Manchild in the Promised Land (32 page)

Most of the people didn't know it, and this was one of the great truths that we discovered. When you got high, you'd discover a whole lot of answers to many questions. This was one of them. We knew that the women were running Harlem. The women didn't know it themselves, but we knew it. Anyway, we knew it when we got high.

We'd get high, and we'd solve all the problems of Harlem. When it wore off, we would just have to live with them all over again.

The real reason I wanted to be in Harlem was to spend more time with Pimp. But I couldn't. There just wasn't enough time. I couldn't take him to live with me. He was still too young. I couldn't have him
hang out with me. I couldn't go back home. I'd just see him sometimes and talk to him.

He got in trouble once with some kids, something childish like snatching a pocketbook. It didn't seem too important at the time. I was a little bothered about it, and I spoke to him. He said they'd just done it for kicks. I was trying real hard to keep a check on him from a distance. I knew what he was doing.

He had started shooting craps, but this was nothing, really. All the young boys shot craps and gambled. This was what they were supposed to do. But Mama was worried about it. I suppose she and Dad were getting kind of old. She used to tell me, “Oh, that boy, he stays out real late.” It seemed as though they were trying to throw their burden of parenthood on me, and I kind of resented that, but I cared about Pimp. I wanted to do something for him.

The only trouble was that I had set such a high standard for him, such a bad example, it was hard as hell to erase. People knew him as my brother. The boys his age expected him to follow in my footsteps. He was my brother, and I had done so much, I had become a legend in the neighborhood. They expected him to live up to it.

I used to try to talk to him. I'd say, “Look, Pimp, what do you want to do, man?” I tried to get him interested in things. He used to like to play ball and stuff like that, but he wasn't interested in anything outside of the neighborhood. He wasn't interested in getting away. He couldn't see life as anything different. At fourteen, he was still reading comic books. He wasn't interested in anything except being hip.

I was real scared about this, but I knew that I couldn't do anything. He was doing a whole lot of shit that he wasn't telling me about. I remember one time I asked him, just to find out if he had started smoking yet, if he wanted some pot. He said, “No, man, I don't want any, and if I wanted some, I'd have it. I know where to get it.” I was kind of hurt, but I knew that this was something that had to come. He would've known, and I suppose he should've known. When I was his age, even younger, I knew.

I couldn't feel mad about it, but I felt kind of hurt. I wanted to say, “Look, Pimp, what's happenin', man? Why aren't we as tight as we were before?” He still admired me, but something had happened. It was as though we had lost a contact, a closeness, that we once had, and I couldn't tell him things and get him to listen any more the way he used to do. I felt that if I couldn't control him, nobody could, and he'd
be lost out there in the streets, going too fast, thinking he was hip enough to make it all by himself.

I'd take him to a movie or something like that. I'd take him downtown to the Village, and we'd hang out for a day, but I noticed something was missing. We didn't talk about all the really intimate things that we used to talk about. He wouldn't share his secrets with me any more, and this scared me, because I didn't know how far he'd gone. I wanted to say, “Pimp, what happened to the day that you and I used to walk through the streets with our arms around each other's shoulder ? We used to sleep with our arms around each other, and you used to cry to follow me when I went out of the house.” I wanted to say it, but it didn't make sense, because I knew that day had gone.

I gave my gun away when I moved out of Harlem. I felt free. This was one of the things that made me feel free, that I didn't need a gun. I didn't need any kind of protection, because I wasn't afraid any more. I had been afraid in Harlem all my life. Even though I did things that people said were crazy—people who thought that I must not be afraid of anything—I was afraid of almost everything.

Fear made me stop and think. I was able to see things differently. I had become convinced that two things weren't for me: I wasn't going to go to jail, and I wasn't going to kill anybody. But I knew I couldn't completely sever all ties with Harlem. My family was there, and just about all my life was there. I didn't know anybody anywhere else. I didn't know anybody in the Village. All I knew was that I had to get away.

I was only seventeen when I moved downtown, but I felt much older. I felt as though I was a grown man, and I had to go out and make my own life. This was what moving was all about, growing up and going out on my own.

Every time I came up to Harlem, it was a surprise, a frightening or disheartening surprise. If somebody hadn't died from an O.D., somebody had gotten killed trying to get some drugs or something crazy like that.

I remember once I came up to Harlem after I had been living down in the Village for about a year. I saw Turk, and he said, “Sonny, have you seen Knoxie around?”

I said, “No, man.” I hadn't seen Knoxie for years, not since before
I went to Warwick. He had gone into the Army. I hadn't seen him since the time he and Turk had had a fight on the corner of 145th Street for about two hours. That was about four or five years before.

Turk said, “When you see him, man, you really gon be surprised.”

I said, “Why, is he bigger, or is he into somethin', is he into drugs?”

“Yeah, man, he's into a whole lot, but more than that, he's changed, man. He's changed a hell of a lot.”

He smiled when he said it, so I said, “Yeah, like, I'm anxious to see the cat.”

Turk said, “Look, man, he'll be in the Hole tonight. Come by and see him. That's where he deals stuff from.”

That night, I went by the bar called the Hole and asked for Knoxie. The bartender said, “Yeah, he's over there.”

As I started over, a peculiar-looking character looked up from the bar and said, “Hey, Sonny, how you doin', baby?” He said it in a very feminine voice. He threw his arms open wide to grab me and hug me. I didn't have that much against faggots, but I was shook. This was Knoxie. I had heard years ago that he'd gone good boy, but I could never imagine Knoxie being a faggot. But here it was.

He acted real happy to see me, but I felt a little uncomfortable. He said, “Come on, I want to buy you a drink.”

I didn't want anybody to think I was his man, but I said, “Yeah, okay.” We were friends, and it went past that feeling of not associating with faggots.

I stood there and talked to him. I asked him what had happened. He said, “Nothin' happened to me, baby; like, I'm happy. It got a lot of pressures off my back. I think I was cut out to walk queer street all my life, and I just found out recently, so I'm doin' it.”

Knoxie put his arm around my shoulder. I sort of pulled away. I did it automatically, and I felt bad about it after I'd done it. He said, “Sonny, are you mad at me, man, for the change I made?”

“No, man, that's your life, and anything, you know, anything you want to do with your life is all right with me.”

“Do you feel the same about me?”

“Yeah, we're still all right.” Then I joked, “If I wanted to go party with some bitches, I'd never say ‘Come along, Knoxie.'”

He laughed it off and said, “I'm glad, man, that you feel the way you do.” He told me a lot of stuff about how he thought I was one of the hippest cats around there and could understand a lot of things.

I said, “Yeah, thanks.”

Then we talked about the fight he'd had with Turk. He said he remembered it, that it was a good fight. I said, “I think Turk is kinda hurt behind that now.”

He said that he'd seen him and they'd talked. He said that Turk took it big and was an all right cat. He understood things too. Turk had changed a lot since we were kids out there in the backyard bebopping.

Turk had started fighting in the Air Force, and he was talking about turning pro when he came out. He was pretty good; I guess he was always pretty good with his hands. He was always cut out for that. It would be a funny thing, I told Knoxie, if one day Turk became champ. I said, “Look, man, you're gonna have to change your way of life, of doin' things. We couldn't have Turk bein' heavyweight champion of the world and having once fought a faggot for two hours. That sounds damn bad.”

Knoxie laughed at it. We had a drink, and he asked me if I wanted some drugs. Knoxie had a piece, so he wasn't worried about anybody trying to take the drugs from him. He said some cats had tried a couple of times. He'd been around for a while, out of the Army, and he had been dealing drugs downtown. He said some cats stopped him once, and he stabbed one of them. The word got out, and that was the only time he had ever had any trouble with junkies. It seemed as though most of the junkies thought a lot of him. If they came to him half a dollar short, sometimes a dollar short, Knoxie would let them ride with some drugs.

Here he was, a faggot dealing drugs and wearing a raccoon coat. He used to wear the coat even in hot weather. It was June or July, and the weather was damn hot. And here was Knoxie standing up at the bar in his raccoon coat, while everybody else was in shirt sleeves. Nobody thought that Knoxie was crazy for wearing the raccoon coat or for being a faggot, because there were a whole lot of crazy people around Harlem, and there were a whole lot of faggots. Nobody thought anything was wrong with faggots. Faggots were an accepted part of life.

One of the biggest thieves around there was a faggot, Broadway Rose. They tell me that Broadway used to rule Rikers Island every time he went over there. Cats used to say that if you had Broadway as your woman when you went over there, it worked in your favor. He would say, “That's my man,” and nobody would mess with you.

All the kids in the neighborhood knew Broadway. He used to take
them to the candy store or ice-cream shop. He even had them calling him mother.

I remember one time I was going up on the hill with Reno and Broadway was coming down. He stopped and started talking to Reno. He looked at me and said to Reno, “He's cute. What's his name?”

Reno said, “That's Sonny. He lives on the Avenue.”

Broadway said, “Yeah, I've seen him around.” He put his arm around me and started talking, trying to play that girl role. He said, “Sonny, I'm gon put five dollars in my back pocket, and if you take it out real slow you can have it.”

I looked at Reno as if to say, “What the hell is wrong with this faggot? Is he crazy or somethin'?”

Reno kept hunching me, as if to say, “Go on, man, go on.”

The whole thing was that I was supposed to put my hand in Broadway's pocket and take some time getting the five dollars out and play with his ass. This faggot was about six foot four and big as a house. Since Reno kept hunching me to go on and do it and since he was a cat who knew what was going on, I thought, Shit, this is probably the best thing to do. He must know what he's doin'.

So I went on and got the five dollars out kind of slow and thanked him … played the part like I dug him. I said, “Thanks, baby, maybe I'll do you a favor one day.”

Broadway said, “Maybe someday I'll hold you to it.”

I asked Reno afterward, “What was that all about, man? Why you gon tell me to play with some faggot's ass?”

He said, “This faggot is one of the best people you could ever know if you go to the Rock. Cats who're suppose to be real killers on the outside, when they come in there—like, if Broadway's there, he rules the Rock. A cat might think he's a killer, and Broadway might walk up to him and say he digs him, like, ‘Look, you my man.' And if the cat squawks or acts like he's not gon play the game, he just punches him out, and that's that. On the other hand, if a cat comes in there and Broadway likes him and thinks he might be able to get a play out of him now and then, he'll tell everybody else, ‘Look, that's my man, don't fuck with him.' They know this is law, because he runs the place.”

He was big enough. Broadway must have been a good 270 pounds, a good six feet four. He used to walk sloppy and slow, but anybody who's been in jail knows you can't tell how good a cat is with his hands
by the way he walks or carries himself out on the street—or even in jail, for that matter. You never know until you see him in action.

The people in the neighborhood were accustomed to faggots. Faggots were no big thing, neither were studs. There were a lot of girls who just liked girls. Some started at a young age. I remember once my little sister asked my mother, “Mama, is that a lady or a man?” It was a stud.

Mama just looked at her and said, “That's a bull-dagger, baby.”

It was just like somebody telling a child, “That's a horse.” This was how the people accepted it in the community. Nobody could be shocked at people being faggots. Nobody thought there was anything so crazy about it. A lot of people, if their sons became faggots or their daughters became studs, were disappointed and hurt. At first you'd hear about people putting their sons out because they became faggots, and putting their daughters out because they started liking girls. But after a while, they always came back home. The family accepted it, the community accepted it, and everybody else accepted it. But, then, there was so much going on in the community. There were a lot of old women who just liked young girls. There were a lot of old men who just liked young boys. Just about everybody knew who was who and who was what, and they just accepted it.

I never met any faggots in Harlem who were in love with anybody. With them, it was sex, and they always wanted to try this sex thing with anybody who was willing.