Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  “Sonny, I remember when you were talking to me about getting away from drugs, when you started going to school. Now I want to do something for you. I want to show you how to find your way, if you haven’t found it.”

  “Thanks anyway, Billy, but I think I’ve found my way.”

  “Have you got a minute, man? Could I have a minute of your time?”

  “Yeah, sure, go on. What’s on your mind?” I didn’t want to hear that stuff, but I didn’t want to be rude to the cat.

  When I had decided to go to school and get out of street life in Harlem, I talked to Billy. He was dealing heroin at the time. I told him, “Look, man, you know what’s going to happen? Sooner or later, you’re going to start dabblin’ and you’ll be strung out.” I tried to tell him to give it up, but he said, “No, man, what am I going to do if I give up dealing drugs?” I thought he was convinced that he was going to be doing that for the rest of his life, so I just stopped talking to the cat. Now here he was, deep in this religious thing and trying to sell me on it too. It was damn surprising.

  “Tell me something, Billy. What happened to you, man? How did you get into this Muslim thing?”

  “I’m not a Muslim, man. Those people are a little mixed up.”

  When he said that, I sort of raised an eyebrow and thought, Well, damn, I thought one of those groups was bad enough around here, and now we got something else. Everybody’s going crazy in his own right. I said, “Well, what you into, man?”

  “Have you ever heard of the Coptic faith?”

  “No, man. The Coptic? There’s no such thing.”

  “Yeah, man. There’s a Coptic.”

  “You mean Catholic, man.” I thought the cat was just pronouncing “Catholic” wrong.

  “No, Sonny, I mean Coptic. This is the true black man’s faith. It comes straight from the black continent.… Haven’t you ever heard of Haile Selassie?”

  “Damn right, everybody’s heard of Haile Selassie. So what’s that got to do with the Coptic faith?”

  “He’s head of the Coptic Church. Haven’t you ever seen those signs up along Lenox Avenue and Seventh Avenue whenever Haile Selassie comes to town? They’ve got up the banners saying, ‘Welcome, Conquering Lion of Judah,’ and all this sort of thing.”

  “Yeah, I’ve seen them.”

  “That’s the Coptic, man, who put up all that stuff. This is what I’m into.”

  “How did you get involved in this?”

  “Somebody pulled my coat, man, in a dark moment when I was heading down the road to destruction.”

  I said to myself, Oh, Lord, here comes some more of that shit about “how I was saved,” and what not. Whenever junkies kicked for a little while, they’d go into this crazy kind of shit.

  Billy said, “You know Lonnie Jones, who use to live on 146th Street?”

  “Yeah, man, I know Lonnie. I haven’t seen him in a couple of years at least.”

  “Lonnie saved me. He was the cat who pulled my coat to this brand-new, hip way of life.”

  “Oh, yeah?” I was a little surprised, but not too much so, because Lonnie had been a guy who I thought was not cut out too well for the Harlem scene.

  “Yeah, man, that’s no stuff. Lonnie is a priest in the Coptic faith.”

  “A priest! I always thought Lonnie was cut out for something different, but I didn’t think he was made to become a priest in anybody’s religion.”

  “Yeah, man, he’s a priest.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned! You never know what people are going to do next!” It wasn’t too surprising in Lonnie’s case, because Lonnie was a good boy. He didn’t steal and stuff like that. He was in the Buccaneers with us, with most of the cats in the neighborhood. I think he was just in it because his brothers were. Just about everybody he knew was in it, so he had to get in the clique too.

  I remember once when we were bebopping on 148th Street with some cats called the Chancellors. We only had three guns with us when we went uptown that night, and the person who had one of the guns was Lonnie. I was with him, Rock, Danny, and a couple of other cats. There were two brothers on 148th Street who everybody knew were killers. They were called the Lordly brothers. The Lordlys had stabbed and shot a lot of cats. People knew that you couldn’t play with them. You didn’t go up there and wave a gun in front of their faces or stick them with knives or try to scare them. These cats were dangerous. If you went to war with them, you had to kill them.

  We had gotten cornered in a hallway up on 148th Street, me, Danny, Lonnie, Butch, and a couple of other cats. About ten or twelve Chancellors were coming after us. Some of us were trying to get out the back door, but it was locked. Lonnie had a gun, and these cats were coming in through the front door. Lonnie hollered, “You niggers don’t move or I’ll kill every last mother-fucker.”

  I tried to say, “Look here, man, do something in a hurry.” I knew if these cats got to us, we were through. Lonnie kept hollering about what he was going to do and shaking, and they kept coming on. He kept telling them not to take one more step, and these cats were taking five steps at a time.

  Rock stopped them; he snatched the gun and shot Junior Lordly. Everybody else stood back, and he kept shooting. We got out of the back door, and all the other Chancellors ran back out the front door. We went up on the roof and got out of there, but I don’t think we would have gotten out if we’d waited for Lonnie Jones to shoot. This was the sort of cat he was. He had no business gang fighting anyway.

  I said to Billy, “Come on in this bar and I’ll buy you a drink.”

  He hesitated. He said, “No, man, I don’t drink any more.”

  “Damn, man, that sounds like that’s something really powerful that you’re into.”

  “Yeah, man. I don’t need alcohol; I don’t need drugs; I don’t need anything any more. When I came out of Kentucky about a year ago, I didn’t know what I was going to do, Sonny. I didn’t know if I was going to go back on drugs, start drinking wine, or what. But I found out that I didn’t need anything but this.” He took something out of his shirt. It looked like a little metal triangle on a chain. He said, “Do you know what this is?”

  “Yeah, man, it’s a triangle.”

  “No, man.” He turned it over. It was a pyramid with the Sphinx engraved on it. “This is the symbol of the Holy Land and a symbol of our religion.”

  “That’s all right, man. Tell me some more.”

  “Actually, this is the symbol of man also.”

  “Since you don’t want to go in a bar, why don’t we just have a cup of coffee? You can tell me about this.”

  We went into a restaurant. He started telling me that this was something that had originated in Ethiopia and that this was the true black man’s religion. He asked me if I knew a cat by the name of Father Ford. I said, “No, I don’t know him.”

  “You’ve probably seen him. He’s a short dark-skin cat, and he’s really weird looking. I know you’ve seen him, because he’s been around here for years, hollering the truth like a madman, hollering in the wilderness.”

  “No, man. I never met the cat.”

  “Well, anyway, we have classes on Wednesday and Friday nights around Father Ford’s house. He lives on 142nd Street. Man, why don’t you come by on Friday or Wednesday night, like next Wednesday night, and check it out?”

  “Yeah, man, I’d like to do that. Give me the address.”

  I was so surprised at Billy that I just had to find out about this thing, because something that could take a cat who was a stone junkie and turn him around like that, I wanted to know what it was all about. I decided to go around there that next Wednesday night.

  When Wednesday night rolled around, I went to the address that Billy Dobbs had given me, 142nd Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenue. It was a basement apartment. Lonnie Jones answered the door. He looked surprised. He said, “Hey, Sonny, how you doin’?” He had a long goatee. Billy Dobbs had one almost just like it.

  I said, “Hi, Lonnie. How are things?”
/>   “Oh, fine, fine. I’m glad to see you here, man. I thought everybody was lost down here.” Then he said, “How’d you find out about it? What brought you down?”

  “I ran into Billy Dobbs, and he told me to come down. He gave me the address.”

  “Oh, yeah, one brother finds another.” Then I heard somebody call him St. John.

  “St. John? What is all this saint business about?”

  Billy Dobbs had told me that Lonnie was a priest in the Coptic faith now, but I had forgotten about it. This brought it back to mind. I thought maybe they called them all saints, all the priests.

  He went into the other room, and he called me after he got in there. He said, “Sonny, come here. I want you to meet somebody.”

  I came in the room, and there was this little short black man, whom I had never seen before. He was short, skinny, and spooky looking. He had one eye that he couldn’t see out of, and it was turned around; you couldn’t be sure whether the back of the eyeball was facing you or not. It looked a little nasty. He looked ugly and frightening at the same time.

  When Lonnie introduced me, he said, “This is Father Ford.”

  I said, “Hello, Father. How are you?”

  He just looked at me, nodded, and said, “Welcome to our house, son, and peace.” I felt kind of funny. I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. I looked at Lonnie.

  He went on talking about what they were going to do. They were having lessons in Amharic and in numbers, this sort of thing. He was showing some other students, as he called them. There were some younger people, teen-agers; there were a lot of kids around, too, and quite a few adults. This was supposed to be some kind of Bible class, or whatever they were teaching, and language class. Everybody was being taught Amharic, the native language of Ethiopia. I didn’t know what was going on. But nobody cared that much. They weren’t going to stop just because I didn’t know what was going on.

  When the class was over, Father Ford said, “Son, I want you to wait and let me give you a proper introduction to the Coptic.” When most of the people had left, Father Ford asked me if I knew anything of the black people.

  I said, “You mean Negroes?”

  “No, I don’t mean Negroes. I mean the black people, some of whom are called Negroes.”

  “I don’t know. I know about as much as anybody else, I suppose, but a lot less than many.”

  “Well, do you know anything about the black man’s faith?”

  “Do you mean the Baptist faith or something?”

  “No, that’s not the black man’s faith.” He started frowning and grimacing as he talked about the Baptist faith. He said, “All these Western beliefs have been given to you by the white idiots who are running the world today. Do you know that the first civilized people were black? … You’ve heard of the Egyptian civilization, haven’t you?”

  “Yeah, I heard of the Egyptian civilization.”

  “That was the beginning. That was the very first civilization, even before the Chinese.” He said that the ancient Egyptians who built the first civilization were black people. They were blacker than the Egyptians of today. They fell because they clashed with their brothers, who were Ethiopians. He said in the beginning there was one great civilized continent, Africa. There were two great powers, Egypt and Ethiopia, and these two powers clashed. A house divided cannot stand, and they fell.

  “It was the practice in those days for the victor in any battle to take slaves and sell them to other people, like the yellow people in Asia. That’s what was done with the Ethiopians when they lost the battle between Ethiopia and Egypt.” He said there were a lot of long-forgotten mysteries that every black man once knew the answers to. He said, “Did you know this?”

  “No. Mysteries like what?”

  “Do you know what the Pyramids symbolize?”

  “No.”

  “I’ll bet you your first ancestors knew, and I’ll bet you your great-great-great-great-grandfathers knew before they were brought to this land.”

  “They might have, but I don’t know anything about it now. So what does it stand for?”

  He still didn’t answer my question. He asked me if I knew what the Star of David symbolized, and I said I didn’t. He took out a dollar bill. He said, “You’ve seen this pyramid before, haven’t you?” and he pointed to the back of the one-dollar bill.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you ever know whose eye that was? That’s the all-seeing eye of God.”

  There were only seven or eight of us left there then. He seemed to hypnotize everybody; his voice filled the room. Everybody got very quiet, and it seemed as though if the dog made a sound, he could look at the dog and the dog would shut up. His voice had a commanding effect on everybody, I think. I know it had a hypnotic effect on me. I could remember everything he said, and he wasn’t talking especially slow.

  Then he started talking about the pyramid and the all-seeing eye and how man could rise to this power of all-seeing wisdom, as he put it, the omnipotent wisdom of God. I was stopped. I was really fascinated at this point. After explaining this, he went on talking. I was still listening, but I was looking around at the room. I felt as though I’d gotten high, like somebody getting high off some kind of drug. I looked around at all the pictures of symbols. There was a big poster on the wall of the Star of David, another of the Sphinx, and another of one of the Pyramids. There were pictures all over the room of black crucifixes and of Haile Selassie nailed to the cross.

  After telling me about the all-seeing eye, Father Ford went on to speak about the symbol of the pyramid. He said that the pyramid straight up symbolizes woman, the inverted pyramid symbolizes man, and the two of them together are a six-pointed star, or the Star of David The Star of David symbolizes life, because man and woman, in their holy union, symbolize life.

  Then he told me that Haile Selassie, or somebody from the house of Haile Selassie, was the promised Messiah that the New Testament speaks of. He said, “They don’t know too much about it actually. They’re expecting some white God to come down here with blond hair and blue eyes. But you can’t expect too much of the white people, beause they were barbarians not too long ago.”

  He asked me if I’d heard about the love affair—he didn’t call it the love affair, but that was what it amounted to—between Solomon and Sheba. I said I had, so he asked me if I knew that Sheba had come from Ethiopia. I said, “Yeah, I heard about that too.”

  He said in Ethiopia today, there was a piece of the ark of the covenant that had been given to Moses and that had been kept by Solomon. It had been stolen by the son that Solomon and Sheba had, and it was now kept in Ethiopia. Ethiopia was the true Holy Land today. One day, when the promised Messiah came, he would come from Ethiopia. He said that life was a cycle—it would get back to the black man’s rule. I became more and more enthralled.

  He said that everything about us was full of spirits, and these spirits were just waiting for some way to express themselves in life. I felt that there was nobody in the room but me. This cat was talking this stuff, and it really sounded good. It sounded new and different. I hadn’t heard anything that sounded so fascinating in all my life.

  He told me about the cycles of life. He said, “When it goes back again, and life is traveling on in this cycle or evolution, the evolution will not be complete until the black man is back on top again.” This was what the Christians in their faith thought was the Second Coming of the Messiah. He said, “It is the coming of the Messiah, but it’s the coming of Haile Selassie or someone from the line of Haile Selassie. Then the evolution shall be complete. All one has to do is watch Ethiopia, and he shall see the coming of the millennium and of complete peace on earth that the Christian Bible speaks of in confusion.”

  After this, he told me about the symbol of the snake. “The snake that was symbolized in the Garden of Eden was merely a sperm.” He asked me if I’d ever looked at a sperm under a microscope. I said I hadn’t. He said, “Well, it has a tail. There’re a lot of sper
m cells wiggling around, and they all look like snakes. This is the snake in Genesis that caused Adam and Eve in the Christian mythology to lose face with God and be thrown out of the Garden.” He said that there were a lot of things that no black people would ever believe if they hadn’t been subjected to Christian domination and indoctrination for the last few hundred years.

  Father Ford said that the sperm starts down the brain, it goes into what he called the genital sac, and then it starts tempting. It makes you tempt women, because you get riled up when the sperm cell starts moving down. That’s how Christian mythology took it as the snake tempting woman. The snake was man getting excited, the beast in man.

  He went from there to the mystery of the Sphinx. Father Ford said that the body of the Sphinx was that of a lion, to symbolize the beast in man. He said that the head on the Sphinx was that of a man, or godlike, to symbolize the potentiality in every man. He said that a man could rise from his beastly nature, which he was born with and which he was basically, and fulfill, through exercising his mental power, his potential for omnipotent wisdom, or godlikeness.

  I was still fascinated, but nothing else was said. Guys got up and started moving around. I looked at the clock in the room; it was a little after two o’clock in the morning. I had been there since eight o’clock. It didn’t seem that I had been there so long. Maybe it was just that what he was saying was so interesting and so enthralling that I just lost all track of time. I wanted to tell him, “Go on. Go on, man. Talk some more.” I hadn’t heard anything that I had listened to so attentively in I don’t know how long.

  When I went home that night, I told Tony about it, and Tony said he just had to see this. I brought him with me the next night I went to Father Ford’s. Then he started going regularly. He was just as fascinated by it as I was, but Tony said he didn’t think he could get but so involved in this thing, because these people didn’t drink, they didn’t smoke, they didn’t do anything. He said St. John—that was Lonnie’s priest name—and Billy Dobbs had told him that they could get high if they just thought, by exerting mental power. Tony said he didn’t think he had that much mental power, and he was going to have to keep on smoking pot to get high. Since these people didn’t go for that, he knew he wasn’t going to be in this thing. I thought that after a while he would be able to get high without smoking and could get into it. I had stopped smoking, so it didn’t bother me.