Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  When Reno came back on the street scene, he found out that Tony and I were tight. He said he didn’t like him and that I shouldn’t be hanging out with a farmer. I told him that the cat was all right with me and that I was going to swing with him for a while. Reno started staying away from me, and he started telling other cats that I was swinging with a lame, an old farmer. He was putting me down. I thought, Fuck it, I don’t need him. But I still liked the cat and still admired him. I’d see him, and if he needed anything, I’d whip some money on him. Or we’d get high together.

  Sometimes Tony would come around and try to talk with him. Tony might say, “Hi, Reno,” but Reno would ignore him and then walk.

  I guess it was something that Tony deserved, in a way, because he had been a nice boy for so long. Reno and Danny and Butch and Kid and I were with the dirty side. We were always the ones that people said would probably be in jail or dead before we were twenty-one. I think a lot of those “good boy” cats believed their parents when they were telling them that kind of stuff. Guys like Reno had to get their revenge on those cats, I guess, and now the “bad boys’” day had come. We were the elite in the neighborhood. We were the people who were into all the happenings, and these cats were trying to get in.

  I guess we all kind of had it in for the righteous-doing folks in the neighborhood because they had messed with all of us when we were just kids coming up. They were always squealing on us and stuff like that. But I don’t think anybody had as much reason to get back at them as Reno and his family. Most of them were pretty nice. Bucky was a nice guy. Mac was kind of lame and didn’t have a lot of heart, but he was damn nice. He was a natural athlete. He was tall and lanky; he could play a whole lot of basketball, and he could run real fast. He had everything needed to become a good athlete, everything but confidence. Maybe if Miss Jamie had just shown him a little bit that she cared and tried to give him a little bit of self-respect, he would have made out all right. But she didn’t do that, so the cat just never had any heart.

  I guess it was harder on the girls than it was on anybody. Dixie started tricking when she was thirteen. She was big for her age, and “nice” ladies used to point at her and say, “Oh, ain’t that a shame.” But it wasn’t. The shame of it was that she had to do it or starve. When she got hip and went out there on the street and started turning tricks, she started eating and she stopped starving. And I thought, Shit, it ain’t no shame to stop starvin’. Hell, no.

  Babe, Dixie’s younger sister, was kind of ugly. She tried tricking, but she was just too ugly to make any money. Babe and Dixie were both sent to Hudson State Training School for Girls. When Dixie came out, she moved from Miss Jamie’s and got a nice little place downtown. She made it on her own. Babe was too young to make it, so she just kept going back to Hudson. She said that she liked it there. It was the first place she’d been where people didn’t make her feel she was out of place.

  When Dixie got to be thirteen, there was nobody to tell her not to trick. She figured that since her mother was laying so many cats, why shouldn’t she be tricking, especially if it was going to mean money and food. She used to feed the whole family sometimes, and that was a damn job, but the people in the neighborhood just kept looking down on her. They used to say that they didn’t want their daughters hanging out with Dixie. But some of their daughters were giving away more cunt than Dixie was selling.

  Reno was always in the Tombs for jostling. The Tombs used to be his winter home. He said he didn’t mind being down there in the wintertime, but he liked to be out on the streets in the fresh air and living and partying in the summertime, when so much was happening out on the streets. I guess to most people, it would have seemed like a hard life to be spending all your winters down in the Tombs, but it wasn’t so bad. Life out on the street for some people was harder. It was much harder to be out there working every day than to be in the Tombs. Jail wasn’t hard for anybody who knew how to live down there and get by.

  A few weeks after I moved to Hamilton Terrace, a panic was on. You couldn’t get any pot. Cocaine was pretty nice, but nobody used cocaine much but the hustlers, and it wasn’t an all-night thing with them. You could sell a hundred dollars’ worth of cocaine if you made all the bars up to 148th Street. You could sell it to the pimps, the whores, all the hustlers out there at night. But there weren’t many customers for cocaine on the street, not like pot. Cats who were working would hardly come up and give you five dollars for a tiny cap of cocaine or ten or twenty dollars for a little tin of cocaine. It was too expensive for the average person, and you couldn’t be selling it to the hustlers every night, because they couldn’t afford to be blowing all their money on cocaine.

  I had a little money in the bank, but I was scared that wasn’t going to last too long. So I got a job working at a joint called Hamburger Heaven. This was a real drag. It was something terrible. It was on Madison Avenue, and you had to be a real Tom. Most of the cats there were from the South and weren’t too hip. They hadn’t been in New York long, and they didn’t know anything. Most of them were really dumb—farmers.

  I stayed with that for a while. The thing that bothered me most—I didn’t know it would, because I’d never thought about it before—was that only white people came in there. I started off as a busboy. Later I became a waiter—white coat, black tie, and black pants. You had to smile at the white folks, hoping they’d throw a big tip on you. You had to watch what you said, and you had to watch the way you acted, because they had an old, dumbhead waiter who was a real Tom. If you said anything to one of the customers and didn’t put a “sir” on it, he’d run up there and say, “Boy, what’s wrong wit you?” and all this kind of simple shit. It was pretty hard to take, but I needed a job.

  I stayed on for about a year. Behind the panic coming on, I couldn’t get any pot, so I wasn’t dealing anything then. I still had my contacts, and as soon as stuff came in again, I would go back into business.

  The first time I heard the expression “baby” used by one cat to address another was up at Warwick in 1951. Gus Jackson used it. The term had a hip ring to it, a real colored ring. The first time I heard it, I knew right away I had to start using it. It was like saying, “Man, look at me. I’ve got masculinity to spare.” It was saying at the same time to the world, “I’m one of the hippest cats, one of the most uninhibited cats on the scene. I can say ‘baby’ to another cat, and he can say ’baby’ to me, and we can say it with strength in our voices.” If you could say it, this meant that you really had to be sure of yourself, sure of your masculinity.

  It seemed that everybody in my age group was saying it. The next thing I knew, older guys were saying it. Then just about everybody in Harlem was saying it, even the cats who weren’t so hip. It became just one of those things.

  The real hip thing about the “baby” term was that it was something that only colored cats could say the way it was supposed to be said. I’d heard gray boys trying it, but they couldn’t really do it. Only colored cats could give it the meaning that we all knew it had without ever mentioning it—the meaning of black masculinity.

  Before the Muslims, before I’d heard about the Coptic or anything like that, I remember getting high on the corner with a bunch of guys and watching the chicks go by, fine little girls, and saying, “Man, colored people must be somethin’ else!”

  Somebody’d say, “Yeah. How about that ? All those years, man, we was down on the plantation in those shacks, eating just potatoes and fat-back and chitterlin’s and greens, and look at what happened. We had Joe Louises and Jack Johnsons and Sugar Ray Robinsons and Henry Armstrongs, all that sort of thing.”

  Somebody’d say, “Yeah, man. Niggers must be some real strong people who just can’t be kept down. When you think about it, that’s really something great. Fatback, chitterlin’s, greens, and Joe Louis. Negroes are some beautiful people. Uh-huh. Fatback, chitterlin’s, greens, and Joe Louis … and beautiful black bitches.”

  Cats would come along with this “baby�
� thing. It was something that went over strong in the fifties with the jazz musicians and the hip set, the boxers, the dancers, the comedians, just about every set in Harlem. I think everybody said it real loud because they liked the way it sounded. It was always, “Hey, baby. How you doin’, baby?” in every phase of the Negro hip life. As a matter of fact, I went to a Negro lawyer’s office once, and he said, “Hey, baby. How you doin’?” I really felt at ease, really felt that we had something in common. I imagine there were many people in Harlem who didn’t feel they had too much in common with the Negro professionals, the doctors and lawyers and dentists and ministers. I know I didn’t. But to hear one of these people greet you with the street thing, the “Hey, baby”—and he knew how to say it—you felt as though you had something strong in common.

  I suppose it’s the same thing that almost all Negroes have in common, the fatback, chitterlings, and greens background. I suppose that regardless of what any Negro in America might do or how high he might rise in social status, he still has something in common with every other Negro. I doubt that they’re many, if any, gray people who could ever say “baby” to a Negro and make him feel that “me and this cat have got something going, something strong going.”

  In the fifties, when “baby” came around, it seemed to be the prel-ade to a whole new era in Harlem. It was the introduction to the era of black reflection. A fever started spreading. Perhaps the strong rising of the Muslim movement is something that helped to sustain or even usher in this era.

  I remember that in the early fifties, cats would stand on the corner and talk, just shooting the stuff, all the street-corner philosophers. Sometimes, it was a common topic—cats talking about gray chicks—and somebody might say something like, “Man, what can anybody see in a gray chick, when colored chicks are so fine; they got so much soul.” This was the coming of the “soul” thing too.

  “Soul” had started coming out of the churches and the nightclubs into the streets. Everybody started talking about “soul” as though it were something that they could see on people or a distinct characteristic of colored folks.

  Cats would say things like, “Man, gray chicks seem so stiff.” Many of them would say they couldn’t talk to them or would wonder how a cat who was used to being so for real with a chick could see anything in a gray girl. It seemed as though the mood of the day was turning toward the color thing.

  Everybody was really digging themselves and thinking and saying in their behavior, in every action, “Wow! Man, it’s a beautiful thing to be colored.” Everybody was saying, “Oh, the beauty of me! Look at me. I’m colored. And look at us. Aren’t we beautiful?”

  Around November of 1953, I went up to Wiltwyck. I hadn’t seen Papanek since I’d gotten out of Warwick for the last time. I guess I didn’t want to see him. I’d resigned myself to the fact that I was in street life for good. I’d be going to jail soon, and I’d be doing a lot of time. I liked Papanek, but we could only be but so tight, because I was going the crime way. That’s all there was to it.

  I went up to Wiltwyck for Thanksgiving to visit the people and see what the place looked like. Maybe it was a kind of homesickness that took me up there. When I left, Papanek drove me to Poughkeepsie to catch a train back to New York City.

  He said, “What are you doing, Claude? Are you going to school?”

  “No, I’m goin’ to school next term, when it starts in February. I’m gonna go to night school.” I was only joking with him.

  “Yeah, that’s good. You can really do it if you want to, and I’m glad to hear that you want to.”

  I looked at him and said to myself, Well, damn, this cat really believes me. I just didn’t think too much more of it after that.

  Before I left Wiltwyck, I had been talking to Nick and had told him that I was dealing pot. He was a hip guy and knew how life was on the streets and knew something about Harlem, so I just came out and told him, “Like, man, I’m dealin’ pot, and I’ll probably be in jail in another couple-a months or so. But right now, I’m doin’ good.”

  He could see I was doing good. He saw the way I dressed. After that, Nick started telling me about what Papanek was saying to people about me. He said, “Papanek really thinks a lot of you. He thinks you’re gonna make out just great. He keeps tellin’ people that Claude Brown is gonna be a real success.”

  I said, “Yeah, man. Uh-huh. I’m gon be a real success. I’m liable to be the biggest drug dealer in Harlem.… Nobody from here is gonna make it too far. I don’t think anybody is gonna make it farther than Floyd Patterson has made it.” Floyd was Golden Gloves champion at that time. I said, “Maybe Wiltwyck ought to be satisfied with that.”

  Nick finally said, “Well, Claude, you never know how the cards are stacked up for you, and if it’s in the cards, maybe Papanek is right.”

  I looked at Nick, and I thought, Damn, what the hell is wrong with Nick? He must be gettin’ old. Here I just told the cat that I was into the street life and was dealin’ pot and cocaine. I just looked at him and said, Poor Nick, to myself. Aloud I said, “Yeah, man. You never know,” and I just forgot about it until I got in the car with Papanek and he started asking that business about school.

  I’d always been aware throughout my delinquent life of the age thing, and I knew that I didn’t have a sheet yet. I knew that I didn’t have a criminal record as long as I was sent to the Wiltwycks and War-wicks. But I also knew that since I was sixteen and out on my own, the next time I was busted, I’d be fingerprinted. I’d have a sheet on me for the rest of my life. I thought, Yeah, I could still make it, but, shit, what would I want to make it for ? I knew I didn’t want to go to school, because I would have been too dumb and way behind everybody. I hadn’t been to school in so long; and when I was really in school, I played hookey all the time and didn’t learn anything. I couldn’t be going to anybody’s school as dumb as I was.

  I got back out on the streets, and I forgot about what I’d told Papanek on the ride from Wiltwyck to Poughkeepsie. I knew what I was going to do, and there was nothing to think about. When I got back to New York, I did the same things I’d been doing. I kept on working. I kept on dealing pot. I kept on dealing a little cocaine.

  One night, I was uptown on 149th Street. I had gone to see some cute little girl up that way. She was a beautiful little brown-skinned girl with long, jet-black hair. She looked like an Indian, so everybody called her Cherokee. I had come out of Cherokee’s house about twelve-thirty or one o’clock, and as I started into the hall leading to the outside, somebody from behind the stairs called my name.

  “Sonny!”

  I said, “Yeah,” and turned around. The first thing I saw was a gun in a hand. Then I saw a cat. I’d seen him around. They called him Limpy. I don’t know why. He had a sort of hunched back, but he didn’t have a limp.

  He just said, “Sonny, I want all your shit. I don’t want to have to kill you.”

  I knew he was a junkie, and I knew about junkies. When their habit comes down on them, you can’t play with them. It’s kill or be killed. I didn’t have a gun at the time, because last time I’d gotten busted, I’d lent my gun to Danny.

  “Look, Sonny, I don’t want to kill you, man. All I want is your shit, now. It’s, like, I gotta have it.” He started talking real fast. He seemed to be nervous but not scared. His habit was down on him, and he was trying to say all this before anything happened. He wanted to explain.

  I liked the way he respected me, and I thought maybe he was a little “religious.” He must have seen a look in my eye, and he said, “Now, look, nigger, I’m not scared-a you, and I’ll kill you if I have to. But I don’t want to. All I want is what you got on you.”

  I didn’t say anything, and he started toward me. I said, “Man, I ain’t got nothin’.”

  “Look, Sonny, I don’t want to hear that shit.” He put the gun up to my face.

  “If that’s all you want, man, go on and take it.”

  “Where is it, man? Don’t get crazy and try any
thing, because my habit’s down on me; I got to have some drugs. The way I see it right now, it’s you that’s standin’ between me and some drugs. And I’ll kill you, nigger, if you make me.”

  I told him where the drugs were. I had them in an eyeglass case in my inside jacket pocket.

  He reached in there, got it, and looked in it. He said, “Okay, like, you stay here, man. You in my neighborhood now, and I know the backyard; I know the people and everything around here, so don’t try and act like you crazy.”

  He told me to just stay there for about two minutes, and he ran in the backyard. He just took the drugs and was gone. He took about a hundred and ten dollars’ worth of coke and pot from me. He’d sell it for horse.

  I felt bad. Nobody had ever stuck me up or shit like that. I knew that this would get around, and you couldn’t deal any drugs if you were going to be letting cats stick you up and take it. I knew that I’d have to get a gun, and that when cats heard about it—cats like Bubba Williams, Big Freddie, Reno, and Tommy Holloway—they would also want to hear that the guy had been killed. This was the way the people in our set did things. You didn’t go around letting anybody stick you up. Shit, if you let somebody stick you up and go on living behind it, you didn’t have any business dealing drugs. Everybody who wanted some free drugs would come by and try to stick you up. I didn’t want to, but I knew I had to get another piece and find that cat.

  The cat pulled a fadeaway. Danny heard about it. Danny and I were still tight. He was still coming around. Cocaine couldn’t do much for Danny, because Danny was strung out on smack. When you’re using heroin, nothing else is going to do but so much for you. I used to always give Danny money to cop, or if I came by some horse by accident—somebody might have given me some for some cocaine—I used to give it to Danny. Danny was a cat who appreciated this sort of thing.