Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  I looked around and pointed to myself, as if to say, “You mean me?”

  “Yeah, you, the virtuoso.” She was a white girl, and I’d never seen her before. I didn’t know who she was. She wasn’t an especially attractive girl. She had a kind-looking face, but you couldn’t say any more than that. I went over to her, and she said, “I was listening to you play this evening. You’re quite good.”

  I said, “Well, thanks, anyway, but I’m not that serious about it.”

  She said, “Well, maybe you ought to be. I tried playing piano for years, and I never made that much progress. How long have you been at it?”

  “Oh, about three years.” She looked at me as if to say, “You’re joking!” I still had the feeling that this girl was just trying to flatter me. I said, “Why? How long did you think I’d been playing?”

  “From the sound of it, I thought you had been playing at least five years or more.”

  I just looked at her, sort of skeptically, and said, “How long did you play?”

  “I played for about eight years.”

  “Eight years? That doesn’t sound too long. You look as though you’re only about sixteen as it is.”

  “That’s nice to know.” I liked the way she said it, very calmly, as if she was going to act mature. And she was doing okay at it.

  I said, “Do you still play?”

  “Occasionally. I think I’d like to be a teacher, teach music.”

  “So, what are you doing here, at Washington Irving?”

  “Oh, I have to get another course to graduate, and I have to go in the evening because they don’t have it up there.”

  “Oh? They don’t have it up where?”

  She said, “I attend school at Music and Art during the day.”

  “I know some one who used to go there. By the way, I’m Claude Brown. Who are you?”

  She told me her name was Judy Strumph. I said, “I’m glad to meet you, Judy. Are you going out?”

  She said, “Yeah, I’m going to the subway.” I asked her where she wanted to go in the subway. She said, “I’m going home.”

  “Yeah, I figured that much, but where’s home?”

  “It’s uptown.”

  “Why don’t you just come over here in the cafeteria with me and have a cup of coffee?”

  “Okay, I have some time.”

  She seemed very relaxed. She wasn’t overly friendly, and she wasn’t frightened. It was interesting to meet a young girl like this. She looked about seventeen.

  We went into the Automat and had two cups of coffee and a couple of slices of pie. We sat and talked. She was very interesting; there was something beautiful about her manner. She was too plump to be attractive. Her hair was kind of kinky; it wasn’t long, blond, or soft. She was just a very plain-looking girl. She could have been a country girl, or maybe a hillbilly, from her looks.

  We talked about music, and I told her what I’d been doing. She told me that she had been playing piano and violin since she was a very little girl. Everybody in her family played some musical instrument.

  I asked her if she liked jazz. She told me she liked it but didn’t know too much about it. She said her brother had a lot of jazz albums; the only artists she knew of were the ones he had the records by. She said she had never been to a jazz concert because no one had ever offered to take her.

  “If you’d like to go, I’d be happy to take you sometime.”

  “Yes, I’d like to, but I couldn’t go on a school night because I have to get home. I live uptown from here, so I would prefer that it’s on a weekend or sometime like that.”

  “Okay, that’s all right. We’ll make it on the weekend.” She seemed kind of puzzled when I said, “Meet me down here this Friday night, about eight o’clock.”

  “Okay, but I don’t have a class on Friday night.”

  I said, “I know, but since this is a place that we both know, it’ll be easy for you to find me down here. So if you come down here and meet me, you won’t have any trouble.”

  She looked at me for a while, and she said, “Why couldn’t you come to my house and pick me up?”

  “Judy, I don’t think that would be a very wise thing to do. I like you, and maybe you like me. We could probably be good friends. But I don’t think this is something you should spring on your folks right now.”

  “Oh, my folks are rather broad-minded. We’re Jewish, you know.”

  “I didn’t know, but I sort of suspected it.”

  “My parents are not prejudiced, and they would treat you nicely They would show you the same hospitality they would show any other fellow.”

  “Judy, this is usually the way it is in theory. Many parents don’t know how they really feel about Negroes until something like this happens, right in the home. They feel that Negroes are nice people, and they sympathize with them, but they feel they shouldn’t be around their daughters or their sons. ‘They’re nice people as long as they stay away from us.’ There are exceptions. I’ve met some and they were beautiful people. It’s possible that your family might be an exception, but just in case they aren’t, let’s not let them ruin anything that we might be interested in.”

  “You sound as though you’ve had experience.”

  “No, but I’ve heard about these cases.”

  She said, “Okay, I’ll meet you down here on Friday night.”

  Friday night came around, and I had my doubts about whether or not she’d show up. I didn’t really feel certain that she would want to come down there.

  I went to class and left early. I came out about eight o’clock. She was standing there with a pretty dress on. She was a very serious-looking girl. There was something attractive about her, but I think it was attractive only after you had spoken to her. She was the kind of girl you would never notice before you spoke to her.

  Someone was talking to her. It was a white fellow. I didn’t know just what I should do, whether I should just walk by, wait, or what. She was standing just inside the door to the building. I walked around in the lobby for a little while and tried to get her attention, but she didn’t see me.

  So I went over into the hall leading outside the building. I just looked at her. She said, “Oh, hi, Claude. Are you ready?”

  The fellow looked at her, and he looked at me. She said, “I’ll see you around,” and she just walked away from him.

  I felt more admiration for this girl right then and there. She had a knack for doing things. She seemed like a chick who could have done anything. She had so much poise and self-confidence. I just knew I was going to enjoy being out with her.

  “Look, I’m going to take you to a place down on Fifth Street. Are you hungry?”

  “A little.”

  “Okay, let’s go to the Italian Kitchen and have something for dinner. Do you like wine?” She said she liked Manischewitz, and I said, “Yeah, you would.” She smiled. I felt good being with her; I really felt good.

  While we were sitting in the restaurant talking, I said, “Judy, that’s a nice dress you’ve got on.”

  “Oh, do you really like this dress?”

  “Why do you think I said it was nice?”

  “I don’t know. I thought you were trying to be nice.”

  I said, “No. I like it; I really like it.”

  “Look, Claude, if you don’t like something I’m wearing, or if you object to something I do, or if something I do displeases you, please let me know. I’ll change it. If you don’t like my shoes, or if you don’t like my handbag, or anything, tell me. Even if you don’t like my hairstyle, you tell me that too … because I want to look the way you like me. I want to do what you would like me to do.”

  I was sort of moved. Girls had said a lot of things to me that, I suppose, were more meaningful or more emotional, but nothing had ever moved me like this before.

  Just about all my life before, most of the girls I had gone with, most of the girls I had taken out, they were bitches. I’d never gotten involved with a white girl befo
re, and I always had all kinds of skepticism about that nigger thing. You could argue with a colored girl anytime, and if she said “nigger,” nobody would mind too much. But I never knew what I would do if I was arguing with a white girl and she called me a nigger. I didn’t know how I’d take it, whether I’d want to hit her or something.

  But after Judy said what she had, I was certain that it wouldn’t mean a damn thing. It wouldn’t mean any more than if a colored girl said it. If you get close enough with people, you can say anything. After the little bit about the dress and what I wanted her to do or wear, I just wanted to grab her, hug her, and just say, “You’re wonderful.” She was across the table, so all I could do was squeeze her hand. She looked at me and smiled. I guess she got the message.

  We went down to the Five Spot. She was a different sort of girl. She was nice, she was uninhibited, and she had so much self-confidence that it just got next to me. She told me she’d never been in a nightclub before and not to hesitate to tell her if she did something wrong.

  “Oh, relax, Judy. Some people, anything they might do wouldn’t be wrong. And I feel that you’re one of those people.”

  She smiled and said, “Thanks, anyway, but don’t forget to let me know.”

  We went in and sat down. She said she’d never drunk anything but wines before, kosher wines, that sort of thing. I said, “Okay, we can just order your wine.”

  She said, “No. I’d like to try something, but I don’t know that much about drinks. Why don’t you order something for me, something that would be tasty and safe.”

  “Okay, I’ll do that.” I ordered her a crime de cacao, and she thought it was tasty. We sat there and listened to Thelonious Monk and his group play for a couple of hours.

  We walked all around Greenwich Village. We walked around the Fountain Circle at Washington Square. It was a real different thing just being with someone like her. I had the funniest feeling that I could never approach her sexually. But she was so unrestrained and so unafraid that I just had to be less inhibited with her. She would grab my arm or my hand. Her eyes just glowed all the time. She could look at me and ask me anything she wanted.

  I knew I could never tell Mama anything about this. She and Carole and Margie would have gotten down on me about being “white-woman crazy.” I could hear Mama now. “You stay away from those white women. They ain’t never lynched no white man over a colored woman. You just better stay away from those white girls, because you’ll get yourself in a whole lot of trouble.”

  I showed Judy the restaurant where Eugene O’Neill used to hang out. We went to places where they had cats painting or reciting poetry to jazz.

  When I showed her the Circle, I told her how the folk singers would get in the middle, with their banjos and their guitars, and sing on Sundays; how it was mixed—everybody would come down, white and colored. She said she’d have to come and see it.

  We walked and walked for most of the night. I hated the thought of having to say good night to her. I wanted to do things. I guess I was just scared. Maybe I was just afraid of the fact that she was white. But this was something new. I was thinking, I don’t know what to do with a white girl. But I had a feeling that she didn’t think of herself as a white girl. She didn’t think of herself as any different from me.

  She was so natural-acting, I just had to react to her. When we sat down at the Circle in Washington Square and I told her that I would bring her down there the following Sunday, she said, “It sounds like something marvelous, like something they’d have in foreign countries.” She started getting that faraway look in her eye. I just grabbed her and kissed her.

  She sighed and said, “Well! That was nice. You know, I always knew that it would be.”

  “How do you mean you knew?”

  “I just had that feeling before it happened that when you kissed me, it was going to be something exceptional.”

  “Yeah? You’re an authority on kissing already?”

  “No, but I knew it would give me a feeling like I never had before. I knew it would be a real good feeling.” She just looked at me. I still had my arm around her.

  She said, “How about an encore?” I kissed her again. We just sat there and held each other for a while. Then she said she thought she’d better be going home. She was supposed to be out with a friend of hers, and she didn’t want her mother to start calling the friend.

  I said, “Yeah, well, that’s understandable.” She told me she would call me Saturday, which was the following day. I said, “Okay, I’ll be looking forward to it.”

  I took her to the subway. I wanted to take her home, but I realized I couldn’t do that. I rode uptown with her to Eighty-sixth Street and said good night there.

  I felt good. I really felt as though I had met something wonderful. I had just never met a girl like that. It was everything. Everything was different about her. Compared with her, most of the colored chicks I’d known seemed crude and harsh. They were chicks who you couldn’t be but so sweet to, because they weren’t sweet themselves. Her voice and manner were warm. She seemed to be more feminine than most of the women I knew, and more of everything a woman was supposed to be.

  She did call that Saturday, and she talked about the time we’d had and how she’d enjoyed it very much. And she thanked me. She thanked me for asking her out. This was kind of funny. It made me laugh, but these little things made me think of her as more and more beautiful all the time. She seemed to be the sweetest girl in the world. I just kept talking about it, in my head, and every time I thought about it, I would laugh, not just smile, even if I was out in the street someplace. I guess people looked at me and thought I was a little crazy.

  I brought Judy down to the Village on Sunday and took her over to the Circle to see the folk singers carrying on. She really thought this was something great. Everybody there seemed so free. She wanted to take off her shoes and go into the Circle too.

  I said okay. I had to let her do what she wanted to do, and hope that she wouldn’t go too far. She took off her shoes.

  I said, “Come on. You want to sing?”

  She said, “No, I’ve got a terrible voice. I don’t sing, but I’d like to listen.”

  “Come on, you can get closer to the crowd.”

  “No, I just want to stand here.”

  “Well, aren’t your feet hot?”

  “No, it feels comfortable. This is something I’ve wanted to do all afternoon, but there aren’t many places like this. Everybody else has their shoes off, so I don’t look conspicuous here.”

  We both smiled. That thought ran through my head again: Wow! I must have done something good, somewhere in my life, and this must be the goodness I’m reaping for it. We talked about the people in the Village.

  She asked me, “Why did you, that time when I told you I was Jewish and my parents were Jewish, why did you say that you suspected it?”

  “Look around you, here.”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “The Village is like a showplace for interracial couples. You’re a square down here if you’re going with somebody of the same race. It’s all a fad, I think, with these people. I don’t think most of them dig any of the people they’re going with. They’re just down here trying to be different, and if you’re really going to be different, you’ve got to get you a companion of a different race.”

  She said, “I’m not so sure that’s true. Maybe it’s just that down here all these people have found something good … and people who happen to be of a different race. It’s something they wanted, and this is the only place they can come to and not be looked on as something queer. So they all just come down here.”

  I said, “Yeah, that’s a possibility, too, but I’ve been living down here now for about three years, and most of the younger people out here, they’re just experimenting. They’re taking a taste of the different fruits. Every few months, they have different boyfriends, different girl friends.”

  “That may be true with many of the people down h
ere. Still, that doesn’t answer my question.”

  I said, “I don’t know exactly what it is, Judy, but there seems to be a strong attraction between Jewish people and Negroes. Most of the white girls who you see around here going with colored fellows will be Jewish. And most of the white guys you see going with colored girls will be Jewish guys.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that. I don’t know of anybody who has done anything like that. I thought it was a very unusual thing.”

  “It is, but when it docs happen, it’s with Jewish people.”

  “Oh, I thought it was something that rarely happened with Jewish families, because Jewish people have strong family ties. I have a cousin who married this Puerto Rican fellow. Her family just doesn’t have anything to do with her any more. I still like her, and I see her. She can come by my house, and my parents say it’s okay, but my aunt and my uncle say that she isn’t their child any more.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s the way some parents might take it.”

  “If my parents were to do that, and I was in love with somebody, I think we’d be disowning each other, because if they couldn’t accept someone I was in love with, it would only indicate to me that they didn’t really love me.”

  I looked at her, and I tried to smile. I said, “Yeah, that’s a big stand to take. It takes big parents to accept it. You’ll have a rough way to go.”

  We just sat there. Before I’d realized it, we were talking about something new, something different. Suddenly, it had gotten serious.

  “You know, Judy, many times I think that if a Negro fellow really loved a girl … and she was white, he would … if he really loved her … I think he wouldn’t want to marry her.”

  Judy said, “Why not? I think anybody who loves anybody, regardless of color … if they really love them, they couldn’t help but marry them.”

  “No. You see, what I’m talking about is most Negroes know that life is hard for a Negro anyway; it’s terribly hard unless you’ve got some money, and most Negroes don’t have any money. And if a Jewish person marries a colored person, this is murder. Life is going to be twice as hard for both of them. Then, just think about the kids you’d have. Damn. Can you imagine a kid being born a Jew and a Negro? You’ve struck out before you even start. It seems like a cruel thing to do to a child, bring a child into the world of Jewish and Negro parents.”