by Claude Brown
Grace was the only person I didn’t have a way to bullshit. Everybody else I knew, I had a special way, everybody. Grace was the first girl I wanted to play with, and I wanted to play with her all the time. She was the first girl I knew who was nice to look at all day long and whose face I could see even when I wasn’t looking at her. Mama’s name was the first name that made me happy when I heard it. Grace was the second name to make me happy at the sound of it, and it made me happier than Mama’s name sometimes.
In Mrs. Newton’s second-grade class, the kids had to rest for one hour each day, and there were cots in the class for them to lie down on. One day, when I found my cot next to Grace’s, she asked me which girl I liked best in the whole class. Even though I knew the question would come one way or another at some time or another, that was the happiest question I had ever been asked, and all I could answer was, “You.” I prayed she would give me the same answer when I asked her who was her favorite boy in the whole class. We both gave the right answer, and I told everybody I knew that Grace was the prettiest girl in the world, and some of them I told it to over and over again.
I sure wanted to see Grace again and find out if she still liked me. I sure was sorry for not doing it to Grace when I had the chance that day up on the roof. I knew she wanted me to. She wanted me to do it to her real bad. And I would have too, if it wasn’t for her little sister wanting me to do it to her too and not giving me a chance to get Grace by herself.
The year I had spent down South didn’t look so bad from the train going to New York. I could even remember some good things about it that I didn’t even know before. I had some fun down there. I didn’t even hate Grandpa any more. Maybe I never did really hate him except for that time when he made me stay in the woods and saw down a tree when I was freezing. Or when he got the gun at me that time when he caught me playing house with Reverend Green’s daughter. He told me he was going to kill me for being such a nasty damn scamp that nobody could bring their daughter around without me taking them under the house. He would have killed me that day if I hadn’t run in the woods and stayed until that damn old owl scared the hell out of me. I know he would have shot me, because he had the devil in him. I had heard of a lot of people having the devil in them, but I never saw anybody who had it in them for sure until I met Grandpa.
The people down South said that somebody had put the bad mouth on Grandpa or had worked roots on him because he was so evil and that was why his whole right side was stiff. Grandma said God had put his hand on Grandpa as a warning for him to change his evil ways, but it seemed that the only thing that changed about Grandpa was that he was only half as able to do the evil he used to do. He sure was an evil man.
The time I hated him most and shouldn’t have was that “hog-killing” time when I hit the hog on the head with the ax. The hog didn’t die. Grandpa said, “Boy, you ain’t shit.” I wanted to hit him in the head with that ax, but I was scared of what would happen if he didn’t die. On the train, I started hating that damn hog for not dying. Grandpa was still evil as hell, but he was all right with me now.
I learned some things down South too. I learned how to talk to a mule and plow a straight row in the sweet-potato patch. I even learned how to say “yas’m” and “yas suh.” And Grandma told me what pecker-woods were and taught me not to call white potatoes white potatoes, “because they ain’t white potaters, they is ice potaters.” But I don’t think I really learned those things—I think I just made believe I learned them. As soon as I got on that train going back to New York, I knew white potatoes were white potatoes, and I knew I had said “yas suh” and “yas’m” for the last time. And Grandpa told me some of the best-sounding lies I’d ever heard. At first, the only way I could tell they were lies was to keep watching Grandma when he started telling me things: when he was lying, Grandma would be peeking at him over her glasses in a certain way. After a while, I could tell when he was lying, because he would always start scratching his head when he started lying. I guess that’s what made me pretty good at lying when I went back to New York. I learned to tell when Grandpa was lying, and I learned to lie to him so well that he only hit me with that oak stick of his two times for lying. That oak stick was real hard, so my lies had to be good.
I learned a lot about the church songs Dad and I used to sing. Grandpa didn’t go to church any more, but he knew all about the songs and who sang them at what funeral. The best songs were sung at the funerals for the “bad niggers.” I learned that a bad nigger was a nigger who “didn’t take no shit from nobody” and that even the “crackers” didn’t mess with him. Because a bad nigger raised so much hell in life, people couldn’t just put him in the ground and forget him. I met an old man who used to be a bad nigger; he had one eye and one hand, and he looked just like what people said he used to be, a bad nigger.
One time I went to a funeral for a bad nigger. A lot of people were there, and most of them had heard about him but were seeing him for the first time. I guess they were scared to see him while he was still alive—and still bad. He was a real black man with big purple lips, and he had some ashy-looking powder on his face. They said he was a real big man, but he was lying down when I saw him. And they said he was so mean, he looked like the devil; but his eyes were closed when I saw him, and he just looked dead to me. At his funeral, a lot of ladies cried, and the preacher talked about him real loud for a long time. Before the preacher started talking, somebody sang “Before This Time Another Year” and “Got On My Traveling Shoes.” When the preacher finished talking about him, they took the casket outside and put it down in the ground. I had seen people do that before, but I didn’t think they would do it this time. It just didn’t seem like the right way to treat a bad nigger, unless being dead made him not so bad any more.
Sometimes Grandpa used to hum some of the church songs when he was sitting in his rocking chair out on the porch patting his foot and watching the sun go down behind Mr. Hayward’s tobacco barn. He would close his eyes and just start humming away. Maybe he was thinking about a funeral where he sang a song real good for somebody. Or maybe he was thinking about a funeral that didn’t happen yet, a funeral where he wouldn’t hear the songs, wouldn’t know who was singing them, and wouldn’t hear the preacher talking … talking about him … real loud. Maybe he was thinking about who would sing his favorite song for him and hoping that Mr. Charlie Jackson would live long enougn to do the singing for him.
I couldn’t understand why they sang nothing but those sad old church songs. They sure seemed to be some dumb country people to me. They didn’t know any boogie songs or jump songs—they didn’t even know any good blues songs. Nobody had a record player, and nobody had records. All the songs they sang, they’d been singing for years and years.
Somebody would sing real good at Grandpa’s funeral, and a lot of people would be there. It would have to be a big funeral, because Grandpa was a real bad and evil nigger when he was a young man. He had the devil in him, and everybody knew it, even people who didn’t know him. When Grandma took me to town or to church, people would come up to me and stare at me for a while, then ask, “Boy, is Mr. Son Brown yo’ granddaddy?” And after a while, I knew why they were looking at me so hard; they were trying to see if I had the devil in me too.
For a long time, I used to be scared of Grandpa. He used to go walking in the woods in the evening, and when I asked Grandma where Grandpa was always going, she said he was hunting the devil. I only asked one time. I started to follow him once, but I got scared and changed my mind.
People used to say I was going to be just like Grandpa, since I had the devil in me too. I never paid attention to what people said about being like Grandpa until one day. That day, my cousin McKinley Wilson and me were out in the yard seeing who could pick up the biggest and heaviest sack of corn. While I was straining to pick up a sack, I heard Grandma scream and felt a stinging feeling on my neck that made me drop the sack, jump up and down, and grab my neck. When I turned around to see what had h
appened to me, I saw Grandma standing there with a switch in her hand. She was screaming and hollering a whole lot of things at me, but all I could make out was that she was going to kill me if I ever did that again. I didn’t know what to think except that maybe she was going crazy. She had never said anything when I messed with the wasps’ nests and got stung and cried and kept on messing with them. I couldn’t understand why she had hit me, and Grandma didn’t talk much. I knew she had mistreated me, and I had to do something about it, so I started walking, walking back to New York.
When Grandma caught up with me on the highway, she had a bigger switch, and she was real mad. After she finished beating me for running away, she said she had hit me because she didn’t want me to be walking like Grandpa. I asked her if Grandpa had gotten his stroke from lifting corn.
She said, “It wasn’ no stroke that makes Grandpa walk the way he do. The stroke just stiffened up his right side. But you see the way he gotta swing his left leg way out every time he take a step?”
I said, “Yeah, I seen him do that.”
Grandma said that Grandpa walked that way because he was toting corn one day. I didn’t understand, but I kept on listening. Then Grandma started telling me about the things I saw Grandpa cut out of the pig to keep the bacon from getting rank when they killed the pig. And she told me that right above the things that make the bacon rank are the chitterlings and that chitterlings press against a thin window in pigs and boys and men. I never knew I had chitterlings in me until that day. Grandma said if somebody lifted something too heavy for him, the chitterlings would press right through that window and the man would have a hard time walking and doing a lot of other things for the rest of his life. She said one time Grandpa was in the woods making liquor, and his dog started barking. Grandpa picked up his still and started running with it. The still was too heavy—the window broke, and now Grandpa had to walk real slow. She was saying that she didn’t mean to hit me. She just didn’t want me to break my window.
We walked back home up the highway. Grandma had her arm around my shoulder, and I had my arm around her waist. That was the only time I ever touched Grandma—and the only time I recall wanting her to touch me and liking her touch. When I saw the house coming at us up the road, I was kind of sad. I looked at Grandma’s wrinkled face and liked it. I knew I had fallen in love with that mean old wrinkled lady who, I used to think, had a mouth like a monkey. I had fallen in love with a mean old lady because she hit me across the neck for trying to lift a sack of corn.
Down South seemed like a dream when I was on the train going back to New York. I saw a lot of things down South that I never saw in my whole life before, and most of them I didn’t ever want to see again. I saw a great big old burly black man hit a pig in the head with the back of an ax. The pig screamed, oink-oinked a few times, lay down, and started kicking and bleeding … and died. When he was real little, I used to chase him, catch him, pick him up, and play catch with him. He was a greedy old pig, but I used to like him. One day when it was real cold, I ate a piece of that pig, and I still liked him.
One day I saw Grandma kill a rattlesnake with a hoe. She chopped the snake’s head off in the front yard, and I sat on the porch and watched the snake’s body keep wiggling till it was nighttime. And I saw an old brown hound dog named Old Joe eat a rat one day, right out in the front yard. He caught the rat in the woodpile and started tearing him open. Old Joe was eating everything in the rat. He ate something that looked like the yellow part in an egg, and I didn’t eat eggs for a long time after that.
I saw a lady rat have a lot of little baby rats on a pile of tobacco leaves. She had to be a lady, because my first-grade teacher told a girl that ladies don’t cry about little things, and the rat had eleven little hairless pink rats, and she didn’t even squeak about it.
I made a gun down South out of a piece of wood, some tape, a piece of tire-tube rubber, a nail, some wire, a piece of pipe, and a piece of door hinge. And I saw nothing but blood where my right thumbnail used to be after I shot it for the first time. The nail grew back, little by little. I saw a lot of people who had roots worked on them, but I never saw anybody getting roots worked on them.
Down South sure was a crazy place, and it was good to be going back to New York.
The smell of the Eighth Avenue Subway was all I needed to make me know that I was really in New York and that I would not be hearing that old red rooster crowing out in the chicken house.
The train ride uptown was the longest train ride I ever took. As the train came to each station, I remembered something about that station. I remembered shaking down the two white shoeshine boys at the Forty-second Street station. And I remembered that time the cops saw me beating in a gum machine at the Fifty-ninth Street station and I had to run across the subway tracks in front of a train. I sure was fast. I must have done something at Seventy-second Street, but I couldn’t remember it, and that bothered me. I remembered the way that lady screamed when I snatched her pocketbook at Eighty-first Street. She screamed so loud that it scared me. She acted like somebody was killing her. A lot of people started chasing me, and the woman kept on screaming. I got scareder and dropped the pocketbook. I got away, but I should have kept that pocketbook. The way that lady was screaming, she must have had a lot of money in it.
At every stop, I wanted to get off the train and yell that I was back. I wanted everybody to know that I was back and that it was, like Goldie used to say, “goddamn good” to be back.
When I came out of the subway at 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, I thought there had never been a luckier person in the world than me. I wanted to grab the sidewalk and hug it tight. I wanted to run away from Mama and Pimp, run and jump on the back of the trolley car going up the hill. The trolley cars had changed. Somebody went and painted them orange and green; they used to be red and yellow.
It was Sunday morning. Kids were coming from church with their mothers and fathers, and some people were sick and vomiting on the street. Most of the people were dressed up, and vomit was all over the street near the beer gardens. There was a lot of blood near the beer gardens and all over the sidewalk on Eighth Avenue. This was a real Sunday morning—a lot of blood and vomit everywhere and people all dressed up and going to church. Some of them were all dressed up and sleeping on the sidewalk or sleeping on building stoops. It was all real good to see again, real good. There were the ladies going to church in white dresses and trying real hard not to look at the men standing on the corners cussing and saying fresh things to them—but trying real hard to listen to what the men were saying without looking as if they were hearing it. That man who was all dressed up and sleeping on the sidewalk propped up against the newspaper stand with a smile on his face sure looked happy. I was so happy to see them, to see it, to see it all, to see Harlem again.
As I came to our stoop, people started calling me and running up to me asking stupid questions. Was I a good boy now? How did I like down South? I would have said something smart or cursed them out, but I was so happy to see everybody, I just smiled, laughed, and said yeah to everything. Everything would have been good and happy if only I didn’t have to see Dad in a little while. A lot of times I used to wish that Dad would die and that Mr. Sam would marry Mama and be our father. Mr. Sam used to like Mama, and he was real nice. He believed everything I told him. Dad was real mean, and he didn’t believe anything I told him. But Dad told Mr. Sam that if he ever came across our threshold again, he was going to kick him in his ass. Mr. Sam must have believed Dad, because he didn’t come back any more.
The hallway looked smaller, but it was still the same, the way it was supposed to be looking on Sunday morning. Somebody had gotten cut the night before, and blood was still in the hall. And somebody had pissed on the stairs, and it was still there, just like it should have been. Whoever pissed on that radiator sure was lucky Mr. Lawson hadn’t caught him, because the super might have hit him in the head with his baseball bat and busted his head open, like he did to that oth
er man that time. On the landing just before ours, somebody had vomited. Pimp stepped in it and started to cuss, but he remembered that he was with Mama. That sure seemed funny—I didn’t know Pimp knew how to cuss. I started thinking that there might be a lot of things that I didn’t know about him now, and that scared me, so I stopped thinking about it.
When we walked into the house, everybody was sleeping. I started feeling sorry for Carole and Margie for being home with nobody but Dad for a whole week. I sure felt sorry for them. I wanted to run into their rooms and wake them up. I knew they would be real glad to see me, and I wondered what they looked like now. But I had to go through Dad’s room to get to theirs. Dad was still in bed, but he was awake.
We just stared at each other for a long time. I knew he was wondering what to say, and I was wondering what to say back to him when he finally did find something to say. I said hello, and Dad asked me if I liked it down South and if I was going to be a good boy now. I stood up way over on the other side of the room, answered him real fast, and waited for the next question to come. We talked for a long time about nothing, and I knew that Dad was the same and that I still didn’t like him. Carole came out of her room and screamed when she saw me. Her scream woke up Margie, and she ran in shouting my name. But then both of them saw that Dad was talking to me, so they stood over on the far side of the room smiling and waving at me. I hated Dad more than ever before now, hated him because Carole and Margie were over there and I was over here and we all had to stay where we were till he finished talking about nothing. I wanted to touch Carole and Margie and push them and grab them and hit them. I had really missed them while I was down South, and I was still missing them now while Dad just kept on talking.