake in bed, and he started his same old preaching.

  That made me mad. It was like I had never gone away and nothing had changed. It seemed like I was right back where I was years before, and it really made me mad to hear him start all that preaching in his old humdrum voice. He knew he was going to kick my ass afterward, so I never could understand why he had to go through all that preaching first.

  When he started that preaching, I just looked down and moved around. The next thing I knew, he was on me. But it was different this time. He didn’t have a belt or ironing cord or stick or anything. He was hitting me with his fist. I was balled up. He hit me in my head. I had never hit him; I guess I was too scared. But I had never let anybody hit me with his fist without hitting him back, and it was a scarey kind of feeling. Maybe if he hadn’t stopped beating me when he did, I would have hit him this time. But he stopped, and when he stopped, we both knew something. We both kn
ew it was the last time. He had beat me with his fist and hadn’t killed me. In fact, he hadn’t hurt me that much. That had to be the last time.

  When we got in court the next morning, we went before a judge. Some people were sitting around on the sides, but there wasn’t a jury. We were just standing there in front of this one judge. He said, “Do you boys know you could have hurt yourselves going into that store the way you did ? That plate-glass window could have fallen down on you and broken your necks.”

  The people there just seemed to be visitors; they reminded me of the board at Wiltwyck that would come around and watch sometimes. They were all white people, in their forties, I guess, and they were just watching.

  The judge kept talking to us about how we had risked our lives and how we were lucky not to get hurt. He said he was going to give us another chance. We’d expected this; we’d heard that everyplace they could have sent us was all filled up—Warwick and Wiltwyck and Lincoln Hall. We were all under sixteen, all except Earl, and he wasn’t there. They had taken him to another court.

  After the lecture, when the judge said, “I’m going to give you boys another chance,” I don’t know why or what happened, but I heard myself say, “Man, you not givin’ us another chance. You givin’ us the same chance we had before.”

  All the other cats looked at me like I was crazy or something, as if to say, “Sonny, what you saying’, what you doin’? You tryin’ to git us sent somewhere for life?” Nobody really said anything, but this was all in the look, and I felt sorry for what I had said. I felt sorry because the other cats were there too; in a way, I was talking for them, or against them, and these cats wanted to get back on that street scene. I just didn’t care too much about being on the streets myself. I guess I was just fed up with it all.

  But when the judge looked at me and shook his head, with his eyes looking real sad, I knew he was going to put me and all the rest of the guys back on the street. He said, after shaking his head, “Yes, son, I guess I’m giving you the same chance you had before. But I hope that you won’t use it as you did the last time.” Then he said, “Mothers and fathers, you can take your sons home now.”

  Everybody rushed out like they were scared. Parents looked at me as if to say, “Let me git my boy outta here before this little crazy nigger sends everybody someplace.” Alley Bush’s father grabbed him by the shoulder and almost ran out of the courtroom.

  I guess I was about the last one out. I wasn’t too anxious to go. I had a feeling that something kind of bad was in store for me out on the streets. Mama was always having feelings. I guess feelings ran in our family, feelings about bad things anyway. Nobody said anything to me about what I had said in the courtroom, but I knew they talked about it among themselves. We kept on hanging out together, mainly because all of us needed one another and didn’t have anybody else to hang out with. So we just had to keep on doing the same things. We had to keep on stealing, keep on playing hookey, keep on playing around with Trixie and Jackie and just see what would happen.

  I don’t think anybody was too happy. It was a bad time. It was a bad time for me because I was sick. I was sick of being at home. I was sick of the new Harlem, the Harlem I didn’t know, the Harlem that I couldn’t find my place in. When I was at Wiltwyck, I used to tell everybody jokingly—but I halfway believed it—that Harlem was the capital of the world. I remember telling Nick that there was no greater place in all this world than Harlem. We almost got in a fight one time because he started telling me about people in Harlem suffering and that sort of thing. I was hurt when he told me that. I guess Nick knew it was the truth of it all that hurt me.

  The Harlem that I had dreamed of and wanted to get back to seemed gone. I didn’t know this place. I didn’t know what to do here. I was like a stranger. I longed to get back into Wiltwyck. I wanted to get back to Wiltwyck so bad, even though I knew I couldn’t. I used to stay in my room and lie on my bed in the dark. Girls would come around, but I didn’t want to be bothered with them. Mama used to worry about me. I guess she was scared—she figured I had been with nothing but boys for a long time, maybe too long.

  I was thirteen. That had something to do with it. I was going through some kind of change. But I knew that more than anything in the world, I wanted to get back to Wiltwyck. Wiltwyck had become home, and I felt like a butterfly trying to go back into the cocoon.

  I started going down to the Wiltwyck office on 125th Street to talk to Mr. Papanek. First I went down there to see my social worker, Mr. Moore, and he wasn’t in. I spoke to Papanek. He was a real nice cat. Nobody could hate him, but we’d never been but so tight—not while I was up at Wiltwyck. I was too busy trying to get my own way to see what a nice cat he really was. He wasn’t a pushover kind of cat. He was just a nice cat, a nice cat that you had to respect. When most people say “nice,” they mean someone you can run over or get your way with, but he wasn’t nice that way. The cat was nice in his mind. The way he looked at life and people was beautiful.

  It was about this time that I discovered Papanek’s secret. It was really very simple. He had the ability to see everybody as they really are—just people, no more and no less. Also he saw children as people, little young people with individuality, not as some separate group of beings called children, dominated by the so-called adult world. Having this ability alone made him a giant at understanding people; being Papanek … made him irresistibly likable.

  Papanek had a way of making the whole world seem beautiful and making everybody in life seem to be important. And he made life important from the standpoint of the individual. He made life big, but only in relation to people. He made it go over a whole lot of little nonsensical things like color, like handicaps, like looks. The cat was so beautiful, I stopped asking for Mr. Moore when I went down there. I would ask if Papanek was in, and Papanek would sit and talk to me, always smiling, and looking funny at first. He’d always come out with a smile; he’d look at me, and if I looked sad, he wouldn’t smile. We’d just sit and talk about things. I remember one time I went to the Wiltwyck office and sat for a while. The receptionist asked me who I was waiting for, and I told her I was waiting to see Papanek. She told me Papanek wasn’t in. I felt hurt and kind of mad. I remembered our old rivalry, and I said, “I didn’t want to see the cat anyway.” But I knew I was lying to myself, and I felt kind of bad that he wasn’t there.

  I used to think the cat was a little crazy at first, some of the things he said, but it’s hard to really see somebody as being crazy when you like them and know that they mean well. After a while, I didn’t think he was crazy any more. I thought he was real smart. He knew so much about nearly everything. He was always telling me things. If I came in saying, “I’m not gonna make it; I gotta git outta this place,” he knew I wanted to go back to Wiltwyck. But he seemed determined to force me to make it out on the street.

  I had finally found somebody who cared. I’d go in there and tell him, “Now, look, I gotta git away. I’m gon run away from home.”

  And he’d say, “Well, Claude, don’t you love your mother?”

  I’d say, “Yeah, man, but it’s not just me and her at the house, and I gotta stay there wit all-a ’em. Like, my father too, and me and this cat can’t make it. He got one more time to kick my ass and we gon go to war, and somebody in that house is gonna die.”

  Papanek would look sad and really disappointed. He’d say, “That’s bad. I don’t think you really mean that.” And we’d talk about it, talk and talk and talk, until the cat had me saying that I didn’t really mean it. He would give me all kinds of plans for getting along with my father, like just saying nice things to him or only talking to him when he wasn’t tired. It seemed all right, but Papanek didn’t know my father, and that nigger was something that would have been hell for the devil to get along with.

  I had to talk to this cat. He was real stable, and everybody else was crazy. Papanek was the only one I knew who seemed to know what was really going on. When Papanek wasn’t in the office, it u
sed to really upset me, because I never went to see him unless there was something really bothering me. Most of the time, I never told him what was really bothering me, but we would talk about something. And regardless of what we talked about, it always made me feel better. I usually didn’t tell Papanek what was really bothering me; I didn’t think he could understand. He had come up in someplace called Austria, and I figured there wasn’t a colored person in the whole country. So what could he know about coming up in Harlem ?

  I was growing up now, and people were going to expect things from me. I would soon be expected to kill a nigger if he mistreated me, like Rock, Bubba Williams, and Dewdrop had.

  Everybody knew these cats were killers. Nobody messed with them. If anybody messed with them or their family or friends, they had to kill them. I knew now that I had to keep up with these cats; if I didn’t, I would lose my respect in the neighborhood. I had to keep my respect because I had to take care of Pimp and Carole and Margie. I was the big brother in the family. I couldn’t be running and getting somebody after some cat who messed with me.

  I knew that I was going to have to get a gun sooner or later and that I was going to have to make my new rep and take my place along with the bad niggers of the community. Johnny D. was always talking stuff about men in Harlem, saying that the only way men could be friends was that each one had to stay off his friend’s toe, but that if a friend got on a friend’s toe, you had to be able to tell each other about it and go on being friends. If you couldn’t do that, you’d have to go to war, and war certainly ends friendship.

  It made life seem so hard. Sometimes I just wanted to give it up. There were all kinds of things bothering me. I used to go over Trixie’s house, and Trixie would say, “You little jive nigger, I’d screw you to death.” And I’d look at her, and all those curves, and I believed it. I really believed it.