Manchild in the Promised Land (43 page)

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 have 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.

“My eyes just started pushin' the water out. Heat waves would swell up and come out of my eyes in tears. That's how I felt. It wasn't a thing of body with him. It wasn't a thing of this flesh stuff. He didn't even know that I had a body when I first met him. He didn't like me; he couldn't stand having me around. One day, he said something kind, and I realized that it wasn't just me that he disliked. It was everybody. And he was lonely. He needed somebody, and I knew that the somebody could've been me.

“I'd never felt so un-alone, you know, until I met this guy. I never felt as though I had anybody or anything but him. I would've lived with him or done anything he asked. I would've went out on the street corners and tricked for him if that was what he wanted me to do, because he became a part of me, and I wanted him just that badly.

“But he really loved me; he didn't expect anything out of me. That wasn't the worst part of it. I thought he was getting money from me to give to another woman, because sometimes he'd be going into my handbag in the middle of the night, and he'd take money out of it. Then he'd be gone. Maybe he'd come back later that night, or maybe
he wouldn't come back until the next day or two days later. It scared me.