Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

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, good-bye 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.

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?

I was sorry I hadn’t started school sooner, because hookey sure was a lot of fun.

That round brown bottle had more than religion in it. It must have had the Lord in it. I never saw him in it, but I know he was there.

The cat was nice in his mind. The way he looked at life and people was beautiful.

One of the most dangerous things in the world is to steal from poor people. This was what Jim and some other young cats his age were doing. They would start taking numbers, and they wouldn’t pay these people when they hit. They were stealing from the poor, and when you steal from the poor, you gamble with your life.

A .45 is a frightening thing. Not just because it’s a gun, because all guns are frightening. The thing that’s so terrifying about any gun is that when you look into it, you’re aware that here’s this little black hole that at any time can spit death out at you and take your life.

I remember when I was younger, when I was at Warwick and right after I came out, I had heard about people I knew who had gone to the chair. We all wanted to know what they had said, but now we wanted to know what they said because we wanted to find out something for ourselves. We wanted to find out if it was worth it at the last minute, if they felt that it was worth it, now that they were going to die.

The moment that somebody heard that anybody had gotten cooked, they would say, “Well, man, what did he say?” I never heard of anybody ever saying it was worth it. They said a lot of things, but nobody ever said it was worth it.

He said, “Yeah, man, I know it may sound hard to you, but you know somethin’, Sonny? I was up in Woodburn for three years and three months, and I didn’t get one letter, man, not even around Christmastime, from my mother or my brother. It would be easier for me to take, man, if they were dead or something. I could understand that. But I’d hate to think of them being alive and couldn’t even send me a Christmas card. I don’t even want to know where they at, nothin’. I don’t want to know if they alive or not, ’cause I’m afraid they just might be.”

I fought him for three days. I beat him one day, and he beat me the next day. On the third day, we fought three fights. I had a black eye, and he had a bloody lip. He had a bloody nose, and I had a bloody nose. By the end of the day, we had become good friends. Somebody took us to the candy store and bought us ice-cream cones.

Fighting was the thing that people concentrated on. In our childhood, we all had to make our reputations in the neighborhood. Then we’d spend the rest of our lives living up to them. A man was respected on the basis of his reputation. The people in the neighborhood whom everybody looked up to were the cats who’d killed somebody. The little boys in the neighborhood whom the adults respected were the little boys who didn’t let anybody mess with them.

She had the idea that colored people weren’t supposed to want anything like that. You were supposed to just want to work in fields or be happy to be a janitor.

“Man, Sonny, they ain’t got no kids in Harlem. I ain’t never seen any. I’ve seen some real small people actin’ like kids. They were too small to be grown, and they might’ve looked like kids, but they don’t have any kids in Harlem, because nobody has time for a childhood.

The intern who comes to Harlem and starts his internship around April will be ready to go into surgery by June. He’s probably already tried to close up windpipes for people who’ve had their throat slit. Or tried to put intestines back in a stomach. Or somebody has hit somebody in the head with a hatchet. Or somebody has come into his house at the wrong time and caught somebody else going out the window. That’s quite a job too, putting a person back together after a four- or five-story fall.

“No, man. They know. You may not believe me, Claude, but the white man was made by a colored scientist, in a test tube, man. He isn’t even real. He’s like a Frankenstein monster.”

I haven’t seen too many of my Muslim friends lately, but I imagine they’re still involved. I hear about the things that they’re doing now. The Muslim movement is a good thing. It’s good because these cats know they’re angry, and they’re letting everybody else know they’re angry. If they don’t do any more than let the nation know that there are black men in this country who are dangerously angry, then they’ve already served a purpose.

I never found Skippy either. The police found him. That was surprising, that the police would really find somebody—that they’d really look for somebody for two weeks—for having hurt somebody else in Harlem. I guess Harlem was changing.