Manchild in the Promised Land (20 page)

All the other cats looked at me like I was crazy or something, as if to say, “Sonny, what you saying', what you doin'? You tryin' to git us sent somewhere for life?” Nobody really said anything, but this was all in the look, and I felt sorry for what I had said. I felt sorry because the other cats were there too; in a way, I was talking for them, or against them, and these cats wanted to get back on that street scene. I just didn't care too much about being on the streets myself. I guess I was just fed up with it all.

But when the judge looked at me and shook his head, with his eyes looking real sad, I knew he was going to put me and all the rest of the guys back on the street. He said, after shaking his head, “Yes, son, I guess I'm giving you the same chance you had before. But I hope that you won't use it as you did the last time.” Then he said, “Mothers and fathers, you can take your sons home now.”

Everybody rushed out like they were scared. Parents looked at me as if to say, “Let me git my boy outta here before this little crazy nigger sends everybody someplace.” Alley Bush's father grabbed him by the shoulder and almost ran out of the courtroom.

I guess I was about the last one out. I wasn't too anxious to go. I had a feeling that something kind of bad was in store for me out on the streets. Mama was always having feelings. I guess feelings ran in our family, feelings about bad things anyway. Nobody said anything to me about what I had said in the courtroom, but I knew they talked about it among themselves. We kept on hanging out together, mainly because all of us needed one another and didn't have anybody else to hang out with. So we just had to keep on doing the same things. We had to keep on stealing, keep on playing hookey, keep on playing around with Trixie and Jackie and just see what would happen.

I don't think anybody was too happy. It was a bad time. It was a bad time for me because I was sick. I was sick of being at home. I was sick of the new Harlem, the Harlem I didn't know, the Harlem that I couldn't find my place in. When I was at Wiltwyck, I used to tell everybody jokingly—but I halfway believed it—that Harlem was the capital of the world. I remember telling Nick that there was no greater place in all this world than Harlem. We almost got in a fight one time because he started telling me about people in Harlem suffering and that sort of thing. I was hurt when he told me that. I guess Nick knew it was the truth of it all that hurt me.

The Harlem that I had dreamed of and wanted to get back to seemed gone. I didn't know this place. I didn't know what to do here. I was like a stranger. I longed to get back into Wiltwyck. I wanted to get back to Wiltwyck so bad, even though I knew I couldn't. I used to stay in my room and lie on my bed in the dark. Girls would come around, but I didn't want to be bothered with them. Mama used to worry about me. I guess she was scared—she figured I had been with nothing but boys for a long time, maybe too long.

I was thirteen. That had something to do with it. I was going through some kind of change. But I knew that more than anything in the world, I wanted to get back to Wiltwyck. Wiltwyck had become home, and I felt like a butterfly trying to go back into the cocoon.

I started going down to the Wiltwyck office on 125th Street to talk to Mr. Papanek. First I went down there to see my social worker, Mr. Moore, and he wasn't in. I spoke to Papanek. He was a real nice cat. Nobody could hate him, but we'd never been but so tight—not while I was up at Wiltwyck. I was too busy trying to get my own way to see what a nice cat he really was. He wasn't a pushover kind of cat. He was just a nice cat, a nice cat that you had to respect. When most people say “nice,” they mean someone you can run over or get your way with, but he wasn't nice that way. The cat was nice in his mind. The way he looked at life and people was beautiful.

It was about this time that I discovered Papanek's secret. It was really very simple. He had the ability to see everybody as they really are—just people, no more and no less. Also he saw children as people, little young people with individuality, not as some separate group of beings called children, dominated by the so-called adult world. Having this ability alone made him a giant at understanding people; being Papanek … made him irresistibly likable.

Papanek had a way of making the whole world seem beautiful and making everybody in life seem to be important. And he made life important from the standpoint of the individual. He made life big, but only in relation to people. He made it go over a whole lot of little nonsensical things like color, like handicaps, like looks. The cat was so beautiful, I stopped asking for Mr. Moore when I went down there. I would ask if Papanek was in, and Papanek would sit and talk to me, always smiling, and looking funny at first. He'd always come out with a smile; he'd look at me, and if I looked sad, he wouldn't smile. We'd just sit and talk about things. I remember one time I went to the Wiltwyck office and sat for a while. The receptionist asked me who I was waiting for, and I told her I was waiting to see Papanek. She told me Papanek wasn't in. I felt hurt and kind of mad. I remembered our old rivalry, and I said, “I didn't want to see the cat anyway.” But I knew I was lying to myself, and I felt kind of bad that he wasn't there.

I used to think the cat was a little crazy at first, some of the things he said, but it's hard to really see somebody as being crazy when you like them and know that they mean well. After a while, I didn't think he was
crazy any more. I thought he was real smart. He knew so much about nearly everything. He was always telling me things. If I came in saying, “I'm not gonna make it; I gotta git outta this place,” he knew I wanted to go back to Wiltwyck. But he seemed determined to force me to make it out on the street.

I had finally found somebody who cared. I'd go in there and tell him, “Now, look, I gotta git away. I'm gon run away from home.”

And he'd say, “Well, Claude, don't you love your mother?”

I'd say, “Yeah, man, but it's not just me and her at the house, and I gotta stay there wit all-a 'em. Like, my father too, and me and this cat can't make it. He got one more time to kick my ass and we gon go to war, and somebody in that house is gonna die.”

Papanek would look sad and really disappointed. He'd say, “That's bad. I don't think you really mean that.” And we'd talk about it, talk and talk and talk, until the cat had me saying that I didn't really mean it. He would give me all kinds of plans for getting along with my father, like just saying nice things to him or only talking to him when he wasn't tired. It seemed all right, but Papanek didn't know my father, and that nigger was something that would have been hell for the devil to get along with.

I had to talk to this cat. He was real stable, and everybody else was crazy. Papanek was the only one I knew who seemed to know what was really going on. When Papanek wasn't in the office, it used to really upset me, because I never went to see him unless there was something really bothering me. Most of the time, I never told him what was really bothering me, but we would talk about something. And regardless of what we talked about, it always made me feel better. I usually didn't tell Papanek what was really bothering me; I didn't think he could understand. He had come up in someplace called Austria, and I figured there wasn't a colored person in the whole country. So what could he know about coming up in Harlem ?

I was growing up now, and people were going to expect things from me. I would soon be expected to kill a nigger if he mistreated me, like Rock, Bubba Williams, and Dewdrop had.

Everybody knew these cats were killers. Nobody messed with them. If anybody messed with them or their family or friends, they had to kill them. I knew now that I had to keep up with these cats; if I didn't, I would lose my respect in the neighborhood. I had to keep my respect
because I had to take care of Pimp and Carole and Margie. I was the big brother in the family. I couldn't be running and getting somebody after some cat who messed with me.

I knew that I was going to have to get a gun sooner or later and that I was going to have to make my new rep and take my place along with the bad niggers of the community. Johnny D. was always talking stuff about men in Harlem, saying that the only way men could be friends was that each one had to stay off his friend's toe, but that if a friend got on a friend's toe, you had to be able to tell each other about it and go on being friends. If you couldn't do that, you'd have to go to war, and war certainly ends friendship.

It made life seem so hard. Sometimes I just wanted to give it up. There were all kinds of things bothering me. I used to go over Trixie's house, and Trixie would say, “You little jive nigger, I'd screw you to death.” And I'd look at her, and all those curves, and I believed it. I really believed it.

The bad nigger thing really had me going. I remember Johnny saying that the only thing in life a bad nigger was scared of was living too long. This just meant that if you were going to be respected in Harlem, you had to be a bad nigger; and if you were going to be a bad nigger, you had to be ready to die. I wasn't ready to do any of that stuff. But I had to. I had to act crazy.

I had to stay straight with the cats I knew because I didn't have anybody else, and I didn't have anyplace else to go, unless I hung out over in Brooklyn, and in Brooklyn it was the same thing. You had to get into this thing with the whores, and sooner or later you had to use drugs, and sooner or later you had to shoot somebody or do something crazy like that. And I didn't want to. I used to carry a knife, but I knew I couldn't kill anybody with a knife. I couldn't cut … the sight of blood used to do something to me. Dad used to carry a knife. Maybe that was why I was so scared of him. Every time I looked at that big scar on his neck where somebody had tried to cut his throat, it scared me. I never wanted a scar like that. But there was no place to go, and it seemed like all life was just closing in on me and squashing me to death.

Sometimes I used to get headaches thinking about it. I used to get sick. I couldn't get up. And sometimes I'd just jump up out of the bed and run out and say, “C'mon, man, let's go steal somethin'!” I'd get Turk, I'd get Tito, I'd get anybody who was around. I'd say, “C'mon,
man, let's go pull a score.” It seemed like the only way I could get away.

Sometimes I'd just play hookey from school and go down to the Wiltwyck office and see Papanek. And when he saw that I was feeling kind of bad about something, he used to tell me little stories.

Once I told him, “I don't think I'm gonna stay on the street, Papanek, not for much longer. I don't think I'll see Christmas on the streets.”

I knew he really believed me, but he was trying to act like he didn't. He said, acting jovial, “Claude, oh, you're just being too pessimistic about it. If any boy from Wiltwyck can stay on the streets, if any boy is ready to come home and to get along in New York City in the school system and in the society of New York, it's Claude Brown.”

He kept looking at me, and I got the feeling all the while that he was trying to see if I believed it and was going to gauge his belief by just how much of it I seemed to be believing. It made me smile at him, and I felt self-conscious about smiling at him, because at one time I'd thought he was funny or crazy, but I didn't feel that way about him any more. I couldn't afford to; he was all I had then.

He was the first person I ever wanted to do anything for. I wanted to stay out there so that Papanek would be right. I wanted to do this for him. I wanted to stay in the streets.

He would tell me things like, “Claude, you're being pessimistic, and this is one way to lose out on anything. Did I ever tell you about two frogs who were sitting up on a milk vat and fell in?”

I said, “No, you never told me.”

He went on looking jovial and said, “Well, there were two frogs sitting on a milk vat one time. The frogs fell into the milk vat. It was very deep. They kept swimming and swimming around, and they couldn't get out. They couldn't climb out because they were too far down. One frog said, ‘Oh, I can't make it, and I'm going to give up.' And the other frog kept swimming and swimming. His arms became more and more tired, and it was harder and harder and harder for him to swim. Then he couldn't do another stroke. He couldn't throw one more arm into the milk. He kept trying and trying; it seemed as if the milk was getting hard and heavy. He kept trying; he knows that he's going to die, but as long as he's got this little bit of life in him, he's going to keep on swimming. On his last stroke, it seemed as though he had to pull a whole ocean back, but he did it and found himself sitting on top of a vat of butter. “

I'll always remember that story.

After that time in court when the judge gave us that same chance all over again, I went home and stayed in the streets for a while, but I always had a feeling that something was going to happen. I knew that it was just going to be a little while till something happened and I wouldn't be here any longer.

One day, Mama came in the house. She'd had one of her feelings; she was always having them. She came running into the house when she came home from work this day, and she was hollering, “Sonny Boy, Sonny Boy!”

I came out of my room and said, “Yeah, Mama, what?”

She was breathing hard. She said, “Oh, I had one-a those feelin's. My eye was jumpin'.”

I said, “Yeah, Mama you always havin' some kinda feelin's.”

She said, “I'm glad you here. Everything must be all right. Where's the other children?”

She always figured that if anything had happened to anybody, it would be me. Since I was in the house, everything must have been all right. After a while, she settled down, and we stopped talking about her feelings, then somebody came upstairs and told her she had hit the number.

We just forgot all about her feelings. I forgot about her feelings. Mama forgot about her feelings. Everybody did. She started concentrating on the number. This was the first time she'd had a hit in a long time. They bought some liquor. Mama and Dad started drinking; everybody started making a lot of noise and playing records.