Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  You learned something new from everybody you met. It seemed like just about all the Puerto Rican guys were up there for using drugs. They had a lot of colored cats up there for using drugs, but most of them were jive. Most of these guys were just using drugs to be down and to have a rep as a junkie. You could tell that these cats were jive by the way they went around saying, “Yeah, man, do you shoot stuff?” and all this sort of nonsense, as though they were bragging about it. They would start talking about how much stuff they used a day. I’d look at them and say, “Yeah, like, that’s real nice,” but they could never make me feel bad or anything, because all I had to do was say my name was Claude Brown. I didn’t have to use drugs. I already had a reputation. I’d been other places. I knew people from here, I knew people from there.

  Cats had heard about me when I was in Brooklyn gang fighting with K.B. and the Robins. And when I got shot, it was something that everybody seemed to respect me for. I’d only gotten shot with a .32, but the word was out that I’d gotten shot in the stomach with a .38. Cats didn’t believe it. They’d come up to me and say, “Man, did you really git shot wit a .38?” and I’d either joke it off or act like they were being silly. I’d say, “Shit, people have gotten shot with .45’s, so what?” They would go away marveling.

  When we were in the dormitory getting ready to take a shower, the cool guys would say, “Hey, Brown, could I see your scar?” or they would just say, “Man, is that your scar?” I’d say, “Yeah, that’s it.” If they were hip cats, they might just say something like, “Yeah, man, those bullets can really fuck you up.” And I’d say something like, “Yeah, but you can keep gittin’ up behind ’em.”

  Cats used to come up and offer me ins on reefers or horse or anything I wanted. I had two or three flunkies after I’d been there for a month. It was no sweat for me; I was ready to stay there for a long time and live real good. I knew how to get along there. I’d had a place waiting for me long before I came. If I’d known that Warwick was going to be as good as it turned out to be, I would never have been so afraid. As a matter of fact, I might have gotten there a whole lot sooner.

  At Warwick, it all depended on you when you went home for a visit. The first time, you had to stay there twelve weeks before you could go home. After that, you could go home for a three-day visit, from Friday to Monday, every eight weeks. That’s if you didn’t lose any days for fucking up or fighting. This was pretty good, because some people were always going home, and they would see your fellows and bring messages back, and your fellows were always coming up every Friday. A new batch of guys would come up and drugs would come up. When you came back from a weekend home visit, you were searched everywhere. They’d even search in the crack of your ass. You had to go to the doctor and let him look for a dose of clap. But cats would always manage to bring back at least a cap of horse or at least one reefer. Everybody could always manage to smuggle in a little bit of something.

  By the time Dunny came up to Warwick, I had a place for him. I was there and ready, sitting pretty. I’d already established myself and was waiting for some of the fellows to come up. I’d been up there about eight weeks when Dunny came. He told me Turk was in the Youth House. They’d gotten busted robbing a hardware store on 145th Street, and for some reason—I guess because he had a worse record than Turk—they sent Dunny right on up, but Turk was still in the Youth House waiting to go to court.

  When Dunny came up, I saw him passing by the reception crowd, and I stopped and said something to him before Mr. Jenkins, the cat in charge, told me to go on. Dunny said, “Damn, Sonny, we gon live up here, man; like we gon really run the place!” And I sort of had the feeling it was true, because Dunny was a crazy cat, and he had a whole lot of heart. But I wanted to get a chance to pull his coat about the place called the Annex.

  The cats who had a little bit of sense but who were just general fuck-ups were sent to the Annex. At the Annex, you didn’t get any visits home, and you could only have a visitor once a month. At Warwick, you could have a visitor every Sunday, if your folks wanted to come and see you. Not too many people actually came up there every Sunday, though. At the Annex, you had to do two years. For all that time, you weren’t going to be back on the street, see any girls, go to the places you liked to go, or do the things you liked to do. They said the work was harder too.

  Up at Warwick, the cats had never really served any time before. They might have been someplace like Wiltwyck, where you went home only every six months, but they could go home for a visit or could go someplace eventually. In places like Warwick, you find a lot of guys who never had any home to go to, so they didn’t mind. One place was just as good as another. For them, Warwick was just one more place until the next stop, which would probably be Coxsackie or Elmira or someplace like that. But to the average cat who hadn’t ever served any time, the thought of going to the Annex was something frightening. I hadn’t served any time, and I wasn’t about to serve any time. I wanted to get back on the streets.

  My folks didn’t come up too much. Dad would never come any place to see me, and Mama couldn’t come often because she didn’t have that much money. Dad wouldn’t give her any money to come up and see me. The way he felt about it was, “Shit, he got his damn self in that trouble, so let him worry about it himself.”

  We all came out of Warwick better criminals. Other guys were better for the things that I could teach them, and I was better for the things that they could teach me. Before I went to Warwick, I used to be real slow at rolling reefers and at dummying reefers, but when I came back from Warwick, I was a real pro at that, and I knew how to boost weak pot with embalming fluid. I even knew how to cut drugs, I had it told to me so many times, I learned a lot of things at Warwick. The good thing about Warwick was that when you went home on visits, you could do stuff, go back up to Warwick, and kind of hide out. If the cops were looking for you in the city, you’d be at Warwick.

  One of the most interesting things I learned was about faggots. Before I went to Warwick, I used to look down on faggots like they were something dirty. But while I was up there, I met some faggots who were pretty nice guys. We didn’t play around or anything like that, but I didn’t look down on them any more.

  These guys were young cats my age. It was the first time I’d been around guys who weren’t afraid of being faggots. They were faggots because they wanted to be. Some cats were rape artists because they wanted to be, some cats were flunkies, some cats were thieves, and some cats were junkies. These guys were faggots because they wanted to be. And some of the faggots up there were pretty good with their hands. As a matter of fact, some of them were so good with their hands, they had the man they wanted just because he couldn’t beat them.

  At Warwick, there was even a cottage just for faggots. If a cat came up there acting girlish, they’d put him right in there. They had a lot of guys in there—Puerto Ricans, white, colored, everything—young cats, sixteen and under, who had made up their minds that they liked guys, and that’s all there was to it.

  When I first came up there, I had to go to school for half a day. They put me in a class, and there was a faggot in the class. The cat was about a year older than I was, a real nice-looking guy. As a matter of fact, he was so handsome, I guess it would have been hard for him not to be a faggot. He said that he just liked guys, and that’s why he was a faggot. This was the first faggot I had ever talked to, except for Earl, Bucky’s brother. His name was Baxter.

  He used to give me things and offer me cigarettes. These were things you weren’t supposed to have outside of the cottages—cigarettes and candies, stuff like that. One day, I had to talk to him. I said, “Like, look, man, I been talkin’ to you, and we been all right, and I like you, but I don’t want you givin’ me things, ‘cause that could be misunderstood. And I suppose sooner or later, you’d be wantin’ me to give you somethin’ or do somethin’ for you, and it’s, like, that’s just not my way, man. Like, the way I hear it, cats who mess around wit faggots usually come out wit
claps or somethin’ like that sooner or later.”

  He looked at me and laughed and said, “No, I don’t want anything from you, Brown. I know how you are, but there aren’t many guys around here who think they are down who would … you know, who I could talk to and who would treat me like I’m somebody or somethin’. It’s like, I just like you, and I know we couldn’t have anything goin’ in that love vein, but, well, I just like you.”

  I said, “Yeah, well, I like you too, man. And as long as we both understand how things are, there’s no reason why we can’t go on bein’ friends. But, like, it’s gotta be friends like this, man, everybody understandin’ where he is.”

  The cats up there I really disliked as a group weren’t the faggots but the guys who were afraid somebody might think they were. Warwick made everybody very conscious of his masculinity, and there were a lot of cute guys up there, guys who were real handsome. They were so handsome that if they weren’t good with their hands, somebody was liable to try to make a girl out of them. So these guys used to be brutal, dirty. They used to do a whole lot of wicked stuff to cats. They would stab somebody in a minute or hit a cat in his head with something while he was sleeping, all that kind of stuff, because they were afraid guys would think they weren’t mean.

  At Warwick, I got my introduction to jazz. Most of the older cats from Brooklyn and Harlem knew something about jazz, and even though I still liked to listen to rock ‘n’ roll and the singing by groups like the Clovers, since I was swinging with the older cats and had to be in with them, I had to listen to jazz. At first, if cats were talking about Charlie Parker and then said Yardbird, I didn’t know what they were talking about. I was only fourteen at the time, and I just wasn’t that interested in jazz. I’d never heard about these things before.

  Gus Jackson used to start talking about it all the time in class, and I’d talk with him as if I knew something about it. I’d heard a little bit of stuff about Charlie Parker, and I’d read some stuff, so one day when he asked me if I wanted to borrow some of his Bird records, I said, “Yeah, man.” Since I was playing this part, I had to. Gus gave me a whole album of 78’s by Bird called Charlie Parker with Strings.

  I took the things to the cottage and kept them for about a week before I played them. Gus kept asking me for them, and I figured that he was going to ask me something about them, so I knew I had to listen to them at least one time.

  One day, I was going to my cottage, and I met K.B. He had some pot and gave me a couple of joints. I went to my cottage, got high, and started listening to these records. It seemed like something real different. It was something crazy … the music, it was the most beautiful sound I’d heard in all my life. I must have played “Summertime” over about twenty times.

  I tried to buy that album from Gus, but it was Gus’s favorite, and he wouldn’t part with it. But the cat was really moved. Since I liked it, it made him feel good. He lent it to me for another week. After that, I asked him to lend it to me for one more week. Gus was really moved by the whole thing, so he let me keep it for one more week. Gus never got it back. Skylo, the area man, hit Gus soon afterward, and Gus hit him back, knocked him out. By the time I heard about it, Gus was already in the Annex doing two years.

  That was how I got my first Charlie Parker album. For a year, I didn’t like any of the jazz artists but Charlie Parker, and I still liked the singing groups, the Orioles and the Clovers, these people. But little by little, I started liking other people. I remember that a year later, “Moody’s Mood for Love” by King Pleasure came out. I really liked that. I guess I was growing away from that rock ‘η’ roll thing and getting closer to jazz. So I found jazz at Warwick too, among all the other things.

  On my first visit home, I met the Albees. The Albees were crazy-acting people who were always having family fights on Eighth Avenue. There were two girls and three boys in the family. I’d never seen them before. I think they’d just come up from Georgia somewhere, and they acted like it.

  I had a fight with Tony Albee, who was about my age, and we started a rivalry. Every time I came home, we’d have this little feud. Pimp would tell him, “I’m gon git my brother to kick your ass,” if Tony or his younger brother would mess with Pimp. This became a regular thing. It meant that there was always something to come back to in those streets

  Mama told me that Jackie had asked her if she could come up to see me, and she told her, “Hell, no.” Mama said that’s what she told her, but Carole said Mama had really cursed her out. I told Mama she didn’t have any right to be looking down on this girl just because she was dirty sometimes and because she was dark-skinned. Mama said that Jackie didn’t have any business asking to come up to see somebody as sloppy as she looked.

  When I came out, I found out that Jackie wasn’t looking so sloppy any more. As a matter of fact, she dressed real nice, but Mama still didn’t like her. Mama said she was still just a dirty little neighborhood whore, even if she had learned how to dress.

  When I came home, that was one of the first places I went, to see Jackie. It made Mama mad, but it was my life. I was older now. I had grown a lot at Warwick, so I think Mama and Dad didn’t think I was a little boy any more. And they didn’t try too hard to keep me under their control. If I went out and stayed at Jackie’s house all night, it was all right. Whatever I did was all right.

  Sugar came around to my house that first time I came home from Warwick. Carole must have told her I was home. Sugar was getting kind of nice looking. Her teeth still weren’t straight, but she was getting a shape. I asked her why she hadn’t come to see me in the hospital when I had gotten shot. I’d never thought about it before, but when I saw her I said, “You were one-a the first people I expected to see.” She told me that she didn’t know anything about it until after I had come out. We stayed in the hallway and talked for a long time, a real long time. Then she left, and I went up to see Jackie.

  After the first time I came home, Sugar just stopped coming around. She didn’t want to see me any more. I forgot about her for a long while.

  After about eight months at Warwick, they told me that I’d be going home in about a month. When K.B. heard about it, he panicked. He said, “I want to go home too, man. These people better let me outta here.”

  “Look, K.B., I been tellin’ you ever since I came her, if you want to git outta this place, you got to stop fuckin’ up. It’s, like, you gotta stop all that beboppin’ and you gotta stop all that fuckin’ up with the area men, like, just goin’ around tryin’ to be bad. You can do that shit with the cats around here, but if you start screamin’ on the area men like that, you can’t possibly win, man. Because these are the cats who can keep you up here all your life if they want to.”

  “Look, Claude, you don’t understand. I’m from Brooklyn. There’s a whole lotta stuff goin’ on up here that I can’t stay out of. You know, like, when my fellas, the Robins or the Stompers, go to war, it’s, like, I’ve got to git into it too, because cats gon be lookin’ for me to kick my ass or stab me or some kinda shit like that even if I don’t come right out and declare war, because they know, like, I’m in this clique, man. Just about everybody who comes up here from Brooklyn, they know who’s in what gang.”

  I said, “Yeah, man, but that’s not the main thing. The main thing is to stop screamin’ on the area men. You can go and have your rumbles and shit if you want, but you know if you stab anybody and they find out about it, you’re through. The only way you gon make it outta here is to cool it. Didn’t I tell you I wasn’t gon stay up here a year when I came? And now I’m walkin’, right? So it must be somethin’ to it.”

  K.B. said, “Yeah, Claude, it’s, like, yeah, man, I should-a listened to you, ‘cause I know you usually know what you’re talkin’ about. I’m gon change my whole way-a actin’ up here. And I’m gon be gittin’ outta here soon. I’m gon be gittin’ outta here in about three months now, just you watch.”

  I left Warwick after staying up there for about nine months and three wee
ks. I came home and went to the High School of Commerce, down around Broadway and Sixty-fifth Street.

  I didn’t go for school too much. The cats there were really dressing, and I didn’t have any money. The only way I could make some money was by not going to school. If I told Dad I needed about four or five pair of pants and some nice shirts, he would start talking all that nonsense again about, “I didn’t have my first pair-a long pants till I was out workin’.” That shit didn’t make any sense, not to me. He had been living down on a farm, and this was New York City. People looked crazy going around in New York City with one pair of pants, but this was the way he saw it, and this was the way he talked. I think the nigger used to talk this nonsense because he didn’t want to get up off any money to buy me some clothes. So I just said, “Fuck it, I’ll buy my own.”

  The only way I could buy my own was by selling pot when I went to school. And I’d take some loaded craps down there, some bones, and I would beat the paddy boys out of all their money. They were the only ones who were dumb enough to shoot craps with bones.

  After a while, I just got tired. I never went to any of the classes, and if I did go to one, I didn’t know anything. I felt kind of dumb, so I stopped going there. The only time I went to school was when I wanted to make some money. I’d go there and stay a couple of hours. Maybe I’d take Turk with me. Turk would sell some pot, and I’d shoot some craps, and when we got enough money, we’d go uptown. We’d go to 114th Street, to Tito’s house, and we’d party up there. His mother was never home; nobody was there. Nobody cared about him. There were always a lot of girls, and we’d have some pot and some liquor; we’d smoke and we’d jugg some of the old funky girls down there. It was fun. It was something to do. But after a while, I found myself getting tired of the school thing, getting tired of the Harlem thing.