Manchild in the Promised Land Read online

  “Incredible! No Negro writer ever told the whole street thing in Harlem: Claude Brown is the first.”

  —Tom Wolfe, New York Herald Tribune

  “The first thing I ever read which gave me an idea of what it would be like day by day if I’d grown up in Harlem.”

  —Norman Mailer

  “This is a magnificent book, not a good book, not an interesting book, a magnificent book.… It is a guided tour of hell conducted by a man who broke out.”

  —Dick Schaap, Books

  “It is written with brutal and unvarnished honesty in the plain talk of the people, in language that is fierce, uproarious, obscene and tender.”

  —Romulus Linney, The New York Times Book Review

  “Sprung from the alley, a rare cat … As a survivor among the dying and the dead, Brown tells it like it was—and like it still is.”

  —Nat Hentoff, Book Week

  “He writes about his life—and Harlem—with frank, brutal, and beautiful power. Mr. Brown’s graphic narrative will make you laugh, cry, think, and possibly understand.”

  —Atlanta Journal

  “Brown’s Harlem is alive in a way that no black ghetto has heretofore been brought to life between book jackets.”

  —Daniel A. Poling

  “Sometimes a unique voice speaks out so clearly and with so much passion that it comes to speak for an era, a generation, a people … and we have to listen.”

  —William Mathes, Los Angeles Times

  TOUCHSTONE

  Rockefeller Center

  1230 Avenue of the Americas

  New York, NY 10020

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  Copyright © 1965 by Claude Brown

  Copyright renewed © 1993 by Claude Brown

  All rights reserved,

  including the right of reproduction

  in whole or in part in any form.

  All the names in this book—with the exception of public figures, judges, staff members at the Wiltwyck School for Boys, Mr. Alfred A. Cohen, the Reverend William M. James, Mr. Louis Howard, and the author—are entirely fictitious, and any resemblance to the names of living persons is wholly coincidental.

  First Touchstone Edition 1999

  TOUCHSTONE and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  20 19 18 17 16

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Macmillan edition as follows:

  Brown, Claude, date.

  Manchild in the promised land / Claude Brown.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-02-517325-1

  1. Brown, Claude, date. 2. Afro-Americans—Biography.

  3. Afro-Americans—New York (N.Y.)—Social conditions.

  4. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—Social conditions. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Social conditions. I. Title

  E185.97.B86A3 1990

  974.7’10049607302—dc20

  [B] 90-34905 CIP

  ISBN-13: 978-0-684-86418-1

  ISBN-10: 0-684-86418-5

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-2617-9

  To the late ELEANOR ROOSEVELT,

  who founded the Wiltwyck School for Boys.

  And to the WILTWYCK SCHOOL,

  which is still finding Claude Browns.

  Foreword

  I WANT to talk about the first Northern urban generation of Negroes. I want to talk about the experiences of a misplaced generation, of a misplaced people in an extremely complex, confused society. This is a story of their searching, their dreams, their sorrows, their small and futile rebellions, and their endless battle to establish their own place in America’s greatest metropolis—and in America itself.

  The characters are sons and daughters of former Southern sharecroppers. These were the poorest people of the South, who poured into New York City during the decade following the Great Depression. These migrants were told that unlimited opportunities for prosperity existed in New York and that there was no “color problem” there. They were told that Negroes lived in houses with bathrooms, electricity, running water, and indoor toilets. To them, this was the “promised land” that Mammy had been singing about in the cotton fields for many years.

  Going to New York was good-bye to the cotton fields, good-bye to “Massa Charlie,” good-bye to the chain gang, and, most of all, goodbye to those sunup-to-sundown working hours. One no longer had to wait to get to heaven to lay his burden down; burdens could be laid down in New York.

  So, they came, from all parts of the South, like all the black chillun o’ God following the sound of Gabriel’s horn on that long-overdue Judgment Day. The Georgians came as soon as they were able to pick train fare off the peach trees. They came from South Carolina where the cotton stalks were bare. The North Carolinians came with tobacco tar beneath their fingernails.

  They felt as the Pilgrims must have felt when they were coming to America. But these descendants of Ham must have been twice as happy as the Pilgrims, because they had been catching twice the hell. Even while planning the trip, they sang spirituals as “Jesus Take My Hand” and “I’m On My Way” and chanted, “Hallelujah, I’m on my way to the promised land!”

  It seems that Cousin Willie, in his lying haste, had neglected to tell the folks down home about one of the most important aspects of the promised land: it was a slum ghetto. There was a tremendous difference in the way life was lived up North. There were too many people full of hate and bitterness crowded into a dirty, stinky, uncared-for closet-size section of a great city.

  Before the soreness of the cotton fields had left Mama’s back, her knees were getting sore from scrubbing “Goldberg’s” floor. Nevertheless, she was better off; she had gone from the fire into the frying pan.

  The children of these disillusioned colored pioneers inherited the total lot of their parents—the disappointments, the anger. To add to their misery, they had little hope of deliverance. For where does one run to when he’s already in the promised land?

  1

  “Run”!

  Where?

  Oh, hell! Let’s get out of here!

  “Turk! Turk! I’m shot!”

  I could hear Turk’s voice calling from a far distance, telling me not to go into the fish-and-chips joint. I heard, but I didn’t understand. The only thing I knew was that I was going to die.

  I ran. There was a bullet in me trying to take my life, all thirteen years of it.

  I climbed up on the bar yelling, “Walsh, I’m shot. I’m shot.” I could feel the blood running down my leg. Walsh, the fellow who operated the fish-and-chips joint, pushed me off the bar and onto the floor. I couldn’t move now, but I was still completely conscious.

  Walsh was saying, “Git outta here, kid. I ain’t got no time to play.”

  A woman was screaming, mumbling something about the Lord, and saying, “Somebody done shot that poor child.”

  Mama ran in. She jumped up and down, screaming like a crazy woman. I began to think about dying. The worst part of dying was thinking about the things and the people that I’d never see again. As I lay there trying to imagine what being dead was like, the policeman who had been trying to control Mama gave up and bent over me. He asked who had shot me. Before I could answer, he was asking me if I could hear him. I told him that I didn’t know who had shot me and would he please tell Mama to stop jumping up and down. Every time Mama came down on that shabby floor, the bullet lodged in my stomach felt like a hot poker.

  Another policeman had come in and was struggling to keep the crowd outside. I could see Turk in the front of the crowd. Before the cops came, he asked me if I was going to tell them that he was with me. I never answered. I looked at him and wondered if he saw who shot me. Then his
question began to ring in my head: “Sonny, you gonna tell ’em I was with you?” I was bleeding on a dirty floor in a fish-and-chips joint, and Turk was standing there in the doorway hoping that I would die before I could tell the cops that he was with me. Not once did Turk ask me how I felt.

  Hell, yeah, I thought, I’m gonna tell ’em.

  It seemed like hours had passed before the ambulance finally arrived. Mama wanted to go to the hospital with me, but the ambulance attendant said she was too excited. On the way to Harlem Hospital, the cop who was riding with us asked Dad what he had to say. His answer was typical: “I told him about hanging out with those bad-ass boys.” The cop was a little surprised. This must be a rookie, I thought.

  The next day, Mama was at my bedside telling me that she had prayed and the Lord had told her that I was going to live. Mama said that many of my friends wanted to donate some blood for me, but the hospital would not accept it from narcotics users.

  This was one of the worst situations I had ever been in. There was a tube in my nose that went all the way to the pit of my stomach. I was being fed intravenously, and there was a drain in my side. Everybody came to visit me, mainly out of curiosity. The girls were all anxious to know where I had gotten shot. They had heard all kinds of tales about where the bullet struck. The bolder ones wouldn’t even bother to ask: they just snatched the cover off me and looked for themselves. In a few days, the word got around that I was in one piece.

  On my fourth day in the hospital, I was awakened by a male nurse at about 3 A.M. When he said hello in a very ladyish voice, I thought that he had come to the wrong bed by mistake. After identifying himself, he told me that he had helped Dr. Freeman save my life. The next thing he said, which I didn’t understand, had something to do with the hours he had put in working that day. He went on mumbling something about how tired he was and ended up asking me to rub his back. I had already told him that I was grateful to him for helping the doctor save my life. While I rubbed his back above the beltline, he kept pushing my hand down and saying, “Lower, like you are really grateful to me.” I told him that I was sleepy from the needle a nurse had given me. He asked me to pat his behind. After I had done this, he left.

  The next day when the fellows came to visit me, I told them about my early-morning visitor. Dunny said he would like to meet him. Tito joked about being able to get a dose of clap in the hospital. The guy with the tired back never showed up again, so the fellows never got a chance to meet him. Some of them were disappointed.

  After I had been in the hospital for about a week, I was visited by another character. I had noticed a woman visiting one of the patients on the far side of the ward. She was around fifty-five years old, short and fat, and she was wearing old-lady shoes. While I wondered who this woman was, she started across the room in my direction. After she had introduced herself, she told me that she was visiting her son. Her son had been stabbed in the chest with an ice pick by his wife. She said that his left lung had been punctured, but he was doing fine now, and that Jesus was so-o-o good.

  Her name was Mrs. Ganey, and she lived on 145th Street. She said my getting shot when I did “was the work of the Lord.” My gang had been stealing sheets and bedspreads off clotheslines for months before I had gotten shot. I asked this godly woman why she thought it was the work of the Lord or Jesus or whoever She began in a sermonlike tone, saying, “Son, people was gitting tired-a y’all stealing all dey sheets and spreads.” She said that on the night that I had gotten shot, she baited her clothesline with two brand-new bedspreads, turned out all the lights in the apartment, and sat at the kitchen window waiting for us to show.

  She waited with a double-barreled shotgun.

  The godly woman said that most of our victims thought that we were winos or dope fiends and that most of them had vowed to kill us. At the end of the sermon, the godly woman said, “Thank the Lord I didn’t shoot nobody’s child.” When the godly woman had finally departed, I thought, Thank the Lord for taking her away from my bed.

  Later on that night, I was feeling a lot of pain and couldn’t get to sleep. A nurse who had heard me moaning and groaning came over and gave me a shot of morphine. Less than twenty minutes later, I was deep into a nightmare.

  I was back in the fish-and-chips joint, lying on the floor dying. Only, now I was in more pain than before, and there were dozens of Mamas around me jumping up and screaming. I could feel myself dying in a rising pool of blood. The higher the blood rose the more I died.

  I dreamt about the boy who Rock and big Stoop had thrown off that roof on 149th Street. None of us had stayed around to see him hit the ground, but I just knew that he died in a pool of blood too. I wished that he would stop screaming, and I wished that Mama would stop screaming. I wished they would let me die quietly.

  As the screams began to die out—Mama’s and the boy’s—I began to think about the dilapidated old tenement building that I lived in, the one that still had the words “pussy” and “fuck you” on the walls where I had scribbled them years ago. The one where the super, Mr. Lawson, caught my little brother writing some more. Dad said he was going to kill Pimp for writing on that wall, and the way he was beating Pimp with that ironing cord, I thought he would. Mama was crying, I was crying, and Pimp had been crying for a long time. Mama said that he was too young to be beaten like that. She ran out of the house and came back with a cop, who stopped Dad from beating Pimp.

  I told Pimp not to cry any more, just to wait until I got big: I was going to kill Dad, and he could help me if he wanted to.

  This was the building where Mr. Lawson had killed a man for peeing in the hall. I remembered being afraid to go downstairs the morning after Mr. Lawson had busted that man’s head open with a baseball bat. I could still see blood all over the hall. This was the building where somebody was always shooting out the windows in the hall. They were usually shooting at Johnny D., and they usually missed. This was the building that I loved more than anyplace else in the world. The thought that I would never see this building again scared the hell out of me.

  I dreamt about waking up in the middle of the night seven years before and thinking that the Germans or the Japs had come and that the loud noises I heard were bombs falling. Running into Mama’s room, I squeezed in between her and Dad at the front window. Thinking that we were watching an air raid, I asked Dad where the sirens were and why the street lights were on. He said, “This ain’t no air raid—just a whole lotta niggers gone fool. And git the hell back in that bed!” I went back to bed, but I couldn’t go to sleep. The loud screams in the street and the crashing sound of falling plate-glass windows kept me awake for hours. While I listened to the noise, I imagined bombs falling and people running through the streets screaming. I could see mothers running with babies in their arms, grown men running over women and children to save their own lives, and the Japs stabbing babies with bayonets, just like in the movies. I thought, Boy, I sure wish I was out there. I bet the Stinky brothers are out there. Danny and Butch are probably out there having all the fun in the world.

  The next day, as I was running out of the house without underwear or socks on, I could hear Mama yelling, “Boy, come back here and put a hat or something on your head!” When I reached the stoop, I was knocked back into the hall by a big man carrying a ham under his coat. While I looked up at him, wondering what was going on, he reached down with one hand and snatched me up, still holding the ham under his coat with his other hand. He stood me up against a wall and ran into the hall with his ham. Before I had a chance to move, other men came running through the hall carrying cases of whiskey, sacks of flour, and cartons of cigarettes. Just as I unglued myself from the wall and started out the door for the second time, I was bowled over again. This time by a cop with a gun in his hand. He never stopped, but after he had gone a couple of yards into the hall, I heard him say, “Look out, kid.” On the third try, I got out of the building. But I wasn’t sure that this was my street. None of the stores had any windows left, and glas
s was everywhere. It seemed that all the cops in the world were on 145th Street and Eighth Avenue that day. The cops were telling everybody to move on, and everybody was talking about the riot. I went over to a cop and asked him what a riot was. He told me to go on home. The next cop I asked told me that a riot was what had happened the night before. Putting two and two together I decided that a riot was “a whole lotta niggers gone fool.”

  I went around the corner to Butch’s house. After I convinced him that I was alone, he opened the door. He said that Kid and Danny were in the kitchen. I saw Kid sitting on the floor with his hand stuck way down in a gallon jar of pickled pigs’ ears. Danny was cooking some bacon at the stove, and Butch was busy hiding stuff. It looked as though these guys had stolen a whole grocery store. While I joined the feast, they took turns telling me about the riot. Danny and Kid hadn’t gone home the night before; they were out following the crowds and looting.

  My only regret was that I had missed the excitement. I said, “Why don’t we have another riot tonight? Then Butch and me can get in it.”

  Danny said that there were too many cops around to have a riot now. Butch said that they had eaten up all the bread and that he was going to steal some more. I asked if I could come along with him, and he said that I could if I promised to do nothing but watch. I promised, but we both knew that I was lying.

  When we got to the street, Butch said he wanted to go across the street and look at the pawnshop. I tagged along. Like many of the stores where the rioters had been, the pawnshop had been set afire. The firemen had torn down a sidewall getting at the fire. So Butch and I just walked in where the wall used to be. Everything I picked up was broken or burned or both. My feet kept sinking into the wet furs that had been burned and drenched. The whole place smelled of smoke and was as dirty as a Harlem gutter on a rainy day. The cop out front yelled to us to get out of there. He only had to say it once.

  After stopping by the seafood joint and stealing some shrimp and oysters, we went to what was left of Mr. Gordon’s grocery store. Butch just walked in, picked up a loaf of bread, and walked out. He told me to come on, but I ignored him and went into the grocery store instead. I picked up two loaves of bread and walked out. When I got outside, a cop looked at me, and I ran into a building and through the backyard to Butch’s house. Running through the backyard, I lost all the oysters that I had; when I reached Butch’s house, I had only two loaves of bread and two shrimp in my pocket.