by Claude Brown
People were afraid to mess with Jim. He could do a whole lot of shit and get away with it. After a while, nobody would play any numbers with him. He would just go around shaking down people, and most of the people who used to like him started putting him down.
I didn’t think anybody would shoot him, not in Harlem. I listened to Danny tell me what had happened.
He said that Jim had been taking care of a cat’s gambling joint down on 112th Street. Some guys had come there looking for the cat who owned the joint. He had beaten somebody out of some money or cheated somebody. Since Jim was the substitute houseman and since the owner was his main man, he wasn’t going to turn them away and tell them to come back another time. He was going to find out what it was all about, and if it was trouble, well, Jim wasn’t afraid of anything.
Danny said that the cats knocked on the door and asked for Kelsey, the guy who was running the house.
Jim said he wasn’t there. He never opened the door, because it might have been the police. He asked what they wanted with Kelsey, and one cat said they had some business with him. Jim said, “You tell me the business.”
This cat, Eddie Carter, who was gunning for Kelsey, had heard about Jim. He knew that Jim was tight with Kelsey. He called through the door and said, “Look, is that you, Jim?”
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“Jim, this is Eddie. I got no squawk with you, man, but I’ve got to see Kelsey.”
Jim said, “Look, man, like, Kelsey’s my man, and if you got anything to see him about, you got to see me about it too.”
Eddie asked him, “Is that really the way you want it, Jim?”
Jim said, “Yeah, man, that’s the way it is.”
Danny said that he shot through the door six times. Four of the bullets caught Jim in the head. Jim was a big, rugged cat. Danny said they were .45 slugs, but I couldn’t believe that anybody with four .45 slugs in his head could open a door, walk out of a building, walk for a block, walk up to a policeman, and say, “I’m shot,” before he dropped dead.
That’s the way the story went. Danny said that everybody was expected to the funeral Tuesday night.
I said, “Yeah, man. Yeah, I’ll be there.”
We would come. We had to come, because we were all a part of that Harlem thing. I guess I’d want them to be at my funeral too. It was a scream. The junkies were there. I recall sitting there in the back wondering who was going to follow Jim. Chink and Dew, a whole lot of other cats, they were just nodding and nodding, scratching and carrying on. They had to be there. We had all come up together, and we were all a part of this thing, all a part of the Harlem scene in some way or another, all a part of Jim’s death. I looked at Jim. He seemed to have a frown on his face, a grimace. It looked as though he were in pain, as though he were hurt behind leaving so early.
Everybody passed around the coffin. The preacher said a whole lot of shit about “he was a good strong boy.” All this nonsense. All I could think about was how he had lived so quick. He was like the community Horatio Alger. He had made it big in a short period of time. He had become a real big-time gangster.
He was a funny cat. People said he could smell a crap game a mile away. I’d never been to one where Jim didn’t show if there was any real money there. I thought about all Jim’s funny ways and all the things he did, and there just wasn’t that much to say about him. So I could understand why the preacher had to preach such a bullshit sermon, because if he was to tell the truth, all he could say was, “Jim did some time in jail. He was a member of the old Buccaneers. He grew up on the streets of Harlem, running loose, like so many other of you boys back there nodding and scratching and carrying on.”
As a matter of fact, the preacher did make a crack about “some of us who will follow this coffin on” in his sermon. I felt it was uncalled for. Those colored preachers would do that sort of stuff.
He died so young, and he wasn’t even on stuff. It was okay for the junkies to die that young. Everybody expected them to. They were popping off right and left from an O.D. or from getting shot or from falling out of a window. Nobody paid it any attention. The thing at the funeral that seemed to get to most people was when Jim’s mother screamed out, “Oh, my baby’s gone! And he didn’t even use no dope.”
It seemed like a whole lot of people in the neighborhood, cats that we’d come up with, gone to school with, were being cooked in Sing Sing. It had become a thing with people in the neighborhood to talk to these cats’ mothers and relatives, cats who went to the electric chair in Sing Sing. I remember when I was younger, when I was at Warwick and right after I came out, I had heard about people I knew who had gone to the chair. We all wanted to know what they had said, but now we wanted to know what they said because we wanted to find out something for ourselves. We wanted to find out if it was worth it at the last minute, if they felt that it was worth it, now that they were going to die.
When I was younger, a few years after Warwick, I wanted to know just whether these cats were really hard. I think most of the guys my age looked upon them as heroes when they were getting cooked at Sing Sing. We wanted to know their last words. Somebody told me that when they cooked Lollipop—Lollipop was a cat who was kind of crazy, and we called him Lollipop because he liked candy—just before he left, he said, “Well, looks like Lolly’s had his last lick.” That was it. Everybody admired him for the way he went out. He didn’t scream or anything like that.
Years later, after so many guys from the neighborhood had gone to the chair up at Sing Sing, we’d gotten too old to be hero-worshipers any more. The cats we used to worship when we were younger, these were the cats we had to equal. But I think everybody was curious about whether or not it was worth it to kill somebody and save your name or your masculinity, defend whatever it was that had been offended—whether it was you or your woman or somebody in your family. It seemed as though nobody would know this any better than the cat who was going to pay with his life, and he wouldn’t know it any better than when he was getting ready to pay. If a cat could say it was worth it at the time he was going to give his life for it, who could challenge it ? Who could say that it wasn’t worth it? This was what everybody wanted to know.
The moment that somebody heard that anybody had gotten cooked, they would say, “Well, man, what did he say?”
I never heard of anybody ever saying it was worth it. They said a lot of things, but nobody ever said it was worth it.
One day Carole called me and said that Butch had fallen off a roof. Just about all the roofs were five stories high, and I couldn’t imagine anybody falling off a roof and living.
I went to the hospital to see Butch. He was all broken up. He didn’t know anything. He was hung up on one of those bed contraptions that seem to be holding people together with wires, holding each joint in place. He couldn’t talk, and a couple of days later he died.
I couldn’t think about it. Butch had always been such a strong person to me. He was one of the people whom I admired most when I was very young, before he got on drugs. I thought he was one of the strongest cats in the neighborhood. I thought if anybody could come back off drugs, it would be Butch. I just never thought that drugs were going to be a fatal thing with Butch and Danny. Maybe with Kid, but I just knew it wouldn’t be fatal with Danny and Butch. I just figured they were stronger than drugs. Maybe if Butch hadn’t fallen off that roof, he might have been strong enough to come back and kick. But he’d already been down to Kentucky about seven times, and he hadn’t kicked. He’d stayed in the Army for a short time, and he still hadn’t kicked.
I remember going by his house to see his mother afterward. I’d heard from a lot of the fellows that she didn’t want any of them coming around. There were stories that somebody had given him an O.D. on the roof and that they threw him off when they couldn’t bring him around. There were stories that he was trying to break into somebody’s apartment to steal some money to get some drugs and that some cats who were holding the rope had just run and let him d
rop in the backyard when they saw the police or when somebody came up on the roof.
When I walked into her house, there was sadness all through it. He was the only boy. His mother had three girls, and I suppose Butch was pretty close to her. I went in, and I said, “Look, Mrs. Crawford, I came to pay my respects.” She didn’t say anything for a long time. I didn’t know what to say, because I’d never been around the parents or the family of any friend of mine who had died. I’d never had a close friend die before, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to do.
I knew that as a friend I was supposed to be able to offer something. Even though we hadn’t been hanging out together much for the past few years, I was still close to Butch. I felt close to him. I doubt if any of the cats he had been hanging out with could have felt anything for his family, because they were junkies. They were always dying. These cats would run away and leave each other when one of them passed out from an overdose.
I used to wish I’d been there when it happened, whatever happened. Since I hadn’t been, I felt that all I could do now was try to give his family a word of comfort, say something that might help. After fumbling for words and sitting there feeling uncomfortable for what seemed like hours but really wasn’t more than fifteen minutes, I got up to go.
Just as I got up, Mrs. Crawford said in her West Indian accent, “Why, Sonny Boy, didn’t you start using the damn dope too? Why did my Butch have to use that damn dope and go and kill himself?” She said, “All of the boys on Eighth Avenue, just about, is killing their damn selves with that damn dope. Sonny Boy, why didn’t you?”
I told her I didn’t know. She didn’t say it, but I had the feeling she was saying, “Why aren’t you dead too? Why aren’t you dead instead of my Butch? Or if he has to be, why aren’t all you boys who came up on Eighth Avenue and did all the same things together? … You played hookey together, you stole together, and you stayed out together.” She knew these things, so I guess she felt we were all supposed to die together. I suppose that when a mother’s son dies, she hates all sons, all sons who are alive.
After I got out of there, I just couldn’t go to the funeral. Butch was a good friend of mine, but it was too much. I was getting tired of funerals. I was getting tired of seeing cats I knew die from overdoses, cats who had promising futures, who had good heads on their shoulders, cats I ran the streets with when we were in short pants. I was tired of seeing their familes looking at me and saying, “I wish he could have been like you,” or something like this. I was tired of being alive, not being strung out on dope at somebody’s funeral who had been strung out and finally died from it. I was tired of going there and watching what duji was doing to everybody.
People came back and told me about Butch’s funeral. I looked all over town that night for Danny. I finally went around to his parents’ house and found him there. His mother was happy to see me. Mrs. Rogers was always nice to me, and she always wanted me to keep hanging out with Danny. It was kind of hard, seeing as how he was a junkie, and junkies couldn’t be trusted too much.
Mrs. Rogers asked me if I had been to the funeral. I told her no. She said, “Why? He was a good friend of yours.” She looked at me for a long time, and she said, “Why didn’t you go to that boy’s funeral?” She was angry with me.
I said, “I saw him before, in the hospital, and I saw his family yesterday.” Then I saw myself, and I thought, Damn, I don’t have to explain to you. She didn’t know anything about him or me. She didn’t know anything about how I felt about him, and she had no business asking that. I got angry with myself for feeling as though I had to explain my not being at his funeral to her.
I could halfway understand her fears and her anger, because I guess she figured if I had forsaken Butch, perhaps I wouldn’t appear at Danny’s funeral if he should ever take an O.D. or be shot by a cop or fall off a roof. After a while, I just walked away from her and went into Danny’s room.
Danny wasn’t high. He was packing. I sat on the bed, and I said, “Danny, where you goin’?”
He said, “I’m going to Kentucky.”
I said, “Yeah, again, man?”
“Sonny, I think I’ve seen something.” He grabbed me by my shoulders as though he wanted me to know that he wasn’t just talking this time. He grabbed me by my shoulders and started squeezing. He said, “Sonny Boy, Sonny Boy, look at me.”
I looked at him; I thought he was going crazy for a while.
He said, “Sonny Boy, you know what my mama told me?”
I said “No, Danny.”
Danny told me that she had said that Butch’s death was the way God was giving the message to him and Kid. He said he was going to kick his habit. He was going to really kick it this time. He was going to Kentucky, and when he came back, he was going to be through with drugs.
I said, “Yeah, Danny. I think you just might do it this time.”
He sounded serious. I guess he had been serious all the other times too, although we had never really talked about it before.
I went with him to a cab. We talked about the time he and I and Butch and Kid had done things together—when I cooked shrimp in hair grease, that sort of thing.
As Danny got into the cab, I prayed for him. I found myself praying that he had gotten the message, if not from God, from someplace, at least into himself. I had the feeling that he’d found something.
When he got into the cab, he held out his hand and said, “Sonny Boy, say good-bye to Danny the Junkie, because when I come back, I’m gon be a new man. I’m gon be bigger than drugs. I’m gon be bigger than Harlem. I’m gon be bigger than anything that’s against me.”
When Danny got in the cab, I felt really alone. I decided to go uptown and look for Tony. I just had to find somebody, because Harlem had become sickening to me. Butch was gone; Danny was gone, in a way; and Kid, I felt that he would be following Butch soon.
I was wondering what had happened to the Harlem I used to know, to my Harlem, the Harlem of my youth, to our Harlem, Butch’s Harlem, Kid’s Harlem, Danny’s Harlem. Young Harlem, happy Harlem, Harlem before the plague. I had to find something to show me that my Harlem was still there, that it wasn’t just falling apart. I had to find something that was still intact.
I couldn’t find Tony or anybody else. I wanted to talk to Pimp. I wanted to find out just how he had taken this thing, if he was aware of what was going on. I went to my parents’ house and sat and talked with Pimp. I asked him if he knew that Butch had died. He said that he’d been to the funeral. He told me about somebody else on 146th Street, a guy I didn’t know, who had died from an O.D. about two weeks before.
I asked him if he was still drinking wine. He said that he was. Then I asked him if he’d started smoking yet, because he was about fifteen. He said that he smoked a cigarette now and then and that Mama said it was okay.
“Look, nigger, don’t play with me.”
“No, Sonny, you know I ain’t smokin’ no pot yet.”
“Why? Aren’t you curious? Come on, let’s get high for a first time.”
“No, I’ve found out what it was like. I know it. I’d rather spend my money on other things.”
Then I told him that I was going to come up the next day and spend the evening with him.
He said, “Yeah, I could show you a lot of things.”
Pimp tried to talk to me, so it seemed, but I don’t think I gave him the right answers. He told me things that I thought he didn’t really feel. He was trying to emulate me. He was tired of Dad nagging him. He said, “Man, that cat gets on my nerves.”
It seemed that his favorite conversation with me was tearing Dad down. I didn’t want to encourage him in it, but this was what he wanted, and if I didn’t do it, I felt as though I wasn’t giving him what he wanted. I couldn’t give him what he wanted, because he had to stay in that house and learn how to get along with Dad. He wasn’t old enough to get a job and move out. If he started staying out in the street and getting himself into trouble, he wouldn’t have had any
place to go or anything to do.
He would talk that talk, and I’d try to change the subject. Or I’d say, “Yeah, man, he seemed that way to me too at one time.”
Then, he’d say things like, “No, Sonny, you can’t say that now, because you outta here; and, like, you know, I know you didn’t feel that way when you were here. You been out of it for so long you forgot what it’s like.”
I knew that there was some truth to it, and I could almost agree with him. I did, to myself, but I couldn’t let him know. I couldn’t say, “Yeah, man, you’re right. You’re gonna have to get out. You’re gonna have to put the house down and get away from them.”
Pimp was getting big and wanted to declare his independence, bur he was just too young. I couldn’t encourage him, and my failure to encourage him was pulling us apart. I was afraid of this, but there was nothing I could do. I felt as though I was losing out on all fronts in Harlem. I was losing my bearings there, and I was losing whatever hold I’d had on my old stamping ground, my home town, my family, and my friends. I was just losing my place.
I decided to run. There was nothing else I could do. I was going to go back down to the Village and just stay there. I was going to try to find something new, because every time I went up there, it was almost sickening.
When I went back home after that night, I decided I wasn’t going to go uptown for a while.
I gave up pot. It used to make me think too much, and the things I thought about bothered me. So I wouldn’t get high. I just stayed down there in the Village. I went to school and read a lot. I drank a lot of wine. I tried to stay away from Harlem and forget it, but I couldn’t do that. I guess it was too much in my blood to stay away for long.
Something happened to me just about that time. I was staying downtown, and I’d call up to see how people were. There was a guy I knew from Washington Irving Evening High School. I called him up one night, and we were talking over the phone. I heard a record playing on a disc-jockey program coming from the Palm Café. I asked him, “Man, what’s that playing?”