Manchild in the Promised Land (11 page)

I was glad to be with Mama, and I wanted to be nice to her because she had tried so hard to get the mean queen to send me home. So I told Mama the truth. I told her that I didn't know what was going to happen and that there was nothing I could do about it anyway.

Mama got mad and said, “You little dumb nigger, didn' you hear that lady judge say she gonna send you away someplace to a school?” Mama looked down the counter and saw a white man drinking a cup of coffee. Then she looked down at the floor real fast. She wanted to hit me, but she remembered I had just gotten out of the Youth House, and she didn't want to start hitting me already. Mama looked at the floor for a little while, and I knew she was ashamed that the white man had heard her call me a nigger.

Then I said, “Mama, that's nothing, ‘cause I don' care, and it ain't none-a his business anyway.”

Mama said, “Boy, hurry up and eat that hot dog.” The next thing Mama said was something about hoping that I didn't think that lady judge was talking about a real school. Mama said that the judge was sending me to a reform school and that I might get out when I was eighteen if I was real good till that time. Mama asked me again if I understood that. I told her that there was nothing I could do about it now and that maybe I would die before I went, so it didn't make sense for me to worry about it. And I told Mama that Grandpa use to always say that. Mama said that Grandpa was older than me and that Grandpa had never stolen anything from anybody—or at least he had never gotten caught. I said I never thought that I was older than Grandpa and that I didn't get caught all the time either. Mama got mad, and I kept on eating the hot dog. I liked Mama a whole lot, but there were things that she just couldn't understand, and she wouldn't listen to me when I tried to explain them to her.

When I got back home I promised Dad and Mama that I wasn't going to hang out with Toto any more, and I didn't for two whole days. I even went to school for a week straight without playing hookey once. Then Knoxie started coming by my house early in the morning, and we would go up on the Hill instead of going to school. I just stopped going to school altogether, and nobody seemed to care about it. I had to leave the house every morning so Dad and Mama wouldn't know I wasn't going to school, but nobody sent any absence cards to my house, and the truant officer didn't come around either. I didn't know what was going on, but I liked it, whatever it was. Well, I liked it for a while anyway.

One day when I hadn't been to school in a long time, Mama said, “So you ain't been goin' to school, huh? Okay, have your fun young man, ‘cause pretty soon you gonna be someplace where they'll make you go to school.”

This was the kind of thing that was supposed to make Dad grab the ironing cord and me at the same time, but Dad didn't do a thing, and I got scared. Not knowing what I was scared of and not knowing that it was too late to “git by,” I started going to school almost every day.

Even though I was going to school a whole lot, I still had time to get into trouble with Knoxie, Bucky, and Toto. They all knew I was going to a place called Warwick. All of us had been hearing about Warwick for years. We kind of knew that we would all get there one day. The judge said I was going to a place called Wiltwyck, but Bubba Williams said that there was no place by that name and that the judge just didn't know how to say Warwick. Bubba knew everything. He knew almost as much as God, so I had to be going to Warwick, because Butch and Kid were there, and it made me feel as old as them to be going there too. Toto was mad because he wasn't going. I kept telling him that he was too young, but not to worry, because I would probably still be there when he got old enough. This made him real mad, because we were the same age. But I kept telling him I was older than he was.

Mama said I would have to stay up there till I was twenty-one if I was bad; but if I was real good, I could come home when I was eighteen. When I told Bubba about it, he said I would probably come home when I was fourteen. He thought I was twelve then. So I was telling everybody who didn't know any better that I was going to
Warwick for two years. Knoxie was the only one I knew who didn't think it was so great—he thought there wouldn't be anything up there to steal. He kept trying to talk me out of going. I knew that Knoxie was just worrying about losing a stealing and fighting partner. But just to shut him up, I promised to duck out on Mama the day I was supposed to go away. Knoxie said that he would stay home from school and that I could come around his house and stay as long as I wanted to.

I was supposed to go away about a week after my birthday. I was going to be eleven years old, but almost everybody thought I was going to be thirteen, since that's what I told them. I wasn't really lying about my age; I was just tired of not being older than anybody but Bulldog, who wasn't even around any more. I was planning on having a real big birthday and going-away party on the Sunday after my birthday. I had started stealing things for the party and had invited everybody I knew about a month ahead of time.

Bucky was going to miss me a lot while I was away. I was his most important friend. Since food was the most important thing in the world to Bucky, I was always showing him where some food was and how to get it. When I was teaching Bucky how to stay out all night, he use to get hungry all the time and would do dumb things that might have gotten us caught just to get some food. When we would be looking for a store to break into, Bucky always wanted to break into a restaurant, a candy store, or a grocery store. It didn't make sense to break into those kind of stores, because they didn't have anything you could sell for some money. Anyway, if somebody got hungry, he could always go up to 155th Street to the Father Divine place and say “peace” to the people there and get all the food he could eat for just fifteen cents. If you were real quick with your hands, you only had to say “peace” and smile every time the lady looked at you. After I showed Bucky where the peace place was, he hardly ever went home. Sometimes I would see him in the street with a big old turkey leg. Other kids would ask him where he had gotten it, and he would just tell them, “Father gave it to me,” meaning Father Divine. Bucky was the only guy I knew who would go strutting down the street with a turkey leg in his hand and a pocketful of biscuits.

I guess everybody had something about them that was kind of crazy when it came to stealing or catting out. When I was on the cat, I knew that I was going to get caught sooner or later, but I just didn't want to get caught before I had stolen a new suit. This was usually the
first thing I would steal when I was going to cat out. A new suit would make anybody look respectable, and the cops wouldn't bother you if you looked respectable. Butch had taught me that before I started catting out, and I never forgot it. If I had a new suit on when the cops brought me home, Mama and Dad respected me too. I didn't mind not having money; as long as I had a new suit, it meant the same thing—that I could do okay out in the street. Bubba said that was how you could tell how slick a nigger was—by how well he did in the street. Butch said Mr. Jimmy, the hustler, was the slickest cat on Eighth Avenue. Mr. Jimmy knew how to “git by” in the street so well that he had never had a job since he left Alabama twenty years before. Mr. Jimmy changed cars every year, dressed up with shining shoes every day of the week, always had plenty of money, always had a pretty woman with him, and kept his hair slicked back.

I knew Mr. Jimmy from Dad's Saturday night crap games. He used to be out on the avenue on Sunday morning with an orange crate with a piece of cardboard on it and three nutshells. Mr. Jimmy would hide a little pea under one of the nutshells and bet people that they couldn't find the pea. I used to try to be on Eighth Avenue every Sunday morning just to watch Mr. Jimmy switch those shells around. He had some real quick hands. I watched a lot of people search for that pea, but I never saw anybody find it. That is, anybody but Bubba Williams, and that didn't count, because Bubba was Mr. Jimmy's hustling buddy. Bubba would always find the pea a few times, then he would go to the corner and watch for the cops while other people paid a whole lot of money to look for a pea they couldn't find. Sometimes Mr. Jimmy had three cards out on the avenue, and people would be looking for a card that nobody could find. When I walked up to where Mr. Jimmy was, I would always say hello to him and he would say hello back to me, and it made me feel good, especially if some of my friends were with me. Yes, I guess Mr. Jimmy was the slickest cat on Eighth Avenue, just as Butch said, because nobody ever found that pea or that card, and Mr. Jimmy is still doing good out in the street.

My eleventh birthday—the first birthday party I had ever had—was really something. On the night before the party, I took Knoxie and Bucky down to Delancey Street, where we waited until three o'clock in the morning for a nightclub to close. It was a Roumanian nightclub, but to us it was a Jewish nightclub. It had to be Jewish, because being white
and talking funny so nobody could understand you was what made people Jewish. When the Jewish nightclub closed we went in with three shopping bags. Only a little bit of change was in the cash register, but we ate a lot of turkey and other kinds of funny-tasting meat. When we left the place, the three shopping bags were full of champagne for my birthday party.

It was the best party Eighth Avenue had ever seen. The people came all afternoon and all night. Ages ranged from twelve to thirty-five. Most of the people there didn't know me, and I didn't know them, and nobody cared about not knowing somebody. The word got out about the champagne, and everybody who passed by the house came in to get some champagne and pigs' feet.

After all that foolishness with the cake, I forgot about everybody at the party. Everybody but Sugar. Sugar was one of my best friends now, and I told her so. She had on a pretty white dress; her hair was curled; she looked as if somebody had worked some magic on her. Sugar must have known she looked brand new, because she didn't act the way she acted most of the time. She didn't laugh—she only smiled; and she didn't talk loud. She seemed to know that it was my party and that she was just a guest. This was the first time I had ever seen Sugar act that way, and I didn't expect her to do it for long. I kept looking at her and waiting for her to do something crazy like come over to me and stick her tongue out at me and start playing. But every time I looked at Sugar, she was still sitting there and still looking brand new.

I don't know how I got to her in that crowded living room. Sugar never said a word; she just held my hand and followed me quietly from one room to another until we found one with nobody in it. Sugar seemed to know I wanted to say something to her, but she didn't know what. She acted like she was waiting for something to happen and like that something was about to happen. Sugar seemed to know that what I said to her was going be something real good, something I had never told her before. I had that same feeling about it. I didn't know what I was going to say to her, but I knew I wasn't going to tell her that she was ugly like I did most of the time. And I knew that Sugar wasn't going to argue and jump all over me when I got her where I was taking her to. I couldn't understand what had happened to Sugar, but she sure was different. She was still ugly, but there seemed to be so many pretty things about her that pretty girls didn't have.

Me and Sugar stayed in that room for a long time, and when we
came out it seemed like the world had changed colors. I still don't know all of what happened to me in that room with Sugar. I knew it wasn't the champagne that did it. For the next two years whenever I was in the city, Sugar and I never had to say anything to each other. We came out of that room with a whole lot of understanding. Sugar could look at me and make me smile or even laugh, and it wasn't because she looked funny either; it was just that sometimes when she looked at me, I felt so good I just had to laugh or at least smile. And I could look at her and make her whole face light up. When we would hit each other, the hit always meant something that both of us understood. Our hitting wasn't like before, when we would hit each other kind of hard. Now we only tapped each other just hard enough to say what we wanted to say.

It was snowing real hard outside. Mama was so nervous, she tied my tie about six times before getting it right. I was all set to go downtown to an office to meet somebody who was going to take me upstate. Mama had locked my shoes in the closet the night before to make sure I didn't get out of the house while she was getting the other kids ready for school. Even though I couldn't get my shoes, Mama made me stay in the front room till we were ready to go. And every chance she got, Mama would come in the front room to check on me. She knew that if I had enough time, I would get my shoes out of that closet somehow. When Mama couldn't come out of the kitchen, she would call to me and ask me what I was doing. Every time she asked, I told her the real truth, that I wasn't doing anything.

It seemed like I had already started serving my time that morning, sitting there all dressed up, with everything on but my shoes and hat, in the room farthest away from the door. I was just sitting there at the window watching all that snow falling and feeling kind of sad. The snow just kept on falling, and I knew it was covering more than just the sidewalk. I knew Knoxie was waiting for me to come to his house, and I knew I wasn't going to make it, but I didn't care. Maybe it was because I knew what I would be doing for the next few days if I went to Knoxie's house. And I was wondering what would happen if I went to that office. Who would I meet there? Would there be something to steal there? Maybe I didn't care about not meeting Knoxie because I knew I couldn't get my shoes out of the closet.

Watching the snow fall made me think about a lot of things. I thought about what Dad had said the night before. He knew he would
already have left for work when I got up that morning, so he gave me his good-bye speech the night before. I never used to listen to Dad when he talked to me—I never thought he had anything to say worth listening to—but I always used to make believe I was listening to him. But that night, I didn't even pretend I was thinking about what he said.