Manchild in the Promised Land (16 page)

When we got on the subway to go home, Dad told me that if anybody asked me how much money we got, I was to say I didn't know. I knew something like that was going to come. He was going to go uptown and tell everybody we had gotten a thousand dollars or something like that. That was the first time I could remember looking Dad
in the eye. I heard myself saying, “I guess we ain't nothin' or nobody, huh, Dad?” He went on talking like he didn't even hear me, and I wasn't listening to what he was saying either. I just wanted to get back to Wiltwyck and steal something and get into a lot of trouble. I never wanted to go back to anyplace so bad in all my life. I wanted to be around K.B. and Horse and Tito and other cats like me. We could all get together up at Wiltwyck, raise a a lot of hell, and show people that we weren't pigs and that we couldn't be fucked over but so much. Simms and Claiborne and Nick and Papanek and everybody else up at Wiltwyck knew I was somebody—even when I wasn't getting into trouble. I couldn't wait to get back to where I wasn't a pig.

In the winter after the summer that I moved into Aggrey, I had my old gang from Carver back together, but things were kind of different. Tito was president, K.B. was vice-president, and I was the war counselor. The gang was made up this way because that was the way I wanted it. Tito felt good being president of something. It was the first time in his life that he had ever been president of anything. And K.B. felt real great about being vice-president. I made Horse the treasurer. Nobody else counted much. No, I couldn't be any more than what I was already, the main cat on the Wiltwyck scene. Most people didn't know it, but when Papanek wasn't at Wiltwyck I ran the place. Every time something happened, Stilly, Simms, or Mrs. Chase or all three of them would come running to me. Mrs. Chase was Stilly's assistant.

That winter, my clique was really raising a lot of hell. We were stealing everything we found, breaking into every place that had a lock on it—just about all of us could pick locks—fighting with other houses, and stomping cats we didn't like. It was mainly J.J. and Stumpy who liked to stomp cats. J.J. liked it because he couldn't beat anybody in a fair fight, and whenever we stomped somebody, all of us stomped him. Stumpy liked to stomp cats because he was a real bully, and it made him feel real good. His eyes used to light up when he did it. J.J. was a real nice guy, and he was one of the best liars up at Wiltwyck, maybe even better than me. J.J. was an orphan, and he had lived in and out of foster homes and places like Wiltwyck all his life. So he really knew how to make people like him, man or woman, white or colored. This made him one of the slickest cats on the Wiltwyck scene. Stumpy was a real nice guy too, but he needed somebody to kick him in his ass every now and then just to let him know how nice he was.

One day that same winter, Simms called everybody into the living
room, where we used to have our house meetings. He told us that some girls were coming to Wiltwyck soon from a place called Vassar College and that they were going to teach us things like skiing, music, painting, and stuff like that. Simms said he expected us to treat those chicks better than the guys in the other houses, since we were older than the other guys. He had that “if you don't do right I'm gonna kick your ass” tone in his voice when he told us about the chicks from Vassar, but nobody cared much, because Simms hadn't hit a cat in a long time.

The first day the girls came to Wiltwyck, the cats in Aggrey swarmed all over them. In fact, everybody took to them right away. They were all white and not so hip, but most of them were real fine, so nobody cared about them being white and not being hip. It really wasn't hard to be nice to these chicks, because they were all real sweet. They were some of the nicest girls I had ever met, and some of them knew some things too. You could talk to them, and they could understand things. Every day, they would come to Wiltwyck early in the morning and stay until evening. One day, the girls from Vassar took us to the college for a picnic. It sure was a big place, and I never saw so many pretty girls in one place before in all my life. There must have been about a million bicycles at that place. The girls said we could ride any of the bikes we wanted to, but we had to remember where we got them from and put them back when we finished. We really broke up some bikes that day. I saw Horse bring a bike back in five parts.

J.J. caused a girl to faint. He was coming down this steep hill real fast. There was a brick wall at the bottom, and J.J. couldn't steer too well. When J.J. hit the wall, he didn't get hurt, but the bike was all smashed up, and J.J. went straight up into the air about fifteen feet. The girl was standing on the bridge, and when she heard the crash, she turned around just in time to see J.J. going up, and she fainted. When they woke her up, the girl said that she fainted because she thought sure the boy would be killed, but Rickets said that seeing a nigger flying through the air on the campus of Vassar College was enough to make any nice, respectable white girl faint. And sometimes Rickets knew what he was talking about.

Cathy, my piano teacher, was a big, fine chick. She was white, but she was from China. Her father was a doctor or something in China, and she was born there and had lived there, but she was still white. She just came over here to go to Vassar College. She didn't speak Chinese or anything. As a matter of fact, she spoke real good English, and she
was a sweet person, real big and real fine. Cathy ran over to J.J., who was lying there on the ground playing dead, and kneeled down beside him. She raised his head and put it in her lap and started screaming all over the place for somebody to get a doctor. I knew if she kept that up for long, they would never get J.J. up from there.

J.J. sneaked one eye open, looked up at those big breasts right over in his face, and started snuggling. I wanted to say, “Poor Cathy.” She just shouldn't have done that. Somebody should have pulled her coat. I would have, but J.J. was a friend of mine, so I couldn't do that. After a while, she saw this cat opening one eye and getting closer, and I think she felt kind of foolish. So she threw his head off her lap and told him to get up. He laughed and got up. And everybody thought it was pretty funny.

But that wasn't the funniest thing that happened that day. The funniest thing was when we were in the music room and another girl screamed. We turned around to see what it was, and this girl was trying to jump up off a piano stool, because while she was playing the piano, somebody was under there playing with her legs. That was dear old Rickets. That's the way he was.

We had a lot of fun at Vassar College, and the girls were really something wonderful. I never would have thought that white girls could be so nice. Cats could look all up under their dresses and everything, and all they did was laugh.

We got along real fine with the girls until the day J.J. got lost in a snowstorm with the skiing teacher. They had searching parties out for them, lots of searching parties, all day long. But J.J. and the skiing teacher were lost in a blizzard for about four hours. Everybody in the world was wondering where they could be. But nobody found them. After the snowing was over, J.J. and the teacher came back, with smiles on their faces. They were happy, and I suppose everybody was happy—that is, everybody but Stilly and the rest of the staff. They were a little peeved. They wondered where in the world a nigger could be in a snowstorm with some pretty little Norwegian skiing teacher. That's not supposed to happen to people from poor Negro backgrounds.

J.J. said he and the teacher had to stop in some barn for four hours to get out of the storm. All the cats up there envied J.J. that day. I kind of wished I had been caught in that storm too, because that teacher sure was something sweet … cute accent too.

After a while, I think they found out that it wasn't working. The
guys got used to the girls, and they started treating them like mothers and sisters and that sort of thing. These were guys who cursed out mothers and sisters, and when they started treating these chicks like mothers and sisters, they were cursing them out too. One cat, Baldy, even had enough nerve to slap one of those girls. Now, everybody knew that perhaps you could curse them out or scream at them, but they also knew that no niggers were supposed to be slapping any girls from Vassar College. I guess we were supposed to be glad to even be able to say hello to them.

Then there was the Mac thing. Mac used to operate the movie camera for us on Thursday and Sunday nights. One day, while the girls from Vassar were at Wiltwyck, Mac got locked up in the movie booth with that same skiing teacher, and they had a lot of fun, I suppose, because they stayed in there a long time. Everybody started looking for Mac. He was supposed to be getting the cameras ready. They banged on the doors, they did everything, but nobody could find them. When Mac finally came out and they asked him where he'd been, he said, “In the movie booth.” Somebody said, “Lawd, it's time to git these girls outta here.”

They were all seniors in college, and when graduation time came around, they had to go. I think, in spite of everything, we missed them, and maybe they missed us too. That was the first time we'd ever known any Vassar girls, but I suppose that was the first time they'd ever known any poor little colored boys.

The summer after the girls from Vassar College left was pretty much the same as the other two summers I'd spent up at Wiltwyck. Only now I'd been at Wiltwyck two years, and there was nothing new about the place. We did the same things. In the summer, we played softball, went fishing; we just ran around and acted crazy in general and waited for fall to come around so we could steal the apples out of Farmer Greene's orchard … things like that. We went to Mrs. Roosevelt's house in June for the annual picnic and all that sort of nonsense. To me, Wiltwyck now seemed like a babyish sort of place.

They let me go home that summer for a long visit. And it was good. It was a real good visit. I saw people I hadn't seen in a long time. Kid and Butch were out of Warwick; Danny was home on a visit from Warwick the same time I was there. I sure was glad to see all those
guys. We had all been home on visits before, but it seemed that we were never in the city at the same time. And now, here we all were. I felt I was getting a part of my life back that I'd been missing for a long time. It sure was good to see these cats and to find out the new things. All the time I was hanging out with those young guys at Wiltwyck, I was beginning to feel young. But now all my old friends were here, the people I felt I was just as old as, and I felt good.

We started hanging out again. I was thirteen, so now it was okay for me to hang out. Nobody squawked. Butch and Danny used to take me to a place called the Lounge, and we'd dance. It was a cellar. It was dark in there, and we used to listen to records by the Orioles. We would dance the Grind, a dance that anybody could do. All you had to do was stand still and move a little bit.

Then I started staying out real late at night. Sometimes I'd come in at two or three o'clock in the morning, but Mama and Dad wouldn't squawk. They started treating me like I was old now, so whenever I was home, I didn't mind being there. But something else happened that summer—something that made things change, that made Harlem change.

When I came home, Kid and Butch and Danny weren't smoking reefers any more. I'd have a smoke, but they were doing other things. And the first thing that Danny told me was that they were using something that they called “horse.” I remember Danny saying, “If I ever catch you messin' wit horse, I'll kill you.” I had the feeling that he meant it, but it made me curious about horse. It seemed that they were saying this was something I wasn't old enough for. But I wanted to do the same things they were doing; I wanted to be as old as they were. All the older cats were using horse. The younger cats were still smoking reefers, drinking wine, and stuff like that. But I didn't want to be young. I wanted to be old. And the first time Danny spoke to me about it, I knew I was going to get some horse somehow, somewhere—soon.

Horse was a new thing, not only in our neighborhood but in Brooklyn, the Bronx, and everyplace I went, uptown and downtown. It was like horse had just taken over. Everybody was talking about it. All the hip people were using it and snorting it and getting this new high. To know what was going on and to be in on things, you had to do that. And the only way I felt I could come out of Wiltwyck and be up to date, the only way to take up where I had left off and be the same hip guy I was before I went to Wiltwyck, was to get in on the hippest
thing, and the hippest thing was horse. It wasn't like the other time I came home and heard that the Orioles were singing at the Apollo and that guys were going around singing in little goups and trying to imitate them. These things had happened before. The first time I came home, it was still the gang fights. If you were in a gang, you were somebody, and you were doing things. The summer before this one, the Grind was the thing that was going on. But things kept changing, and I'd always been able to change with them and keep up with the neighborhood.

When I left New York that summer and went back to Wiltwyck, the thing I still wanted most was horse. I had been smoking reefers and had gotten high a lot of times, but I had the feeling that this horse was something that was out of this world. Back at Wiltwyck, I started telling everybody about horse. I told K.B. about horse; I told Tito about horse; I told Horse about horse. We just had to get some somehow. We knew that it was medicine and that you could get high off it and that it was better than reefers, but that was about all we knew.

For about six months or more, the guys in Aggrey House used to try to get high by taking a cigarette and sticking the teeth of a comb into it. All it did was stink when you smoked it. It didn't really get cats high, but you could make believe if you had enough imagination. Then I think it was Stumpy who came up with putting camera film into a cigarette. We tried this, and a lot of cats got sick, got headaches, and got everything else, but I don't think anybody ever really got high. When we heard about this horse thing, every cat who knew about it wanted to try some. I'd gotten some guys high off reefers when I took them home with me or when they came to visit me. Now we wanted to get some highs off horse.