Manchild in the promised land

by Brown, Claude, 1937-

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  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 the 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 saw 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-comer cats, they would come out of the bars or the numbers joints or anyplarfce 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.

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  If there were two little boys on one block who were good with their hands, pr one around the corner and one on Eighth Avenue, men on the comer would try and egg them into a j fight. '

  I remember Big Bill, one of the street-comer 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 telUng 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 Uke 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 comer 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 ^ebt. 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, f^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 the 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 child-

  hood, 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 'nfore 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^is 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.

  The Morris brothers were hollering, "Sonny, you ain't com-in' down? Man, you better not come down here any more, 'cause I'm gon kick your ass."

  They would take turns hollering up and telling me all this. Dad was standing there in the doorway, and I had a headache. I had a real bad headache, but I knew that wasn't going to help. Dad started telling me about running from somebody who was bigger than me. He said, "You'll probably be short all your life, and little too. But that don't mean you got to run from anybody. If you gon start runnin' this early, you better be good at it, 'cause you probably gon be runnin' all your life."

  I just sat down there on the cold hallway tile, my head hurting.

  Dad said, "Get up off that floor, boy."

  Mama came to the door and said, "Boy, what's wrong with you?"

  Dad said, "There ain't nothin' wrong with him. He just scared, that's all. That's what's wrong with him. The thing that's wrong is you try and pamper him too much. You stay away from that boy."

  Mama said, "That boy looks like he sick. Don't be botherin' him now. What you gettin' ready to beat him for?"

  Dad said, "Ain't nobody gettin' ready to beat him. I'm just gon beat him if he come in this house."

  Mama came in the hallway and put her arms around me and said, "Come on in the house and lay down."

  I went in and I laid down. I just got sicker until I went downstairs. They really did kick my ass. But it was aU right I didn't feel sick any more.

  I remember one time I hit a boy in the face with a bottle of Pepsi-Cola. I did it because I knew the older cats on 146th Street were watching me. The boy had messed with Carole. He had taken her candy from her and thrown it on the ground.

  I came up to him and said, "Man, what you mess with my sister for?"

  All the older guys were saying, "That's that Utde boy who

  lives on Eighth Avenue. They call him Sonny Boy. We go« see somethin' good out here now."

  There was a Pepsi-Cola truck there; they were unloading some crates. They were stacking up the crates to roll them inside. The boy who had hit Carole was kind of big and acted kind of mean. He had a stick in his hand, and he said, "Yeah, I did it, so what you gon do about it?"

  I looked at him for a while, and he looked big. He was holding that stick like he meant to use it, so I snatched a Pepsi-Cola bottle and hit him right in the face. He grabbed his face and started crying. He fell down, and I started to hit him again, but the man who was unloading the Pepsi-Cola bottles grabbed me. He took the bottle away from me and shook me. He asked me if I was crazy or something.

  All the guys on the corner started saying. "You better leave that boy alone," and "Let go of that kid." I guess he got kind of scared. He was white, and here were all these mean-looking colored cats talking about "Let go that kid" and looking at him. They weren't asking him to let me go; they were telling him. He let me go.

  Afterward, if I came by, they'd start saying, "Hey, Sonny Boy, how you doin'?" They'd ask me, "You kick anybody's ass today?" I knew that they admired me for this, and I knew that I had to keep on doing it. This was the reputation I was making, and I had to keep living up to it every day that I came out of the house. Every day, there was a greater demand on me. I couldn't beat the same little boys every day. They got bigger and bigger. I had to get more vicious as the cats got bigger. When the bigger guys started messing with you, you couldn't hit them or give them a black eye or a bloody nose. You had to get a bottle or a stick or a knife. All the other cats out there on the streets expected this of me, and they gave me encouragement.

  When I was about ten years old, the Forty- Thieves—part of the Buccaneers—adopted me. Danny and Butch and Kid were already in it. Johnny Wilkes was older than Butch, and Butch was older than Danny and Kid. Johnny was an old Buccaneer. He had to be. When he came out on the streets in the early forties, it must have been twice as hard as it was a few years later. Harlem became less vicious from year to year, and it wai hard when I first started coming out of the

  house, in 1944 and 1945, and raising all kinds of hell. It was something terrible out there on the streets.

  Being one of the older Buccaneers, Johnny took Butch, Danny, and^Kid as his fellows. He adopted them. I guess he Hked the fact tha^ they all admired him. They adopted me because I was a thief. I don't know why or how I first started stealing. I remember it was Danny and Butch who were the first ones who took me up on the hill to the white stores and downtown. I had already started stealing in Harlem. It was before I started going to school, so it must have been about 1943. Danny used to steal money, and he used to take me to the show with him and buy me popcorn and potato chips. After a while, I stole money too. SteaHng became something good. It was exciting. I don't know what made it so exciting, but I liked it. I liked stealing more than I liked fighting.

  I didn't like fighting at first. But after a while, it got me a lot of praise and respect in the street. It was the fighting and the stealing that made me somebody. If I hadn't fought or stolen, I would have been just another kid in the street. I put bandages on cats, and people would ask, "Who did that?" The older cats didn't believe that a little boy had broke somebody's arm by hitting him with a pipe or had hit somebody in the face with a bottle or had hit somebody in the head w
ith a door hinge and put that big patch on his head. They didn't believe things like this at first, but my name got around and they believed it.

  I became the mascot of the Buccaneers. They adopted me, and they started teaching me things. At that time, they were just the street-comer hoodlums, the delinquents, the little teen-age gangsters of the future. They were outside of things, but they knew the people who were into things, all the older hustlers and the prostitutes, the bootleggers, the pimps, the numbers runners. They knew the professional thieves, the people who dealt the guns, the stickup artists, the people who sold reefers. I was learning how to make home-mades and how to steal things and what reefers were. I was learning all the things that you needed to know in the streets. The main thing I was learning was our code.

  We looked upon ourselves as the aristocracy of the community. We felt that we were the hippest people and that the other people didn't know anything. When I was in the street with these people, we all had to live for one another. We had to live in a way that we would be respected by one

  ; another. We couldn't let our friends think anything terrible of us, and we didn't want to think anything bad about our friends.

  ' I think everybody, even the good boys who stayed in the i house, started growing into this manly thing, a man's money, I a man's family, a man's manhood. I felt so much older than I most of the guys my age because I had been in it for a long I time before they came out of the house. They were kids, land I felt like an old man. This was what made life easier on me in Harlem in the mid-fifties than it was for other cats my age, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen, I had been through it. I didn't have to prove anything any more, because I'd been proving myself for years and years and years.

  In a way, I used to feel sorry for the cats coming out of

  the house at sixteen and seventeen. I knew they were afraid.