Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  But Turk had knocked out a lot of cats in the Air Force, and he was making a name for himself. He had a lot of people wanting to manage him when he came out. When he came out of the Air Force, Turk was a completely changed cat. He didn’t have any of the old larceny in his heart. He didn’t want to do any of the old things. He wasn’t so childish any more. He was more social. He knew how to hang out with people, how to socialize with a lot of different people. He used to bring gray boys around. His fight trainer was an Irish cat. He used to bring him up to Harlem; he’d bring him to a bar, and he’d fit the cat right in with everybody.

  Turk had grown a hell of a lot. He had gotten real big, and he was ready to do things. I didn’t know whether he would be good as a professional fighter; as a matter of fact, I had some doubts about it until he came out and started fighting. Everybody in the neighborhood kept going to see him fight, but nobody paid it much serious attention at first. I suppose most of the older cats who knew him kept laughing, but this is the way it goes sometimes.

  I kept coming uptown, and I kept going to school and working. I ran into a cat I hadn’t seen for about three years. This was a cat I had gotten tight with up at Warwick. We called him T. He was using drugs, but he wasn’t strung out, and he said that he wasn’t going to get strung out, because all he did was snort. He said he would stop using drugs altogether rather than start skin-popping. He knew he would never get strung out because he would never be putting stuff in his veins. He had this method for not getting hooked.

  T. was a pimp now. Not any real big-time pimp; he just had some funky little girls turning tricks for him down on 125th Street in the bars in that neighborhood. It was enough to pay for a dumpy hotel room, keep him in cocaine and support the chicks’ habits.

  He had some cocaine one night and wanted to turn me on. He said he had some fine girls. “Like come on, and we’ll party.” I told him no. He said, “What’s wrong, Sonny, you scared-a some good cocaine ?”

  I laughed at it. I said, “No, man, I’m not scared.” The truth of it was that I was more afraid of those chicks he had than the cocaine, because they were funky girls. They used to call those kind of girls skunks because they were so dirty.

  He introduced me to one of his girls. He said she was his main woman. We were sitting in a bar on 125th Street, and the chick came up to him and slid onto a stool next to him. He said, “Sonny, I want you to meet the woman I love, the woman who’s going to be my wife as soon as I can get her to go down to Kentucky and come back. She’s got a slight habit.”

  I said, “Hello, woman T. loves.”

  Her name was Gloria. She looked like she might have been nice looking at one time, but she was played out. The average chick who’s been using drugs for some time looks like a played-out old prostitute, even though she may be young and may have been tricking for just a few months or so. It’s the drugs that make them look so wasted, more so than the night life or going around hooking.

  She had to go to work, so she left. He kept on talking to me after she was gone. At first I didn’t pay too much attention to what he was saying about marrying her, because I figured nobody in his right mind would do that, go out and marry some chick who was a hooker. This didn’t make sense.

  T. and I were still good friends even though I hadn’t seen him in a long time. So I said, “Look, T., you can’t be serious, man.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, because the chick is … I mean, you know why not, man. If you gon marry her, you must not intend to live in Harlem. Look at all the shit you’d have to go through. All the cats who’ve jugged her, and that sort of thing. You just can’t.”

  We sat there for a long time arguing about it. Then he just said, “Look, Sonny, the chick may be a whore, but she’s my whore, and I love her, and I’m gon marry her.” I saw that he was mad. He raised his voice when he said this.

  “Yeah, man. Well, that’s okay. You go on, man. And when you walk down the street and everybody points, what you gonna do? Fight all the niggers in Harlem about her?”

  “Look, man, I don’t care about anybody pointin’. I don’t know, but my mother could have been a whore and I would have loved her. You can’t tell me I’m not gon love a woman because she’s a whore. That’s just her work, man. It doesn’t mean a damn thing to me. Maybe it means she’s gone to bed with a whole lot of cats, but they didn’t take it with them. It’s still there, and I want it. She’s my whore, and I love her.”

  This stopped me. I said, “Yeah, man.” Suddenly it made a whole lot of sense. “Yeah, you’re right. You can’t stop lovin’ a woman because she’s a whore.” I believed it; it seemed like the most sensible thing in the world. If he had said that two hours before, I wouldn’t have had any argument. It made a hell of a lot of sense for somebody to love their mother even if she was a whore. This was what it was all about. I didn’t try to stop him any more. We finished our drink and left.

  I thought about Dunny and Trixie, and I thought that these people were really mature; I felt childish, the way I’d been thinking about people not loving whores and all that kind of nonsense. It seemed stupid to me. I realized that even though I had been out there in the streets and had met all kinds of people, I hadn’t learned to accept people, not really accept them. I had still thought of a whore as being something unlovable. It was as though T. had been pinning diapers on me when we sat there at the bar and he told me about the mother and the whore thing. I was kind of grateful to him for that.

  It seemed that every time I came uptown, I learned something. The best way to look at Harlem was to be on the outside and have some kind of in. I’d come up occasionally, look at it, see the changes and the stuff that everybody was going through, and be able to feel it. The only way you could feel it was to have had the chance—I don’t know whether it was good or a misfortune—to experience it and to know what the people were feeling.

  The more I learned, the more beautiful it was. The more I came up, the more I had the feeling that I wanted to come back and stay and give it something. I didn’t know what. I didn’t feel as though I had that much to offer, but I just knew I wanted to give it something. The more I came up and the more I saw of the people … I just felt closer. People would do things and say things that made me like them more and more.

  One day I was walking on 143rd Street. I was remembering a lot of things about the block. I was with Tony, walking up the street. I met somebody I hadn’t seen in seven or eight years. It was Hildy. Hildy was a lady who used to keep us when Mama worked. She used to keep me and Carole and Margie and Pimp. She lived on 145th Street then, and she drank a lot. She used to drink wine. A lot of people would call her a wino, I guess, but I just couldn’t think of Hildy as a wino, because she was always a nice person, real nice. That’s the only way I could think of her.

  On this day, Hildy was standing around the stoop with some more people who looked like winos.

  I stopped and said, “Hello, Hildy.”

  She looked around and said, “Sonny Boy! My Sonny Boy!” She grabbed me with both arms—she was kind of a fat woman—and she started kissing me. I would have been embarrassed had it been anyone but Hildy, I guess.

  “Sonny Boy, you really grew.”

  “Yeah, well, I guess everybody does.”

  She pointed to the building that she was standing in front of. She said, “I live right here, you know. Right down in the basement. I want you to come and see me sometime, and I want you to bring Pimp to see me. How is that little rascal? I’ll bet he’s gotten bigger.”

  “Yeah. He’s gotten bigger and badder.” We joked about it.

  I introduced her to Tony as an aunt of mine. I think it really made her feel good, and I was glad that I had done that.

  She told some of the other people on the stoop that I was her nephew. They looked and said, “Yeah, uh-huh.” It made her feel proud; she was proud of me. As I walked away, I told her that I was going to bring Pimp by to see her and that I was going to tell Carole and Margie where
she was living, this sort of thing.

  “Sonny Boy, would you wait a minute?”

  I asked Tony to wait at the corner and turned around and went back. I thought she was going to ask me for some money or something. I wouldn’t have minded giving it to her, but when I went back, she grabbed me by the arm and started walking a little way away from the crowd with me. She said, “I want you to come back real soon, and I want you to bring Carole and Margie and Pimp, but don’t tell anybody I live in the basement.”

  I don’t know why, but I felt a little hurt when she said this. I wanted to tell her, “Look, Hildy, you don’t have to be ashamed of living in the basement or anyplace else. They’ve got people living on Central Park South and Sutton Place and Tudor City who’re not half as good as you are.” I wanted to hug her and comfort her and tell her, “You don’t have anything to be ashamed of.”

  I just smiled and kissed her on the cheek and said, “Okay, Hildy,” and I left.

  That was only one of the things that I loved about Harlem, the meeting old people and old things. There was always something new to do. Somebody would always come along now and then and make me feel that it was getting better. Harlem was getting better. The people throughout Harlem were getting a lot more compassion for one another.

  People were protesting, but not that the police should take all the junkies and put them in jail. As a matter of fact, they were petitioning to get a place to cure the junkies, to get more facilities at the hospitals for helping drug addicts to kick their habits. Before, all the people wanted to do was put them in jail or shoot them. It just wasn’t this way any more. People were getting a little bit of tenderness.

  As time went on and I kept going to Harlem, I was still out of it, but I was getting more feelings for it each day I lived out of it.

  Around the end of 1957, I saw Danny. I think he had been back for a month before I saw him. He had straightened out. He’d been in Kentucky for fourteen months, and he was still clean. Danny had been down there a few times before. He’d been to a lot of places, and he had kicked it before. But this time, there was something different about him. He was more determined. When I saw Danny, he was really clean. He had new clothes; he was really dressed. He was decked out like a Madison Avenue executive.

  The cat was happy. He grabbed me and started hugging me, all that nonsense. We went into a bar and had a drink. Danny said, “Sonny Boy, you know what? I’m off a drugs; I’m off a drugs for good!”

  I said, “That’s damn nice, man.”

  “No, man, it’s not like before. I’m tellin’ you I’m offa drugs and soundin’ like I’m just sayin’ that like I’ve said it so many times before. But it’s not that way. I’ve been through it. I’ve had it.”

  “What do you mean you’ve had it, Danny? Did you get the calling from the Lord or something?”

  He said, “Look, man, you know me better than that. I’m just through. I know that I’ve had it. I was strung out for seven years, and it seemed like I was strung out all my life. When I was down there and I couldn’t get any drugs, I did a whole lot of thinking this time. It seemed like when I was strung out, I was living on the outside of life. There was so much shit happening that I didn’t know about. I didn’t know what was going on. I’d hurt my whole family, man, I’d hurt them something terrible. Sonny Boy, I’m twenty-three years old now, and I got to do something. I haven’t been doing anything, so I’m going to get a job. I’m going to straighten up. As a matter of fact, I think I’m going to get married soon.”

  “Oh, yeah? That’s damn nice, Danny.”

  “You don’t believe me now, but just wait a couple of months. Have I ever stayed off drugs for three months or even one month?”

  “No, not that I can recall.”

  “Okay.” He took fifty dollars out of his wallet and laid it on the bar. He said, “Sonny, I want you to take that.”

  “What for?”

  “I want you to take it, and I want you to hold it for three months. Take down the date and time and put it on a piece of paper with the fifty dollars. Three months from now, I want you to give me that fifty dollars if I’m still clean, only if I’m not messin’ with that poison again.”

  “Okay, Danny, I’ll do that.” I took the money, but I was kind of concerned about what Danny was doing with a fifty-dollar bill. I figured he must have been dealing drugs; he must have been dealing a whole lot of drugs. I said, “Look here, Danny, what are you doing?”

  “I’m back in business, man. I’m clean, and I know I won’t get strung out. I feel so secure about this thing that I don’t have to stay away from drugs. I can stay right here in Harlem, and I can even deal drugs, sell it to the cats I use to get high with, Sonny. That’s just how secure I feel in this cure that I’ve got now. I know it’s over with. All those other times when I was kickin’, I’d go down to Kentucky or I’d go to Brothers Island, and the psychiatrist would say that I had complexes and all this. That was a lot of B.S., Sonny. I just used drugs because drugs was good. I liked it, and I wanted to. It made me feel better than anything else. It made me feel as though I was complete, man. I just wanted to use drugs; I didn’t want to do anything else. I didn’t want to stop doing it.

  “But when I was down there, I did so much thinking, I just had to stop. I had to stop causing my family all that trouble. My moms is getting old. Have you seen my moms lately ? Have you seen how much gray hair she got? Shit, I got to do something for that woman before she dies. She’s suffered a whole lot for me, man. Half of that gray hair up there is on account of me.”

  When Danny said that, I had the feeling that he was serious, that this was it. But at the same time, I was still kind of leery about him dealing drugs and staying off it. Cats didn’t do that. Just about everybody who dealt drugs for any length of time had to start dabbling, and eventually they got strung out.

  “Danny, man, do you have to deal drugs? There are a lot of better ways to … it’s safer to get away from it altogether.”

  “Yeah, but if you do that, you’re not really cured. The only time you’re cured, man, is when you can sit around people who’re getting high off drugs and you know the good feeling, but still it doesn’t move you to get high. I had seven years of that, man, so I know I’m not missing anything if I sit around and see people get high.”

  “Yeah, uh-huh. Okay, Danny, if you do it, man, that’s a mother-fuckin’ miracle. But I just hope you can do it.”

  He said, “Okay, Sonny, you just hang on to that fifty dollars.”

  I did and three months later, I had to give Danny that fifty dollars back. This was a big surprise because he was out there with everybody. It’s easy, I suppose, to kick a habit and stay off it if you get away from the old environment, but Danny was doing what I had thought impossible. And I suppose just about everybody who knew anything about junkies thought it was impossible too. He had kicked his habit, he was dealing drugs, and he was successful at it. This was a most admirable feat to anybody who knew anything about drug addiction and had watched drugs rule an addict for so long and so destructively as it had Danny for all those years when he was strung out.

  It was a damned admirable feat when the victim became the master of the poison that had had him by the throat. But Danny did it.

  Cats used to say, “Man, I’m gon do like Danny. I’m gon kick my habit. I’m gon make drugs work for me.” He began to be a living symbol of victory over drugs even though he was still dealing drugs.

  I suppose he wasn’t an asset to the community in the eyes of the law or in the eyes of the good-doing folks who do all the talking, the guardians of our society and community. But he was an asset to the junkies, and I think many of them knew it. If it weren’t for Danny, many cats would have had no kind of hope. He had compassion for the junkies. He didn’t do cutthroat business. If a cat wanted a five-dollar bag and he only had four and a half, Danny would tell his lieutenants, “Don’t wring it out of anybody, and don’t tell a cat to go get a gun and get him some money if he can’t
make it any other way.”

  Everybody liked him not only for defeating the drug habit but for the kind of cat he was. I always knew that Danny had it. I always knew this, but I never thought I’d see him bring it forth. But he did it.

  Danny never thought it was such a miracle or any fantastic feat. He just said, “Look, man, it was something I had to do.”

  One time he said, “Remember the time I went into the liquor store and pulled a stickup with the toy gun, Sonny? Well, I was doin’ shit like that every day, climbing into people’s apartments while they were sleeping and robbing them because my habit was down on me. I was going down from the roof into somebody’s fifth-story apartment window on some kind of thin rope.”

  He said, “Every day, I was goin’ out there, risking my life, gambling, for just five dollars or enough to get straight, enough to get me enough to buy some duji and stay high for a day. It went around in a cycle. If the phone rang while I was out—my three brothers, they were fuckin’ up too; my moms couldn’t sleep; there were four of us out there for her to worry about—every time the phone rang, she figured somebody was gon say, ‘Your son is dead.’

  “We’d all gotten shot trying to pull stickups or running from the cops after we had stolen something. The best thing we could have done to make it easier on Moms was to die. When you stop and think about this shit, you know what you have to do. I knew I had to go on and throw just one big brick—kill myself, take an overdose, or something—or put the shit down. I couldn’t do the shit any more; I couldn’t do it to my moms, to my family. Everybody was suffering too much on account of me. I remember one day. You know my older sister, don’t you? Vivian.”