Manchild in the promised land

by Brown, Claude, 1937-

  I got kind of scared. I was hoping that somebody would come out in a hurry. If he didn't see anybody, I was afraid he might start shooting. After about six loud calls, this guy roused everybody in the house. They all came down. Pops came down and said he was going to write his councilman.

  The cops down there were terrible, but we were living right near the Bowery, so we couldn't expect but so much. They wouldn't put any good cops down there—if there is such a thing as a good cop.

  Sometimes I wanted to run back to Harlem, but I couldn't find anything up there any more. I didn't want to get high; I didn't want to go around to the old places. I didn't want to be with those people any more, because I didn't feel I was a part of it.

  Cats wouldn't say certain things around me any more. The truth was that I didn't want to hear a lot of these things, and I guess a lot of them sensed it. Cats would whisper when they were talking about drugs or about some other kind of business. Everybody started feeling as though I wasn't a part of the Harlem scene any more. I started feeling like it too.

  When I did go back up to Harlem after staying away for about three or four weeks, I met some young cats who were musicians. They'd been in the neighborhood a long time, and I'd seen them around, but we'd never said anything much to one another. I'd sold them some pot a few times, but we'd never really swung together.

  Now these cats were blowing their horns, their axes, whatever they had. I remember that Flip was playing saxophone, and he was damn good. David was playing some nice drums. There were a lot of cats around there who were doing things.

  I started talking to Flip one night. He asked me to come down to Connie's on Seventh Avenue, and hear Sonny Rollins blow. I'd heard about Sonny Rollins, but I wasn't any great jazz enthusiast.

  I went there one night and sat and listened to these guys blow. Anybody could sit in. After a while, it became a regular thing for me to go to Connie's and listen to these cats. I liked some of the stuff they were doing. This gave me a stronger urge to blow piano, or blow a box, as they used to say. It still was just something I wanted to do but didn't know how to go about. I had to find another out, someplace else to go, something to do away from Harlem.

  I was passing by a place on Broadway in mid-Manhattan one day. It was a gym where a lot of well-known personalities went. I didn't know the difference. It just seemed to be a place where people went to lift barbells, and I thought this would be the thing for me.

  I had just started seeing others parts of New York. When I took the job with the watch repair firm; I used to deliver watches to parts of New York City I didn't even know existed, like Flatbush. I'd never been to Flatbush in my life before. I'd never known that there was such a pretty section in New York City. I used to go over there when it was spring and everything was in bloom. I liked being in a place where everything was so clean. It used to make me feel like me. I was lost, the colored folks were lost, because there were

  no Negroes in this nice clean section of town, nothing but Jewish people. '

  I wanted to see a lot more of New York. Sometimes on Sundays I'd go way up in the Heights just to see new sections of town.

  This day when I was in mid-Manhattan and saw the sign about the gym, I went up to look at it, to see what it was all about. The fellow who owned the gym walked up to me. I had noticed that there were no colored cats in there. I felt a little out of place, but everybody who was working out at the time seemed to be all by himself. This encouraged me. It wasn't as though it was one big happy family, all white cats, and I'd be the only colored cat there. The cat told me that it was fifteen dollars a month and that you could come up and train as often as you liked. I said, "Okay, I would like to try it."

  I started going every other night. I would knock off from work, go to the gym, and then go to school. I started feeling pretty good. Sometimes I'd be tired when I got off from work. Then I'd go up to the gym and work out for a little while, and I wasn't tired any more. I'd go home and get a good night's sleep. I'd be sleepy, but I never felt really tired.

  After I was at the gym for a couple of months, I met a guy. He was a sort of funny-looking guy. I'd never paid any attention to him, but I think he'd been up there a couple of times before. He was about twenty-seven, twenty-eight. We were sitting in the locker room getting dressed. He spoke to me. I had a thing about speaking to those gray cats first. I wouldn't, because I didn't want my feelings hurt. I was made to feel pretty silly sometimes. You'd say hello and I they'd look at you as if you were crazy, so I never spoke to J them first. I just didn't know how to approach them. I used to think that maybe my voice was too low-pitched for them. Most of these cats were nice clean gray boys, and I knew I was kind of crude, right off the streets of Harlem. I didn'ti know how to talk to these cats. They were polished. I wasi pure Harlem.

  Somebody had put a trombone under the bench that I wasi sitting on. This funny-looking gray cat—he wasn't really) funny looking; he just wore glasses and looked real serious— said, "Is that your trombone?"

  I said, "No."

  "Somebody blows trombone in here?"

  "Yeah, I guess so." Then I said, "I'd Hke to play piano myself."

  The cat said, "Well, why don't you play piano? What's stopping you?"

  "Oh, man, I'm kind of old."

  He started telling me about somebody he knew who had started playing piano at the age of thirty-eight and had gotten quite good at it by the time he was forty-five.

  "Yeah, well, he must have been a pretty determined fellow."

  "Yeah, he was. You could do it if you wanted to."

  "Yeah," and I had the feeling that this guy wasn't playing.

  "If you want me to, I can give you the name of a guy who'll rent you a piano and give you a good deal if you want to buy it."

  "Yeah, thanks a lot."

  "If you have any trouble finding a teacher, I can recommend some good teachers to you." The guy was very serious, and I knew he wasn't playing.

  I said, "Yeah, I'd appreciate it."

  He wrote this down and gave it to me. Then he introduced himself to me, so I told him my name. His name was James Finley. He was a musician. He was also a composer who had written a couple of hit tunes. He'd written a couple of scores for Hollywood films, this sort of thing. He was a young man who had been out on his own for a long time, and he was doing a lot of things for himself. He believed in getting things done.

  He showed me how to get a piano and a music teacher, a lot of things. He was a quack psychologist, apart from being a good musician. He was a Freudian. He introduced me to psychoanalysis, a lot of things, a whole new world. I was fascinated by the guy because he had accomplished so much while he was young. He had started at Juilliard when he was about fifteen.

  The teacher he recommended was top-notch. When I was ready to change, he recommended other top-notch teachers. After a while, I'd just find my own. This was all right too. After I really got started in music, I didn't need anybody to recommend them. I knew where I was going.

  I became more engrossed in the piano than in anything else I'd ever been involved with in all my life. I was grateful to Jay, because he had started me. Before, it was just a talking thing. I might have talked and talked about it for years

  and never have gotten a piano and started taking music lessons.

  When I started taking the music lessons, I was studying with white music teachers. After I'd been at it six months or a year, I'd go uptown and play with the cats. These guys didn't have any formal teaching. They'd been around joints where the cats were jamming all the time, and they'd pick up a little bit here and a Uttle bit there. They were getting good by just being around people who were always playing.

  We would talk a lot. Many of the guys said that the reason Bird blew so well was that he stayed high, that it was dnigs that made him blow so well; so if somebody wanted to really blow, he had to use dnigs. A lot of them beUeved it. They would point out that just about all the good jazz musicians used drugs. Everybody had this big thing abou
t colored cats and all the soul they had. They would say, "None-a them gray boys can blow any real jazz."

  I had trouble with rhythm. I just couldn't seem to get into it with these cats; they were way ahead of me. They had all these eighth notes and sixteenth notes going, up-tempos. Every time I tried to speed up things or do something fancy, I'd get lost. These cats would be saying, "Sonny, you got to stay away from them gray boys and them gray teachers, because, like, they stealin' your soul, man. You got to get you a colored teacher if you really gon learn how to blow some good jazz."

  I started looking around for a colored teacher, and I found one. I went to the Professor. The Professor wasn't a professor, but he was a good music teacher, damn good. That's why everybody called him the Professor. The first time I went to him, he made me feel that maybe there was some truth to all the stuff those cats were saying, because the first thing he said when I told him I was having trouble with rhythm was, "Boy, you havin' trouble with rhythm? You-must not be as colored as you look, huh?"

  I thought, well, damn, this cat's a real musician and knows something about it, so I guess there is something to that color thing in music. After I got this teacher, I figured I was all set to get into this soul thing.

  I had started hanging out with a new group. I found a new groove in the Harlem thing. I was with the young jazz musicians now. I was still living down in the ViQage, but now I had a companion in my room with me. It was a piano, something that I had needed for a long time. I played the piano

  from four to eight hours a day, and I liked it. I really liked it. I felt that I was into something. Every time I learned a new tune, I would struggle and struggle with it, but I could see the progress. For the first time in ages, I felt as though I was really doing things, learning new things. I felt that now I was going places and doing something. I was ready. I had everything back in its right perspective. I had Harlem in its place. I had the job in its place. I had school and everything. I felt whole. I was ready to take on the Harlem scene again.

  One night in the fall of 1956, I was walking down Lenox Avenue, and I saw somebody coming toward me. The face looked familiar, but the way he was walking . . . there was something about him that just didn't resemble anybody I knew. As he got closer, he started smiling, and I recognized him. It was Billy Dobbs.

  Billy walked up to me and said, "Peace, brother."

  I thought. Oh, shit, here's another one of those cats on this Muslim kick. I said, "Hey, man, how you doin'?"

  He said, "Oh, I'm doin' fine. Sonny. I'm doin' better than I've ever been doin' in my life."

  "That's good, Billy. I'm glad to hear it." I was all prepared for a sermon or a long spiel about the Muslim thing, Allah, and Elijah Muhammad, all that bullshit. I didn't want to hear it. I had heard enough of that. It just didn't get to me. Those cats were crazy, the way I saw it.

  Billy started talking, and I was surprised. I had never thought that Billy could get into that thing. The last time I'd seen him, Billy was strung out. He had at least a forty-dollar-a-day habit. He was far away from any kind of religion then, unless it was drugism. Billy said he'd found a whole lot of peace.

  "Yeah, man, everybody's finding some peace."

  "Have you found any, Sonny?"

  I said, "Yeah, jnan. I just had a nice piece last night, a fine bitch, man," and I went on. I was doing this because I didn't want to hear any of that nonsense about peace. I was just being nasty to avoid all that.

  "Sonny, I remember when you were talking to me about

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  getting away from drugs, when you started going to school. Now I want to do something for you. I want to show you how to find your way, if you haven't found it."

  "Thanks anyway, Billy, but I think I've found my way."

  "Have you got a minute, man? Could I have a minute of your time?"

  "Yeah, sure, go on. What's on your mind?" I didn't want to hear that stuff, but I didn't want to be rude to the cat.

  When I had decided to go to school and get out of street life in Harlem, I talked to Billy. He was dealing heroin at the time. I told him, "Look, man, you know what's going to happen? Sooner or later, you're going to start dabblin' and you'll be strung out." I tried to tell him to give it up, but he said, "No, man, what am I going to do if I give up dealing drugs?" I thought he was convinced that he was going to be doing that for the rest of his life, so I just stopped talking to the cat. Now here he was, deep in this religious thing and trying to sell me on it too. It was damn surprising.

  "Tell me something, Billy. What happened to you, man? How did you get into this Muslim thing?"

  "I'm not a Muslim, man. Those people are a Httle mixed up."

  When he said that, I sort of raised an eyebrow and thought. Well, damn, I thought one of those groups was bad enough around here, and now we got something else. Everybody's going crazy in his own right. I said, "Well, what you into, man?"

  "Have you ever heard of the Coptic faith?"

  "No, man. The Coptic? There's no such thing."

  "Yeah, man. There's a Coptic."

  "You mean Catholic, man." I thought the cat was just pronouncing "Catholic" wrong.

  "No, Sonny, I mean Coptic. This is the true black man's faith. It comes straight from the black continent. . . . Haven't you ever heard of Haile Selassie?"

  "Danm right, everybody's heard of Haile Selassie. So what's that got to do with the Coptic faith?"

  "He's head of the Coptic Church. Haven't you ever seen those signs up along Lenox Avenue and Seventh Avenue whenever Haile Selassie comes to town? They've got up the banners saying, 'Welcome, Conquering Lion of Judah,' and all this sort of thing."

  "Yeah, I've seen them."

  "That's the Coptic, man, who put up all that stuff. This is what I'm into."

  "How did you get involved in this?"

  "Somebody pulled my coat, man, in a dark moment when I was heading down the road to destruction."

  I said to myself. Oh, Lord, here comes some more of that shit about "how I was saved," and what not. Whenever junkies kicked for a little while, they'd go into this crazy kind of shit.

  Billy said, "You know Lonnie Jones, who use to live on 146th Street?"

  "Yeah, man, I know Lonnie. I haven't seen him in a couple of years at least."

  "Lonnie saved me. He was the cat who pulled my coat to this brand-new, hip way of life."

  "Oh, yeah?" I was a little surprised, but not too much so, because Lonnie had been a guy who I thought was not cut out too well for the Harlem scene.

  "Yeah, man, that's no stuff. Lonnie is a priest in the Coptic faith."

  "A priest! I always thought Lonnie was cut out for something different, but I didn't think he was made to become a priest in anybody's religion."

  "Yeah, man, he's a priest."

  "Well, I'll be damned I You never know what people are going to do next!" It wasn't too surprising in Lonnie's case, because Lonnie was a good boy. He didn't steal and stuff like that. He was in the Buccaneers with us, with most of the cats in the neighborhood. I think he was just in it because his brothers were. Just about everybody he knew was in it, so he had to get in the clique too.

  I remember once when we were bebopping on 148th Street with some cats called the Chancellors. We only had three guns with us when we went uptown that night, and the person who had one of the guns was Lonnie. I was with him-. Rock, Danny, and a couple of other cats. There were two brothers on 148th Street who everybody knew were killers. They were called the Lordly brothers. The Lordlys had stabbed and shot a lot of cats. People knew that you couldn't play with them. You didn't go up there and wave a gun in front of their faces or stick them with knives or try to scare them. These cats were dangerous. If you went to war with them, you had to kill them.

  We had gotten cornered in a hallway up on 148th Street,

  me, Danny, Lonnie, Butch, and a couple of other cats. About ten or twelve Chancellors were coming after us. Some of us were trying to get out the back door, but it was locked. Lonni
e had a gun, and these cats were coming in through the front door. Lonnie hollered, "You niggers don't move or I'll kill every last mother-fucker."

  I tried to say, "Look here, man, do something in a hurry.'* I knew if these cats got to us, we were through. Lonnie kept hollering about what he was going to do and shaking, and they kept coming on. He kept telling them not to take one more step, and these cats were taking five steps at a time.

  Rock stopped them; he snatched the gun and shot Junior Lordly. Everybody else stood back, and he kept shooting. We got out of the back door, and all the other Chancellors ran back out the front door. We went up on the roof and got out of there, but I don't think we would have gotten out if we'd waited for Lonnie Jones to shoot. This was the sort of cat he was. He had no business gang fighting anyway.

  I said to Billy, "Come on in this bar and I'll buy you a drink."

  He hesitated. He said, "No, man, I don't drink any more."

  "Damn, man, that sounds like that's something really powerful that you're into."

  "Yeah, man. I don't need alcohol; I don't need drugs; I don't need anything any more. When I came out of Kentucky about a year ago, I didn't know what I was going to do, Sonny. I didn't know if I was going to go back on drugs, start drinking wine, or what. But I found out that I didn't need anything but this." He took something out of his shirt. It looked like a little metal triangle on a chain. He said, "Do you know what this is?"

  "Yeah, man, it's a triangle."

  "No, man." He turned it over. It was a pjramid with the Sphinx engraved on it. "That is the symbol of the Holy Land and a symbol of our religion."

  "That's all right, man. Tell me some more."

  "Actually, this is the symbol of man also.',' .

  "Since you don't want to go in a bar, why don't we just have a cup of coffee? You can tell me about this."

  We went into a restaurant. He started telling me that this was something that had originated in Ethiopia and that this was the true black man's religion. He asked me if I knew a cat by the name of Father Ford. I said, "No, I don't know him.'*