by Claude Brown
In the fall of 1945, I was expelled from school for the first time. By the time February rolled around, I had been expelled from three other schools in Harlem. In February, Mama sent me downtown to live with Grandpapa on Eldridge Street. Papa enrolled me in a public school on Forsythe and Stanton Streets. It was cold that winter, and I usually went to school to be warm.
For weeks, everybody thought things were going along fine. The first day I didn’t come home from school, Papa ignored it, thinking that I had gone uptown. But the next day, Mama received a card from Bellevue Hospital’s psychiatric division informing her that I was undergoing psychiatric observation and that she was allowed to visit me on Wednesdays and Sundays. My grandfather knew nothing about any of this, so when Mama (his oldest daughter) came to him wanting to know what her son was doing in Bellevue, Papa asked, “How did he get there?” They both came over to Bellevue believing I had gone crazy. Dad didn’t bother to come, because, as he put it, “That’s where he shoulda been years ago.” I was glad Dad didn’t come, because he might not have believed that I was falsely accused of trying to push a boy in school out of a five-story window. Mama had already heard my teacher’s version of the window incident, and now I was trying to explain my side of the story. My teacher had told her that I persuaded a boy to look out of the window to see an accident that hadn’t taken place. Because of the window’s wide ledge, I was holding his legs while he leaned out of the window. The boy started screaming and calling for help. When he got down out of the window, the boy said that I had been trying to push him out of the window. Just because we had fought the day before and I was the only one who saw the accident, I ended up in the nutbox.
I don’t think my story completely convinced Mama or Papa, but they gave me the benefit of the doubt. Mama told me that I would have to stay in the hospital for a few weeks. Her eyes were filled with tears when she said good-bye, and I tried to look sad too, but I was actually happy. I thought about how nice it was going to be away from Dad. Also, there were a few of my friends there, and we were sure to find something to get into. I had already had a couple of fights and won, so this was going to be a real ball.
I had lots of fun in the nutbox and learned a lot of new tricks, just as I thought. I didn’t know it at the time, but many of the boys I met in Bellevue would also be with me at Wiltwyck and Warwick years later. Some of those I had bullied in the nutbox would try to turn the tables later on in life. Some would succeed.
There were a few things around to steal. There were plenty of guys to fight with and lots of adults to annoy. The one drawback that the nutbox had was school and teachers. But I found the nutbox to be such a nice place that I was sad when Mama came to take me home.
When I returned home, I was told that my former school had refused to readmit me. This was the best news I had heard since I started going to school. I thought that I had finally gotten out of going to school. But two weeks later, I was enrolled in another school in Harlem.
Within two months from the time I had left Bellevue, I found myself in Manhattan’s Children Court for the first time. The reason was that I had been thrown out of two more schools, and there weren’t any more in Manhattan that would accept me. The judge told Mama that if I was still in New York State when the fall semester began, he would send me someplace where I would be made to go to school. After Mama had promised the judge that I would not be in New York when September rolled around, we went home.
This was the first time that Mama had been in court, and she was pretty angry about the whole thing. All the way uptown on the bus, Mama kept telling me that I should be ashamed of myself for making her come down to that court and face those white people. Every ten or twelve blocks, Mama would stop preaching just long enough to look at me and say, “Child, maybe that head doctor was right about you,” or, “Boy, why you so damn bad?” She didn’t understand what the psychiatrist was talking about when he was telling her about my emotional problems. Since she couldn’t understand the terms he was using, Mama thought he was trying to tell her in a nice way that I was crazy. Of course, she didn’t believe him. “That ole big-nose, thick-eyeglasses white man, he looked kinda crazy his own self,” she said. No, she didn’t believe him, whatever it was that he had said—but sometimes she wondered if that man might have been right.
When we got back uptown, Mrs. Rogers, who lived next door to us, came over to find out how things had gone in court. Mrs. Rogers, Danny’s mother, had made many trips to Manhattan’s Children Court. Now she had come to sympathize with Mama. Mrs. Rogers—who was also a jackleg preacher (she did not have a church)—called everybody “child,” “brother,” or “sister.” What a person was called by Mrs. Rogers depended on whether or not he was “saved.” To be saved meant to live for the Lord. Mrs. Rogers was saved, and so was her husband; she couldn’t understand why all her children had not yet been “hit by spirit.”
Mrs. Rogers, a big, burly woman about fifteen years older than Mama, always called Mama “child.” I can remember her saying to Mama when we came home from court that day, “Child, ain’t that Lexington Avenue bus the slowest thing in this whole city?” I always found Mrs. Rogers’ visits hard to take. She was a very nice meddlesome old woman, but too godly to have around constantly. Poor Danny, he had to live with it. Mrs. Rogers had told Mama that Danny was so bad because his behavior was the Lord’s way of testing her faith. Dad called Mrs. Rogers the “preacher woman.” He believed that Mrs. Rogers was going against the Lord’s Word and that this was the reason for her son’s behavior. He had often said that “the Lord never told no woman to go out and preach the Gospel to nobody.” Dad said that if the Lord had wanted a woman to preach, he would have chosen a woman to be one of his apostles.
On this day, Mrs. Rogers’ advice was no different from the other times. After Mama had told Mrs. Rogers about what had happened in court, Mrs. Rogers began her usual sermon, saying, “Child, you just gotta pray, you just gotta pray and trust in the Lord.” I always left the house at this point, because our house would be used as a practice pulpit for the next two or three hours.
As I ran down the stairs, I tried to imagine what was going on in the bouse. In a little while, Mrs. Rogers would be patting her foot real fast, and she would start talking real loud, clapping her hands, shaking her head, and every other word would be “Jesus” or “Lord.” I wondered why Mrs. Rogers never got tired of talking about the Lord. Before Mrs. Rogers finished her private sermon, she would have Mama talking about the Lord and patting her feet. By the time Mrs. Rogers was ready to leave, she would have Mama promising to come to a church where she was preaching next Sunday. Mama would promise, and Mrs. Rogers would start telling her how good it is to be saved, to walk with Jesus, and to let God into your soul. Even though Mama knew Dad wasn’t going to let her go to a sanctified church with that “jackleg preacher woman,” she still promised to go. Dad always said, “All those sanctified people is just a bunch of old hypocrites, and none of ’em ain’t a bit more saved than nobody else.”
Mrs. Rogers never talked about saving Dad. She said, “That man got the devil in him,” and I believed it. As a matter of fact, I had suspected something like that long before Mrs. Rogers did.
We had all been to Mrs. Rogers’ Sunday sermon once. All of us except Dad. She was preaching that time in what looked like a church-apartment to me and a church-store to Carole. I think most of the people there were relatives of Mrs. Rogers. All of her family was there except for Danny; he had escaped on the way to church. June, one of Mrs. Rogers’ daughters, was playing an old, out-of-tune upright piano. Another one of Danny’s sisters was banging two cymbals together and mumbling something about Jesus. She seemed to be in a trance. Mr. Rogers was shaking a tambourine and singing about Jesus with a faraway look in his eyes. Mrs. Rogers, who was dressed in a white robe, got up and started preaching. After Mrs. Rogers had been preaching for about fifteen minutes, an old lady got up and started screaming and shouting, “Help me, Lord Jesus!” She was still thro
wing her arms up and shouting for Jesus to help her when a younger woman jumped up and hollered, “Precious Lord Jesus, save me!” Mrs. Rogers’ voice was getting louder all the time.
For two hours, she preached—and for two hours, people were getting up, shouting, jumping up and down, calling to Jesus for help and salvation, and falling out exhausted. Some of these “Holy Rollers,” as Dad called them, would fall to the floor and start trembling rapidly; some of them even began to slobber on themselves. When I asked Mama what was wrong with those people and what they were doing on the floor, she told me that the “spirit” had hit them. When Carole heard this, she began to cry and wanted to get out of there before the spirit hit us. Mrs. Rogers had gone over to a man who was rolling on the floor, slobbering on himself, and babbling as if he were talking to the Lord. She held the man’s hand very tight and told him repeatedly to walk with the Lord and not to fear Jesus. She was saying to the man, “Brother, say, ‘Yes, Jesus; yes, Jesus.’” After a while, the man calmed down, and Mrs. Rogers said he had been saved.
Carole and Margie were frightened by these strange goings-on. I had been fascinated until now. But now this spirit thing had Mama jumping up and shouting. I joined Carole and Margie in a crying chorus, and the three of us started pulling on Mama. After Mama had jumped, clapped her hands, and had her say about Jesus, she fell back in her chair, tired and sweating. One of Mrs. Rogers’ blood sisters had started fanning Mama. Carole, Margie, and I had stopped crying, but we were still scared, because we didn’t know if Mama was all right or not.
In the makeshift pulpit, Mrs. Rogers was looking real pleased with herself, probably thinking that she had saved a lot of people. I think Mrs. Rogers judged her sermon by the number of people who were hit by the spirit and fell down during her sermon. She cautioned the people who were saved about “backslidin’” and told them about how happy they were going to be with Jesus in their lives. She also asked some of the old saved souls to “testify.” After three or four saved souls had told about what a good friend Jesus had been to them, Mrs. Rogers began her third request for money. The ushers, who were also relatives of Mrs. Rogers, passed a china bowl down each row. Carole and Margie dropped the nickel that Mama had given to each of them in the bowl, then they turned and looked at me. Although that was the first time we had ever been to church together, they would have been surprised if I had put my nickel in the bowl. I didn’t surprise them that day.
While Carole and Margie were busy telling Mama about me not putting my nickel in the bowl, I was pulling a chair from the aisle behind us. All the chairs in the place were kitchen chairs, and they weren’t all the same size. Before I could get the chair into our aisle, a big fat shiny dark-skinned woman with a man’s voice said, “Boy, leave dat chair ‘lone.” I was frightened by the heavy, commanding voice, but not as much as I was after I looked up and saw that great big old woman giving me the evil eye. My first thought was that she was a witch or a hag, whatever that was. I knew she couldn’t be the boogeyman; not in church. But the longer I looked, the more I doubted her being anything other than the boogeyman. About thirty seconds later, when I had gotten my voice back, I meekly said, “Dat ain’t your chair.” The next thing I heard was the sound of Mama’s hand falling heavily across my mouth. As I started crying, I heard Mama say, “What I tole you about sassin’ ole people?” While I went on crying, Mama was telling me about the dangers of talking back to old people. I remember her saying, “If one of these ole people put the bad mouth on you, maybe you’ll be satisfied.”
For years afterward, the mention of church always reminded me of the day that we went to hear Mrs. Rogers preach. To me, a church was a church-apartment where somebody lined up a lot of kitchen chairs in a few rows, a preacher did a lot of shouting about the Lord, people jumped up and down until they got knocked down by the spirit, and Mrs. Rogers put bowls of money on a kitchen table and kept pointing to it and asking for more. It was a place where I had to stand up until I couldn’t stand any more and then had to sit down on hard wooden chairs. The one good thing I got out of going to hear Mrs. Rogers preach was a new threat to use on Carole and Margie. Whenever Carole and Margie would threaten to tell on me, I told them that if they did, the spirit would hit them the way it hit those people in Mrs. Rogers’ church-apartment.
Maybe Dad was right when he said Mrs. Rogers was just robbing people in the name of the Lord. Anyway, I felt pretty good about her not getting my nickel.
Even though Dad didn’t care for preachers and churches, he had a lot of religion in his own way. Most of the time, his religion didn’t show. But on Saturday night, those who didn’t see it heard it. Sometimes Dad would get religious on Friday nights too. But Saturday night was a must. Because it always took liquor to start Dad to singing spirituals and talking about the Lord, I thought for years that this lordly feeling was something in a bottle of whiskey. To me, it was like caster oil or black draught. You drink it and the next thing you know, you’re doing things.
I was introduced to religion on Saturday night. I don’t recall just when, but as far back as I can remember, Saturday night was the Lord’s night in our house. Whenever Dad was able to make it home on his own two feet, he would bring a recording of a spiritual, a plate of pigs’ feet and potato salad from the corner delicatessen or a plate of fish-and-chips from the wine joint around the corner, and whatever was left of his last bottle of religion. He usually got home about three o’clock in the morning, and the moment he hit the block I could hear him singing (or yelling) the record he had. By the time he got upstairs, everybody in the building knew the song and hated it. Before Dad was in the house, I could hear him calling me.
By the time he finished unlocking and relocking the door at least six times, kicking on it, cursing out the lock and the neighbors who had tried to quiet him down, I was up and had already turned on the phonograph. On her way to the door, Mama would say, “Boy, turn that thing off and git back in that bed.” While Mama told Dad how disgusting he was, I would be busily picking out the pigs’ feet or fish-and-chips with the least amount of hot sauce on them. When Mama had gotten tired of competing with Dad’s singing, she went back to bed. As Dad gave me the record—usually by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, the Dixie Hummingbirds, or the Four Blind Boys—he would tell me how somebody I had never heard of sang it in the cotton fields or at somebody’s wedding or funeral “down home.” After listening to the record at least a dozen times, Dad would turn the phonograph off, and we would sing the song a few times. Before dawn started sneaking through the windows, Dad and I had gone through his entire repertoire of spirituals. By daybreak, we were both drunk and had fallen on the floor, and we stayed there until we awoke later in the day.
When Dad awoke on Sunday, it was usually around eleven or twelve o’clock. If he had half a bottle of religion around, we would continue our Sunday singing. If there was less than half a bottle around, Dad would just ignore Mama’s protests and take me with him to a King Kong joint. I recall one of their Sunday morning arguments.
Mama said, “Ain’t no six-year-old child got no business drinking that King Kong.”
Dad said, “I was drinking it when I was five, and I’m still here working hard and steady five and six days a week.”
The King Kong joint was usually in a basement apartment and operated by a friend of Dad’s or a relative. Dad knew where most of the joints in the neighborhood were, and many times we had to go from one to another for what seemed like hours. Sometimes the cops would get there before we did, and at other times the stuff hadn’t finished cooking. But eventually, we would find a bottle and enough drunks to make a quartet and would sing some spirituals.
Saturdays and Sundays were the only days that Dad mentioned the words “God” and “Lord.” But on these days, he made up for the rest of the week. He was very serious about the spirituals and the Lord on weekends. To his way of thinking, this was a private kind of religion all his own. Nobody understood except him and the Lord, but that was enough understanding f
or him. It had to be right, because his daddy had lived that way.
Grandpa had made the “best goddamn corn liquor” in Sumter County, according to Dad. Dad promised me, every time he got drunk, that he would teach me how to make good corn liquor. He often said that he was making corn liquor long before he even knew how to plow, and he couldn’t remember not knowing how to plow. Dad claimed that there were no baby-nursing bottles in the South when he was coming up. He said that when a baby cut his first tooth, “his papa would take him off the titty and put him on the corn-liquor jug.” I never learned how to make good corn liquor, but I learn quite a few good lies about drinking and making it.
Whiskey was one of my best friends. I talked to whiskey bottles all the time. That is, all the time I was by myself or with Toto, Bucky, or Bulldog. These were the times when I knew I wouldn’t have to explain anything to anybody. These guys knew what I was saying to the whiskey bottle and what it meant to me even though I never told them. We would fight almost every day and call each other dumb, but to me they were some real smart guys. The smartest thing about them was that you never had to explain anything to them for them to know it. They just knew it anyway. I had whiskey, and they probably had a good friend like that too, a friend who could tell you if it was okay to go home. The only time I could go home after being away for a few days would be on a Friday or Saturday night. On these nights, Dad would have a bottle of whiskey and wouldn’t be so mad, so he wouldn’t beat me too badly. Some Friday and Saturday nights he didn’t have any whiskey, and I got a real bad beating. Whenever that happened, I would curse those whiskey bottles that had told me it was okay to go home. The next chance I got, I would break every whiskey bottle I could find. Most of the time, the whiskey bottles were on my side, and I wouldn’t go home. That round brown bottle had more than religion in it. It must have had the Lord in it. I never saw him in it, but I know he was there.