Manchild in the promised land

by Brown, Claude, 1937-

  The only way I could stop Reno when he got wound up like this was to say, "Come on, man. Let's go get a drink,'*

  or "Let's go get high." That would take him down off his soapbox.

  Reno was only one. There were a whole lot of other cats out there who felt the same way that Reno felt about going downtown, about working for Goldberg.

  I remember when I was down in the garment center and used to see George Baxter down there. He used to tell me, and the cat would be almost crying, "Man, a cat got to take a whole lotta shit for fifty dollars a week." Just about every time I saw him, he'd say, "Man, I don't think the stuff that a man has to take down here is worth fifty dollars a week; it's worth a lot more, at least ten times more."

  He used to say that he was going to leave, that he was going to get up off of this thing. But I didn't think he was going to leave the garment center, because Baxter was sort of a nice guy. But he did. He was one of the guys I knew who tried it and gave it up to come back uptown and deal drugs. There was more money in it. Cats used to say it made them feel better than being down there, being messed over by Goldberg all the time.

  I remember Baxter used to say all the time, when I'd meet him uptown after he'd give up the garment-center gig, "Man, if you keep goin' downtown every day, you'll be a boy all your life. I use to be afraid. Sonny, I use to be deathly afraid of bein' a boy all my life. I used to have nightmares, man, about me bein' old, about sixty years old and almost bent, knockin' around there, sweeping the floors for Goldberg in that dress house of his. He's comin' in there pattin' me on my back and callin' me 'boy,' sayin', 'Come over here with your broom and sweep up this thing for me, boy.' It use to get to me. I use to jump up out of bed screamin', 'Mr. Goldberg, please, Mr. Goldberg, don't call me boy. Please, Mr. Goldberg, don't pat me on my back.*

  "Sonny, I think if I had stayed down there in that garment center much longer, man, and continued to be Goldberg's boy, I might've lost my mind. I had to get outta there."

  Before he got busted, he used to say, "Man, I might not be out here on the streets for long. I'm gamblin' and I know I'm gamblin'. Every time I come out of my house, I got to look around for the Man. Before I go in my house, I got to look around to see if any junkies are waitin' to sting me. I got to be careful about everybody who comes up to me and

  asks me for a sale. I'm livin' on pins and needles, man, but I can stand up a whole lot straighter. Nobody calls me a boy, and I know even when the Man walks up on me and busts me out here, he's gon do it in a fashion that I can appreciate.

  "If they take me downtown and put me in the lineup, they're not gonna say 'boy.' They're gonna say, 'Stand there.' If a cat ever runs up on me in a hallway and says, 'Freeze, nigger,' he's not gonna say, 'Freeze, nigger boy.' Man, the nigger thing is all right, but the boy thing, that's too goddamn hard to live with. Sonny. It was almost killin' me, man; it was almost killin' me.

  "You go down there into this thing—I guess I had a boss as nice as anybody—and Goldberg would say, 'George, do you know where I might find some nice honest colored girl who could come in and help my wife clean up the house?' He didn't mean help, man, he meant somebody who would come in and actually clean up the house for his wife. It was a drag, man. He said the other girl had to leave because her daughter was having a baby. He said, 'You saw the girl who was here. She was a very nice girl, and she'd been with us for a long time, for three or four years.'

  "Man, you should've seen this girl. This girl was about sixty years old. Her hair was gray, but she was colored, so she was still a girl. She was twice the age of Goldberg's wife. It hurt me, man, when I saw her. This colored girl was sixty years old, and she was cleanin' this house for his wife. I felt like, damn, if that was my wife, I'd beat her ass and make her help that woman clean up that house, man. But I knew, after I saw that woman and he'd asked me if I knew some girl who could help his wife, I wanted to say, 'Hell, no I' But I needed the job, so all I could say was, 'No, man, I don't know any girls. I don't know nothin'. I don't know anything about that.' I felt like I was gon lose my mind if I had stayed in that stuff.

  "I don't remember my father too weU. He use to work on the docks, and he died in the chair, man. I guess you knew; everybody in the neighborhood heard about it. He died behind some gray cat tryin' to fuck over him, tryin' to make him look like a Tom. It's somethin' I've always had a big thing about, man. And my brothers, they can't stand to be around gray people. That's why they all stand around 143rd Street and take- numbers. I guess we couldn't make it outside of some Harlem somewhere. We weren't cut out to play

  that boy role. I sui)pose they're a lot of people who aren't."

  As I used to listen to George, I'd think I had fallen in there and played that role without giving it much thought. But then I became aware of what I knew about the garment center and about Goldberg and his relationship to the Negro, the "boy'* who worked for him. I had the feeling that he never saw us. He never saw our generation. He saw us only through the impressions that the older folks had made.

  He never even tried to see us, and he tried to treat us the way he had treated them. Most of the older folks were used to it. They didn't know Goldberg from Massa Chariie; to them, Goldberg was Massa Charlie. I suppose the tradition had been perpetuated when the folks moved to the North and took the image of Massa Charlie and put it into Goldberg. Perhaps Goldberg was unaware of it.

  When I worked at the watch repair shop, if I said anything that would indicate that I thought a little of myself, or if I didn't seem damn grateful when somebody said, "I'm gonna give you a five-dollar bonus for Christmas," they all seemed to think that I was being arrogant in some way or another. They all seemed to fe51. What is wrong with this nigger? They all seemed to have the impression that niggers weren't supposed to act Uke that. They'd think. This nigger's crazy. What kind of Negro is he? Doesn't he know his place?

  In the evening, I'd run out of the shop with my books in my hand and say I was going to school, and they would crack jokes about it, as if to say, "This Negro must be dreaming. Doesn't he know that Negroes are supposed to just be porters?"

  It wasn't just our parents and Goldberg who weren't ready for my generation. Our parents' coming to Harlem produced a generation of new niggers. Not only Goldberg and our parents didn't understand this new nigger, but this new nigger was something that nobody understood and that nobody was ready for.

  There was trouble everywhere, every time. Everyplace I looked, I wasn't understood. I felt like a misfit on just about every job I went to. Everyplace I went, it was like a first time. It was always a new thing. I always had to establish a new relationship with everyone. I always had to find out where I was and what things were like. I always wanted to run. It was so difficult. There was nothing that was old. I really didn't have any familiar ground. I guess, in a way, my

  generation was like the first Africans coming over on the boat. There was still the language problem. The Harlem dialect was something that I was a little afraid to use. When I first went down to the gym on Broadway in mid-Manhattan, I was very self-conscious about it.

  I knew that these were gray boys, and I felt I had to be careful around them or else I might frighten them. Sometimes I was made to feel silly. I was caireful to pronounce my r's and say "you are" and '*you're not." I'd say, "Hello. How are you?" very properly. Occasionally somebody would say, "Hi, How you doin'?" and I'd feel ridiculous. There was always this uncertainty, this thing of feeling your way through. I became aware that I was a new thing. The average cat who ventured out of Harlem would be afraid and run back. It was safer deahng drugs or doing something like that. And there was much less embarrassment.

  I couldn't take my job in the watch repair shop after a while. Everybody was reading the papers about the Emmett Till case, and they'd say, "Gee, that's terrible." But I knew that if I went out to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn or Brighton Beach, where all these cats lived, they'd probably lynch the landlord if he rented me an apartment. This was the relationship betwe
en the Jew and the descendants of Ham. We were all right. We were supposed to work for them; we were good enough for this, good enough to clean their houses. They were supposed to sympathize with us. I think sometimes the sympathy used to bother me more than anything else, this attempt at being liberal-minded.

  I just got tired of it one day. I felt I was going to crack up, just blow up. I said, "Look, I'm tired. You take this job; you just take it and shove it," and I walked out of the shop. I didn't know where I was going. I didn't have any money; I didn't have anything, but I couldn't feel too bad about it or the least bit frightened. I was aware that I hadn't had anything all my life. I'd had jobs, money, and expensive clothes, but I still hadn't had anything. ' "

  I didn't even have a slight understanding of what it was all about, what I was trying to accomplish, what I was supposed to accomplish. I had no idea of where I was going. I went to Central Park and started walking around. I didn't understand anything about me. It was crazy to expect Goldberg to understand. I couldn't feel any kind of animosity toward anybofly, toward anybody in the world. I'd hoped that one day I could go back and say, "I'm sorry if I

  offended you people," and that they would forgive me, I realized that I had said some pretty nasty things to them. They were all little people, and I was demanding that they suddenly become big, tremendous, and understand this gigantic problem that the entire nation was trying to resolve and had been struggling with for years.

  I was demanding, "Now, look, Goldberg, look here, now. You understand this problem because you've been here all this time. You've been close to me. My mother been buying the pig tails and the neck bones from you as long as I can remember. She's been paying you the rent, she's been pawning stuff to you whenever we got up tight. So if anybody should give us some kind of understanding, you should."

  But Goldberg didn't owe us anything. If I had said this to him, he probably would have said, "Look, what do you want from me? What do you want? I owe you nothing." And he would have been right, because he didn't owe me anything. I had been demanding a whole lot of understanding, but, shit, I didn't understand him, so why should he understand me?

  One night I stayed uptown, and about six o'clock in the morning I left to go home to get a bath and shave and go look for a job that day. I planned to go to school that evening. I had a little briefcase with me, with my French textbook in it, and a couple of notebooks.

  I was coming up 145th Street toward Eighth Avenue, and I heard somebody call me. It was Jake Snipes. He was coming out of a Japanese restaurant with a takeout order. I said, "Hey, Jake, how you doin'? What you doin' out so early in the mornin'?"

  He started telling me about this chick who wanted some chop suey. "At five-thirty in the mornin'. Ain't that just like a bitch, man?"

  "Yeah, man, that's just like a bitch. You sure she's all right?"

  "Man, she better be all right. This chick's got to make me some money."

  I smiled. Jake was a pimp.

  "Damn, Sonny, you look kind of under the weather, man. What's it all about?"

  "Man, I got to get out here and find me a gig."

  "Damn, man, why don't you stop workin'? All your troubles'd be over."

  "rm not like you, Jake. I don't have any chicks out here hustlin' for me. I got to get me a job and work. That's the only way I know, man."

  "Damn, Sonny, you sure changed a whole lot."

  "Yeah, well, that sort of thing will happen, and sometimes you can't do anything about it."

  "Look, Sonny, why don't you come on up to my house, man? I got a freak up there. You get in the bed with this chick one time, and I guarantee you that you'll lose your mind. You'll probably want to fight me over this woman."

  I knew he was just trying to cheer me up, so I smiled and said, "Man, I know it before I even go up there. I'm so sure of it, Jake, that I don't even have to try it."

  "Look here. Sonny," and he pulled something out of his pocket. "I want you to taste that."

  It was a tinfoil, and I knew what was in it. I said, "Coke, huh?"

  "It's not just coke. Look at it."

  I opened it, and it was brown cocaine.

  "Sonny, when was the last time you had some brown cocaine? It couldn't have been recently, because there ain't been none in the city in the last four months."

  "No, it hasn't been recently, Jake. It's really been a long time, man."

  "Look, man, forget about that job and come on up to my crib. I'll turn you on to a freak; she is a stone animal. Sonny. She'll mess your mind up. You'll never want to leave there, and behind some of this good cocaine, you just might decide to stop workin' altogether."

  "Okay, Jake. Fuck it, man. I'll just take you up on that."

  "Good, good," and we started walking.

  He said, "What you got in the briefcase, man?"

  "Oh, just a textbook and some notebooks. I go to school in the evening."

  "Oh, yeah? You really sold on that thing, huh?"

  I said, "Well, it's somethin' new, man. It's^somethin' else to do."

  "Yeah, man, you always were one for books."

  We were walking toward Eighth Avenue, and as we got near the corner, a little boy was coming up the street walking his dog. I didn't pay any attention to the little boy and the dog until they stopped right in front of me. Jake walked on and waited a f$w paces away.

  I looked down at the boy. He was looking at me and

  smiling. Suddenly ^e just said, "Hey, what do you do?"

  "Who are you? A member of the police department or somebody?" 1 said it jokingly.

  He said, "No. I just want to know what you do."

  "Why do you want to know what I do?"

  He said, " 'Cause I want to do it too. I want to be like you."

  I looked at him, and I was kind of surprised, because I didn't recall ever seeing him before. I asked him, "Why do you want to be like me? Have you ever seen me before?"

  He said, "Yeah, I saw you a lot of times."

  I was kind of moved by the whole thing, but at the same time I was a little hurt because I couldn't say anything to him that might have been inspiring to him or given him something to set his sights on. I said, "Would you do me a favor?"

  He said, "Yeah." He smiled and looked real anxious, as if he was glad I'd asked him.

  I said, "Would you just go on down the street, keep walking your dog, and don't want to be Uke me? I'm just lookin' for a dog to walk. All my life, I've been lookin' for a dog to walk."

  He looked kind of sad. He walked around me and pulled his dog.

  I felt different. I'd forgotten about the job and all that sort of thing. I'd forgotten about Jake too. I looked down the street after the little boy had gone. He'd only walked away about a minute before. I looked down the street, and he was gone. I didn't even remember what his face looked like. All I remembered was the Uttle dog. It was a white dog, the kind they used to have in my first-grade reader, the kind nice little white kids would have, a little white dog with a black patch on his eye. And they would call him Spot.

  I stood there thinking for a while, wondering if there were any other little boys who watched me and wanted to be like me. I was hoping that there weren't any others, not yet anyway. As I stood there, just thinking, I heard Jake's voice calling me.

  He said, "Come on, Sonny. You comin'?" I walked up to him. Jake was getting ready to turn the corner, and he asked me, "What was that all about?"

  I said, "That was about what I've got to do, man, I got to go."

  "Where you gon go, man. I thought you'd forgot about

  the job for now. I thought you were gon come on up and knock off this bitch and get high off this cocaine."

  "No, Jake, thanks anyway, but I don't have time for freaks right now, and I don't have time for any cocaine right now. I've got to go and do something, and I've got to do it before another little boy with a dog comes up and asks me what I do."

  He looked at me in that peculiar sort of way I had come to expect, the way the cats on the block
looked at me when I first started telling them that I was going to evening high school and that I was going to stop dealing drugs. They all looked at me and said, "Yeah, man," with a look in their eye that said, "Is this cat crackin' up?"

  Jake looked at me and smiled and said, "Okay, Sonny. Take it easy, man. I'll see you around."

  "Later, Jake, and thanks, man, thanks anyway."

  I didn't see any more of Jake after that. I heard about three months later that he'd gotten busted for using drugs. It was the same old story.

  It was good to see Turk. I'd see him and he'd tell me about his upcoming fights. He was doing good. He'd started knocking out some pretty good light heavyweights. It did me good to see him around and know that it could be done. He was living proof that we could make it—the cats who had come our way in Harlem and had thrown the bricks that we had thrown in our youth. We weren't all cursed or destined to end up in jail.

  I suppose that I was the living proof of it to him too. Whenever I saw him, we talked for a long time. I could tell him my dreams. He was the only one who could accept me as I was, and he wouldn't say, "Well, damn. Sonny, you've changed," or look at me in that peculiar way.

  I could accept his dreams. When he told me that he was going to become heavyweight boxing champion of the world, I believed it. I guess I wanted to believe it, because I wanted him to believe me when I told him what I was going to do.

  It became a thing. Whenever I started feeling sad or that everybody was losing out in Harlem or that all Harlem was going to pot and nobody was making it any more, I'd go to the Uptown Gym, on 125th Street, and I'd watch Turk work out. I'd talk to him afterward. We'd have a cup of coffee

  or a glass of wine,' and we'd talk about our plans. I always felt good afterward.

  The g'm was right next to the Apollo Theatre, and one day when I was with Turk, I happened to bump into someone going into the Apollo. As I turned around to apologize, I looked right into Rickets' face. It was the first time I'd seen him since I'd left Wiltwyck, I grabbed him, and he grabbed me. We were real excited. I introduced him to Turk, and they said hello. I told him we were going over to a restaurant to have a cup of coffee and asked him to come along.