Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  “Yeah.”

  “Her little girl, man, my niece, she’s about five years old now, but she was only about three years old then. I’d been out all day trying to scrounge up enough to get high. I finally got. enough to get me a ten-dollar bag. I came home and cooked my stuff. The family use to hide all the belts and all the cords. You know how Moms is, man, she didn’t know that much about drugs. She figured if I couldn’t get any belts or shit like that … she even use to hide the spoons so I couldn’t cook my drugs in it. They figure it’s gon be that hard. They were doin’ all kinds of crazy stuff to stop it, but they just didn’t know what was goin’ on.

  “This day when I had finally got my stuff together and came home to take off, I went into my room. I had had me a belt. The people had taken most of my belts, my ties, any kind of cords that I could use to tie up my arms and get the vein to bulge. I had cooked up everything, and I looked for a belt, but my belt was gone. I figured, I’m gon go in my father’s room and get a belt. I put the drugs in the spoon, put a matchbox under the spoon to keep it level, and left it on the bedside table in my room. I went in the front room to get the belt. It seemed like I was only gone for about a minute.

  “Vivian was in her room ironing some clothes. My niece, Debby, was comin’ out of my room as I was coming down the hall. When I saw her coming out of the room, I said, ‘Oh, shit, I should’ve locked the door!’ I ran back to my room.

  “The spoon wasn’t there, man. You don’t know. I panicked behind that … when I saw the spoon gone off the bedside table. The floor was kind of wet, man, looked like it had some water on it. I said, “Oh, Lord, no, it can’t be that! I know that’s not my stuff.’ I fell down on my knees, and I prayed when I saw that liquid on the floor. I prayed one-a them hopeless prayers, like ‘Lord, please don’t let it be my stuff.’ The spoon was gone from the table

  “I knew, I just knew. I put my tongue down on the floor in the liquid and tasted it. I coulda almost died. My habit just started coming down on me altogether then and started eatin’ through me. My whole stomach tightened up in me, and I knew I was gon die. I got down on my hands and knees, and I crawled on my knees into Vivian’s room, and I grabbed Debby. I was gon throw her out the window with the last bit of strength I had.

  “Vivian was ironing, and she hit me in the head with that hot iron. I didn’t wake up until they woke me up in the hospital about three hours later. I was so glad when I woke up that I was in the hospital and hadn’t done what I was going to do.”

  He said, “Sonny, when I was down in Kentucky, I use to lay awake at night and have awake nightmares just thinking about it. I knew, man, now I had to get up off it. I think if I wasn’t so young before, I would have done it a long time ago. I was just too young.”

  I believed Danny. I believed a lot of cats out there were too young. We talked about drugs and about the cats coming up using drugs and not really knowing what was happening. Danny seemed to really know something about it, and I said, “Damn, man, if you could write about this or talk to the younger cats comin’ up, it might stop somebody, turn ’em around.”

  Danny said, “No, Sonny, that’s not gon help, because everybody has got to try that thing for themselves. Either they’re hip enough to know before they start that they can’t win, or they have to find out for themselves. If anybody could tell ’em … look at all the examples they’ve got. It doesn’t make sense for anybody to be starting to use drugs, when they’ve seen all the cats who were dying.” Danny started naming the cats, like Skully, Butch, Wattlo, like Sonny Bobbins, all the cats in the neighborhood who had died off drugs.

  He said, “Man, these should be enough examples for everybody; the cats who use to be big time, and now they’re down and out and noddin’, this should be example enough for anybody, if examples were gonna help. Here’s the living story. Look at some of the cats around here, like Father Time.”

  Father Time was an old junkie. He’d been around for years. He didn’t want to kick; he didn’t want to do anything but use drugs. He was harmless. Most of the cats who dealt drugs would give Time some, because he was a good-doing cat, and everybody wanted to keep him on the street. The cats who dealt drugs used to feel it was luck to give Father Time drugs.

  I think it had started years ago, when Johnny D. was dealing drugs. He had given Father Time some drugs one time. The law was waiting at Johnny’s house to bust him. Father Time had started begging him to give him some drugs. Johnny only had one last bag on him, but he let Father Time talk him out of it. He was just in a good mood. He gave it to Father Time and went upstairs.

  The Man was waiting for him, but he didn’t have anything. So it became a tradition with all the drug dealers to give Father Time some drugs. Almost every night, somebody would give him a bag of drugs. He just sat around on the stoop. The other junkies used to try to get tight with him, hoping that when the drug dealers gave him some drugs, he would turn them on. But Father Time never got tight with anybody.

  He never talked. He never talked about anything. I guess this was why all the drug dealers liked him. He used to see a whole lot on Eighth Avenue. In fact, it was just about impossible to stay on Eighth Avenue all night long, like Father Time did, and not see a hell of a lot. He had to know what was going on, but since he never talked, nobody ever knew how much he saw.

  Danny said, “If examples or stories were gonna help any, Father Time would be the living example and the living story. You see the pants that cat wears, man? I bet he hasn’t changed them in three months. The cat doesn’t bathe, and he stinks. Unless somebody takes him out in the backyard and turns a hose on him, he’d never get no water on him. That’s how the cat is, he’s so strung out.

  “Do you think all these young boys going around trying to be hip, who want to use drugs, who want to nod, who want to be down, want to get away from this scene, to get older in a hurry, you think they don’t know, Sonny? They can see. They got two eyes, just like you and me, man. They dig Father Time; they dig the whole scene, all these other cats noddin’. They know who died last month and who died last year. They know just who got killed over some drugs. But that’s not gonna help them, man. They have to find out for themselves. What they don’t know is all the individual hell that a junkie goes through. And this is something that they got to know, man, before they really understand what they’re doing.

  “Yeah, they’re just a bunch of little chumps, man, just the way I was, scared to live. Scared, that’s all it is. You can’t talk people out of fear, man. You just can’t do it. You got to let them grow up and one day stop runnin’.

  “That’s all it was with me, Sonny. I stopped runnin’. You know how it is; you run and run from a cat, down the street or around the corner. Then one day you come out of your house and you say, ‘Damn this. I’m not gon run from that mother-fucker any more. He’s just gon have to kick my ass, or I’m gon have to kick his ass.’ That’s the same way it is with drugs out here. When you come out of your house every day and you’re a young boy on Seventh Avenue, Eighth Avenue, Lenox Avenue, or any of the other avenues around here, you got to walk up to that big gorilla, that big gorilla named duji.

  “Every man’s got to pick his own time, Sonny. Every man’s got to pick his own time to stop running.”

  10

  IF ANYONE had asked me around the latter part of 1957 just what I thought had made the greatest impression on my generation in Harlem, I would have said, “Drugs.” I don’t think too many people would have contested this. About ten years earlier, in 1947, or just eight years earlier, in 1949, this wouldn’t have been true.

  In 1949, I would have answered that same question with the answer, “The knife.” Perhaps all this could have been summed up in saying, “The bad mother-fucker.” Throughout my childhood in Harlem, nothing was more strongly impressed upon me than the fact that you had to fight and that you should fight. Everybody would accept it if a person was scared to fight, but not if he was so scared that he didn’t fight.

  As I sa
w it in my childhood, most of the cats I swung with were more afraid of not fighting than they were of fighting. This was how it was supposed to be, because this was what we had come up under. The adults in the neighborhood practiced this. They lived by the concept that a man was supposed to fight. When two little boys got into a fight in the neighborhood, the men around would encourage them and egg them on. They’d never think about stopping the fight.

  There were some little boys, like myself, who when we got into a fight—even though we weren’t ten years old yet—all the young men, the street-corner cats, they would come out of the bars or the numbers joints or anyplace they were and watch. Somebody would say, “Little Sonny Boy is on the street fightin’ again,” and everybody had to see this.

  Down on 146th Street, they’d put money on street fights. If there were two little boys on one block who were good with their hands, or on around the corner and one on Eighth Avenue, men on the corner would try and egg them into a fight.

  I remember Big Bill, one of the street-corner hustlers before he went to jail for killing a bartender. When I was about seven or eight years old, I remember being on the street and Bill telling me one day, “Sonny Boy, I know you can kick this little boy’s ass on 146th Street, and I’ll give you a dollar to do it.”

  I knew I couldn’t say no, couldn’t be afraid. He was telling all these other men around there on the street that I could beat this boy’s ass. There was another man, a numbers hustler, who said, “No. They ain’t got no boy here on Eighth Avenue who could beat little Rip’s ass on 146th Street.”

  Bill said, “Sonny Boy, can you do it?” And he’d already promised me the dollar.

  I said, “Yeah.” I was scared, because I’d seen Rip and heard of him.

  He was a mean-looking little boy. He was real dark-skinned, had big lips and bulgy eyes, and looked like he was always mad. One time I had seen him go at somebody with a knife. A woman had taken the knife out of his hands, but she cut her hand getting it. I knew he would have messed up the cat if he could have held on to that knife.

  He knew me too, and he had never messed with me. I remember one time he told me that he was going to kick my ass. I said, “Well, here it is. Start kickin’.” He never did. I don’t think he was too anxious to mess with me. I didn’t want to mess with him either, but since Big Bill had given me this dollar and kept pushing me, I couldn’t have said no. They would have said I was scared of him, and if that had gotten back to him, I know he would have messed with me.

  I fought him for three days. I beat him one day, and he beat me the next day. On the third day, we fought three fights. I had a black eye, and he had a bloody lip. He had a bloody nose, and I had a bloody nose. By the end of the day, we had become good friends. Somebody took us to the candy store and bought us ice-cream cones.

  Rip and I got real tight. If anybody messed with him and I heard about it, I wanted to fight them. And it was the same with him if anybody messed with me.

  This was something that took place in all the poor colored neighborhoods throughout New York City. Every place I went, it was the same way, at least with the colored guys. You had to fight, and everybody respected people for fighting. I guess if you were used to it and were good at it, there was nothing else you could do. I guess that was why Turk became a fighter. He had fought so long and had been so preoccupied with fighting that he couldn’t do anything else. He had to get this fighting out of his system.

  With cats like Turk and many others who came up on the Harlem streets, the first day they came out of the house by themselves, at about five or six years old, the prizefight ring beckoned to them. It beckoned to them in the form of the cat around the corner who had the reputation or the cat who wanted to mess with your little brother or your little sister. If you went to school and somebody said, “I’m gon kick your ass if you don’t bring me some money tomorrow to buy my lunch,” it was the prizefight ring beckoning to you.

  I remember they used to say on the streets, “Don’t mess with a man’s money, his woman, or his manhood.” This was the thing when I was about twelve or thirteen. This was what the gang fights were all about. If somebody messed with your brother, you could just punch him in his mouth, and this was all right. But if anybody was to mess with your sister, you had to really fuck him up—break his leg or stab him in the eye with an ice pick, something vicious.

  I suppose the main things were the women in the family and the money. This was something we learned very early. If you went to the store and lost some money or if you let somebody gorilla you out of some money that your mother or your father had given you, you got your ass beaten when you came back home. You couldn’t go upstairs and say, “Well, Daddy, that big boy down there took the money that you gave me to buy some cigars.” Shit, you didn’t have any business letting anybody take your money. You got your ass whipped for that, and you were supposed to.

  You were supposed to go to war about your money. Maybe this was why the cats on the corner were killing each other over a two-dollar crap game or a petty debt. People were always shooting, cutting, or killing somebody over three dollars.

  I remember going to the store for my father on a Sunday morning. He’d given me a quarter to get him some chewing tobacco. I had to walk up to 149th Street, because no place else was open. I went up to this drugstore on 149th Street, and there were some cats standing around there. I was about eight, and they were about ten or eleven.

  One of them said, “Hey, boy, come here,” one of those things. I was scared to run, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to outrun them all. I figured that if I acted kind of bad, they might not be so quick to mess with me. So I walked right up to them. One cat said, “You got any money?”

  I said, “No, I ain’t got no money.”

  I guess I shouldn’t have said that. He kept looking at me real mean, trying to scare me. He said, “Jump up and down.” I knew what this was all about, because I used to do it myself. If you jumped up and down and the cat who was shaking you down heard some change jingling, he was supposed to try to beat your ass and take the money.

  I said, “No, man. I ain’t jumpin’ up and down.”

  He grabbed me by my collar. Somebody said, “He’s got something in his hand.” That was Dad’s quarter. One cat grabbed my hand. I’d forgotten all about the guy who had my collar. I hit the boy who had my hand. Then the cat who had me by the collar started punching me in the jaw. I wasn’t even thinking about him. I was still fighting the other cat to keep that quarter.

  A woman came out a door and said, “You all stop beatin’ that boy!”

  I had a bloody nose; they’d kicked my ass good, but I didn’t mind, because they hadn’t taken my quarter. It wasn’t the value of money. It couldn’t have been. It was just that these things symbolized a man’s manhood or principles. That’s what Johnny Wilkes used to like to call it, a man’s principles. You don’t mess with a man’s money; you don’t mess with a man’s woman; you don’t mess with a man’s family or his manhood—these were a man’s principles, according to Johnny Wilkes.

  Most girls in Harlem could fight pretty well themselves, and if other girls bothered them, they could take care of themselves. You couldn’t let other cats bother your sisters. In the bebopping days in Harlem, if the girls had brothers who were scared to fight, everybody would mess with them and treat them like they wanted to. Cats would come up and say things like, “You better meet me up on the roof,” or “You better meet me in the park.”

  It went deep. It went very deep—until drugs came. Fighting was the thing that people concentrated on. In our childhood, we all had to make our reputations in the neighborhood. Then we’d spend the rest of our lives living up to them. A man was respected on the basis of his reputation. The people in the neighborhood whom everybody looked up to were the cats who’d killed somebody. The little boys in the neighborhood whom the adults respected were the little boys who didn’t let anybody mess with them.

  Dad once saw me run away from a fight. He
was looking out the window one day, and the Morris brothers were messing with me. I didn’t think I could beat both of them, so I ran in the house. Dad was at the door when I got there. He said, “Where are you runnin’ to, boy?”

  I said, “Dad, these boys are out there, and they messin’ with me.”

  He said, “Well, if you come in here, I’m gon mess with you too. You ain’t got no business runnin’ from nobody.”

  I said, “Yeah, Dad, I know that. But there’s two of ’em, and they’re both bigger than me. They can hit harder than I can hit.”

  Dad said, “You think they can hit harder than I can hit?”

  I said, “No, Dad. I know they can’t hit harder than you.” I was wondering what was behind this remark, because I knew he wasn’t going to go out there on the street and fight some boys for me. He wasn’t going to fight anybody for me.

  He said, “Well, damn right I can hit harder than they can. And if you come in here you got to get hit by me.”

  He stood on the side of the door and held on to the knob with one hand. I knew I couldn’t go in there. If I went downstairs, the Morris brothers were going to kick my ass. I just stood there looking at Dad, and he stood there for a while looking at me and mumbling about me running from somebody like some little girl, all that kind of shit.

  Dad had a complex about his size, I think. He was real short. Maybe that’s why he played that bad mother-fucker part so strong. That’s probably why he always had his knife. This was what used to scare me about him more than anything—the scar on the neck and his knife. I used to associate the two of them together.

  Every night when Dad went to bed, he’d put his watch, his money, his wallet, and his knife under his pillow. When he got up, he would wind his watch, but he would take more time with his knife. He had a switchblade, and he would try it a couple of times. Sometimes he would oil it. He never went out without his knife. He never went to church, but I don’t think Dad would have even gone to church without his knife. I guess it was because of that scar on his neck; he never was going to get caught without it again.