Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  I made up my mind. When they came down on me, I was just going to hit the biggest cat and pray.

  Warwick seemed to be a real nice place. April had something to do with it. It was a nice time of the year to be in the country. The place looked like it was maybe a farm or a summer resort.

  I didn’t get tight with anybody in the reception center. Mumbles and Charlie Tucker and the cats I had known in the nutbox started pulling away after they heard that a whole lot of bad cats were waiting to get me. They’d talk. They’d say, “Hi, man,” and, “How you doin?” but they wouldn’t hang out.

  The funny thing was that this Italian cat, Minetti, seemed determined to get tight with me. Every time smoking session came around after the meals, he’d come and sit down and want to talk to me. He would tell me about his girl. He would tell me about “that no-good, fuckin’ Joe.” Just about everything that came out of Minetti’s mouth was “fuckin’” or “mother-fucker.” He was a funny sort of guy. It was almost like watching somebody out of a comic book, and he used to talk with that funny kind of talk, like Louie, the iceman.

  I couldn’t seem to stop this guy from getting tight. A lot of times I would catch myself and try to pull away from this cat. I thought, I know I can’t be tight with this paddy boy when I get outta here; I’m gon have to find me some strong cats to get tight with, cats with reps. I knew that Minetti wasn’t going to be any help. But if it hadn’t been for him, I wouldn’t have had anybody to talk to. Out of all the cats I knew at the reception center, he was the only one who wasn’t scared that there were a whole lot of niggers waiting to get next to my head when I came out. So it just had to be that way. Everybody threw us together.

  Sometimes this cat used to make me forget that I’d been shot only three or four months before. We’d start messing around, just joking and clowning. But somebody was always coming up and screaming on him. Minetti was good with his hands, so cats would say, “Man, why don’ you stop messin’ with so-and-so?” They’d try to talk up a whole lot of ill feeling against him. I usually stayed out of it. I wasn’t in too good fighting shape, at least I didn’t think so. I just didn’t know.

  But one day Minetti started arguing with a boy named Freddie Bemar. Freddie was a loudmouthed guy. He was harmless, but he was a loudmouth. He was always messing with people, but everybody knew he couldn’t do anything with his hands, so most people paid no attention to him. But this day, Minetti and I were sitting and talking at a table in the recreation room at the reception center. Freddie came in and started screaming at Minetti and saying, “Man, you took my cigarettes off the table.”

  Minetti just joked it off and started screaming at him playfully. Freddie came over and snatched a cigarette out of Minetti’s mouth. When he did that, Minetti was kind of frozen. He didn’t know what to do. He said, “Like, Freddie, what you doin’, man? What’s it all about? What’s the matter?” This is the way he used to talk, with just a tiny bit of an Italian accent. When he got excited, he used to go real fast, and you couldn’t understand whether he was saying “What’s the matter?” or “What’s-a what’s-a what’s-a?”

  Nobody understood Minetti as well as I did. It seemed as though he was going to cry in a minute, as though he wanted to say, “Well, Freddie, I don’t bother you, and I wouldn’t want to bother you; so, like, why, why would you come over here and snatch my cigarette outta my mouth like that and make me look bad?”

  I started rising and I started feeling scared. I could almost feel a punch in the stomach already. But I saw all these cats crowding around Minetti, and I didn’t dig it, because there were no other paddy boys in there with any heart, and this cat was all right with me. I wasn’t going to see him stand alone, so I got up.

  Before I realized what I was doing, I said, “Minetti, don’t explain yourself to that mother-fucker. Just go on and git your cigarette. That’s all. Just go on and git your cigarette and tell that nigger not to do it no more ‘cause you ain’t playin’ with him. That’s all you gotta do.”

  Tucker looked at me and said, “Brown, damn, man, you shouldn’t have said that.”

  It was real wrong to call somebody a nigger in front of a paddy boy. That’s the way they felt. It made me feel a little bit bad myself. This sort of cooled everything down. But saying “nigger” wasn’t the main thing to me. The main thing was that these cats were trying to fuck over this paddy boy. And this paddy boy was more man than any of those cats there. I didn’t care. Between us there was no nigger thing. There was no white, no color thing. To me, he was a beautiful cat; and if you dug people and if people had something that was beautiful about them, they were raceless. And that was the only fucking thing that mattered.

  I told those cats, “Don’t try to tell me how to carry myself. I been through twice the shit all you niggers been through. And as far as I’m concerned, that paddy boy is twice the nigger any of you cats might think you are or might ever try to be.”

  After that, nobody ever said anything to me about it.

  5

  I CAME out of the reception center on a Friday afternoon. They put me in cottage C2. There were mostly Puerto Rican fellows in there, a few Negroes, and a sprinkling of white cats. The cottage parents were Puerto Rican. I remember it well.

  When they were bringing us all up the walk of the cottage area, a lot of cats started bowing their heads and saying, “Bye, Brown,” in a whisper, as if they thought I was going to my funeral or something.

  Minetti went to cottage A3. But he didn’t stay there long, because he kept fucking up, right and left.

  When I got into my cottage, there was nobody in there looking for me. There was nobody in there I knew. But I made out and I sat and I waited. A lot of cats in there had heard about me, and they’d heard that cats were out to get me, so they stayed away.

  Warwick was a funny kind of place. It was a jail in disguise. The windows in the cottage and in most of the buildings were divided into very small sections, and they had steel dividers that were painted to look like wood. The panes between the dividers were only about six square inches, and the windows were usually down from the top and up from the bottom. It would look like a normal house to anybody from the outside. But if any of the cats had tried to push a window up more from the bottom or pull it down more from the top, they would have found out that it had slats on the side, long wooden slats that wouldn’t allow the window to go up or down any more than a couple of inches farther.

  It was a pretty place. They had people walking around and looking like they were free, but you had to have a pass to go anywhere; and if you were gone too long, they had somebody out looking for you. They had what they called “area men,” and the area men were like detectives up at Warwick. Anytime something happened—if something had been stolen or if someone had gotten stabbed—these were the cats who came around and investigated and found out who had done it. They were usually big cats, strong-arm boys. And they usually found out what it was they wanted to know.

  The area men would come for you if you were gone from a place too long, and they would bring runners. Runners were like trustees. They would run after guys in the woods if they ran away, and they’d bring them back. The runners usually came from cottage A4 or one in the D group, where most of the big cats were. A4 was a crazy cottage. They had the nuts in there; they had the rapists, murderers, and perverts in there. These were the most brutal cats up there, and everybody knew it. A lot of times when people ran away, if they saw these cats behind them, they would stop, because they knew they didn’t have much chance of getting away. And if they gave the A4 guys a hard time, they’d catch hell when they were caught.

  To someone passing by, Warwick looked just like a boy’s camp. Rut everybody was under guard, all the time, and everybody had a job to do. You worked in the bakery or in an office or on the work gangs, and so on. Work gangs were a lot like chain gangs, minus the chains. In the summer, work gangs just busted rock and threw sledgehammers and picked onions and stuff like that. In the winter, th
e work gangs shoveled coal and shoveled snow. If you were a decent guy or if you could be trusted, you could get a job in one of the offices or in one of the buildings. That’s where most of the younger guys worked if they weren’t hell raisers. Most of the older guys were runners. They’d take people back from offices, take them around whenever they had to go see their sponsors or social workers. That sort of business. Everybody had a place to fit into, so it seemed.

  On Monday, I went out, and they told me I was going to be assigned to a job working in the halls with some woman named Mrs. Washington. She was an elderly lady, about fifty-five, I guess, and she had a gang of boys who used to mop the halls and sweep up in the detail building. Next thing I know I’m down on my knees scrubbing away when I hear something funny. I look up and all these cats are standing about ten feet away. One rugged-looking cat had on a cap and a ragged vest, and he said, “Man, is your name Claude Brown?” I didn’t say anything, so he said, “Punk, don’t you hear me talkin’ to you?” I still didn’t say anything. He and all the other cats kept coming closer.

  Quick as a flash, this cat was in my collar. He said, “Git up, little punk!”

  I said, “I’m gon give you two seconds, man, to git a hold-a yourself and git your hand outta my collar.”

  All these other cats moved back; I guess they figured it was time for action.

  He said, “You gon what?”

  Before I could answer, another voice came from in back of the crowd, and the voice said, “I’ll give you one second to git your hand outta his collar, or I’m gon bust your mother-fuckin’ ass.”

  The rugged guy let my collar go and turned around real quick.

  I recognized the voice. I couldn’t see anybody, but I recognized the voice. It was the most beautiful voice I’d ever heard in all my life. It was K.B.

  K.B. pushed his way on through the crowd. This first guy was a Spanish cat named Black Joe. I hadn’t done anything to him or any of his relatives, but he’d heard a lot of guys were out to get me, so he was going to be the first one and make a rep on me. K.B. came to the front of the crowd, snatched him, pushed him up against the wall, and told him to throw up his hands. He wouldn’t throw up his hands, so K.B. gutted him and dropped him.

  Then he turned around and faced the crowd. Everybody was looking. The next thing I knew, cats started moving away. K.B. said, “Look, don’t nobody move. Don’t a nigger move, ‘cause I got somethin’ to say, and I want all-a y’all—I want every livin’ ass here—to hear it, because if you don’t, you liable to make the same mistake Black Joe made, and you’ll end up right down there wit him. Look, this is my main nigger, my number one nigger, and anybody who fucks wit him, it’s just as well as if they’d came and fucked wit me. If you got anything to say to him, against him, or about him, say it to me, because when you fuck wit him, you fuckin’ wit me.”

  Everybody looked and said, “Yeah, man.” They started mumbling to themselves. One cat said, “Damn, K.B., I thought this cat was from Harlem, man; like, we didn’t know he was tight wit you.”

  He said, “There’re a whole lotta things you cats don’t know. But, like, if you fuck wit him, you gon find out all you need to know in a hurry.” So everybody moved on.

  Then a big cat with one arm came up to me and said, “Hey, Claude, how you doin’?” I didn’t know who he was, not for a while anyway. He said, “You don’t remember me, huh?”

  K.B. knew him, so he smiled at me, and he said, “You don’t remember this cat, Claude? You don’t remember Gus Jackson?”

  Then I recognized him, but the cat had gotten twice as big as he was when he was at Wiltwyck. Gus was one of my first partners when I was at Wiltwyck. He was a big cat, and I used to bully him when I first went up there. But then he started fighting, and we got tight and became partners. Gus had lost one of his arms bebopping in Brooklyn. It didn’t matter too much, because all the cats up at Warwick had a whole lot of respect for him. They had more respect for him than they did for the average half-dozen cats up there with two arms. I was so glad to see them; I was so glad to see K.B. and Gus. When I saw them, I relaxed. I felt right at home. I wasn’t scared of anything any more. I had a feeling that it wouldn’t be long before I’d be running things up there.

  After this, I met a lot of cats I’d known at Wiltwyck, in Youth House, in the streets; cats from Brooklyn, cats K.B. had cut me into; and cats I had only seen passing by. But it seemed there were more people up here waiting to get to know me, who’d heard about me and wanted to know me even before I got there, than there were enemies looking to do me in. There were so many people in my corner and people I had been tight with at some time or other, nobody would fuck with me. So I just took my time. I suppose I was the first guy in a long time, or maybe in the history of Warwick, to come up there and stay for four months without getting in a fight. That was probably a record.

  One of the first guys I met up at Warwick was a guy I’d read about in the paper. Just about everybody had read about him, I suppose. He had been blamed for shooting somebody in the Polo Grounds in the summer of 1950. It was a jive tip, but there were a whole lot of cats up there on humbles. He was a damn nice guy, but they had him in A4, the crazy cottage. Just about all the guys under sixteen who were up there for murder were in A4.

  This guy was on Mrs. Washington’s gang with me, and he was telling me one day how they sent him up there on a humble. He said when this guy had gotten shot in the Polo Grounds, they started looking in all the houses on Edgecombe Avenue, and that’s where he lived. They started looking for guns and stuff. They had a house-to-house search for guns. And they found a .22 rifle in his house. The man had been shot with a .45, but they blamed it on him.

  He turned out to be a real nice cat. It was a funny thing, but all the cats I met up there and all the cats I knew on the streets who had been accused of murder or who had actually killed somebody always seemed to be the nicest cats.

  After I’d gotten out of reception, Minetti and I started palling around, and we got tight. A lot of guys used to say, “Oh, man, like stay away from that cat. You know, like, those paddy boys, they all for themselves,” and that sort of thing. But I liked him a lot. He was one of the first cats I’d gotten close to up there. In the reception center, if it hadn’t been for this paddy boy, I would have been alone. So I didn’t give a damn what anybody said.

  After a while, Minetti was moved into A4, the crazy cottage. He kept breezing and getting caught and brought back into the detail building. He would have to wait outside the office sometimes. I was usually out there cleaning the halls when they brought him back.

  One afternoon, they brought Minetti in, and I was talking to him. He sat on a bench outside the detail office and waited for an area man to come and take him someplace. I asked him what had happened, how he’d gotten caught. He told me he’d stolen a car and it conked out on him. He was running through the woods, and then Skylo, one of the area men, saw him. The cats from A4 ran him down and caught him.

  I said that was weak stuff and went on down the hall, mopping. Then I saw some guys coming up to him. I paid it no attention, but he got up, and I heard his voice raised. I turned around. Some cats had him up in a corner and were punching him. There were three of them, and they were runners from A4. It sounded like they were kicking his ass for giving them such a hard time catching him. I thought that was crazy. If a guy is running away, the reason he’s running away is to get away, and why should he stop just because somebody is coming for him?

  He started going down, and they started kicking him. I knew that in a little while they were going to stomp him. So I ran up there with the mop in my hand. I guess I just didn’t do too much thinking. The first thing I knew, I was lashing into those cats with that mop handle, and everybody was hollering and going on. We were raising hell out there in that hall. Skylo, the area man, came out, and he said, “What are you doing, Brown? What’s wrong with you?”

  Then Mrs. Washington came down the hall, all excited, hollering, “Go
od God, what is going on here?”

  So I told them that the cats had been jumping on this one boy and that I was trying to help him.

  Skylo looked at me, and he said, “He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, in a way.”

  “Well, take some advice from me, Brown. You stay away from him, because this guy is heading for trouble, and he’s not gonna be around here long, and I wouldn’t want to see you get yourself into any trouble on account of him.”

  I pretended to appreciate his advice, then I walked away. But the main thing was that I’d gotten those cats off Minetti. At the same time, I had made them enemies of mine. But that was all right, because I didn’t like those cats anyway. I thought they were all jive. The way I saw it, those niggers weren’t so crazy. They were just acting like they were crazy. And they’d only act like that with cats who didn’t know any better. Now I knew that if I was to breeze and they came after me, one of us would get hurt—me or whoever it was. But I just couldn’t get too scared of them. I’d seen cats like that just about all my life.

  There were a lot of real hip young criminals at Warwick. It wasn’t like Wiltwyck. For one thing, Wiltwyck only had about a hundred guys, and Warwick had five hundred. And Warwick had guys from all over New York City. They had cats from Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Richmond—everywhere. There were even cats from small towns upstate and from suburban areas of New York City. And Warwick had real criminals. Nobody at Wiltwyck was there for murder, and they didn’t have any cats up there who knew how to steal a car without the keys. But it seemed like just about everybody at Warwick not only knew how to pick locks but knew how to cross wires in cars and get them started without keys. Just about everybody knew how to pick pockets and roll reefers, and a lot of cats knew how to cut drugs. They knew how much sugar to put with heroin to make a cap or a bag. There was so much to learn.