Manchild in the Promised Land (58 page)

For a long time, I was sorry I'd ever stopped that time when Judy called to me in the hall with that “Hey, there.” I remembered it for a long time. For a long time, I expected the phone to ring or thought I'd get a letter. Nothing came.

I
DECIDED
to run. The most natural thing to do was to take refuge in Harlem. I was hurt, and I was running home. I was going to stay away from white people and the white world.

I joined a new group of young jazz musicians. We weren't good enough to play club dates for pay yet, but we were good enough so that the people who liked jazz wouldn't mind listening to us. We all hung out together, and we liked playing. The cats who were still in this young-jazz-musician groove around Harlem were really serious about music. They had to be serious to stick with it.

The attitude had changed about drugs. These guys didn't believe that drugs had anything to do with playing good jazz. Many of the cats did when we first started out. But it seemed as though the guys who felt that drugs had something to do with it didn't make it as musicians. The cats who were still hanging in there were just good jazz musicians, damn good.

This was the group of cats I started hanging out with. We would go places together. We'd go to little gigs, and we'd do a lot of things; they cut me into a lot of different musicians and a lot of cute chicks, dancers and singers, people in show business. It was a hip group of people, who knew how to be happy. I liked them more than I liked anybody else.

They didn't want to be a part of street life. Some of them had just awakened to this fact. They were the same cats who had lived according to the code of the street. Now they were the only young people in the community who were doing anything worthwhile. They were married, they had good jobs, and they were always dressed presentably. They had to stand out, because most of the young people in the community were junkies. Anybody who wasn't a junkie stood out.

They became a new class, the young elite of the Harlem community. A few of them had government jobs. They worked for the city or the Federal government, those who'd finished high school and didn't have a sheet on them. Many cats had a sheet on them; they had been in street life for a little too long, past that sixteenth year. Even
then, they straightened out. But to get a good job, making a good salary, I suppose they had to go into phases of employment where the sheet didn't mean too much, like into the entertainment world or music. Occasionally, some of the guys would get a good job from a private employer who believed in them. These were the lucky ones. There were some guys who had talent but didn't necessarily want to be musicians. But since they didn't want to be in street life either, the only thing that was open for them was a field like music.

I became a part of this. I had been making it for a long time, but I hadn't noticed that there were so many other cats who had put down street life too. They were hip; they'd already made a name for themselves and gained street respect when they were coming up in Harlem. Now they were settled cats; not settled in the sense that they didn't want to go anywhere and didn't want to do anything, but settled in the sense that they weren't going to go out and get in trouble and go to jail.

I admired these cats, and I thought that they had done more, far more than I had, in staying right there in Harlem and meeting all the pitfalls of street-life temptations and eluding the plague. I think everybody in the community sort of looked up to these young cats and respected them. I guess many of the older generation would look at them and wish that their sons or their nephews or whoever they had were like these nice young men. It was an admirable thing, because there were so many who had gotten wasted by the plague.

I felt that this was a new Harlem. I saw it as a sort of by-product of the plague generation. All those cats who stayed there and eluded the plague were strong. They were dynamic and beautiful cats. They all stood out, ten feet tall, because they had the strength of character not to be swallowed up in vice and crime. They were such a small segment that the drug generation had overshadowed them, but when I saw them, I knew that everybody in the community was aware of them and admired them. I was glad to be a part of this.

It made me feel strong just being in Harlem and being a part of this, even though I knew in my heart that I hadn't achieved what these guys had. I had run away, I had hidden. That's how I'd gotten away from it. Still, I felt good. I just wanted to be around them, as though some of their strength might rub off on me.

Whenever I went up to Harlem and saw somebody like Turk, I
knew that all the junkies admired him, and all the kids and the older generation too. Here was a neighborhood boy who had really made good. Turk had become quite a reputable boxer now. Just about everybody in the neighborhood watched him on TV when he had a fight. Many, including me, had even gone down to watch a couple of his fights at the Garden. I guess it was a symbol of the achievement that was possible in the community. Damn, somebody from Eighth Avenue could make it.

One day we were coming out of the building where Turk had an apartment. He couldn't get out of the house good before the junkies would pounce on him. Every junkie who saw him would come around with his hand out. Turk would reach in his pocket and keep giving out.

I stood on the side and watched this one day. After the junkies had scattered, gone on their way, I spoke to him about it. I said, “Turk, baby, you got a big heart, but I sure hope you don't end up like Joe Louis.”

He smiled and said, “Sonny, it seems crazy to you, doesn't it?”

I said, “Yeah, man. It damn sure does. Down my way, man, you could go broke like that. On Third Avenue near the Bowery, they've got a whole lot of panhandlers down there. I have to light all my cigarettes in the house, man. If I come out on Third Avenue with a pack of cigarettes, I can't walk two blocks. Before I've gone a block and a half, the panhandlers have got the whole pack of cigarettes. They just seem to smell cigarettes and they come out begging. By the time you get two blocks, all you've got is a match, man. They've got the cigarettes and gone. Cigarettes aren't that expensive, man, but I was just wondering how long that pocket you kept going into was going to hold up.”

Turk laughed. He said, “It's not what it may appear to be, Sonny. I brought this money out just for this purpose. It's seed money. Actually, I'll get all the money back that I gave away, ten times that.”

“Yeah, man. As long as that good right holds out.”

“No, man. Have you ever heard of seed money, Sonny?”

“No, man. I've never heard of any seed money.”

“Man, brace yourself. I'm going to tell you a secret that you could get rich off of.”

I looked at him as if to say, “Are you all right, man?”

He said, “I know you're going to think I'm crazy, but I thought
so too the first time I heard about this seed money. Believe it or not, Sonny, this is the way that most of the cats all over the world who are rich got rich, man. They got rich giving money away. The supreme powers that be, man, God, or whatever you want to call it—I call it fate myself—these supreme powers let you make a tenfold claim on them for any money that you give away, man, or for anything that you give away … behind a noble motivation.”

“Look here, Turk. I think you better start blocking better, baby, because you're in the heavyweight division, and those boys are hitting kind of hard. I think it's beginning to tell on you.”

He smiled. He said, “Yeah, man, I told you that you'd say this. As a matter of fact, I said something like that the first time I heard it, but this is the truth, man. When I come out and I give this money to these cats, or to anybody who asks for it that's up tight, I'm giving to mankind. It's like I'm planting the seed money in the soil of life, and the soil of life is kindness and good deeds. I think the supreme powers that be have just given it to me, like they've given it to all the wealthy men in my time and throughout the ages. They had some sort of kindness, man. I think fate knows who to bestow good fortune on.”

I looked at him for a while, and I said, “You know something, Turk? It's hard to believe, man. I talk to you now, and I listen to you. It's hard to believe that you were in that shit with us back there. I just can't make the connection with you then and you now.”

“Yeah, Sonny, the truth is that none of us had any business in that. Not a cat I grew up with had any business in there. Tito's got no business in Sing Sing. And did you hear that Dunny was in Attica?”

I said, “In Attica? What's he doing in Attica? Dunny is only about twenty-four years old.”

“Yeah, but Dunny was always a hard cat. Some people, when they grow up … I think me and you, we got a little more human as we grew up. We softened to life. We started becoming people, believe it or not. We were crazy. Shit, running around with guns and knives and shit out there in the street. Sometimes I stop and look back and say, ‘Oh, shit. Was that really me?' It's hard to believe it now, Sonny. I look at you now, man, and people tell me you're thinking about going to college.”

I said, “Yeah, I've been thinking about that.”

“When I first heard it, I said, ‘Damn, is that the Sonny who I use to go out there and bebop with, and who was always trying to be so cold?' Now, Sonny, I know that you were a fraud. Yeah, that's right, a twenty-two-carat fake. And so were all of us. This was something we figured we had to be, because we'd come up in all that shit. As we went on, most of us just got softer, became more mature. I guess that's what maturity is, seeing that all that shit was crazy.

“In Dunny's case, Sonny, he … I don't know man, but I think he had missed out on too much in life, and he just kept getting harder instead of getting softer. He got madder, madder with everybody in the world, so it seemed. I heard he was up at Sing Sing and up at Woodburn; he was up at Comstock, a whole lot of places, but they couldn't keep him anywhere—even Auburn. They have killers up there, man, some stone killers. They had Johnny Wilkes up at Auburn, and James Fox is still up there.”

I said, “Oh, yeah? What happened to Johnny Wilkes? I thought he was still up there.”

“You didn't hear about Johnny Wilkes?”

“No, what happened?”

“He killed a hack, and they had to send him to Materwann. His mind is gone, man. They say he hasn't recognized anybody since then. He was a real mean cat.”

“Yeah, a lot of people said that, but I was never able to see Johnny as a mean cat, Turk. I figure I knew him better than most people.”

“Yeah, I guess you did, Sonny. I know you knew him better than me, but I could never see that cat as nothing but a cold killer.”

“Yeah, I guess he seemed that way to most people.”

“The way I heard it, man, this hack was messing with him, and he'd told the hack that he was going to kill him the next time. This hack pushed him once after that, and he just turned around and threw him off a balcony … those tiers; you know, those things they have in jail, Sonny.”

I said, “I wouldn't know,” and we both smiled.

“Well, shit, you've seen the movies haven't you?”

“Yeah, Turk, I guess I've seen it.”

He said, “Well, man, he just threw the cat off it. Then they took him away. They put a straitjacket on him. It took six guards to cool
him down. I hear it was over a year ago, and he's still bouncing around in a rubber room. He hasn't recognized anybody since then.”

“Damn! That's an ice-cold end. I never would have expected that for Johnny.”

“I'm sorry I told you now.”

“No, man, I guess he had to go some hard way or another. He was always unhappy. Maybe that was his way of getting away from it all, Turk.”

He said, “We changed, man. Most of us changed. I saw Mac about three weeks ago. The cat's working. He's got a job with a paint firm. He's happy; he's married and got a daughter. Actually, Sonny, he should never have gone to Coxsackie. He just never had any business in this thing. All of us, believe it or not, we were nice guys. Maybe that was our trouble, that we were afraid because we were such nice guys. I guess that's what this maturity thing is about, growing up and being able to face being what you are.”

“Yeah, Turk. Maybe that's it.”

Turk said, “Sonny, I'm glad that you come up more often now, because you're the only cat I know who I can talk to like this. Most of the cats around here … I just talk the shit that you're suppose to talk. I seldom say the things that are really on my mind, man. When you come up, I can talk to you, anything that's on my mind. You may say I'm crazy, but I know you don't really think it, and I know you're going to say something that I might tell you is crazy.”

I punched him lightly on the shoulder.

Turk said, “Man, don't do that, Sonny. If we were in the ring, I'd be afraid of you.”

“Why?”

“I'd be thinking you were trying to make love to me.”

“Yeah, all that boxing and all that psychology is getting to you. You better watch out.” We laughed.

“Sonny, I thought you had put us down, man, had gone white on us.”

“Yeah, man, I think I could've done it, if it wasn't for the fact that I was so obviously colored. I'd have trouble passing, being my complexion.”

“Yeah, I saw Tony, man. He told me that you had some cute little white girl down there, and I thought you had given up the colored folks completely.”

“No, I guess I was trying something different, Turk, but I know better now. I have dreams about getting away from that Harlem thing. I mean, getting it out of my mind … and wanting to get close to people. I guess the first thing I'd like to do is get a decent girl.”

“Damn, Sonny. That's nothing, man. You don't have to rush.”