by Claude Brown
When I started going regularly, St. John gave me lessons in Amharic. It seemed really easy. I was still going to high school at night, and I thought that French was easy, as far as languages went, but Amharic was much easier than French. There were only thirteen characters in the alphabet. They sounded strange at first, primitive utterances like “ugg” and “uhh” and “omm.” I couldn’t make the sounds at first. I thought it was a crude language, but after I started practicing and getting the hang of it, they were just sounds. In order to write a word in Amharic, you’d take one letter and make a slight deviation. You’d just make one of the lines on “A” a little longer and you had the word “am.” After a while I was convinced that Amharic was the most melodic language I’d heard
I wanted to go to Africa more than anything else in the world. I wanted to visit the Holy Land, and I wanted to see where this thing had come from. I wanted to see the piece of the ark that they had in Ethiopia. I started feeling frustrated, because I knew I’d never get to Africa. It seemed to be the farthest place in the world. I wondered if anybody in Ethiopia knew anything about us in Harlem and what we were doing. I wondered if they really accepted us as a part of the thing.
After a while, I began to feel as though the whole thing was just a crazy masquerade. I thought that if I ever went up to Haile Selassie and bowed down and paid my respects to him in Amharic, he would probably look at me as if I were crazy and resent my using the language, being a Negro and all. The few Africans I’d met just didn’t seem to dig Negroes.
I started thinking, This is all a big farce. I started tapering off in my attendance. First I would go once a week, then every other week. Then I just stopped going altogether, after about four months.
I ran into Billy Dobbs at Broadway and Forty-seventh Street, in front of a frankfurter joint. We went in, and he said, “How you been, man?”
I said, “Okay. How you been?” I figured now was the time he was going to ask me why I had stopped coming to Father Ford’s, why I’d lost interest in the Coptic. He didn’t ask me. I sat there and looked at him. I noticed that he looked a little different. He had a two- or three-day beard on his face, and he looked a little greasy. He hadn’t looked this way since he had kicked his drug habit. As I sat there, I was thinking that he’d undergone some kind of change.
He asked me if I knew some girl by the name of Ann, who lived on 147th Street, a tall light-skinned girl, nice looking, kind of shapely. I said, “No, man. I don’t know her. Why?”
“She’s my brother Doug’s woman.”
I said, “Oh, yeah? How is Doug, and what’s he been doing?” I hadn’t seen Doug in about three or four years. The last time I saw him, he was jostling, working the Murphy. I never was tight with Doug. He was about five or six years older than me.
Billy said, “Man, he ain’t doin’ nothin’. The nigger is strung out. He’s not trying to kick his habit. He’s not trying to do anything.” At first, I didn’t pay much attention to the hostility in Billy’s voice. It seemed to be the ordinary animosity that a cat would have for a brother who was strung out, because when somebody in the family got strung out on stuff, everybody had to suffer. The junkie would steal from everybody in the family and scheme on everybody to get money to support his habit.
Then he said, “Ann is a damn nice girl.”
I didn’t know what this thing was all about, but I knew he wanted to talk about this girl. I said, “Yeah, man, she sounds like somethin’ nice to look at.”
“She’s more than that. She’s got a couple of kids, but she’s a nice girl. I mean …” Then he grabbed my arm and started getting excited about it. He said, “Sonny, I mean, she ain’t no bitch. She’s got a couple of kids, but she ain’t no bitch. She’s a nice girl. She’s a good-doin’ woman; she wants to be a good mother.”
“Yeah, uh-huh, I understand, man.”
“I knew her first.”
“Oh, yeah? You knew her first outta who?”
“I knew her before Doug met her. I knew the chick in high school. He came on and pulled her. He don’t know how to treat her, man. He treats her like she’s just an average old funky bitch out there. The cat gets high front of her. He comes up to her place, and he brings the junkies up there, you know? They all get high in front of her, in front of the kids. He leaves his works around there; he does all kinds of shit. He brings stolen goods up to the chick’s house and leaves it there.”
I said, “Yeah, well, you know how it is when a cat’s strung out. They don’t consider anybody too much. You know how that is. You were strung out too.” I got the feeling that Billy resented this, because he wanted me to give him some kind of support in what he was saying.
I just sat, and Billy went on ranting. “Sonny, the nigger steals everything she’s got, man. He takes the money she’s got to feed the kids with, and all kinds of things like that. He steals everything in the house, pawned her television, stuff like that.” I just sat there and didn’t say anything.
He looked at me as if to say, “Man, aren’t you going to agree with me or at least say something?” Then he said, “Now the nigger wants her to go out on the corner and sell body for him. He’s gon make a whore out of her just to support his habit. And she ain’t that kind of chick, man; she ain’t no bitch.”
I realized he wanted me to encourage him to take his brother’s woman, but I didn’t feel as though I had the right to do this. I couldn’t say anything.
He started pulling on my arm and telling me, “That nigger ain’t no good, man. He ain’t never treated no bitch good in his life.”
“Yeah, uh-huh. Look, Billy, have you talked to Father Ford about it?”
He looked at me and smiled. He said, “Come on, Sonny, man, you know how those people are in that Coptic thing.”
I got the impression that he had somehow been disillusioned with the Coptic faith. I said, “Look, man, I got to go,” and I guess I sounded a little angry when I said it.
He looked at me and said, “Okay, Sonny. I’m sorry, man.”
“There’s nothing to be sorry about. Look, Billy, I’ll see you around. And whatever you do, good luck to you.” I started walking out, and he called me.
He came up behind me after he paid for the franks and the orange drinks. He said, “Look, do you come uptown any more, man?”
“Yeah, I’m up there quite a lot, and I don’t see you around.”
“Do you ever come around the Low Hat Bar on Seventh Avenue?”
“The bar?” I was surprised, because I knew that he wasn’t drinking when I cut into him about six months before, at the beginning of the year.
“Yeah, man. I’m around there quite a lot now.”
I knew he had put down the Coptic faith. It seemed that it couldn’t hold anybody but for so long.
I didn’t see Billy any more until about a month later. I saw him uptown. He was with Ann, and he introduced me to her. She was a nice-looking girl; she looked like she was everything he had said she was. She might have been a good-doing woman and all that. Billy looked happy.
About four months later, I saw him standing on a corner nodding. I didn’t know what had happened, but I felt that he should have stayed with the Coptic faith. If nobody else should have, Billy should have And maybe he should have let his brother keep that good-doing woman.
That same year that I gave up that business with the Coptic faith Dunny, Tito, Alley Bush, and Mac got out of jail. They had all changed Harlem had changed on them a hell of a lot. They didn’t know what was going on. I felt a little sorry for them.
When I had gotten busted with Alley Bush on that last thing, I was glad that I was too young to go to some place like Coxsackie. He’d been gone three whole years. Three years was a long time; it was a real long time. I saw that it had done something to these cats’ lives. Alley Bush was only about sixteen when he went away, and now he was nineteen. He seemed real backward, as though he hadn’t grown any. Dunny seemed to think that the world had waited for him, just stood still while he w
as in Coxsackie. And Mac, he didn’t know exactly what he was going to do. He was lost.
I asked him, “Mac, what you gon do? You gon get a job or something?”
He said, “I don’t know, man. I guess I’ll deal drugs.” This was what everyone in the neighborhood was doing. Nobody seemed to know how to do anything else. He said, “All I know is that I’m gon move.”
They all looked up to me because I was on my own. I told them I hadn’t been living with my parents for about two years, and they all said, “Damn, Sonny, that’s great, man. I want to find me a place too. I want to get me a place somewhere.”
So I said, “Yeah, man, you can do it.”
I figured it would be a good thing if everybody got out of Harlem. But most of these guys didn’t know anything but Harlem, and they couldn’t go anywhere.
Mac had always been miserable living with his family, but he had never had the nerve to walk before. He could finally admit to himself that his mother was no good and that she had mistreated them all. This was something that was damn hard for him to do. Mac used to always try to defend her. When all the others kids in the family had rebelled, he was still defending her.
Mac said, “I don’t know what I’m gonna do, but I want to get me my own place. I want to have me a refrigerator that’s always full of food, you know?”
I said, “Yeah, man, I know.” There was never any food in the refrigerator in his house, and the kids had to fight and scheme on one another to eat up anything they got before anyone else came there, because it was so seldom that his mother ever bought any food. In a way, this was a lot for him to want, just an icebox full of food.
Tito said he wanted to deal drugs, make some money, and get a job. He said he’d have to find a place. His mother had never cared for him. He was always striving to make his mother like him and want him around. He always wanted to make her proud of him. He’d pull a big score and give her all the money he got from it. But if he got busted, she wouldn’t even come to jail to see him. He still tried to hold on to the belief that she cared for him.
Tito said he didn’t know where he was going to stay, and I said, “Look, aren’t you going to stay with your moms and your brother?”
He said, “Man, I don’t even know if they alive, and I don’t care. I hope they aren’t.”
“What you talking about? What kind of shit is that to be saying about your relatives?”
He said, “Yeah, man, I know it may sound hard to you, but you know something, Sonny? I was up in Woodburn for three years and three months, and I didn’t get one letter, man, not even around Christmastime, from my mother or my brother. It would be easier for me to take, man, if they were dead or something. I could understand that. But I’d hate to think of them being alive and couldn’t even send me a Christmas card. I don’t even want to know where they at, nothin’. I don’t want to know if they alive or not, ‘cause I’m afraid they just might be.”
I could understand his feelings. He said he was going to get into some drugs or something. He asked me if I knew somebody, and I told him that I’d cut myself loose from all that. I didn’t have any connections.
He said that was okay, because as soon as he had some money he knew where to go. He had cut into some people in jail who could turn him on to some nice weight. I gave him some money, and he gave it back to me. He said that he’d make it on his own, that all he wanted to do was get high. I took him to get high.
After that, it seemed that Tito, Dunny, Mac, and Alley Bush all went their separate ways. We were too old to hang out any more, and the Harlem we’d known had gone. In three years, it had all gone. Everybody had changed so much, and we didn’t need one another any more. There was nothing else for us to do but say good-bye to the old way of life that we had known and to try to find something new.
Dunny seemed to have matured less than all the other guys. I guess jail didn’t make much impression on Dunny because Dunny was hip, and he knew how to get along. He said it was hard. But if it was hard for him, it was probably twice as hard for everybody else.
Dunny told me once, “Sonny, don’t ever go to jail in New York State, because the jails, man, are all run by Northern crackers. You might as well be down in Alabama someplace if you’re gonna go to jail.” He had been in Coxsackie and Woodburn, and he said that in both of them it was the same thing.
He told me a whole lot of things. The guards—the hacks, as they called them—were hillbillies. These hillbillies disliked anybody who came there and acted too suave or had handkerchiefs that were expensive, anything like that. According to Dunny, a Negro who was too suave had a hell of a hard time to go. The hacks were always kicking his ass for no good reason.
He told me about one cat he had met up in Coxsackie. He said he was a young cat, about eighteen or nineteen, who had hoboed his way to New York from Texas. Dunny said that this cat’s name was Moe and that he had a whole lot of scars on him. Every time they’d catch him hoboing on trains or hitchhiking in some Southern town, they’d beat his ass. The sheriff or some of those cracker cops would beat him just for kicks. A lot of times, they put him in the hospital. He said it took Moe three months to get up here from Texas, because they were always kicking his ass and putting him in the hospital. In Alabama, they broke his leg and put him in jail for two days before anything was done for him. When Moe was at Coxsackie, he told Dunny that the jails in New York were no better, and maybe a little worse, than some of those he’d been in in the South.
Dunny said, “Yeah, Sonny, don’t ever go to jail in this state, because they even have segregated jails.”
I didn’t know this about New York State, but I believed he was telling the truth.
He said, “Yeah, they put the white boys one place and they put the niggers in another section. The niggers get all the shitty jobs, and the white boys … man, they live good. It’s just like it is out here.”
“Damn, man. It can’t be that bad. In jail, everybody’s doing time.”
“Yeah, man, but everybody isn’t doing the same kind of time. There’s white time in jail, and there’s nigger time in jail. And the worst kind of time you can do is nigger time. They’ve got more niggers up there than anything else, but niggers ain’t got no business in jail. They gon get fucked over worse than anybody.”
“Yeah, Dunny, I’m really gon do my damnedest to stay outta jail.” I told him I was going to evening high school, trying to get a diploma, and he said he was thinking about that too, “because there’s not much money out here.”
First of all, he had to get a job. He said as soon as he got a contact, he was going to deal drugs and make a little money. Then he could go to school. I told him it wasn’t such a good idea to put it off. He said, “Look, Sonny, I need some money, man. Can you give me eight hundred dollars right now?”
“No, man, I can’t.”
“I’ve got to have the money.” He said he wanted to get married to Trixie.
I said, “Okay, man, you go on and you get married and you deal drugs. But I think that if you gon deal drugs, and plan on gettin’ married behind that, you’re liable to get busted.” I told him that it was hot out there and that cats were getting busted right and left for dealing drugs. I told him it didn’t make sense. I said, “If you gon deal drugs, man, deal some cocaine or some pot, because you don’t have to be dealing with the junkies. The junkies are gonna start crowdin’ around your house and all that sort of business. If you deal drugs, they point the way for the police to go and bust you.”
He said that he had a way that he was going to avoid all that. He wasn’t going to have them coming to him. He would be at a certain place at certain hours; they’d come and cop there. He was going to have a new place every day or every week or something like that.
After that, I didn’t see Dunny too often. I wanted to tell him that I didn’t think it was a good idea for him to marry Trixie. But if a cat wants to do that, it’s kind of hard to tell him not to. Then again, I thought Trixie might have been in love with Dunny
. They might have been the perfect match.
I didn’t see too much of any of the guys after that. I was going on my way. These cats were out there searching for themselves, not knowing how they were going to make it, trying a whole lot of ways. The most I could do was wish them good luck.
I’d see one of the old cats occasionally. The first one I heard had gotten busted and was back in jail was Tito. I think Turk told me that Tito had gotten busted for drugs, and he was doing something like on to five in a Federal prison at Danbury, Connecticut. I knew that Tit didn’t mind. He didn’t have anything out on the street. He wasn’t in love with anybody. He had a couple of chicks, but they weren’t the kind of women that made a cat serious about not going to jail or that made a guy want to get a job and straighten out his life. He didn’t care about his family, and they didn’t care about him, so, actually, there was nothing to keep him out on the street.
I figured that Alley Bush would be the first to get busted, because Alley Bush was a little crazy. He used to do a lot of stupid things. He might have gotten busted for something silly like stealing apples or breaking a window in the police station. But Tito was the first one.
Mac was second. Mac got busted for dealing drugs too. These guys had made a little bit of money, but none of them stayed out there long. Everybody got busted within six months after they started dealing drugs. That’s how it was. These cats didn’t know what was really going on when they came out. All they knew was that they had to make some money, and since the money was in drugs, they were going to try to make money that way.
I felt sorry for them, but I knew that I couldn’t tell them anything. One reason was that we weren’t as tight as we used to be. We weren’t tight at all. I’d see Turk. He said he was going to become a professional fighter. I remember seeing Dunny and telling him that Turk was going to turn pro after he got out of the Air Force. Dunny laughed at it. He said, “Yeah, man, can you imagine that?” like it was a big joke. Turk had always had a lot of heart. I think the reason Dunny laughed was that Turk wasn’t that good with his hands. He always figured that Turk couldn’t even get started good with him, so how could he be a professional?