Manchild in the Promised Land (30 page)

Heroin had just about taken over Harlem. It seemed to be a kind of plague. Every time I went uptown, somebody else was hooked, somebody else was strung out. People talked about them as if they were dead. You'd ask about an old friend, and they'd say, “Oh, well, he's strung out.” It wasn't just a comment or an answer to a question. It was a eulogy for someone. He was just dead, through.

At that time, I didn't know anybody who had kicked it. Heroin had been the thing in Harlem for about five years, and I don't think anybody knew anyone who had kicked it. They knew a lot of guys who were going away, getting cures, and coming back, but never kicking it. Cats were even going into the Army or to jail, coming back, and getting strung out again. I guess this was why everybody felt that when somebody was strung out on drugs, he was through. It was almost the same as saying he was dying. And a lot of cats were dying.

I was afraid to ask about somebody I hadn't seen in a while, especially if it was someone who was once a good friend of mine. There was always a chance somebody would say, “Well, he died. The cat took an O.D.,” an overdose of heroin; or he was pushed out of a window trying to rob somebody's apartment, or shot five times trying to stick up a place to get some money for drugs. Drugs were killing just about
everybody off in one way or another. It had taken over the neighborhood, the entire community. I didn't know of one family in Harlem with three or more kids between the ages of fourteen and nineteen in which at least one of them wasn't on drugs. This was just how it was.

It was like a plague, and the plague usually afflicted the eldest child of every family, like the one of the firstborn with Pharaoh's people in the Bible. Sometimes it was even worse than the biblical plague. In Danny Rogers' family, it had everybody. There were four boys, and it had all of them. It was a disheartening thing for a mother and father to see all their sons strung out on drugs at the same time. It was as though drugs were a ghost, a big ghost, haunting the community.

People were more afraid than they'd ever been before. Everybody was afraid of this drug thing, even the older people who would never use it. They were afraid to go out of their houses with just one lock on the door. They had two, three, and four locks. People had guns in their houses because of the junkies. The junkies were committing almost all the crimes in Harlem. They were snatching pocketbooks. A truck couldn't come into the community to unload anything any more. Even if it was toilet paper or soap powder, the junkies would clean it out if the driver left it for a second.

The cats who weren't strung out couldn't see where they were heading. If they were just snorting some horse, they seemed to feel that it wouldn't get to them. It's as though cats would say, “Well, damn, I'm slicker than everybody else,” even though some slick cats and some strong guys had fallen into the clutches of heroin. Everybody could see that nobody was getting away from it once they had started dabbling in it, but still some people seemed to feel, “Shit, I'm not gon get caught. I can use it, and I can use it and not be caught.”

Guys who were already strung out were trying to keep their younger brothers away from stuff. They were trying feebly, and necessarily so, because guys who were strung out on drugs didn't have too much time to worry about anybody but themselves. It was practically a twenty-four-hour-a-day job trying to get some money to get some stuff to keep the habit from fucking with you.

There was a time when I'd come uptown on the weekend and cats would say things like, “Man, let's have a drink,” or “Let's get some pot,” or “Let's get some liquor.” But after a while, about 1955, duji became the thing. I'd go uptown and cats would say, “Hey, man, how
you doin'? It's nice to see you. Look here, I got some shit,” meaning heroin. “Let's get high.” They would say it so casually, the way somebody in another community might say, “C'mon, let's have a drink.”

I'd tell them, “No, man, I don't dabble in stuff like that.” They'd look at me and smile, feeling somewhat superior, more hip than I was because they were into drugs. I just had to accept this, because I couldn't understand why people were still using drugs when they saw that cats were getting strung out day after day after day. It just didn't make too much sense to me, but that was how things were, and it wasn't likely that anybody was going to change it for some time to come.

Then money became more of a temptation. The young people out in the streets were desperate for it. If a cat took out a twenty-dollar bill on Eighth Avenue in broad daylight, he could be killed. Cats were starving for drugs; their habit was down on them, and they were getting sick. They were out of their minds, so money for drugs became the big thing.

I remember that around 1952 and 1953, when cats first started getting strung out good, people were saying, “Damn, man, that cat went and robbed his own family. He stole his father's suits, stole his mother's money,” and all this kinda shit. It was still something unusual back then. In some cases, the lack of money had already killed most family life. Miss Jamie and her family, the Willards, were always up tight for money because she spent the food money for playing the numbers and stuff like that. This was the sort of family that had never had any family life to speak of. But now, since drugs demanded so much money and since drugs had afflicted just about every family with young people in it, this desire for money was wrecking almost all family life.

Fathers were picking up guns and saying, “Now, look, if you fuck wit that rent money, I'm gon kill you,” and they meant it. Cats were taking butcher knives and going at their fathers because they had to have money to get drugs. Anybody who was standing in the way of a drug addict when his habit was down on him—from mother or father on down—was risking his life.

Harlem was a community that couldn't afford the pressure of this thing, because there weren't many strong family ties anyway. There might have been a few, but they were so few, they were almost insignificant.

There was a nice-looking little dark-skinned girl named Elsie on 146th Street. When she was a little snotty-nosed thing, she used to hang out with my sister Margie. Around 1955, Elsie was thirteen or fourteen. She was a little large for her age, and she'd just gone into junior high school. She wasn't even a real schoolgirl yet. I remember once standing on a stoop on Eighth Avenue, and she came up. I had seen her in a bar, and I had wondered, What the hell is she doin' in a bar as young as she is?

I started talking to her, asking her what she was doing. She told me she was making money, and she sounded as though she was kind of proud of it, as though she thought she was slick.

I asked her, “How much money are you makin', Elsie?”

She said, “Enough for me.”

“How much money do you need?” She was thirteen, and it seemed kind of crazy to me for her to be out there tricking.

She wasn't such a beautiful girl. She was just trying to grow old fast, too fast. I had the feeling that this little girl ought to be still reading
True Love
magazines, still dreaming about romance and Prince Charming and all that kind of stuff. Here she was out here acting like a whore.

I wanted to get her to face up to what would happen. I said, “Look, Elsie, what cat's gon want you ? The average nigger isn't gonna want to be seen with you in a year or so.”

“No, not unless I've got money.”

“Look, baby, money's not everything.”

She said, no, money wasn't everything, but what money couldn't buy, nobody wanted anyway, so it might as well be everything.

The conversation just went on like this. She had all the answers. She knew that everybody needed money, and she had a good point there. She asked me, “Now, if you ain't got no money and you come uptown, do you think your family would be as happy to see you?”

This stopped me. I knew she was right.

In Harlem, practically everybody I knew had been striving for a long time to make enough money to buy a big car and expensive clothes. They'd always wanted to do these things, and the main way of doing it had been through the numbers. All the people who had a little more nerve than average or didn't care would take numbers. Numbers was the thing; it sort of ran the community.

Early in the morning, everybody used to put in their numbers before they went to work. I remember that Mama and Dad used to always go up to Miss Rose's house and leave their numbers. Sometimes, if it was getting late, they'd give me the numbers to take up. All day long, they'd be thinking about the numbers. Numbers was like a community institution. Everybody accepted it and respected it. This was the way that the people got to the money. If you were lucky, you hit a number now and then, but very few poor people were lucky enough to hit the number for anything big. A few did, but even if you didn't, you could run numbers. If you could be a numbers runner, you'd make about seventy-five dollars a week, which wasn't that much money, but there wasn't that much work to do. And when people hit, they would give you some.

But then it seemed like drugs were coming in so strong with the younger generation that it was almost overshadowing numbers. A lot of younger cats who were taking numbers would start using drugs, and then they would start fucking with people's money. They couldn't be trusted by numbers bankers any more. A whole lot of things started happening. People started getting shot and things like that over their money because cats needed it to get drugs. A lot of the junkies started sticking up the numbers writers and sticking up the controllers.

Peddling drugs had become a popular vocation in Harlem, and it was accepted by everybody, except the police, and they didn't matter. They didn't count unless you got caught, and, if you didn't get caught, nobody asked where you got your money from. That's why a lot of people went into it.

If there wasn't so much time on a drug bust, I suppose a lot of other people would've gotten into it, some of the more righteous people, who had been controlling the numbers for a long time. I remember once, there used to be a preacher down around Eighth Avenue who preached in Jersey on Sundays and during the week came to Harlem and took numbers. That was all right, but now drugs were the thing. This cat had to move on out because drug dealing was a cold business. Anybody who was dealing drugs now would have to have a gun. There was always somebody trying to stick you up, because they knew how much money you had.

If the plague didn't hit you directly, it hit you indirectly. It seemed as though nobody could really get away from it. There were a lot of
guys trying to get young girls started on drugs so that they could put them on the corner. When a chick's habit came down on her, she'd usually end up down in the “marketplace,” 125th Street between Third Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue, where all the whores hung out. They sold cunt out there on the street at night.

If a young girl got strung out on drugs, she wouldn't go around trying to steal. Most girls were afraid they might get caught. Most girls would start selling body. So if a cat was strung out, if there was a young girl he knew who had eyes for him, he would cut her into some drugs to try to get her strung out too. Then he could get the chick to sell cunt for him and get enough money to keep them both high. But it was always just a matter of time before the chick would cut him loose. She'd find somebody else, usually another junkie she dug more than she dug him. She'd go on and pull tight with this cat, and she'd sell body, turn tricks, and make money to support both of their habits. This was usually the way things went.

Many times they were guys who never knew anything about stealing. They were good boys; I mean, they were never into street life. But it seemed as though drugs crawled into all the houses. It even crawled into the churches and pulled some of the nice people right out. It was a plague. You couldn't close all the doors and all the windows and keep everything out. It was getting to everybody. It was getting to cats who went to nice schools, Catholic schools. It was even getting to people whose folks used to live in the Dunbar and up on Edgecombe Avenue in fabulous houses, people who thought cats from Eighth Avenue were dirt.

You'd run into many cats along Eighth Avenue and you'd say, “Look, man, what are you tryin' to do? You tryin' to kick your habit? You want to get yourself together?” A lot of cats just didn't seem to feel that they were in a bad way, being strung out.

They'd say things like, “Man, all I want me is a slick bitch.” This was a good thing to have if you were strung out, I suppose, because just about all the young cats, seventeen or eighteen, knew that if you had a slick bitch, you would always have some money. By a slick bitch, they meant chicks who would help you work a Murphy and who would sell some cunt if you got up tight; chicks who would burn other people for you, that is, go into a bar and tell a cat that the Man was on him, or some shit like that, and have him pass his drugs to her. She'd make it
out with the drugs, and her man would be waiting outside. Or her man would be playing the police.

Around 1955, everybody wanted a slick bitch; nobody wanted to kick the habit much. They were strung out, and they were really going down. They were ragged and beat-up. Cats who had never come out of the house without a pair of shoes on that didn't cost at least thirty-five dollars, who had never had a wrinkle anyplace on them, who had always worn the best suits from Brooks Brothers or Witty Brothers—these cats were going around greasy and dirty. These were people who had a whole lot of pride. They were people who had had too much pride to put a dirty handkerchief in their pockets at one time. Now they just seemed to be completely unaware of how they looked. They would just be walking around dirty, greasy, looking for things to steal.

The slang was always changing for heroin. They called it duji or shit or stuff or poison. After about 1952, nobody called it horse any more. I always referred to it as the shit plague, because that had more meaning to me.