by Claude Brown
The Morris brothers were hollering, “Sonny, you ain’t comin’ down? Man, you better not come down here any more, ‘cause I’m gon kick your ass.”
They would take turns hollering up and telling me all this. Dad was standing there in the doorway, and I had a headache. I had a real bad headache, but I knew that wasn’t going to help. Dad started telling me about running from somebody who was bigger than me. He said, “You’ll probably be short all your life, and little too. But that don’t mean you got to run from anybody. If you gon start runnin’ this early, you better be good at it, ‘cause you probably gon be runnin’ all your life.”
I just sat down there on the cold hallway tile, my head hurting.
Dad said, “Get up off that floor, boy.”
Mama came to the door and said, “Boy, what’s wrong with you?”
Dad said, “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with him. He just scared, that’s all. That’s what’s wrong with him. The thing that’s wrong is you try and pamper him too much. You stay away from that boy.”
Mama said, “That boy looks like he sick. Don’t be botherin’ him now. What you gettin’ ready to beat him for?”
Dad said, “Ain’t nobody gettin’ ready to beat him. I’m just gon beat him if he come in this house.”
Mama came in the hallway and put her arms around me and said, “Come on in the house and lay down.”
I went in and I laid down. I just got sicker until I went downstairs. They really did kick my ass. But it was all right. I didn’t feel sick any more.
I remember one time I hit a boy in the face with a bottle of Pepsi-Cola. I did it because I knew the older cats on 146th Street were watching me. The boy had messed with Carole. He had taken her candy from her and thrown it on the ground.
I came up to him and said, “Man, what you mess with my sister for?”
All the older guys were saying, “That’s that little boy who lives on Eighth Avenue. They call him Sonny Boy. We gon see somethin’ good out here now.”
There was a Pepsi-Cola truck there; they were unloading some crates. They were stacking up the crates to roll them inside. The boy who had hit Carole was kind of big and acted kind of mean. He had a stick in his hand, and he said, “Yeah, I did it, so what you gon do about it?”
I looked at him for a while, and he looked big. He was holding that stick like he meant to use it, so I snatched a Pepsi-Cola bottle and hit him right in the face. He grabbed his face and started crying. He fell down, and I started to hit him again, but the man who was unloading the Pepsi-Cola bottles grabbed me. He took the bottle away from me and shook me. He asked me if I was crazy or something.
All the guys on the corner started saying, “You better leave that boy alone,” and “Let go of that kid.” I guess he got kind of scared. He was white, and here were all these mean-looking colored cats talking about “Let go that kid” and looking at him. They weren’t asking him to let me go; they were telling him. He let me go.
Afterward, if I came by, they’d start saying, “Hey, Sonny Boy, how you doin’?” They’d ask me, “You kick anybody’s ass today?” I knew that they admired me for this, and I knew that I had to keep on doing it. This was the reputation I was making, and I had to keep living up to it every day that I came out of the house. Every day, there was a greater demand on me. I couldn’t beat the same little boys every day. They got bigger and bigger. I had to get more vicious as the cats got bigger. When the bigger guys started messing with you, you couldn’t hit them or give them a black eye or a bloody nose. You had to get a bottle or a stick or a knife. All the other cats out there on the streets expected this of me, and they gave me encouragement.
When I was about ten years old, the Forty Thieves—part of the Buccaneers—adopted me. Danny and Butch and Kid were already in it. Johnny Wilkes was older than Butch, and Butch was older than Danny and Kid. Johnny was an old Buccaneer. He had to be. When he came out on the streets in the early forties, it must have been twice as hard as it was a few years later. Harlem became less vicious from year to year, and it was hard when I first started coming out of the house, in 1944 and 1945, and raising all kinds of hell. It was something terrible out there on the streets.
Being one of the older Buccaneers, Johnny took Butch, Danny, and Kid as his fellows. He adopted them. I guess he liked the fact that they all admired him. They adopted me because I was a thief. I don’t know why or how I first started stealing. I remember it was Danny and Butch who were the first ones who took me up on the hill to the white stores and downtown. I had already started stealing in Harlem. It was before I started going to school, so it must have been about 1943. Danny used to steal money, and he used to take me to the show with him and buy me popcorn and potato chips. After a while, I stole money too. Stealing became something good. It was exciting. I don’t know what made it so exciting, but I liked it. I liked stealing more than I liked fighting.
I didn’t like fighting at first. But after a while, it got me a lot of praise and respect in the street. It was the fighting and the stealing that made me somebody. If I hadn’t fought or stolen, I would have been just another kid in the street. I put bandages on cats, and people would ask, “Who did that?” The older cats didn’t believe that a little boy had broke somebody’s arm by hitting him with a pipe or had hit somebody in the face with a bottle or had hit somebody in the head with a door hinge and put that big patch on his head. They didn’t believe things like this at first, but my name got around and they believed it.
I became the mascot of the Buccaneers. They adopted me, and they started teaching me things. At that time, they were just the street-corner hoodlums, the delinquents, the little teen-age gangsters of the future. They were outside of things, but they knew the people who were into things, all the older hustlers and the prostitutes, the bootleggers, the pimps, the numbers runners. They knew the professional thieves, the people who dealt the guns, the stickup artists, the people who sold reefers. I was learning how to make homemades and how to steal things and what reefers were. I was learning all the things that you needed to know in the streets. The main thing I was learning was our code.
We looked upon ourselves as the aristocracy of the community. We felt that we were the hippest people and that the other people didn’t know anything. When I was in the street with these people, we all had to live for one another. We had to live in a way that we would be respected by one another. We couldn’t let our friends think anything terrible of us, and we didn’t want to think anything bad about our friends.
I think everybody, even the good boys who stayed in the house, started growing into this manly thing, a man’s money, a man’s family, a man’s manhood. I felt so much older than most of the guys my age because I had been in it for a long time before they came out of the house. They were kids, and I felt like an old man. This was what made life easier on me in Harlem in the mid-fifties than it was for other cats my age, sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen. I had been through it. I didn’t have to prove anything any more, because I’d been proving myself for years and years and years.
In a way, I used to feel sorry for the cats coming out of the house at sixteen and seventeen. I knew they were afraid. I’d always been afraid too, and I wasn’t afraid of what they were afraid of. I wasn’t afraid of not using drugs. I sort of knew that I wouldn’t have to kill anybody.
I suppose I was luckier because, when I was young, I knew all the time that I couldn’t get in but so much trouble. If I had killed somebody when I was twelve or thirteen, I knew I couldn’t go to the chair; I knew they couldn’t send me to Sing Sing or anyplace like that.
Then the manhood thing started getting next to cats through drugs. I saw it so many times. Young cats wanted to take drugs because they used to listen to the way the junkies talked, with a drag in their voice. I used to see some of the younger cats on the corner trying to imitate the junkie drag, that harsh “Yeah, man” sort of thing.
It was changing. By 1957 the fight thing had just about gone. A man didn’t h
ave to prove himself with his hands as much as he had before. By then, when I met cats who had just come out of jail, out of Woodburn, Sing Sing, Coxsackie, and I asked about somebody, they’d say, “Oh, yeah, man, I think I know the cat,” and they would start describing him by features, his height, his voice, that sort of thing. But as late as 1953, if I asked somebody, “Do you know a cat by the name K.B.?” The guy would say, “Yeah. He’s left-handed, and he always fights with his left hand cocked back?”
This was something that was dying out. Now people would ask if you knew somebody by scars or the way he talked, something like that. The fighting thing didn’t seem to be important any more. The only thing that seemed to matter now, to my generation in Harlem, was drugs. Everybody looked at it as if it were inevitable. If you asked about somebody, a cat would say, “Oh, man, he’s still all right. He’s doin’ pretty good. He’s not strung out yet.”
I never got too involved with drugs, but it gave me a pretty painful moment. I was walking down Eighth Avenue, and I saw somebody across the street. It was a familiar shape and a familiar walk. My heart lit up.
The person looked like something was wrong with her, even though she was walking all right and still had her nice shape. It was Sugar. She was walking in the middle of the street.
I ran across the street and snatched her by the arm. I was happy. I knew she’d be happy to see me, because I hadn’t seen her in a long time. I said, “Sugar, hey, baby, what you doin’? You tryin’ to commit suicide or somethin’? Why don’t you just go and take some sleeping pills? I think it would be less painful, and it would be easier on the street cleaners.”
I expected her to grab me and hug me and be just as glad to see me, but she just looked around and said, “Oh, hi.” Her face looked bad. She looked old, like somebody who’d been crying a long time because they had lost somebody, like a member of the family had died.
I said, “What’s wrong, baby? What’s the matter?”
She looked at me and said, “You don’t know?”
“Uh-uh, uh-uh.”
I looked at her, and she said, “Yeah, baby, that’s the way it is. I’ve got a jones,” and she dropped her head.
“Well, anyway, come on out of the street.”
“I don’t care. Claude, I just had a bad time. You know a nigger named Cary who lives on 148th Street?”
“I don’t know him. Why?”
“He just beat me out of my last five dollars, and my jones is on me; it’s on me something terrible. I feel so sick.”
I was so hurt and stunned I just didn’t know what to do. I said, “Come on, Sugar, let me take you someplace where I know you can get some help. Look, there’s a man in East Harlem. His name is Reverend Eddie, and he’s been doing a lot of good work with young drug addicts, and I think he could help you. He could get you into Metropolitan Hospital or Manhattan General, one of the places where they’ve started treating drug addicts. Come on, you got to get a cure, baby. This life is not for you.”
I pulled on her, and she said, “Claude, Claude, I’m sick. There’s only one thing you can do for me if you really want to help me. There’s only one thing anybody can do for me right now, and that’s loan me five dollars to get me some stuff, because I feel like I’m dyin’. Oh, Lord, I feel so bad.”
I looked at her, and she was a part of my childhood. I just couldn’t stand to see her suffer. I only had one five-dollar bill and some change. I said, “Look, baby, why don’t you get off this thing? Because it’s gonna be the same story tomorrow. You’ll just be delaying it until another day.”
“Look, Claude, I’ll go anyplace with you, but I can’t go now. In a little while, I’m gon be laying down in the street there holdin’ my stomach and hopin’ a car runs over me before the pains get any worse.”
“Shit. Come on with me. I’m not gon give you another five dollars to go and give it to somebody and get bit again. Come on with me. Come on to 144th Street. I know somebody there who’s got some drugs, and I understand it’s pretty good. I’ll get you some drugs and take care of that. Then we’re gon see about doin’ something for you.”
“Okay. You get me high and I’ll go anyplace with you after that. But first I want to go downtown. You could come with me, down around Times Square. I really appreciate this, and I’m gonna give you ten dollars.”
“Shit. You gon give me ten dollars? Why don’t you just go on and …”
“No, I ain’t got the money now. I got to go down there and turn a trick. I’ll give you ten dollars, or I’ll give you twenty dollars if you need some money. I’ll turn a few tricks for you tonight.”
I wanted to hit her when she said that, because it meant she thought of me as somebody who might want her to turn a trick, somebody who would accept her turning a trick for him. But I knew that it wasn’t so much me. This was what she’d been into, and she’d probably turned a whole lot of tricks. She probably thought of everybody that way now, as somebody who she could turn a trick for. I suppose that’s all anybody had wanted from her for a long time.
I was hurt. I said, “Come on.” I took her to Ruby’s, on 144th Street. Ruby was a chick I knew who was dealing drugs. I said, “Look, you can get high right here.”
I told Ruby who Sugar was. I introduced Sugar to her. I told her I wanted to get Sugar high. Ruby said, “No! I’m surprised. Damn, Sonny, you sure waited a long time to start dabblin’, didn’t you?”
“No, baby, it’s not for me; it’s for Sugar.”
She said, “Oh, yeah? She looks like she’s in a bad way.”
Ruby told us to sit down in the living room. She had a bent-up spoon that she cooked stuff in for the poison people. She cooked some for Sugar. While Sugar was waiting for her to cook it, I asked her, “Sugar, what’s been happening? The last time I heard about you, you were dancing with a popular troupe, and you were doin’ good.”
“Yeah, I was dancin’, but I haven’t done any dancin’ in a long time.”
“I guess not. What happened ? You were doin’ so good. You had finished high school. I thought you were really gonna do things; you were a damn good girl.” I asked her what had happened to the young cat that she had eyes for when I wanted her to be my woman, about five years before.
“Oh, that was just one of those childish flames. It burned itself out.”
“Yeah? I heard you’d gotten married. Wasn’t it to him?”
“No, it wasn’t to him. He wasn’t mature enough for anybody to marry.”
“Well, what happened with the marriage?”
“It’s a long story, Claude, but I guess I owe it to you.”
“No, baby, you don’t owe me a thing. Save it if that’s the way you feel about it.”
“No, I want to tell it to you anyway. I guess you’re the one I’ve been waiting to tell it to.… Do you remember a boy on 149th Street by the name of Melvin Jackson?”
“No, I don’t know him.”
“Anyway, he use to be in a lot of trouble, too, around the same time that you were raisin’ all that hell. I think he was a year or two older than you. When you were at Warwick, he was at Coxsackie. He came out about a year after you did.
“He was a lonely sort of guy. He seemed to really need somebody. Claude, you know what I think? I think all my life, I’d been looking for somebody who needed somebody real bad, and who could need me. Who could need all of me and everything that I had to give him.”
I said, “Yeah, baby, I think I know.”
“We got married in ‘55. For about a year, we were happy. Marriage was good. I thought this was something that would last and last for a long time.”
“Yeah.”
“Claude, I hope you don’t have anyplace to go tonight. The first thing I want to do after I get high is go down and turn a trick and get some money.”
“Look girl, stop saying that. Stop saying that before I beat your ass.”
She looked at me and smiled and said, “Yeah, won’t you do it? I think I’d like that, just for old time’s sake.”
And she went on with telling me about the marriage.
“For the first year, we were happy. He was working and I was working. After about a year, he started going out nights and stayin’ real late. He’d get up out of bed at one o’clock in the morning, go out, and come back about four or five. At first, I thought it was another woman or something like that. I thought it was for a long time, until I found out.
“At first he just started goin’ out and stayin’ for a few hours. After a while, he started goin’ out at night or early in the morning and not comin’ back for two and three days. I got worried. After a while, I couldn’t work. I had a miscarriage about a month before he started staying out all night long. I was kind of sick. I was weak, and I would get worried and couldn’t go to work in the morning.
“Once, when he came home, I asked him where he’d been. He just said, ‘had to go out, baby.’ I knew he knew a whole lot of shady people, because he’d been in street life for a long time, most of his life. And he knew a whole lot of characters who I didn’t want him to bring around the house and who he was respectful enough not to bring around.
“I didn’t ask him too much about these people. I didn’t try to butt into his business, because we just had this understanding. We never talked about it. That’s just the way we understood each other.
“I knew him, and I knew he loved me. I think he loved me more than anybody ever loved me in all my life before. That’s what made it so bad when he started staying out at night. All that love I had finally found, the love that I’d been seekin’ so strongly all my life, was being threatened. It made me sick. I’d wake up in the morning, feel that he wasn’t there, and I became so scared I felt like a little kid hidin’ in the closet from monsters.