Manchild in the Promised Land (19 page)

He said, “Go on and hit me as many times as you want,” and I kept on hitting him. I hit him kind of hard, and he said, “Damn, man, like cool it.” That was enough. He said, “Look, I'm gon hit you in your face. I'm just gon slap you with my hand, and I'm not gon tell you
when, and I'm not gon tell you how many times. If you cry, I'm gon walk away, and I'm gon forget about it. And if you get mad, it's like the whole thing is just lost, and we gotta start all over again.”

I had to go along with it. He hit me. He hit me in my face ten times, and each time was harder than the time before. He just slapped me on one side, and I didn't even know which hand was going to come. He said, “Remember, don't git excited. Don't git excited.” When he slapped me the fifth time, I was ready to cry. But there was no sense in me even thinking about hitting this nigger, because I knew there was nothing in the world, even with God on my side, that could have helped me to kick his ass.

I just held it back and fought it. After hitting me ten times, each time harder than the time before, he stopped. He said, “You mad at me, man?”

“No, man. I'm not mad at you. I think it's a whole lotta bullshit, and if you wanted to hit me in my face, you could-a told me.”

He said, “Uh-huh.”

So we sat down, and he started telling me things about bitches and things I liked to hear. He took me downstairs and showed me some pictures I hadn't seen before. It was pretty nice. He asked me if I wanted to get high. I said, “No, I don't want to get high.” Then James Fox came in and said that he had his works and that he wanted Johnny to straighten him. Johnny asked me again if I wanted to get high, and I said, “No, man, I don't mess wit no horse no more.”

So he said, “All right.” He said he had to take care of some business and would see me later, and he asked me if we were still tight.

“Yeah, man, you know we're all right.”

“Okay, now, Sonny, if I ever see you out there in the street fightin' a cat again and not pressin' him, not stayin' on him every time you throw a punch, and not showin' this cat wit every punch that you mean to kick his ass, I'm gon take you up on the roof again, and that time I'm gon kick your ass.” And he winked at me.

I said, “Yeah, all right, man,” and walked.

I had cut Tito and Dunny and Turk and Bucky and all the cats who were hanging out with me into Johnny too. We all used to sell him stuff, and we all liked to listen to Johnny when he talked. All of us would do anything for him, but after a while we wouldn't sell Johnny the stuff we stole, because we knew the cat was taking us. There were other fences around that we could always get a better deal from. So we
stopped doing business with Johnny and just listened to him. And he used to tell us a whole lot of things that we didn't know about.

He told us how to steal furs and what to do with them afterward, how to steal silver, and how to go downtown to the places where few Negroes went and steal stuff. Johnny told us how to dress. He'd tell us things about looking like a delivery boy when you went down on Park Avenue to steal something or looking like a working boy when you went down to the garment center to steal things. He knew a lot about stealing and all kinds of crime.

He knew more about bitches than anything else, and I guess that was his main stick, bitches. At that time—when I was listening to Johnny—I wanted to try a lot of the things that he was telling me about bitches on some of the bitches I knew. Some of the things I was just too scared to try. And some of them … I didn't know any chicks I'd dare try those on.

There was one good chick. This was Jackie. Jackie was a beautiful black bitch, and she had a body on her that made Hollywood glamour girls look undernourished. And Jackie was only thirteen years old. I remember the first time I went up to her house. I knew her sister, Trixie. She was a skinny little ugly-looking girl when she was in Carole's class in P.S. 90. But Trixie had gotten older, and she'd gotten fresh. She'd started jugging everybody, and just about everybody knew it. She had a reputation as the main young whore on Eighth Avenue.

Dunny was going with Trixie when I first went up to her house. He took me up there. He'd been telling me about her, but I'd never been able to place her as the girl Carole used to bring home for lunch sometimes, because she was real skinny and funny looking then. But it was the same Trixie. And Trixie wasn't so skinny or so funny looking any more. She had a body on her that was far from funny.

Her sister, Jackie, I'd never seen before. I probably would have paid no attention to her a few years earlier. She probably used to be a funny-looking black girl with nappy hair and knock-knees. You wouldn't want to do anything but pull on her hair or punch her in the mouth or something like that. But the first time I saw Jackie, I didn't know how I'd missed it.

Jackie was almost as hip as Trixie was, and she was only thirteen. She started doing things for me; I guess she liked me. A lot of guys used to come up there, but she used to give me stuff and do a lot of
crazy things for me and to me; and when I came up to her house, she never talked to other guys. She always wanted to come around me and play; and if I wanted some money to get some reefers or something like that, she would always run out and get it.

Turk used to always be trying to get some pants from Jackie, but Jackie didn't like him too much. She always told him that he couldn't do anything and that he should take some lessons from me about what to do with a girl in bed. That used to make Turk mad, real mad, because Turk was a big cat, and I was a little cat.

Jackie could always get some money from somebody, so I stayed tight with her. I wanted to stay tight with her, so I didn't treat her too bad. I used to go up there, spend the night. Her mother wouldn't say anything. A lot of cats had come up there to spend the night. It was that kind of place.

Jackie was the first girl I tried some of the things with that I'd learned from Johnny. Just about every time this cat told me something new that you could do with a girl, I tried it out on Jackie. And if it could work on Jackie, I knew what it could do to most of the girls around there. Jackie had had a lot of things done to her, and she'd been to bed with a lot of grown men. That's how she got her money. She was a big girl. But I didn't mind that too much, because she was nice. She liked me, and I liked her. We got along. We were more good friends than anything else, and maybe we just jugged because good friends were supposed to do that sort of thing. Anyway, I liked doing it with her, and I guess she liked doing it with me too, because we just kept doing it. She knew a lot of the older prostitutes in the neighborhood, and I suppose they used to teach her things. She knew a whole lot. As a matter of fact, she taught me a whole lot of things. She was the first girl who ever put her tongue in my ear, and I couldn't take that feeling for a long time. It took me about two weeks to get used to it. At first, it seemed kind of dirty for someone to be putting her tongue in your ear, but after a while, it just felt good.

If you were a cat who could come into Jackie's and make one of the sisters just forget about whatever she was doing and give all her attention to you, you were somebody. It made cats who didn't know you wonder about you and who you were. It made the cats from downtown respect you right away. It had a whole lot of advantages, being good friends with Jackie.

I guess she had her advantages too, because I was known everyplace
and respected in most. When she went to school and told the other girls that she was my girl, it made her somebody. Most of the people in the neighborhood knew that I'd been in trouble most of my life and that I'd been in what they thought was a reform school. They thought I was a bad cat. People who didn't even know me had heard about me, and they had a whole lot of respect for me. If Jackie could tell people she was my girl, they would respect her too. Everybody but Sugar. She should never have told Sugar. Sugar used to call Jackie the Black Spanish Girl. I think she called her that one time because she had some big earrings on. She got all her friends in school to call Jackie the Black Señorita and to tease her about the way she dressed.

Jackie couldn't dress as well as Sugar because Jackie's mother didn't care about her. Sugar was an only child, although there were a couple of cousins living in the house with her. Her mother cared about her a whole lot, about how she dressed, what she ate, and whether she did well in school. Sugar could afford to look down on Jackie, since Jackie's mother didn't give a damn whether she even went to school. Half the time she was just lying around the house with some guy and didn't know whether the kids were alive or dead, full or starving. She didn't care.

I used to feel sorry for Jackie, and I used to tell Sugar I was going to kick her ass if she kept messing with Jackie. But Sugar didn't believe it. She knew I'd never bother her for Jackie. I guess she would have been real surprised if I had. I would have too, because Sugar had become somebody close to me. I liked her a whole lot. I wasn't talking about love or anything like that to her, and I never would say anything that would give her any ideas that I was in love with her. But if she came around the house, I wouldn't mistreat her. I don't know what it was, but she meant something to me, a whole lot. So I just let her give Jackie a hard time.

I think after a while Jackie just learned to fight. That's the only way she could stop those girls from calling her those names and talking about her. She started dressing. She started letting Trixie buy her clothes. And she started trying to imitate Trixie and look the way she did. When she really put her mind to it, she looked real good. I didn't mind her telling people she was my girl friend.

All this time, we had been just stealing and messing around with Trixie and other bitches who were fast like that. After a while, we met
a whole lot of them all over Harlem. Just like that. They wanted to do some of everything.

I stopped seeing Danny, Butch, and Kid and started concentrating on my new friends and the things we were doing. And that went on just fine for a long while, but one day we got busted stealing. We were breaking into an A & P and the cops ran up on us and caught everybody. I ran up on a roof, and that crazy Alley Bush was running in front of everybody and falling down and blocking the staircase so nobody else could get up. A cop was down at the bottom yelling “Stop! Stop! Or I'll shoot!” Niggers were climbing all over one another trying not to be the last one out in case the cop shot. Alley Bush was lying down hollering, “He gon shoot me! He gon shoot me!” Everybody just ran right over the cat and paid him no mind.

I went over the roof and down the staircase two buildings away. At the bottom, I saw the cops, so I ran behind the steps and started pissing, like I had just gone in there to take a leak.

But the white cop said, “C'mon, fella,” and snatched me by my shoulder. “C'mon, let's go.”

I said, “Man, what's wrong wit you; other people piss in this hallway.”

The cop said, “C'mon, don't be a wise guy now.”

He took me on out and threw me in one of the cars. They had everybody there—Mac, Bucky, Turk, Tito, and Dunny. In a little while, they brought out Alley Bush and Earl, Bucky's older brother.

They took us all down to the police station, but they let us go that night. We had to go to court the next morning. I remember that night because it was the first time Dad had beat me since I had come home from Wiltwyck. It was the last time he ever beat me without a fight.

This was about the worst time I'd had since I'd been home. Mama came down to get me that night, the same way she used to before I went to Wiltwyck. Everybody else's mother came down to get them. When I got home, Dad was awake in bed, and he started his same old preaching.

That made me mad. It was like I had never gone away and nothing had changed. It seemed like I was right back where I was years before, and it really made me mad to hear him start all that preaching in his old humdrum voice. He knew he was going to kick my ass afterward, so I never could understand why he had to go through all that preaching first.

When he started that preaching, I just looked down and moved around. The next thing I knew, he was on me. But it was different this time. He didn't have a belt or ironing cord or stick or anything. He was hitting me with his fist. I was balled up. He hit me in my head. I had never hit him; I guess I was too scared. But I had never let anybody hit me with his fist without hitting him back, and it was a scarey kind of feeling. Maybe if he hadn't stopped beating me when he did, I would have hit him this time. But he stopped, and when he stopped, we both knew something. We both knew it was the last time. He had beat me with his fist and hadn't killed me. In fact, he hadn't hurt me that much. That had to be the last time.

When we got in court the next morning, we went before a judge. Some people were sitting around on the sides, but there wasn't a jury. We were just standing there in front of this one judge. He said, “Do you boys know you could have hurt yourselves going into that store the way you did ? That plate-glass window could have fallen down on you and broken your necks.”

The people there just seemed to be visitors; they reminded me of the board at Wiltwyck that would come around and watch sometimes. They were all white people, in their forties, I guess, and they were just watching.

The judge kept talking to us about how we had risked our lives and how we were lucky not to get hurt. He said he was going to give us another chance. We'd expected this; we'd heard that everyplace they could have sent us was all filled up—Warwick and Wiltwyck and Lincoln Hall. We were all under sixteen, all except Earl, and he wasn't there. They had taken him to another court.

After the lecture, when the judge said, “I'm going to give you boys another chance,” I don't know why or what happened, but I heard myself say, “Man, you not givin' us another chance. You givin' us the same chance we had before.”