Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  I couldn’t seem to talk to Tito. I couldn’t seem to talk to Dunny. They were right there in front of me, but they seemed to be so far away that I couldn’t reach them. I fell down on my knees and crawled over to them. They were down there scrambling for some horse; they seemed to be talking and hollering about horse and horse and horse, and they couldn’t hear me. They couldn’t feel me. They didn’t know if I was here dying or if something had a hold on me.

  My guts felt like they were going to come out. Everything was bursting out all at once, and there was nothing I could do. It was my stomach and my brain. My stomach was pulling my brain down into it, and my brain was going to pull my guts out and into my head. And I said, “O Lawd, if you’ll just give me one more chance, one more chance, I’ll never get high again.”

  And then it seemed like everything in me all of a sudden just came out, and I vomited. I vomited on Tito, and he didn’t even feel it. He didn’t even know it. The cat’s were still getting high. I was so scared. I thought we’d just killed ourselves. I wanted to pray. I wanted to tell these guys to pray. And they were so wrapped up in this thing; they were still snorting and snorting and talking about nodding and nodding. And it seemed like this went on for years. … I couldn’t talk to them. I tried to touch them, but I couldn’t reach them. I was trying to say something. I was trying to yell, and all these cats could do was nod, nod, nod, nod. I was dying, I was dying. I seemed to roll over fifty times, and every time I rolled over, I thought my guts were going to pour out on the floor.

  I threw up, and I threw up. It seemed like I threw up a million times. I felt that if I threw up one more time, my stomach was just going to break all open; and still I threw up. I prayed and I prayed and I prayed. After a while, I was too sick to care.

  The next thing I knew, Danny had me in his arms, and he was pouring some buttermilk down me, and he was slapping me and calling, “Sonny, Sonny, Sonny—”

  I’d heard his voice for a long time, and then I started feeling the slap, and I was wondering, What the hell is he doin’ slappin’ me? I was never so glad to see anybody in all my life. And I felt maybe it was the work of the Lord, because Danny’s mother was a preacher, and it seemed like I had been in hell and he had come and saved me.

  After I was wide awake, Danny slapped me again, real hard. I wanted to hit that nigger then—I didn’t go for that big brother thing any more. But I knew I couldn’t beat him yet—Danny was more than six feet tall—so I just took it. And after he hit me, he held my collar, real tight, and he said, “Sonny, if I ever again, as long as I live, hear about you usin’ drugs, I’m gon kill you. I’m gon git my gun, and I’m gon beat you wit it. I’m gon beat you wit my gun in your head, nigger, until you go in the hospital. ‘Cause I’d rather see you there than see you on shit.”

  I didn’t know how to take it. But I had a feeling that Danny meant good, that he meant damn good. Or maybe it was just that I was grateful because I’d almost died, or I thought I’d almost died, and he’d saved me. So I listened. I kind of felt that this was the last time that he was ever going to tell me anything or play that big brother bit with me—and that he knew it. And since it was the last time, maybe it was something to listen to.

  I said to Danny, “Look, man, you don’t ever, long as you live, have to worry about me messin’ wit any more horse as long as I live.”

  I was sick for about two days after that. I didn’t even want a reefer. I didn’t want anything, anything, that was like a high. I started drinking some of Dad’s liquor after that, but I was scared of those dry highs.

  Anyway, that was the big letdown with horse. For a long time, I just looked at other people and wondered how the hell they could go through that. Dunny still liked it. He said it was pretty good. He said he had a real boss feeling. But Tito felt about the same way I did. He said he wasn’t going to fuck with any more of that stuff as long as he lived. The horse had turned out to be a real drag.

  Although I was tighter with the guys who had been with me at Wiltwyck now, I still was close to Danny and Butch and Kid. I just didn’t look up to them as much as I did before I went to Wiltwyck. Now they were just sort of big brothers. I called them whenever I needed them; if I didn’t need them, I didn’t see them.

  One of the reasons was that they weren’t the hippest guys around any more. Johnny D. was the hippest cat on the scene now. Even Butch, Danny, and Kid looked up to him. Everybody used to listen when he said something. It made sense to listen—he was doing some of everything, so he must have known what he was talking about. Sometimes we used to sit on the stoop or up on the roof and talk to Johnny or just listen to him talk shit. He sure seemed to know a lot of things. Johnny just about raised a lot of the cats around there, and I guess I was one of them. To me, what he said was truer than the Word of God.

  Johnny was always telling us about bitches. To Johnny, every chick was a bitch. Even mothers were bitches. Of course, there were some nice bitches, but they were still bitches. And a man had to be a dog in order to handle a bitch.

  Johnny said once, “If a bitch ever tells you she’s only got a penny to buy the baby some milk, take it. You take it, ‘cause she’s gon git some more. Bitches can always git some money.” He really knew about bitches.

  Cats would say, “I saw your sister today, and she is a fine bitch.” Nobody was offended by it. That’s just the way things were. It was easy to see all women as bitches.

  Johnny used to always be on the verge of getting done in. It was dangerous to live in our building when that cat was living there. Somebody was always trying to shoot him or stab him or throw him out the window or something. He was shooting at people, and people were shooting at him. But that was all right. He was big time, that’s all there was to it. And everybody knew it, so everybody listened to the things he said.

  I remember the first time I saw the cat. I think he was still owing some time from Coxsackie, so he was working and looking like a real workingman. But the cat looked slick—he was made for crime and larceny. In spite of the way he looked and all the things he did, Johnny was one of the nicest cats in the neighborhood. He knew how to be nice. He knew it good.

  I was kind of scared of Johnny, but I still always wanted to be around when he started talking. Another thing about him was that he was somebody good to have in your corner. Everybody respected him, the whole neighborhood.

  He was the first cat I ever saw hit a guy and knock him out with one punch, just like in the movies. You could see that sort of stuff happen in the gyms, but not on the streets. Cats got out on the street and knocked each other down and cut each other up, but nobody just put a cat away clean, with one punch—no talking, knifing, cutting up, or noise making. That cat was really smooth.

  When one of Johnny’s girls messed up on him—tried to hold back some money or gave somebody some pants and didn’t get any money—he sure was hard on them. It was good to be around when that happened. Sometimes Johnny would beat their ass and throw them out and not listen to anything. He would say, “Git outta my sight, bitch, and don’t ever come back.” This used to make some of them act like they wanted to go crazy.

  I remember Clara. Clara was a redheaded white bitch of Johnny’s, and she had a fine body on her. I was even scared to dream about her, she looked so good, but I did. But Johnny had a lot of chicks like that. The reason I remember Clara so well was that she was the first white girl I ever jugged.

  Johnny had gotten mad at her one night for not giving him all the money. He beat her ass and had her in there crying. Then he called Harry. Harry lived upstairs on the fourth floor, right under Johnny. So Johnny called to him out of the window and said, “Git the fellas.” Harry called everybody he knew in the building and across the backyard. I was one of the first cats up there, and when I got there I saw this chick lying on the bed crying. I thought, Lord, don’t tell me he’s gon give that away! And I waited and waited to see what he was going to say.

  He kept cursing at her and telling her what a stinking, dir
ty, funky bitch she was. The chick just kept on crying. And then other cats started busting in the doorway.

  Johnny snatched her up off the bed and took her out the door and upstairs to the roof. Everybody followed without being told. We all knew what this meant. She must have really made him mad, because he’d beat her ass, and Johnny didn’t beat chicks unless they’d done something really bad or made him mad. And Clara was one of his favorite women.

  We got up on the roof. She started hollering, “Johnny, please! Johnny, please don’t!” He just left her out there with us and walked.

  She called Kid and said, “Kid, please.… Kid, I thought you were a friend of mine.” And cats kept pushing in on her. Before I knew anything, somebody was reaching over me and snatching her clothes off. I think I was about the third one.

  It wasn’t anything as great as I thought it was going to be. I just didn’t enjoy it as much as I thought I would, but, anyway, the dream came true. And I think it probably came true for a lot of other cats that same night too. A lot of people had their first white girl that night, just about everybody in the building. After that, I was pretty sure that white girls weren’t anything different. Bitches were bitches.

  It was Johnny’s policy to never give a bitch a second chance. He could afford to do that—if you have enough of them, you don’t have to be giving out second chances. Johnny used to tell us that you have to be creative and new in the bed and do things to chicks they’ve never had done to them before. That was the only way you were going to stand out with a chick, especially if she was a bitch who’d been around a whole lot and been in bed with a whole lot of niggers. And Johnny used to say that the worse thing in the world any cat could be was horny. A horny cat was lost, he used to say.

  I remember one time he told us the lowest thing a man could do was beg a bitch for her body. I had never begged any of them, but I didn’t know just how much truth there was in what Johnny was saying. I’d heard begging—and by some cats I really respected too. But I thought that if you were hip enough, like Johnny, you never had to beg. So I listened. I listened to all that stuff he used to tell us about how to pull bitches, how to make them do what you wanted them to do, and how to keep them yours forever.

  I used to think, He’s makin’ it a point to screw all the good-lookin’ bitches in the neighborhood. There were few women around the neighborhood that Johnny wanted to jugg and didn’t jugg, even if they were married. Johnny was getting to every fine bitch in the neighborhood and proving all the things he said to us. It’s easy to believe a guy and listen to what he’s saying when you see he’s doing all the things he’s talking about.

  One time Johnny saw me fighting in the street. Donald Gordon, from 146th Street, and I were going to war, long and strong. After it was over, Johnny said, “Come on up on the roof, Sonny, I want to show you some stuff.” So I went on up. I had seen him watching me while I was fighting. A whole lot of grown people were around there watching, and I didn’t look as good as I wanted to look. It was too long and too hard.

  Johnny brought some gloves out of his house, and we played around up on the roof. He said, “Sonny, I thought you knew somethin’. I thought you’d learned somethin’ up at that place where you were. Man, how did those cats let you come out on the street not bein’ able to use your hands any better than that?”

  I’d always thought I could use my hands pretty good as it was.

  We put on the gloves, and he said, “Throw up your hands.” I hesitated a while. Then Johnny slapped me with a left glove. “C’mon, throw up your hands. I’m not gon hurt you.” He smiled, so I threw up my hands.

  He slapped at me again with his left, and I kept trying to fan it away with my right hand. He just kept throwing it in there; he had a real fast hand, and he was hitting me in the face. He just kept on, getting faster and faster and faster. I was just getting mad. I couldn’t seem to get a good punch on him.

  After a while, I started getting excited, and I hit him one time on his chin. He shouted, “Good! Good! Good! That’s it, baby; that’s it!”

  I stopped and looked. I was wondering what was wrong with him and why he’d shouted like that. Then all of a sudden he hit me straight in the face. I was mad. It almost brought tears, but I just went on throwing everything this way and that way. I wasn’t even reaching him. It seemed like he was all around me and never in front of me, and yet he was so close. It seemed like he was hitting me ninety times a second. I just couldn’t get started. I just got wilder and wilder.

  He grabbed me with both hands and held me and said, “You see, Sonny, every time, you stop. Unless you git excited, you don’t stay on a cat. It’s like if you git in a good punch and you’ve got a cat goin’, you always slow down instead-a keepin’ on, as if to say, That’s one now.’ And the only way you gon rally or really press a cat is when you git excited; and when you git excited, you can’t do a goddamn thing, man. It’s the same way wit a bitch. If you gon pull a bitch, you can’ git excited and let her know that you want that pussy so bad you about to go crazy. You gon lose your brains through your dick?” He said, “No. You see, you just never learned to do things without gittin’ excited. C’mon, I’m gon show you how not to git excited when you do things.”

  And Johnny started showing me how not to get excited. He said, “I want you to hit me in the face three times. I’ll put my left hand behind my back, and I’m not gonna hit you. I’m not gon touch you. You can hit me as hard as you want.”

  The first time I hit him, I didn’t hit him too hard. And he just looked and smiled. I hit him again and didn’t hit him too hard, but it was harder than the first time. And he smiled at that. I said to myself, Yeah, like this is bullshit.

  He said, “Go on and hit me as many times as you want,” and I kept on hitting him. I hit him kind of hard, and he said, “Damn, man, like cool it.” That was enough. He said, “Look, I’m gon hit you in your face. I’m just gon slap you with my hand, and I’m not gon tell you when, and I’m not gon tell you how many times. If you cry, I’m gon walk away, and I’m gon forget about it. And if you get mad, it’s like the whole thing is just lost, and we gotta start all over again.”

  I had to go along with it. He hit me. He hit me in my face ten times, and each time was harder than the time before. He just slapped me on one side, and I didn’t even know which hand was going to come. He said, “Remember, don’t git excited. Don’t git excited.” When he slapped me the fifth time, I was ready to cry. But there was no sense in me even thinking about hitting this nigger, because I knew there was nothing in the world, even with God on my side, that could have helped me to kick his ass.

  I just held it back and fought it. After hitting me ten times, each time harder than the time before, he stopped. He said, “You mad at me, man?”

  “No, man. I’m not mad at you. I think it’s a whole lotta bullshit, and if you wanted to hit me in my face, you could-a told me.”

  He said, “Uh-huh.”

  So we sat down, and he started telling me things about bitches and things I liked to hear. He took me downstairs and showed me some pictures I hadn’t seen before. It was pretty nice. He asked me if I wanted to get high. I said, “No, I don’t want to get high.” Then James Fox came in and said that he had his works and that he wanted Johnny to straighten him. Johnny asked me again if I wanted to get high, and I said, “No, man, I don’t mess wit no horse no more.”

  So he said, “All right.” He said he had to take care of some business and would see me later, and he asked me if we were still tight.

  “Yeah, man, you know we’re all right.”

  “Okay, now, Sonny, if I ever see you out there in the street fightin’ a cat again and not pressin’ him, not stayin’ on him every time you throw a punch, and not showin’ this cat wit every punch that you mean to kick his ass, I’m gon take you up on the roof again, and that time I’m gon kick your ass.” And he winked at me.

  I said, “Yeah, all right, man,” and walked.

  I had cut Tito and
Dunny and Turk and Bucky and all the cats who were hanging out with me into Johnny too. We all used to sell him stuff, and we all liked to listen to Johnny when he talked. All of us would do anything for him, but after a while we wouldn’t sell Johnny the stuff we stole, because we knew the cat was taking us. There were other fences around that we could always get a better deal from. So we stopped doing business with Johnny and just listened to him. And he used to tell us a whole lot of things that we didn’t know about.

  He told us how to steal furs and what to do with them afterward, how to steal silver, and how to go downtown to the places where few Negroes went and steal stuff. Johnny told us how to dress. He’d tell us things about looking like a delivery boy when you went down on Park Avenue to steal something or looking like a working boy when you went down to the garment center to steal things. He knew a lot about stealing and all kinds of crime.

  He knew more about bitches than anything else, and I guess that was his main stick, bitches. At that time—when I was listening to Johnny—I wanted to try a lot of the things that he was telling me about bitches on some of the bitches I knew. Some of the things I was just too scared to try. And some of them … I didn’t know any chicks I’d dare try those on.

  There was one good chick. This was Jackie. Jackie was a beautiful black bitch, and she had a body on her that made Hollywood glamour girls look undernourished. And Jackie was only thirteen years old. I remember the first time I went up to her house. I knew her sister, Trixie. She was a skinny little ugly-looking girl when she was in Carole’s class in P.S. 90. But Trixie had gotten older, and she’d gotten fresh. She’d started jugging everybody, and just about everybody knew it. She had a reputation as the main young whore on Eighth Avenue.

  Dunny was going with Trixie when I first went up to her house. He took me up there. He’d been telling me about her, but I’d never been able to place her as the girl Carole used to bring home for lunch sometimes, because she was real skinny and funny looking then. But it was the same Trixie. And Trixie wasn’t so skinny or so funny looking any more. She had a body on her that was far from funny.