Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  It frightened the hell out of the guy. He said, “Hey, call the police! This guy’s goin’ crazy!”

  Judy kept pulling on me. She said, “Come on, Claude. Please, let’s go, please, please.” We left.

  I was sitting on the stairs at my mother’s, and I was thinking, Damn, I thought I had grown out of all that sort of thing. I thought I had grown out of hitting anybody in the street. I thought I had grown out of not being able to control my anger. I thought I had grown out of putting the blame on somebody else. I guess I hadn’t.

  I just sat there for a while. A wino came in. He was talking to himself. He had a bottle of cheap wine, Two Star Port or something like that. He got halfway behind the stairs and started drinking his wine. He made a loud sound, “Ummm!” and he wiped his lips.

  I just happened to look at him, and it sort of snapped me out of it. I just realized that he was there and that he seemed to be having so much fun with that wine.

  He said, “Hey, buddy, you want some wine?”

  I said, “I don’t want no fuckin’ wine. What’s wrong with you?”

  “Okay, okay, partner, I didn’t mean no harm.”

  “Look, man, I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. I want some wine, man. Shit, I’m sorry. Give me some wine!”

  “Okay, here. Don’t take it all, now.”

  I smiled at the thought of taking all his wine. I hesitated for a long time about putting the bottle up to my mouth, because I had a lot of fears about the germs these cats must carry. But I just went on. I thought, Fuck it, I’m gon drink some wine. I’m gon get with the people again, all the people. I turned it up, drank some wine, and said, “Here, thanks a lot, buddy.” I gave him a quarter. I said, “Here’s something toward the next one.”

  He said, “Look, I got twenty cents. I’ll go get another one right now, and we could kill it.”

  “No, no, thanks. You go on and get it, and you kill it.”

  “Thanks a lot.” The cat wanted to talk all kinds of stuff about how somebody had cheated him out of some money and how this other guy, who he thought was his buddy, would hide his wine when he got some. He said he wasn’t like that. He would share his wine with anybody. He said, “Like, I come in here and offer you a drink.”

  I said, “Yeah, yeah, you seem like a generous guy.”

  “Well, I do that to anybody, especially to all the guys I know around there in the backyard.”

  “Yeah, you go on. You get another bottle. Have some fun; have a drink for me.”

  “Yeah, okay, buddy, thanks a whole lot.”

  I went on upstairs. That wine was burning me up; I never thought it was that strong.

  Pimp was sitting in the living room playing some funky jazz records. I went in, and I said, “Pimp, I want you to meet somebody.”

  “Who’s that, Sonny?”

  “It’s a guy named Reverend James.”

  He said; “A reverend, man? How’d you get to know any reverend?”

  “The cat’s a minister, man.”

  “He’s a what?”

  “He’s a minister.”

  “A real minister, Sonny? He ain’t jivin’, is he?”

  “No, man. He’s a minister.”

  He said, “Man, I don’t know about that. I don’t know what you’re puttin’ down, but I don’t believe that it’s straight up, Sonny, probably another one of those games. I remember when Billy Graham had his convention down there at Madison Square Garden, and you and Reno went down there with shopping bags, collecting money, and all that kind of shit. If this cat is a real preacher, he better beware, ‘cause I know you got somethin’ on the fire now.”

  I said, “No, man. This is straight up.”

  “Square business, Sonny? You mean he’s a real preacher? How do you know him, man? Where do you know him from, and what you doin’ with him?”

  “I’m not doin’ anything with the cat. I’m just talking to him. He’s got a church, and he’s on a council that’s gonna send me to school. I’m trying to get him interested in sending you to school too.”

  “To college, man?”

  “Yeah, man, to college.”

  “Damn, Sonny, that shit would be real nice. I mean real nice, baby,” and he went into a nod.

  I said, “Pimp, I want you to come and talk to this cat.”

  “This is not that other preacher you were tellin’ me about? He hasn’t got anything to do with that cat, has he?”

  “No, this isn’t Norman Eddie. He’s in the same parish, the East Harlem Protestant Parish. He has this chcurch on 126th Street and Madison Avenue, the Metropolitan Community Methodist Church.”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I passed that church a few times. Man, what kind of preacher is he? Has this cat really got somethin’ on the ball?”

  “Man, you wouldn’t believe it. You’ve got to meet the guy.”

  “Okay, I’ll go down there and meet him sometime, but I got to get some money, Sonny.”

  “Look, let’s go down and meet him tonight.”

  “I got somethin’ to do tonight.”

  “We could go and meet this guy about seven o’clock, and you could do it afterwards.”

  “Yeah, okay, Sonny, I guess I could do it. But first I have to get some money.”

  “Uh-uh, Pimp, you got to be straight when you go to see him.”

  “Man, I can’t even get a high?”

  “No, man, not even a little high.”

  “Sonny, I’m just dabblin’ now, man, lightly.”

  “Yeah, Pimp, I know.” I couldn’ get mad at him any more, because it was something that I’d seen before, time and time again. I’d known that there were strong cats, great cats, who were strung out for a long time. Pimp had never been strung out but for so long. As a matter of fact, he’d never really been strung out. He’d always had someplace to go until Dad put him out, and that wasn’t for long. Carole and Margie would keep giving him money. He was their brother, and they loved him. They couldn’t see him as a drug addict. They just had to give to him, whether it was going to hurt him in the long run or not. They couldn’t stand to see him in pain.

  That night we went to see Reverend James. Most of the time, I just listened. Pimp seemed interested in Reverend James, but I think he looked on him as a preacher, and a preacher was just a preacher. They couldn’t be but so hip or know but so much about life. Pimp was going to try to outsmart him at every turn, in everything he said.

  Reverend James had started telling Pimp about a minister at another church, the Church of the Master. He said this minister had done a lot of work with young drug addicts and users. He said he’d like Pimp to meet him. I was really surprised when Pimp agreed. I didn’t expect this.

  After we’d been there for about an hour and a half, Reverend James wrote down an address, gave it to Pimp, and said he could go there about 9 A.M. the next day. Pimp said he would.

  After we left Reverend James’s office, Pimp said that he would go by and see the minister at this Church of the Master the next day. He said, “I liked that cat, man.”

  “Yeah, Reverend James is a pretty hip guy for a minister.”

  “Yeah, man. He surprised me with a lot of the stuff he knew.”

  “Yeah, he’s a surprise to most people.”

  “Yeah, I’m going by tomorrow to see this cat that he told me about, at the Church of the Master, but I want to see this cat again and talk to him. He’s got a good mind.”

  I sort of smiled when Pimp said that, because I knew he didn’t really know how good a mind Reverend James had yet. I said, “Yeah, man, I think so too.”

  Pimp went to see the minister at the Church of the Master, and he got him into something. Pimp wasn’t strung out. I don’t think he had to have any drugs at this stage of the game. He was just dabbling. He would use it when he wanted to get high. He didn’t have to use it if he didn’t want to. The minister made arrangements to get Pimp into Metropolitan Hospital, where they had just opened up a new ward. A whole floor was devoted to treating young addicts
. Pimp said he was all for it.

  He started saying that he was sorry about not continuing in school. Reverend James had told him about a school for people just like him, in North Carolina, that could probably do him a lot of good.

  Pimp thought that his whole problem was not being able to get away from Harlem. He said, “Man, this place is … it just ruins me, Sonny. I feel like I’m being smothered to death sometimes. If it weren’t for you, I guess I could’ve spent my whole life here and never been downtown, except for the trips that you take in grade school.”

  I said, “Yeah.”

  “Or when you get out and start going to work and take the subway downtown.”

  “Yeah, Pimp, but that all depends on the person, man. Downtown isn’t going anywhere. You could go there anytime you want.”

  He said, “My whole life has revolved around Harlem, man, uptown. I think if I could get out of here, I could see somethin’, man, and see somethin’ different, see some other kind of life. Shit, I don’t know anything, man. I wanted to go in the service last year, and Mama started talking all that crazy shit about, ‘Boy, you’ll go in there and you’ll get yourself killed. You ain’t got no business in nobody’s Army.’ You know how that is, Sonny. It was, man … it was hard. She had to sign for me then. I was only seventeen. She wouldn’t let me go. I guess she still sees me as sort of like a second baby. What is it that the old folks called it? The yellin’ baby?”

  I said, “Yeah, the yellin’ baby.” We both laughed.

  “Yeah, Sonny, I’m gonna make some plans to cut this whole thing loose. As a matter of fact, I think I’ll cut Ellen loose too, man.”

  “Why? She seems to be a nice girl.”

  “Yeah, but look at it like this, Sonny, I haven’t seen any other women. I haven’t seen any other girl outside of Harlem. Man, it would be a drag for me to come up in this place, spend my whole life here, get married here, and never go anywhere. That would be a damn shame, Sonny.

  “We got this little thing goin’; she’s a nice girl and all that, but I’d feel buried right here, man, if I was to go and do somethin’ like that. I come up here, and raise all my kids here, and we’d become some hillbillies, man, or some farmers, the people from the woods. We’d be big-city backwoods people, you know, that don’t know nothin’ about people, even if they lived on the East Side, in the Bronx, or if they lived out in Brooklyn. That’s as far as we would go. Sonny, I get scared when I think of that shit.”

  I couldn’t say anything, but I was moved because I never thought that Pimp did that much thinking about this sort of thing. It made me feel good to know that he did and that he had some good thoughts about it. I felt that this was a sign of maturity. I said, “You know, Pimp, I think you’re gonna do everything that you want to do, man. I think you can do anything you want to do. There’s only one thing that can stop you, and that’s shit.”

  He said, “Yeah, Sonny, I’ve been thinking about that too, and to tell you the truth, man, I don’t know where it is, man. I don’t know just where I am with usin’ stuff. I don’t think that I’m really dependent on it, but if I stay here in Harlem, I know I’m gonna have somethin’, man. And right now stuff gives more peace than anything, Sonny, than anything in the world. I couldn’t go to church and pray or any kind of shit like that. I couldn’t go to bed with the finest chick. There was nothing else that could do anything for me that stuff does for me, man.”

  He said, “I think if I could get out of here, man … I think it’s this place, all of it’s dead. There’s just nothing happenin’, man. If you grow up in all this shit, when you get nineteen, there’s just nothing else to do. You’re through, man. There’s just nothin’ happening. You’ve got to find some kind of excitement, something different, or you’ve just got to keep yourself blind … I mean wasted, man, to take all this damn monotony. Boredom. Day in and day out, man, no place to go but the same damn place, nobody to see but the same old faces you’ve been seeing all your life. That shit can really get on your nerves. You don’t know. You have to get away from it somehow. Stuff was the thing for me. This is the only thing that lets me get away.

  “Sonny, you know what? I’m gonna go into this new thing, man. They’re suppose to have a six-week program in the Metropolitan Hospital that’s dynamic, man, really dynamic. I’m gonna go in and see what’s happening. And when I come out, I don’t want to be hanging around here for any time. I want to get on the train, man, and shoot right down South and get in school, man, start doin’ somethin’ with my life.”

  I said, “Yeah, like, it sounds good, Pimp. It sounds damn good. You don’t know how good it makes me feel to hear you talkin’ like that.”

  “Yeah, Sonny, I feel as though my mind is clearer, man, than it’s been in a long time. For the first time in ages, I’m sayin’ the stuff that’s really been on my mind.”

  Pimp went into Metropolitan Hospital for six weeks. He came out looking good. I stayed in his corner while he was in there. I sent him money. When he came out, everybody was happy. Mama was excited over how fat he was.

  He came out around April or May, and he got a job. We were planning on sending him down South. Reverend James had selected the perfect school for him. He was all set.

  In July, he was working in a hospital. They found out why he had been in Metropolitan, and they fired him. After that, Pimp was hanging around the street most of the time, but he still wasn’t dabbling, or so I thought.

  When August rolled around, Pimp was supposed to go down South. I was supposed to give him two hundred dollars, which was half of his first term’s tuition. I was downtown, and I called Sunday night, the day before he was to leave, and asked Mama if Pimp was there. She said he wasn’t. I told her, “When he comes in, tell him to meet me at the bank Monday morning.”

  Mama said Pimp hadn’t been around. He hadn’t been home the night before, and she hadn’t seen him since early Saturday evening. I said, “He didn’t start dabblin’ again, did he?” Mama said no not that she knew of. So I said, “Look, there’s nothing to worry about; as long as he’s straight, he’s gonna be home. As long as he’s not dabblin’, there’s no problem.”

  Mama said she wished that she could believe there was no problem. I said, “Why? He’s probably shackin’ up with some chick. There’s nothin’ to worry about.”

  Mama said, “Ellen’s been calling him since Saturday evening, and she’s called him all day today. She said she hasn’t seen him either.”

  I said, “Look, Mama, he’ll probably be home. There’s nothing to worry about. Damn, he’s a young man, and he’ll be all right.”

  She said, “Yeah, well, I sure hope so, but that ain’t like Pimp. That boy, he never stay out all day Sunday and miss his Sunday meal.”

  “Oh, Mama, come on. He’s just growin’ up. Maybe he found somebody who could cook better than you.”

  I tried to make a joke out of it, but Mama was a little bothered. She wasn’t in a mood for jokes. She just said, “Yeah, I hope so,” and she said it in a sort of frightened way.

  “I tell you what, Mama. Just tell him to meet me there tomorrow. I know he’ll be back. And I’ll call first. Hear?” I felt pretty certain that Pimp would be home that night.

  The next morning, I got up and went to the bank. I’d forgotten to call Mama. Instead, I just went to the bank. I’d told Mama to tell Pimp to meet me at nine o’clock. After I’d been there for fifteen minutes, I decided to call Mama to find out whether Pimp was on his way, because the train was supposed to leave at ten-thirty.

  I called up, and Mama answered the phone. I said, “Hey, Mama, what happened? Didn’t Pimp show up?”

  “Lord, child, I ain’t seen that boy since he left outta here Saturday evening.”

  “Oh, hell, he can’t be messin’ up now. It’s too late.”

  She said, “I hope he ain’t, but I got some bad feelings. I been sittin’ here lookin’ out the window, all day yesterday and all night last night. Lord, I sure don’t know where that boy could be,
but I sure hope ain’t nothin’ happened to him.”

  “Look, Mama, who was he with when he left?’

  “He wasn’t with nobody. He just went out by himself. The last time I saw him, he was goin’ down the avenue by himself.”

  I jumped on the subway and went uptown. I started going around to all the different dope dens. I started asking all the junkies around there if they’d seen Pimp. Nobody had seen him. Nobody had seen him since Saturday.

  I got kind of scared. I went everyplace I could think of where he might possibly be. I even went to the police station, and they didn’t know anything. I called the city morgue, and they didn’t have anybody by that name. I called hospitals, and they hadn’t taken in anybody by that name over the weekend. It seemed like he had just disappeared.

  I didn’t know what to do. I gave up the idea of his going away to school that morning. This was just out of the question, and I knew this. I hated to tell Mama that I hadn’t found him, but eventually she’d have to know. I just kept looking, even though I knew I wasn’t going to find him. I didn’t know anyplace else to look.

  After about twelve o’clock, I felt as though I had to go back and tell Mama something. I came in and said, “Mama, did you hear from him?”

  She had looked hopeful when I walked in, but my question just crushed all her hope. She said, “No, I ain’t heard nothin’. You couldn’t find him?”

  “No, Mama, I couldn’t find him. But I found out something.”

  “What?”

  “I found out he’s not in the morgue, and he’s not in the hospital, and he’s not in jail.”

  “Yeah, well, that ain’t nothin’, because he could be someplace dead, in some backyard, and nobody’d know about it’

  “Yeah, Mama, but he don’t have to be Look, Mama, I’m gonna look for him again, and I’ll check with you before I go to work. If you don’t know anything, I’ll just go to work, and I’ll look for him after I get off. I’ll start looking some more.”

  I got off that night, and instead of going home, I went uptown and stopped in a bar. I started playing around with a girl friend of Margie’s. She asked me if I wanted a drink, and I said, “No, baby, I’m not in the mood for a drink.”