Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  Danny looked at me for a while, and he said, “Sonny, tell me, this is Danny. We stole our first mickies together from Gordon’s fruit stand. Tell me, Sonny, what do people go up to Ruby’s house for? I could go up there to see about some business. You’d be going up there if you were gon turn somebody on. But it’s got to have something to do with some drugs, right? I’m goin’ up there to give her her weight for the week, you know. When somebody else goes up there, just from the street … she doesn’t open the door for everybody, Sonny. You know that.”

  “Yeah, Danny. I guess I know.”

  “Man, you must know what’s goin’ on.”

  “No, man. How the hell are you gonna say I must know what’s goin’ on?”

  “Well, you said you see him all the time. Don’t you see anything different?”

  I said, “No, man. He’s still working, so he can’t be strung out, right?”

  “Yeah, Sonny, that’s right, if you want to take it that way. If that’s all you’re worried about, man, you might as well forget it, because you know you can’t do anything for anybody when they’re strung out. Nobody can do anything for anybody who’s strung out. The only person who can do anything is the man out there who’s dealin’. So if you ever talk to him, Sonny, talk to him now.”

  I just sat here and looked in the mirror for a long time. I wondered about me, and I wondered where I’d failed. I remembered all the days when we were young, the time Pimp and I had spent together. I remembered when Mama brought Pimp to Wiltwyck to visit me and Pimp punched K.B. in the mouth. Everybody laughed and said, “He must be fast if he can hit K.B. in the mouth and not have him get out of the way.” Pimp was only about seven or eight then. He was something.

  But I had known for some time that I had lost him. I guess I should have known it when I saw him. He was hanging out with Murray. Murray just didn’t seem to have enough heart to be hanging out with Pimp. He used to marvel at the fact that I was Pimp’s brother. This was nobody for Pimp to be hanging out with. He should have been hanging out with strong young cats who knew where they were going, knew how to get around the places that they didn’t want to go, and knew how to get around doing the things that they didn’t want to do. Pimp should have been hanging out with cats like me, I suppose. I should have been there to guide him, but I couldn’t be in Harlem all the time leading him around by the hand.

  I thought I had gotten him ready. I thought I had taught him enough. Maybe he just came out of the house too late; maybe Mama held on to him too long. Maybe a lot of things. But there was one thing that I was certain of, and that was that he was in trouble now. And I didn’t know how to help him. I didn’t know where to begin.

  I sat there looking in the mirror across the bar and thinking. When Danny said, “Take it easy, Sonny,” I heard him and I didn’t hear him. I couldn’t answer because I was too hurt, and my mind was too preoccupied with thoughts of Pimp and his youth, the days when we were happy together, and why I never thought the plague would ever get to him.

  I was going to find that nigger, and I was going to beat him and beat him until he stopped breathing. I was going to beat that motherfucker until he realized what he was doing, if I had to beat him to death. Something kept gnawing at me. How the hell could I beat him? I remembered seeing him as a little baby; I remembered slapping him too hard once, when I was about thirteen. His nose bled.… But I was going to beat him. I was going to beat that nigger with my fist, because he didn’t deserve any more slaps.

  I wasn’t even going to tell him why. I was just going to tell that mother-fucker to throw up his hands. I was going to find him and say, “Pimp, throw up your hands. Throw up your hands or go in your pocket.” I wondered how I was going to beat him, when I’d taught him everything he knew.

  As I looked for him, everybody I asked … I guess they saw it. I tried to cool myself, because as I went from place to place asking people if they’d seen Pimp, they’d look at me, and they’d say, “No,” as though they knew that I wasn’t looking for him to bring him any cheerful greetings. I became almost convinced that nobody was going to tell me where he was, so I went around to his girl’s house.

  I asked Shirley if she had seen Pimp. She said she thought that she’d seen him on 143rd Street, but she wasn’t sure, because she called to him and he didn’t answer. She said she didn’t know what was wrong; she was waiting to see him too.

  I said, “Yeah, well, maybe he had something on his mind.”

  I left her, and I went to 143rd Street. Somebody told me that he was in the poolroom on Seventh Avenue and 144th Street. When I got there, I saw Jack Davis. Jack Davis was a cat I had known from way back. He was in my class in junior high school. I asked him if he knew Pimp. He said he did and asked me if I wanted to get something.

  I said, “Oh. Why? Is he dealin’ stuff now?”

  “No, man, but he was just around here a little while ago looking for Johnny McNeil, and Johnny McNeil is dealin’ stuff.”

  I said, “Oh.” It kind of hurt me that Johnny would deal Pimp some stuff, because Johnny knew that Pimp was my brother. When Johnny came out of the Army and was up tight and didn’t know what he was going to do with himself, I started teaching him the street life. I taught him how to Murphy, and I taught him a few other games. I taught him how to scoop cocaine.

  I was mad. Now I was looking for Pimp and Johnny too. I was going to beat both of their asses, and especially Johnny’s, because, if it hadn’t been for me, that nigger would have been just about starving. He didn’t know anything. He didn’t know a damn thing, and he probably never would have known anything if I hadn’t taken pity on him and taught him something. That no good son of a bitch.

  I knew that if Johnny was dealing stuff, he’d probably have a piece on him, because he usually carried one of them even when he wasn’t dealing. He was just a mean cat that way. Johnny wasn’t that good with his hands. He was a cat that didn’t believe in fighting. Anytime anybody hit him, he’d go for his piece and shoot.

  But I was determined. I was going to walk up on Johnny and Pimp together, and I was going to hit Johnny first. I was going to walk up to them smiling, like Bubba Williams taught us in the streets. Bubba always said that if you ever wanted to waste a cat, smile at him for a month. But I was just going to smile at Johnny for one minute, just long enough to get close enough to him to hit him in his kidneys.

  I was mad. How the hell could he? He knew Pimp was my brother. Everybody around there knew I didn’t want him to be using any stuff. Pimp knew I didn’t want him using it, more than anybody else. He was the main one; he was the one I was really disappointed in, because I thought he had so much more sense.

  I wondered what Mama would say when she found out. She probably thought that all her troubles were over, that she’d made it with her boys, that they were all right after all. She’d had her bad days. I felt that she’d had all she could take and that Pimp wasn’t going to give her any more, not if I could help it. I was going to kill that nigger first.

  I went into the Low Hat Bar, on 146th Street and Seventh Avenue. When I looked in there, I didn’t see Johnny McNeil, but Pimp was there. Pimp was standing near the jukebox with a cigarette in his hand and dark glasses on. I thought he was going to scratch himself. Then I saw that he was in a nod.

  I walked toward him. I was just going to walk up to him, snatch him by the arm, pull him over in a corner, and talk to him. But as I walked up to him, I saw him going into a nod, a deep nod. I stopped about four feet away from him, and I just couldn’t move. I don’t know why. The anger was there, but it was mixed with something else. The something else just paralyzed me. It wouldn’t let me move.

  Here was Pimp in a nod, in a nod, the little brother that I loved, the little brother I had fought so many fights for, the little brother who used to come and get me to go and swing on whoever fucked with him, regardless of how big they were.

  I stood there and watched his head go down. I thought I’d hit him as he was coming up and take him
off his feet. But he got all the way up in his nod, and I couldn’t move. I just stood there looking at him, and then a phrase ran through my mind: Absalom, Absalom.

  13

  SATURDAY NIGHT. I suppose there’s a Saturday night in every Negro community throughout the nation just like Saturday night in Harlem. The bars will jump. The precinct station will have a busy night. The hospital’s emergency ward will jump.

  Cats who have been working all their lives, who’ve never been in my trouble before, good-doing righteous cats, self-respecting, law-abiding citizens—they’ll all come out. Perhaps it’ll be their night in the Lar, their night in the police station, maybe their night in the emergency ward.

  They tell me that young doctors really try hard for a chance to do their internship in Harlem Hospital—it offers such a wide variety of experiences. They say it’s the best place in the city where a surgeon can train. They say you get all kinds of experience just working there on Saturday nights.

  It’s usually the older folks who practice this Saturday night thing, or some of the younger cats who haven’t come out of the woods yet, young cats who drink a lot of liquor, who didn’t quite finish junior high school, who still have most of the Southern ways … the young cats who carry knives, the young cats who want to be bad niggers. It’s usually the guys around eighteen to twenty-five, guys who haven’t separated themselves yet from the older generation or who just haven’t become critical of the older generation. They follow the pattern that has been set by the older generation, the Saturday night pattern of getting drunk, getting a new piece of cunt, and getting real bad—carrying a knife in your pocket and ready to use it, ready to curse, ready to become a Harlem Saturday night statistic, in the hospital, the police station, or the morgue.

  The intern who comes to Harlem and starts his internship around April will be ready to go into surgery by June. He’s probably already tried to close up windpipes for people who’ve had their throat slit. Or tried to put intestines back in a stomach. Or somebody has hit somebody in the head with a hatchet. Or somebody has come into his house at the wrong time and caught somebody else going out the window. That’s quite a job too, putting a person back together after a four- or five-story fall.

  I suppose any policeman who’s been in Harlem for a month of Saturday nights has had all the experience he’ll ever need, as far as handling violence goes. Some of them will have more experience than they’ll ever be able to use.

  To me, it always seemed as though Saturday night was the down-home night. In the tales I’d heard about down home—how so-and-so got bad and killed Cousin Joe or knocked out Cousin Willie’s eye—everything violent happened on Saturday night. It was the only time for anything to really happen, because people were too tired working all week from sunup to sundown to raise but so much hell on the week nights. Then, comes Saturday, and they take it kind of easy during the day, resting up for another Saturday night.

  Down home, when they went to town, all the niggers would just break bad, so it seemed. Everybody just seemed to let out all their hostility on everybody else. Maybe they were hoping that they could get their throat cut. Perhaps if a person was lucky enough to get his throat cut, he’d be free from the fields. On the other hand, if someone was lucky enough to cut somebody else’s throat, he’d done the guy a favor, because he’d freed him.

  In the tales about down home that I’d heard, everybody was trying to either cash out on Saturday night or cash somebody else out. There was always the good corn liquor that Cy Walker used to make, and there was always that new gun that somebody had bought. The first time they shot the gun at so-and-so, he jumped out of the window and didn’t stop running until he got home—and got his gun. You’d sit there and say, “Well, I’ll be damned. I never knew they had all those bad niggers in the South. I always thought the baddest cat down there was Charlie.” But it seemed as though on Saturday night, the niggers got bad. Of course, they didn’t get bad enough to mess with Charlie, but they got bad. They were bad enough to cut each other’s throats, shoot each other, hit each other in the head with axes, and all that sort of action. Women were bad enough to throw lye on one another.

  Saturday night down home was really something, but, then, Saturday night in Harlem was really something too. There is something happening for everybody on Saturday night: for the cat who works all day long on the railroad, in the garment center, driving a bus, or as a subway conductor. On Saturday night, there is something happening for everybody in Harlem, regardless of what his groove might be. Even the real soul sisters, who go to church and live for Sunday, who live to jump up and clap and call on the Lord, Saturday night means something to them too. Saturday night is the night they start getting ready for Sunday. They have to braid all the kids’ hair and get them ready. They have to iron their white usher uniforms and get pretty for Sunday and say a prayer. For the devoted churchgoers, Saturday night means that Sunday will soon be here.

  Saturday night is a time to try new things. Maybe that’s why so many people in the older generation had to lose their lives on Saturday night. It must be something about a Saturday night with Negroes.… Maybe they wanted to die on Saturday night. They’d always associated Sunday with going to heaven, because that was when they went to church and sang all those songs, clapped and shouted and stomped their feet and praised the Lord. Maybe they figured that if they died on Sunday morning, the Lord’s day, they’d be well on their way.

  Everybody has this thing about Saturday night. I imagine that before pot or horse or any other drugs hit Harlem good and strong, the people just had to try something else, like knifing or shooting somebody, because Saturday night was the night for daring deeds. Since there was no pot out on a large scale then, I suppose one of the most daring deeds anyone could perform was to shoot or stab somebody.

  Many of the chicks in the neighborhood took some of their first really big steps on Saturday night. Some cats—or as a girl I knew might say, “no-good niggers”—talked many girls into turning their first tricks on a Saturday night just because the cats needed some money. That’s how that thing goes on Saturday night. I recall talking a girl into a trick on a Saturday night. She said it was her first, but I like to tell myself it wasn’t. If it was, that was okay. She was a part of Harlem, and Saturday night was a time for first things, even for girls turning their first tricks, pulling their first real John.

  Saturday night has also been a traditional night for money to be floating around in places like Harlem. It’s a night of temptation, the kind of temptation one might see on Catfish Row at the end of the cotton season on the weekend. Most of the people got paid on Friday night, and Saturday they had some money. If they didn’t get paid on Friday, there was a good chance that they’d be around playing the single action on Saturday in the afternoon. By the time the last figure came out, everybody might have some change, even if it was only eight dollars—one dollar on the 0 that afternoon. It was still some money.

  Then there were all the crap games floating around. The stickup artists would be out hunting. The Murphy boys would be out strong. In the bars, the tricks would be out strong. All the whores would be out there, and any decent, self-respecting whore could pull at least two hundred dollars on Saturday night in some of the bad-doing bars on 125th Street.

  As a matter of fact, Reno used to say, “The cat who can’t make no money on Saturday night is in trouble.” There was a lot of truth to it, because there was so much money floating around in Harlem on Saturday night, if anyone couldn’t get any money then, he just didn’t have any business there.

  It seemed as though Harlem’s history is made on Saturday nights. You hear about all the times people have gotten shot—like when two white cops were killed on 146th Street a couple of years ago—on a Saturday night. Just about every time a cop is killed in Harlem, it’s on a Saturday night.

  People know you shouldn’t bother with Negroes on Saturday night, because for some reason or another, Negroes just don’t mind dying on Saturday ni
ght. They seem ready to die, so they’re not going to take but so much stuff. There were some people who were always trying to get themselves killed. Every Saturday night, they’d try it all over again.

  One was Big Bill. When I was just a kid on Eighth Avenue in knee pants, this guy was trying to get himself killed. He was always in some fight with a knife. He was always cutting or trying to cut somebody’s throat. He was always getting cut or getting stabbed, getting hit in the head, getting shot. Every Saturday night that he was out there, something happened. If you heard on Sunday morning that somebody had gotten shot or stabbed, you didn’t usually ask who did it. You’d ask if Big Bill did it. If he did it, no one paid too much attention to it, because he was always doing something like that. They’d say, “Yeah, man. That cat is crazy.”

  If somebody else had done it, you’d wonder why, and this was something to talk about and discuss. Somebody else might not have been as crazy. In the case of Big Bill, everybody expected that sooner or later somebody would kill him and put him out of his misery and that this was what he was trying for. One time Spanish Joe stabbed him. He just missed his lung, and everybody thought he was going to cool it behind that. But as soon as the cat got back on the street, he was right out there doing it again.

  Even now, he’s always getting in fights out on the streets on Saturday nights. He’s always hurting somebody, or somebody’s hurting him. He just seems to be hanging on. I think he’s just unlucky. Here’s a cat who’s been trying to get himself killed every Saturday night as far back as I can remember, and he still hasn’t made it. I suppose you’ve got to sympathize with a guy like that, because he’s really been trying.

  Harlem is full of surprises on Saturday night. I remember one in particular.

  I was down on 116th Street. I was going to visit someone, and I decided to call before I got there. I went into the bar on the corner to call. I saw a familiar face in the bar. We had stopped hanging out together when I was about nine and never started again. We just weren’t that tight any more. We’d had our fights. We were all right; we’d speak if we saw each other. I was just surprised to see him in that neck of the woods. I didn’t think he ever went anyplace outside our neighborhood. I guess a lot of people had the same idea. It just goes to show how little we all knew about him.