Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  Dad found out what I was doing and said, “The boy ain’t no good; he ain’t never been no good, and he ain’t never gonna be no good.” He told me not to come back in the house, so I thought, Fuck it, I don’t want to come back in the house no more anyway.

  I was only about fifteen, and I couldn’t get a job. I couldn’t do anything. I didn’t like the idea of not being able to get a place and having to stay out on the street. So I just got fed up one day and went back to Warwick. I went down to the Youth House where the bus used to pick up all the boys going to Warwick every Friday. I just told the bus driver and the other cat that was on the bus that my name was Claude Brown, that I had stayed down from Warwick, and that they were looking for me. They said, “Hop on.” So I just hopped on and went up to Warwick.

  When I got to Warwick, everybody was glad to see me. It was like coming home, a great reunion. I had only been home for about four months, and most of the cats I’d left at Warwick were still there, so there was a place for me.

  During my first stay at Warwick, I had been transferred from C2 cottage into B1. They said that I started a riot between the colored cats and the Puerto Ricans. Well, I didn’t start it. Maybe I kept it going a little bit, but I didn’t start it. They had a big investigation. The assistant superintendent told me that if my name “got associated with this sort of thing again,” there was a good chance that I’d get into a lot of trouble, so I’d better cool it. I told him I felt that the Puerto Ricans were getting better treatment than I did, and I told the other cats this, and after a while, everybody could see it.

  When I came back to Warwick the second time, they put me back in B1. I stayed there for about three months and went home in September. Warwick was crowded then, and it was easy to get out when the place was crowded, because there were a whole lot of cats in the Youth House waiting to come up there and they had to make room for them. I told them that I was going down South, and I got Mama to tell them the same thing, so they let me out. When they did that, I was back on the streets for a couple of months. I didn’t have any intention of going down South; that was one place I never wanted to go any more. I was back on the streets doing the same things I had done before.

  K.B. had gotten out about a month before I did, and he went back co Brooklyn and started dabbling in horse. As a matter of fact, he was selling horse, and he wanted to know if I wanted to sell some. He had a connection for me. I told him I didn’t want to be messing around with any horse because I didn’t care for junkies. If you were dealing horse, junkies were always around you, and junkies were some treacherous cats. I’d known junkies who had robbed their mothers and fathers and pawned everything in the house. They just couldn’t be trusted, and I didn’t want them around me. I just didn’t want anything to do with them.

  K.B. just stopped offering, but he started using the stuff. This was one way of putting down bebopping. When you were on horse, you didn’t have time for it. And in Brooklyn, a lot of cats were using horse to get away from bebopping. It gave them an out, a reason for not doing it, and a reason that was acceptable. Nobody would say that you were scared or anything like that; they would just say that you were a junkie, and everybody knew that junkies didn’t go around bebopping.

  So when K.B. started messing with horse, I stopped going to Brooklyn, and I didn’t see him any more. I just stayed in Harlem. Alley Bush and Dunny and Turk and Tito and Bucky and Mac were all back on the streets, and we were all hanging out together.

  One night in December of 1952, I was sitting at home at about seven o’clock in the evening, when I heard a knock on the door. It sounded just like the police knock, and I knew that knock pretty well by now. So I stopped with the cards and just listened.

  I heard a white voice ask, “Is Claude Brown here?” I just went in my room and got my coat. I knew I hadn’t done anything, and I figured I’d just have to go down to the police station and see about something and I’d be right back. But I’d forgotten about what had happened the day before. Alley Bush and Bucky and another cat from downtown had broken into somebody’s house and stolen some silverware and furs. They brought it uptown for me to off it to a fence for them. I did it and forgot about it.

  Mama said, “Yeah, he’s here,” and I came to the door with my coat on.

  One of the white detectives asked me if I knew Alley Bush and Bucky, and I said, “Yeah, I know ’em.”

  He said, “You want to come with us?”

  I just walked out of the door, and Mama kept asking, “What’s he done; what’s he done?”

  They just said, “Well, we don’t know yet.” And they told her where they were taking me.

  I went to the police station and found out what had happened. Then I knew I wasn’t going to be coming home that night, and I knew I wasn’t going to be there for Christmas. It seemed that one of the furs was a cheap piece that wasn’t any good; but Alley Bush, who was kind of stupid and did a lot of stupid things, went around in the same neighborhood trying to sell this piece of junk. I had told him to throw it away. Instead of throwing it away, he tried to sell it, and he got busted—and he mouthed on everybody he knew. He didn’t know the fence or he would have mouthed on him too.

  The police told me I could get off if I would tell them who the fence was and if they could get the stuff back. I told them that I didn’t know, that it was the first time I’d ever seen the guy. They never found out who it was. And a few days before Christmas, I was on my way back up to Warwick, for the third and last time. I was fifteen, and that was the only thing that saved me. Alley Bush was sent to Elmira, but Bucky, the luckiest cat I ever knew, got out of it somehow or other. A couple of weeks later, Tito got busted with a gun, and he was sent to Woodburn. Just about everybody was gone off the streets.

  About a week after Christmas, I was sitting in the cottage that they’d put me in, C3. Al Cohen came in. Mr. Cohen was the superintendent of Warwick, and I had known him before, but only slightly, just to say hello to. I didn’t think he really knew me. He used to call me Smiley, since I was always smiling. This time he said, “Hi, Smiley, what are you doin’ here?” He looked sort of surprised, because he knew I had gone home.

  I just looked up and said, “Hello, Mr. Cohen. Like, I just didn’t make it, you know ? I had some trouble.”

  He didn’t say anything else. He just left.

  I still had my rep at Warwick. Before I left the second time, I was running BI cottage; I had become the “main man.” The cottage parents and the area men thought I was real nice. I knew how to operate up there. I had an extortion game going, but it was a thing that the cats went along with because I didn’t allow anybody to bully anybody and that sort of thing. Since I didn’t get many visitors from home, I made other guys pay protection fees to me when they received visits or packages from home. I just ran the place, and I kept it quiet. I didn’t have to bully anybody—cats knew that I knew how to hit a guy and knock out a tooth or something like that, so I seldom had to hit a cat. My reputation for hurting cats was indisputable. I could run any cottage that I’d been in with an iron hand.

  After a few weeks, they told me that my work assignment would be Mr. Cohen’s house. One of the nice things about that was that I got to know Mrs. Cohen. She was the nicest lady I’d ever met. She was a real person. I didn’t get to know Mr. Cohen too well. I’d see the cat, and he’d talk. I’d see him in the morning when I first came in, before he left, and I’d see him in the afternoon if he came home for lunch. But I didn’t really know him. I only got to know Mrs. Cohen, the cook, and the chauffeur.

  Mrs. Cohen was always telling me that I could be somebody, that I could go to school and do anything I wanted to, because I had a good head on my shoulders. I thought she was a nice person, but I didn’t think she was really seeing me as I was. She’d go on and on, and I’d say, “Yeah, uh-huh, yeah, Mrs. Cohen.” I didn’t believe it. She would get real excited about it and would start telling me about the great future that lay ahead for me. She tried to get me interested in it
, but I couldn’t tell her how I really felt about it. Even though I was in the third term, I knew I wasn’t going to finish high school. I didn’t even know anybody who had finished high school. Cats around my way just didn’t do that. It wasn’t for me; it was for some other people, that high-school business.

  She said that I could even go to college if I wanted to. She was nice, but she didn’t know what was happening. I couldn’t tell her that all cats like me ever did was smoke reefers and steal and fight and maybe eventually get killed. I couldn’t tell her that I wasn’t going anyplace but to jail or someplace like it. She’d say all these nice things, and I’d try to treat her nice and pretend I believed what she was saying. I couldn’t have made her understand that this stuff was impossible for me. Cats who went to college, these were the boys who were in school and playing ball and reading and stuff like that when cats like me were smoking pot and having gang fights and running around with little funky girls. Those other cats were the kind who went to school. Cats like me, they didn’t do anything but go to jail.

  One time she got Mr. Cohen to talk to me about staying at Warwick, going to high school in the town there until I finished, and then going back to New York after I had gotten my high-school diploma. He just suggested it. He tried to show me that it wasn’t being forced on me. I said, “Yeah, Mr. Cohen; like, that’s nice,” but I think he understood that I wasn’t interested in this stuff. He wasn’t really going to try too hard, because if I wasn’t interested, there was nothing he could do.

  All I wanted to do was get back to Harlem. I wanted to get back to Jackie and pot and the streets and stealing. This was my way of life. I couldn’t take it for too long when I was there, but this was all I knew. There was nothing else. I wouldn’t have known how to stay at Warwick and go to school. I didn’t tell him that. When he asked me about staying and going to school, I just said, “Yeah, that would be nice.” He saw that I wasn’t what you could call excited about it.

  One day, Mrs. Cohen gave me a book. It was an autobiography of some woman by the name of Mary McLeod Bethune. When she gave it to me, she said, “Here’s something you might like to read.” Before that, I had just read pocketbooks. I’d stopped reading comic books, but I was reading the trashy pocketbooks, stuff like Duke, The Golden Spike, that kind of nonsense.

  I just took it and said, “Yeah, uh-huh.” I saw the title on it, but I didn’t know who the woman was. I just took it because Mrs. Cohen had given it to me. I said, “Yeah, I’ll read it,” and I read it because I figured she might ask about it, and I’d have to know something. It wasn’t too bad. I felt that I knew something; I knew who Mary McLeod Bethune was, and I figured I probably knew as much about her as anybody else who knew anything about her, after reading a book about her whole life. Anyway, I felt a little smart afterward.

  Then Mrs. Cohen gave me other books, usually about people, outstanding people. She gave me a book on Jackie Robinson and on Sugar Ray Robinson. She gave me a book on Einstein and a book on Albert Schweitzer. I read all these books, and I liked them. After a while, I started asking her for books, and I started reading more and more and liking it more and more.

  After reading about a lot of these people, I started getting ideas about life. I couldn’t talk to the cats in the cottage about the people in the books I was reading. I could talk to them about Jackie Robinson and Sugar Ray Robinson, but everybody knew about them, and there was nothing new to say. But this Einstein was a cat who really seemed to know how to live. He didn’t seem to care what people thought about him. Nobody could come up to him and say, “Look, man, like, you’re jive,” or “You’re not down,” or any stuff like that. He seemed to be living all by himself; he’d found a way to do what he wanted to in life and just make everybody accept it. He reminded me a lot of Papanek, somebody who seemed to have a whole lot of control over life and knew what he was going to do and what he wasn’t going to do. The cat seemed to really know how to handle these things.

  Then I read a book by Albert Schweitzer. He was another fascinating cat. The man knew so much. I really started wanting to know things. I wanted to know things, and I wanted to do things. It made me start thinking about what might happen if I got out of Warwick and didn’t go back to Harlem. But I couldn’t really see myself not going back to Harlem. I couldn’t see myself going anyplace else, because if I didn’t go to Harlem, where would I have gone? That was the only place I ever knew.

  I kept reading, and I kept enjoying it. Most of the time, I used to just sit around in the cottage reading. I didn’t bother with people, and nobody bothered me. This was a way to be in Warwick and not to be there at the same time. I could get lost in a book. Cats would come up and say, “Brown, what you readin’?” and I’d just say, “Man, git the fuck on away from me, and don’t bother me.”

  July 12, 1953, I went home for good. There was hardly anybody else out. Just about all the people I used to swing with were in jail. They were in Coxsackie, Woodburn, Elmira, those places. The only ones who were left on the street were Bucky and Turk. Tito was in Woodburn, Alley Bush was in Elmira, Dunny was in Woodburn, and Mac was in Coxsackie.

  I felt a little bad after I left, because I knew that the Cohens would find out sooner or later that I wasn’t the angel that they thought I was. Actually, I would have had to be like a faggot or something to be the nice boy that Mrs. Cohen thought I was. I think Mr. Cohen knew all the time that although I acted nice in the house and did my work, I still had to raise a little bit of hell down at that cottage and keep my reputation or I wouldn’t have been able to stay there as his houseboy. Those cats would have had me stealing cigarettes for them and all kinds of shit like that I just had to be good with my hands and I had to let some people know it sometimes.

  I guess Mrs. Cohen learned to live with it if she found out. It didn’t matter too much, because I was back on the Harlem scene now. I was sixteen years old, and I knew that I’d never be going back to Warwick. The next stop was Coxsackie, Woodburn, or Elmira. I came back on the street and got ready for it. I started dealing pot. I had all kinds of contacts from Warwick.

  Butch, Danny, and Kid were all strung out. They were junkies all the way. They had long habits. Kid had just come out of the Army Danny had been out all the time. Butch had gone into the Army to try to get away from his habit, but they had found the needle marks and had thrown him out. Now they were all out there, and they were just junkies. I used to feel sorry for them, especially Danny, because he had tried so hard to keep me off the stuff.

  I was hanging out with just Turk from the old crowd. A guy I hadn’t known before but had heard about was on the scene. This was Reno, another of Bucky and Mac’s brothers. Reno was slick. He was about twenty-one, and he’d just come out of Woodburn when I came out of Warwick for the last time.

  He used to kid me about being a better hustler than I was and said he would show me how to make twice the money. He’d heard about me, and we were sort of friends already when we first met. He told me, “If you gon be a hustler, you gon have to learn all the hustlin’ tricks.” I agreed with him.

  When I first came out, I had to get a job in the garment district, because I was on parole, and I had to keep that job for a while to show my parole officer that I was doing good. I kept the job, and I kept dealing pot. I had the best pot in town. Word got around; after a while, I was making a lot of money. I used to always have about two hundred dollars on me. I started buying hundred-dollar suits and thirty-five-dollars shoes and five-dollar ties and dressing real good.

  A whole lot of cats in the neighborhood started admiring me, and they wanted to get tight with me; but to me, even though these guys were my age, they were the younger boys. These were good boys who had been in the house for a long time. They were just coming out, and I didn’t feel as though they were ready for me, so I couldn’t hang out with anybody but Turk.

  Turk was a nice cat, but he was slow. He didn’t want to make any money, or he didn’t know how. He just wasn’t down enough. He had come
out of the house kind of late, and the older hustlers didn’t know him from way back like they knew me. Nobody would do business with him, so he couldn’t really get started. I used to give him some money once in a while, but he couldn’t really get started in the hustling life. So I just started hanging out with Reno. Reno had said he was going to show me all the hustling tricks.

  After a few months, I quit my first job and just dealt pot. I decided I was going to be a hustler. We were going to start from way back, from all the old hustling tricks, and come up to the modern-day stuff. About three months after I’d been out of Warwick, I was going downtown with Reno to learn how to play the Murphy.

  6

  I HAD heard about jostling and the Murphy for a long time, but I didn’t really know what it was all about. All I knew for sure was that cats like Reno would go downtown and look for country cats and out-of-towners in Times Square who looked like they didn’t know what was happening, and they would run down a story to them about selling them some cunt from some of the finest bitches they ever saw. There were many different ways to play the Murphy, but this was the way cats around my way played it.

  Reno briefed me on our way downtown for my first Murphy lesson. He told me that the reason he liked the Murphy so much was that he could make a lot of money in a short period of time. When you’re dealing pot, you have to stand around and wait for people to come, so you can sell only so many joints a day. But with the Murphy, if you made one good hit, you came up with maybe two or three hundred dollars for just a few minutes’ work.