Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

  He said, “Yeah, I found out why. I found out why, because half of those mother-fuckers in there was goin’ to church on Sunday, praying to a white god.”

  “Listen, Alley, the rebellion has gone along the wrong lines.”

  “Yeah, it’s goin’ along the wrong line, Sonny, because it’s still going along that white line. Those mother-fuckers don’t even know what they’re fighting in there. Half of those cats in jail, they were out here stealing from colored people. Now, ain’t that a fuckin’ shame? They were out in the street stealin’ from black people. You know, you’ve got niggers up there who’ve hit black men in the head and taken their wallets. You know why? It’s because all other Negroes see the way that the white man is treating the black man. He’s just got to try and treat them the same way too. Everybody’s down on Negroes because of what the white man has made this society think of Negroes.…

  “I’m damn surprised at you, Sonny. Man, all the way up, since the time I met you, you were a real hell raiser. As a matter of fact, the last time I got back to Harlem, I was looking for you, and I was hoping that you had gotten the message from Muhammad … because I knew you’d be good in this thing. But now, man, I don’t know. If anybody had ever told me that Claude Brown was talking that peaceful shit and he’s not angry, I would have said they were lying. I think one day, it’s gon come out, brother … the same shit. It’s gon come out in you too, and I think it’s gon come out so strong I’m gon be afraid to be around you. I think that stuff is gonna come out … that violent stuff in you, like that riot that you started up at Warwick.”

  I said, “Man, I told everybody I never started all that stuff.”

  He said, “Yeah, but you didn’t have to tell me. When they told me it was a riot between the Puerto Ricans and the colored cats, I just knew you had to be behind it, you know. That’s the way you arc, Sonny, and I think when you get the message from Muhammad, Harlem’s gon move, brother. We gon have fire on the streets, man.”

  “I’ve already got the message, Alley. And it’s not from Muhammad. As a matter of fact, I’m hoping I can give it to you, but I think I’ll have to wait until you become a little disenchanted with Muhammad.”

  He said, “Look, brother, I’ve got to go. I’m going to see you. I want you to stay out of these bars and stop giving that white devil our money.”

  “Yeah, Bashi, I just might think about that. All I’ve got to do is find me a good colored-owned bar.”

  Alley said, “Salaam aleichem.”

  “Salaam aleichem, Bashi.”

  It seemed as though over the next few years, say from 1955 through 1959, just about everybody who came out of jail came out a Muslim. By 1959, I had come to the conclusion that few Negroes could go to any of the city prisons in New York and not come out a Muslim.

  There was one common thing that I noticed about all the cats in the Muslim movement. They seemed to be the cats who were very uncertain about where they were, who they were, or what they were going to do, the cats who had never been able to find their groove. The guys who went to jail, they just knew they were criminals, and that’s all there was to it. They were never going to do anything to be good. They weren’t going to do anything halfway good. Nobody could tell them anything. They were guys who were messing up because they just didn’t know of any other way to let off steam. So the Muslim faith seems to have been just the thing for them.

  But the real cold criminals, none of those guys came out Muslims. After a while, this was a way you could tell cold hoods. If a guy was a real stickup artist, he was a real stickup artist. He didn’t mess with drugs; he didn’t mess with the Muslim faith; he didn’t mess with anything but crime.

  In a way, it was a good thing that the Muslim faith was gaining ground in Harlem, because it gave something to the junkies and to the prostitutes. When a junkie came out of jail or when he came back from getting a cure, it was the rule to just come back on the streets and do the same things that he had been doing all along. Now it was different.

  All the time before, the junkie never had anyplace to go when he came out of jail or out of the hospital. Now the junkies had a place to go, those who could accept the teachings of the Muslims. It wasn’t hard to accept, not for most of the junkies. Junkies weren’t cold criminals at heart, not Harlem junkies. Maybe this was why they became junkies—because they couldn’t see going into the crime life. I’ve seen very few real criminals that ever dabbled in drugs. If a guy was criminally inclined and started messing with drugs, he usually became a junkie and no longer a criminal. There was a difference. The junkie was a junkie first and above all other things. His criminal activities were merely means to an end.

  The Muslim movement was cleaning them up, giving them a lot of food for thought, feeding them with a philosophy—if you could call it that—that provided some type of moral fortitude. Now they had a place to go. They went to 125th Street and Seventh Avenue, started preaching the word and saying “Salaam aleichem” to everybody, and growing beards.

  It was a new thing, and it was a strong thing too. It was something, I suppose, that most cats in Harlem could accept, because it was an angry thing. I guess any angry organization would have more appeal to male Harlemites than any other kind of organization.

  Then, there was this thing in the new name. It was always fascinating to everybody. It was fascinating to the new recruits. It gave them a sense of being somebody, a sense of importance. All the time before they became Muslims, I suppose there was a feeling of insignificance that led them into self-destruction in one form or another. It was just not being anybody. Now they were somebody, a part of something. I suppose that’s all they needed.

  All the Muslims now felt as though 125th Street was theirs. It used to belong to the hustlers and the slicksters. They’re still there, but Seventh Avenue belongs to the Muslims. I think everybody knows this now. This group just came down and claimed it. They started setting up their stands and giving speeches. People started listening, and it just became known that if you wanted to hear a good antiwhite sermon on Saturday night, all you had to do was go to 125th Street and Seventh Avenue.

  It made everybody feel as though they had something. I suppose there were many people who had been mistreated by the white boss during the day. They could come out on Seventh Avenue and hear something that would be consoling … hear some of the “Buy Black” slogans and “hate the white devils” speeches.

  The Muslims would try to embarrass people who weren’t buying black or boycotting the white people. They weren’t gaining too much ground as far as getting the people to stop buying from white store owners, but they got them to start believing this thing about buying from colored, giving the money to colored, and that colored people should stick together.

  I recall one evening I had come uptown to see my folks. I had heard on the news and seen in the evening paper something about a riot down at the United Nations earlier that day.

  This was about the time that Patrice Lumumba had been killed. Lumumba had come to Harlem the summer before. The Muslims had gotten him to speak on 125th Street. Everybody in Harlem was pretty fond of Lumumba, especially the Black Muslims.

  The incident at the United Nations started off as a peaceful demonstration and turned into a riot. It was led by a young light-skinned fellow who—The New York Times said—had features more Arabic than Negroid, and since he was garbed in some royal Arabic attire, the paper speculated that he was most likely a prince or the son of some Arabian prince.

  When I got to my parents’ house that evening, Dad started telling me that he’d seen “that crazy boy who use to come around here.”

  I said, “Dad, which crazy boy is this?” because I knew he was always calling somebody crazy. He thought, at one time, that just about all my friends were crazy.

  He said, “You know, that crazy light-skin boy who was up at Wiltwyck with you and use to come here and have a party with Suzy Q. He use to kiss the dog all the time, that sort of thing.”

  “Oh! Y
ou mean Alley. I haven’t seen him in a little while. He’s down on 125th Street most of the time.”

  He said, “Oh, yeah. Well, I saw him on TV just a little while ago. He was down there at the UN, with some old funny-lookin’ clothes on, making some trouble about that man dying down there in Africa, that man Lumumba.”

  I said, “Oh! So that was Alley who started all that trouble down there at the UN? I wish I’d seen it.”

  Dad said, “The news will be back on at six-thirty, and they’ll probably show it again. So why don’t you hang around. You can see it. He was there. I know it was him, because I saw him, as big as day.”

  When the news came on, there was Alley looking very solemn. I knew he was very fond of Patrice Lumumba, as were all the Muslims who had met him when he was in New York. But I didn’t think Alley would go down to the United Nations and start a riot or anything like that. But evidently he did.

  He came back to Harlem a hero. The next day, The New York Times ran an article about Alley probably being the son of some Arabian prince. The Harlemites who knew him had a good laugh.

  It was a good thing for Alley, I suppose, because he was heard. He made the goddamn white man know that he was angry.

  The thing that I noticed about the Muslim faith that seemed to stand out over that of the Coptic was that people didn’t leave as soon. I would see guys being members of the Muslim faith for years. It just kept expanding; it was more and more. If I stayed away from Harlem for a few months, when I came back, there were many more people who hadn’t been Muslims when I left who were now Muslims, women and men. It was a thing that just seemed to keep expanding, and it also seemed to hold people.

  Then the Muslims started getting places in Harlem. They opened up dry cleaners with lower prices than other places. They opened up their restaurants. They had good food—fried chicken, pies, anything but pork. It was always delicious, because it was home cooking, but without the pork. The prices were very reasonable. As a matter of fact, they were more reasonable than just about any of the places in Harlem except the fish-and-chips joints. I supposed that eventually the Muslims would open up a fish-and-chips joint.

  The policemen in Harlem seemed to resent the Muslims, but they also seemed to be afraid of them. Especially the white police. They weren’t violent. I’d never seen or heard of any Muslim violence before i960. The policemen would come down, and they would watch. Every-body was afraid of the Muslims at first, all the politicians and the law-enforcement agents. They weren’t advocating overthrow of the government. They weren’t advocating riots. They weren’t advocating anything but economic boycott of white stores and giving money to colored enterprises. White policemen would stand around, and they would look at these people as if to say, “These niggers are dangerous, but what’s gonna happen?”

  Sometimes white people would come out, and they would stand around and listen. Many people who weren’t interested in what the Muslims were saying for the sake of enlightenment—the preachers or ministers or professional people in the community—would stand there and look around.

  Most people would just laugh at them, but as they started getting bigger crowds and having bigger rallies, people began to wonder, “Should they be stopped?”

  The police always looked as if they wanted to snatch them down from their soapboxes, but they never had any reason. Many times, these guys would stand up there and purposely single out white policemen and say, “Look at them. Look what they’re doing to us. They’ve got us all bunched up here in some little hole in the wall. That’s what this is. This is a hole in the wall on the island of Manhattan, where they stuck the majority of the black people. And they got their white devils to guard us. You see ‘cm? This is just like being in jail, and you people think you’re free.”

  One of them would point at a white policeman and say, “Look at the white devil, standing around us with a gun, and all we’re doing is talking to one another. Ain’t this somethin’? We can’t even talk to one another in this little hole in the wall that they call Harlem, and stuck us into, without them putting some guard at the door, guarding us with a gun. That’s what he’s doing there, standing up there near that lamppost. That’s just the way the guards do in jail. (The guy probably knew, because there was a good chance that he’d been in jail at one time or another.) Then all the people in the crowd would turn around and look at the cop.

  This was enough to scare the hell out of anybody. But there was nothing the cops could do to stop them, because they had permission to speak. Even the colored cops were made to feel uneasy. The speakers would point to them and say, “Yeah, you put a badge on some black men, and they’ll do anything that the white men wants ’em to do to other black men. You can put a badge on some black men, give them a gun, and tell them, ‘You go out there and guard your black brother. And if he does anything wrong, you shoot him.’”

  Most of the time, the colored policemen would laugh, or they would try to fake a laugh. Many times you could tell that they were pretending. The crowd would usually laugh at them when the Muslims said these things. Many people would turn around and look at the cops and laugh in their faces.

  Had the police tried to arrest them, I think everybody would have resented it. The Muslims had become a part of the community. They became the Seventh Avenue speakers. After a while, no one would come down there to speak but them. At the time when the Muslims first started coming down there, Seventh Avenue was something like Union Square, down on Fourteenth Street. All types of Harlem radicals would get up and speak. Sometimes they’d have debates. Sometimes one speaker would get up and vigorously contradict what the speaker before him had just said. Then, about 1956, people were afraid to get up on Seventh Avenue and try to contradict anything that the Muslims had said, because just about all the people down there around that time were Muslims, and they didn’t want to hear anything other than what the Muslims were saying. It was very hard for anybody to contradict anything that the Muslims were saying, because, right away, they would be labeled an Uncle Tom. What the Muslims were saying was a colored thing. They were saying, “Let’s get more and more for the black man.” Anybody who got up there and opposed this was a traitor to the race. He was saying, “Give to the white man, even more.”

  Then the Muslims started coming around with their newspapers. I think that even the people who weren’t interested in or were indifferent. to the Muslim movement sort of sympathized with them. If the Muslims were trying to sell papers, people would buy papers, just to give some money to the cause.

  The Black Muslim movement was closer to most Harlemites than any of the other organizations, much closer than the NAACP or the Urban League. These were the people who were right out there in the street with you. They had on suits, but their grammar wasn’t something that would make the average Negro on the street feel ill at ease. The words that they used were the same words that the people on the street used. You could associate these people with yourself; you knew some of them. Since the leaders of this group had come from the community, the crowd could identify with these people more readily than they could with anybody else.

  The Muslims were the home team. They were the people, talking for everyone. This was the first time that many of these people had ever seen the home boys get up and say anything in front of a crowd. This was the first time that many of these people had ever seen home boys who had been junkies, pimps, or thieves speak to crowds of people and sound so serious about it. It became a community thing.

  I suppose the Muslims did the same thing in other places, other Harlems throughout the nation. They must have gotten members and speakers right out of the community. This was a way in which they couldn’t lose, because when a guy got up on 125th Street and started talking about how Goldberg who’s got the haberdashery right there on the corner paid him something like forty dollars a week for two years, when he was a grown man, and how he started working for Brother So-and-So, down at his rib joint on 116th Street, and is now making seventy-five dollars a we
ek, everybody’s got to get up and say, “Yeah, yeah. That no-good Goldberg ought to go.”

  The people would holler, “Yeah! Yeah! Them goddamn Jews killed my Jesus too!” It’s easy to build up this sort of feeling among the home folks when one of the people in the neighborhood, the boy who used to work in the butcher store and became a Muslim, says, “Mr. Greenberg didn’t sell you any good meat. Some of that meat was years old. Some of that meat had been in there for days, and it was almost blue, because it had spoiled so long. But he’d shellac it or something to make it look like it was unspoiled, to make it look like it was almost fresh.”

  The people could believe these speakers. They knew them. They knew that they had worked at these places and that they should know what they were talking about. The Muslims became a very influential force in Harlem. They would never have been able to take over, because they couldn’t acquire any political power. For one thing, many of their recruits had been in jail. Once a person goes to jail for a felony, he loses his voting rights. But if the Muslims were to run a candidate for Congress in Harlem, there might be a good chance that they could get enough support. I know if they had done this in i960, they could have gotten quite a bit of support from sympathizers. Today they might stand an even better chance.

  I haven’t seen too many of my Muslim friends lately, but I imagine they’re still involved. I hear about the things that they’re doing now. The Muslim movement is a good thing. It’s good because these cats know they’re angry, and they’re letting everybody else know they’re angry. If they don’t do any more than let the nation know that there are black men in this country who are dangerously angry, then they’ve already served a purpose.

  15

  THERE WAS a piano in the auditorium at Washington Irving, and sometimes I used to go there in the evening and play it before I went up to my classes. I’d just tinkle on it softly so that I wouldn’t disturb anybody. One evening, when I was coming out of school I was stopped. Somebody just said, “Hey, there.” It was a girl, and she sounded as if she knew me.