Manchild in the Promised Land (25 page)

After a few weeks, they told me that my work assignment would be Mr. Cohen's house. One of the nice things about that was that I got to know Mrs. Cohen. She was the nicest lady I'd ever met. She was a real person. I didn't get to know Mr. Cohen too well. I'd see the cat, and he'd talk. I'd see him in the morning when I first came in, before he left, and I'd see him in the afternoon if he came home for lunch. But I didn't really know him. I only got to know Mrs. Cohen, the cook, and the chauffeur.

Mrs. Cohen was always telling me that I could be somebody, that I could go to school and do anything I wanted to, because I had a good head on my shoulders. I thought she was a nice person, but I didn't think she was really seeing me as I was. She'd go on and on, and I'd say, “Yeah, uh-huh, yeah, Mrs. Cohen.” I didn't believe it. She would get real excited about it and would start telling me about the great future that lay ahead for me. She tried to get me interested in it, but I couldn't tell her how I really felt about it. Even though I was in the third term, I knew I wasn't going to finish high school. I didn't even know anybody who had finished high school. Cats around my way just didn't do that. It wasn't for me; it was for some other people, that high-school business.

She said that I could even go to college if I wanted to. She was nice,
but she didn't know what was happening. I couldn't tell her that all cats like me ever did was smoke reefers and steal and fight and maybe eventually get killed. I couldn't tell her that I wasn't going anyplace but to jail or someplace like it. She'd say all these nice things, and I'd try to treat her nice and pretend I believed what she was saying. I couldn't have made her understand that this stuff was impossible for me. Cats who went to college, these were the boys who were in school and playing ball and reading and stuff like that when cats like me were smoking pot and having gang fights and running around with little funky girls. Those other cats were the kind who went to school. Cats like me, they didn't do anything but go to jail.

One time she got Mr. Cohen to talk to me about staying at Warwick, going to high school in the town there until I finished, and then going back to New York after I had gotten my high-school diploma. He just suggested it. He tried to show me that it wasn't being forced on me. I said, “Yeah, Mr. Cohen; like, that's nice,” but I think he understood that I wasn't interested in this stuff. He wasn't really going to try too hard, because if I wasn't interested, there was nothing he could do.

All I wanted to do was get back to Harlem. I wanted to get back to Jackie and pot and the streets and stealing. This was my way of life. I couldn't take it for too long when I was there, but this was all I knew. There was nothing else. I wouldn't have known how to stay at Warwick and go to school. I didn't tell him that. When he asked me about staying and going to school, I just said, “Yeah, that would be nice.” He saw that I wasn't what you could call excited about it.

One day, Mrs. Cohen gave me a book. It was an autobiography of some woman by the name of Mary McLeod Bethune. When she gave it to me, she said, “Here's something you might like to read.” Before that, I had just read pocketbooks. I'd stopped reading comic books, but I was reading the trashy pocketbooks, stuff like
Duke, The Golden Spike,
that kind of nonsense.

I just took it and said, “Yeah, uh-huh.” I saw the title on it, but I didn't know who the woman was. I just took it because Mrs. Cohen had given it to me. I said, “Yeah, I'll read it,” and I read it because I figured she might ask about it, and I'd have to know something. It wasn't too bad. I felt that I knew something; I knew who Mary McLeod Bethune was, and I figured I probably knew as much about her as anybody else who knew anything about her, after reading a book about her whole life. Anyway, I felt a little smart afterward.

Then Mrs. Cohen gave me other books, usually about people, outstanding
people. She gave me a book on Jackie Robinson and on Sugar Ray Robinson. She gave me a book on Einstein and a book on Albert Schweitzer. I read all these books, and I liked them. After a while, I started asking her for books, and I started reading more and more and liking it more and more.

After reading about a lot of these people, I started getting ideas about life. I couldn't talk to the cats in the cottage about the people in the books I was reading. I could talk to them about Jackie Robinson and Sugar Ray Robinson, but everybody knew about them, and there was nothing new to say. But this Einstein was a cat who really seemed to know how to live. He didn't seem to care what people thought about him. Nobody could come up to him and say, “Look, man, like, you're jive,” or “You're not down,” or any stuff like that. He seemed to be living all by himself; he'd found a way to do what he wanted to in life and just make everybody accept it. He reminded me a lot of Papanek, somebody who seemed to have a whole lot of control over life and knew what he was going to do and what he wasn't going to do. The cat seemed to really know how to handle these things.

Then I read a book by Albert Schweitzer. He was another fascinating cat. The man knew so much. I really started wanting to know things. I wanted to know things, and I wanted to do things. It made me start thinking about what might happen if I got out of Warwick and didn't go back to Harlem. But I couldn't really see myself not going back to Harlem. I couldn't see myself going anyplace else, because if I didn't go to Harlem, where would I have gone? That was the only place I ever knew.

I kept reading, and I kept enjoying it. Most of the time, I used to just sit around in the cottage reading. I didn't bother with people, and nobody bothered me. This was a way to be in Warwick and not to be there at the same time. I could get lost in a book. Cats would come up and say, “Brown, what you readin'?” and I'd just say, “Man, git the fuck on away from me, and don't bother me.”

July 12, 1953, I went home for good. There was hardly anybody else out. Just about all the people I used to swing with were in jail. They were in Coxsackie, Woodburn, Elmira, those places. The only ones who were left on the street were Bucky and Turk. Tito was in Woodburn, Alley Bush was in Elmira, Dunny was in Woodburn, and Mac was in Coxsackie.

I felt a little bad after I left, because I knew that the Cohens would
find out sooner or later that I wasn't the angel that they thought I was. Actually, I would have had to be like a faggot or something to be the nice boy that Mrs. Cohen thought I was. I think Mr. Cohen knew all the time that although I acted nice in the house and did my work, I still had to raise a little bit of hell down at that cottage and keep my reputation or I wouldn't have been able to stay there as his houseboy. Those cats would have had me stealing cigarettes for them and all kinds of shit like that I just had to be good with my hands and I had to let some people know it sometimes.

I guess Mrs. Cohen learned to live with it if she found out. It didn't matter too much, because I was back on the Harlem scene now. I was sixteen years old, and I knew that I'd never be going back to Warwick. The next stop was Coxsackie, Woodburn, or Elmira. I came back on the street and got ready for it. I started dealing pot. I had all kinds of contacts from Warwick.

Butch, Danny, and Kid were all strung out. They were junkies all the way. They had long habits. Kid had just come out of the Army Danny had been out all the time. Butch had gone into the Army to try to get away from his habit, but they had found the needle marks and had thrown him out. Now they were all out there, and they were just junkies. I used to feel sorry for them, especially Danny, because he had tried so hard to keep me off the stuff.

I was hanging out with just Turk from the old crowd. A guy I hadn't known before but had heard about was on the scene. This was Reno, another of Bucky and Mac's brothers. Reno was slick. He was about twenty-one, and he'd just come out of Woodburn when I came out of Warwick for the last time.

He used to kid me about being a better hustler than I was and said he would show me how to make twice the money. He'd heard about me, and we were sort of friends already when we first met. He told me, “If you gon be a hustler, you gon have to learn all the hustlin' tricks.” I agreed with him.

When I first came out, I had to get a job in the garment district, because I was on parole, and I had to keep that job for a while to show my parole officer that I was doing good. I kept the job, and I kept dealing pot. I had the best pot in town. Word got around; after a while, I was making a lot of money. I used to always have about two hundred dollars on me. I started buying hundred-dollar suits and thirty-five-dollars shoes and five-dollar ties and dressing real good.

A whole lot of cats in the neighborhood started admiring me, and they wanted to get tight with me; but to me, even though these guys were my age, they were the younger boys. These were good boys who had been in the house for a long time. They were just coming out, and I didn't feel as though they were ready for me, so I couldn't hang out with anybody but Turk.

Turk was a nice cat, but he was slow. He didn't want to make any money, or he didn't know how. He just wasn't down enough. He had come out of the house kind of late, and the older hustlers didn't know him from way back like they knew me. Nobody would do business with him, so he couldn't really get started. I used to give him some money once in a while, but he couldn't really get started in the hustling life. So I just started hanging out with Reno. Reno had said he was going to show me all the hustling tricks.

After a few months, I quit my first job and just dealt pot. I decided I was going to be a hustler. We were going to start from way back, from all the old hustling tricks, and come up to the modern-day stuff. About three months after I'd been out of Warwick, I was going downtown with Reno to learn how to play the Murphy.

I
HAD
heard about jostling and the Murphy for a long time, but I didn't really know what it was all about. All I knew for sure was that cats like Reno would go downtown and look for country cats and out-of-towners in Times Square who looked like they didn't know what was happening, and they would run down a story to them about selling them some cunt from some of the finest bitches they ever saw. There were many different ways to play the Murphy, but this was the way cats around my way played it.

Reno briefed me on our way downtown for my first Murphy lesson. He told me that the reason he liked the Murphy so much was that he could make a lot of money in a short period of time. When you're dealing pot, you have to stand around and wait for people to come, so you can sell only so many joints a day. But with the Murphy, if you made one good hit, you came up with maybe two or three hundred dollars for just a few minutes' work.

He told me, “Remember, you got to keep your story straight, and you got to keep a friendly atmosphere with these cats,” and he said they would probably be paddy boys. He told me not to be too hip with them. He said to use slang words like “guys” and “a piece-a meat” when talking about girls and to offer them some chewing gum and take out some cigarettes. You had to act suave, because you had to convince these guys that you were a pimp.

After about three tries that night, and about four hundred dollars later, I knew the Murphy. I went down the next week a couple of times on my own. You just had to keep watching for the Man. He was always looking for cats who were down there jostling. They'd have paddy boys down there jostling too, and these cats were smooth. A lot of times, they would pull your coat if they saw the Man pinning you. The paddy boy'd just pass by you and say, “Watch it, baby, the Man is on the next corner,” or “The Man is pinning you from across the street.”

After a while, you got to know all the jostlers down there, the jostlers, the whores, and everybody who was hustling in the Times Square area. It was a nice way to make some quick money. But I still had my
big pot customers, and they were still coming to me. I had the market on the good pot uptown sewed up; I didn't want to blow that. So the only time I'd go downtown and play the Murphy was when I was really up tight, when I needed two or three hundred dollars in a hurry. I could do that in a couple of hours if it was a good night. The best night was usually on the first of the month or near the last of the month, when the soldiers got paid. They used to tell soldiers about watching out for the Murphy boys when they went to town, but there were farmers everywhere who wouldn't listen, who were dreaming.

After a couple of weeks, I was an old pro. I could tell somebody who needed money, “You wait here, and I'll be back uptown in about two hours.” I'd tell them I was going to have two hundred dollars when I came back, and I would. All I had to do was walk down the street and see somebody who was looking up at the building like he was fascinated with New York. I'd walk past him, not even stop, and say, “Soldier, you interested in some nice young girls?” The cat's eyes would usually light up, and he'd say, “What? What'd you say?”

I'd keep walking, and he'd usually follow. Then I'd start walking slow, and he would start walking with me, and I'd tell him all kinds of things: “It's nice young girls, colored, white, Chinese, anything you want. They're built fine, nice shapes; they got titties that don't sag down … they set right up. Like, they don't even need a brassiere on.” I'd really build it up. Then I'd tell him that it would only cost him twenty-five dollars for an hour.

You could push a guy a little bit and say, “Look, fellow, I'm out takin' care-a business and I don't have but so much time. So if you want to git some-a the best pussy in New York, you let me know. If you don't, don't hold me up, don't take all night wit it.”

He would ask me things like, “Where is it?” and “How far is it?” I'd tell him that it was at a house and not far from there by cab. Most of the time, he would be taken in by your friendly air, by your offering him a cigarette or some gum. When you were in the cab, you got him to put some money in an envelope and wait for it, as if you were supposed to check his money before he went into the house because the girls might take it from him.