Manchild in the Promised Land (47 page)

This was the first time I'd ever heard “Goldberg” used this way. I said, “Who's Goldberg?”

“You know. Mr. Jew. That's the cat who runs the garment center.”

“Oh, yeah.” But I didn't get the connection right away.

“Goldberg ain't gon ever get up off any money. Goldberg's just as bad as Mr. Charlie. He's got all the money in the world, Sonny, believe it or not. Look across the street. He owns the liquor store, he owns the bar, he owns the restaurant across there, the grocery there. He owns all the liquor stores in Harlem, ‘cause that's where all the niggers' money goes, and he's gon get all that.”

“Yeah, man. You may have a point there.”

“I know I got a point, man.” He really got excited. He said, “The only time I'm goin' downtown, man, I'm goin' to steal me some money from Goldberg, not to beg him for it. That's just what you're doin', man. That cat's got all the money in the world, and what he'll give you is carfare back downtown for another day's slavery.”

“The only way you gon get some-a that real money from him is to get you a gun, go down there and put it to that mother-fucker's head, and take it. That's the only way you gon get any of that dough from Goldberg.”

I used to listen to Reno sometimes, and I'd get scared behind the way he use to get all excited. I'd say, “Cool it, man. This stuff is not to be told too loud, because the kids might hear it.”

If Reno was in a bad mood—if he didn't have any money and he wasn't high—he'd say, “Man, Sonny, they ain't got no kids in Harlem. I ain't never seen any. I've seen some real small people actin' like kids. They were too small to be grown, and they might've looked like kids, but they don't have any kids in Harlem, because nobody has time for a childhood. Man, do you ever remember bein' a kid ? Not me. Shit, kids are happy, kids laugh, kids are secure. They ain't scared-a nothin'. You ever been a kid, Sonny ? Damn, you lucky. I ain't never been a kid, man. I don't ever remember bein' happy and not scared. I don't know what happened, man, but I think I missed out on that childhood thing, because I don't ever recall bein' a kid.”

The only way I could stop Reno when he got wound up like this was to say, “Come on, man. Let's go get a drink,” or “Let's go get high.” That would take him down off his soapbox.

Reno was only one. There were a whole lot of other cats out there who felt the same way that Reno felt about going downtown, about working for Goldberg.

I remember when I was down in the garment center and used to see George Baxter down there. He used to tell me, and the cat would be almost crying, “Man, a cat got to take a whole lotta shit for fifty dollars a week.” Just about every time I saw him, he'd say, “Man, I don't think the stuff that a man has to take down here is worth fifty dollars a week; it's worth a lot more, at least ten times more.”

He used to say that he was going to leave, that he was going to get up off of this thing. But I didn't think he was going to leave the garment center, because Baxter was sort of a nice guy. But he did. He was one of the guys I knew who tried it and gave it up to come back uptown and deal drugs. There was more money in it. Cats used to say it made them feel better than being down there, being messed over by Goldberg all the time.

I remember Baxter used to say all the time, when I'd meet him uptown after he'd give up the garment-center gig, “Man, if you keep goin' downtown every day, you'll be a boy all your life. I use to be afraid, Sonny, I use to be deathly afraid of bein' a boy all my life. I use to have nightmares, man, about me bein' old, about sixty years old and almost bent, knockin' around there, sweeping the floors for Goldberg in that dress house of his. He's comin' in there pattin' me on my back and callin' me boy,' sayin', ‘Come over here with your broom and
sweep up this thing for me, boy.' It use to get to me. I use to jump up out of bed screamin', ‘Mr. Goldberg, please, Mr. Goldberg, don't call me boy. Please, Mr. Goldberg, don't pat me on my back.'

“Sonny, I think if I had stayed down there in that garment center much longer, man, and continued to be Goldberg's boy, I might've lost my mind. I had to get outta there.”

Before he got busted, he used to say, “Man, I might not be out here on the streets for long. I'm gamblin' and I know I'm gamblin'. Every time I come out of my house, I got to look around for the Man. Before I go in my house, I got to look around to see if any junkies are waitin' to sting me. I got to be careful about everybody who comes up to me and asks me for a sale. I'm livin' on pins and needles, man, but I can stand up a whole lot straighter. Nobody calls me a boy, and I know even when the Man walks up on me and busts me out here, he's gon do it in a fashion that I can appreciate.

“If they take me downtown and put me in the lineup, they're not gonna say ‘boy.' They're gonna say, ‘Stand there.' If a cat ever runs up on me in a hallway and says, ‘Freeze, nigger,' he's not gonna say, ‘Freeze, nigger boy.' Man, the nigger thing is all right, but the boy thing, that's too goddamn hard to live with, Sonny. It was almost killin' me, man; it was almost killin' me.

“You go down there into this thing—I guess I had a boss as nice as anybody—and Goldberg would say, ‘George, do you know where I might find some nice honest colored girl who could come in and help my wife clean up the house?' He didn't mean help, man, he meant somebody who would come in and actually clean up the house for his wife. It was a drag, man. He said the other girl had to leave because her daughter was having a baby. He said, ‘You saw the girl who was here. She was a very nice girl, and she'd been with us for a long time, for three or four years.'

“Man, you should've seen this girl. This girl was about sixty years old. Her hair was gray, but she was colored, so she was still a girl. She was twice the age of Goldberg's wife. It hurt me, man, when I saw her. This colored girl was sixty years old, and she was cleanin' this house for his wife. I felt like, damn, if that was my wife, I'd beat her ass and make her help that woman clean up that house, man. But I knew, after I saw that woman and he'd asked me if I knew some girl who could help his wife, I wanted to say, ‘Hell, no!' But I needed the job, so all I could say was, ‘No, man, I don't know any girls. I don't know nothin'.
I don't know anything about that.' I felt like I was gon lose my mind if I had stayed in that stuff.

“I don't remember my father too well. He use to work on the docks, and he died in the chair, man. I guess you knew; everybody in the neighborhood heard about it. He died behind some gray cat tryin' to fuck over him, tryin' to make him look like a Tom. It's somethin' I've always had a big thing about, man. And my brothers, they can't stand to be around gray people. That's why they all stand around 143rd Street and take numbers. I guess we couldn't make it outside of some Harlem somewhere. We weren't cut out to play that boy role. I suppose there're a lot of people who aren't.”

As I used to listen to George, I'd think I had fallen in there and played that role without giving it much thought. But then I became aware of what I knew about the garment center and about Goldberg and his relationship to the Negro, the “boy” who worked for him. I had the feeling that he never saw us. He never saw our generation. He saw us only through the impressions that the older folks had made.

He never even tried to see us, and he tried to treat us the way he had treated them. Most of the older folks were used to it. They didn't know Goldberg from Massa Charlie; to them, Goldberg was Massa Charlie. I suppose the tradition had been perpetuated when the folks moved to the North and took the image of Massa Charlie and put it into Goldberg. Perhaps Goldberg was unaware of it.

When I worked at the watch repair shop, if I said anything that would indicate that I thought a little of myself, or if I didn't seem damn grateful when somebody said, “I'm gonna give you a five-dollar bonus for Christmas,” they all seemed to think that I was being arrogant in some way or another. They all seemed to feel, What is wrong with this nigger? They all seemed to have the impression that niggers weren't supposed to act like that. They'd think, This nigger's crazy. What kind of Negro is he ? Doesn't he know his place ?

In the evening, I'd run out of the shop with my books in my hand and say I was going to school, and they would crack jokes about it, as if to say, “This Negro must be dreaming. Doesn't he know that Negroes are supposed to just be porters?”

It wasn't just our parents and Goldberg who weren't ready for my generation. Our parents' coming to Harlem produced a generation of new niggers. Not only Goldberg and our parents didn't understand
this new nigger, but this new nigger was something that nobody understood and that nobody was ready for.

There was trouble everywhere, every time. Everyplace I looked, I wasn't understood. I felt like a misfit on just about every job I went to. Everyplace I went, it was like a first time. It was always a new thing. I always had to establish a new relationship with everyone. I always had to find out where I was and what things were like. I always wanted to run. It was so difficult. There was nothing that was old. I really didn't have any familiar ground. I guess, in a way, my generation was like the first Africans coming over on the boat. There was still the language problem. The Harlem dialect was something that I was a little afraid to use. When I first went down to the gym on Broadway in mid-Manhattan, I was very self-conscious about it.

I knew that these were gray boys, and I felt I had to be careful around them or else I might frighten them. Sometimes I was made to feel silly. I was careful to pronounce my r's and say “you are” and “you're not.” I'd say, “Hello. How are you?” very properly. Occasionally somebody would say, “Hi, How you doin'?” and I'd feel ridiculous. There was always this uncertainty, this thing of feeling your way through. I became aware that I was a new thing. The average cat who ventured out of Harlem would be afraid and run back. It was safer dealing drugs or doing something like that. And there was much less embarrassment.

I couldn't take my job in the watch repair shop after a while. Everybody was reading the papers about the Emmett Till case, and they'd say, “Gee, that's terrible.” But I knew that if I went out to the Flatbush section of Brooklyn or Brighton Beach, where all these cats lived, they'd probably lynch the landlord if he rented me an apartment. This was the relationship between the Jew and the descendants of Ham. We were all right. We were supposed to work for them; we were good enough for this, good enough to clean their houses. They were supposed to sympathize with us. I think sometimes the sympathy used to bother me more than anything else, this attempt at being liberal-minded.

I just got tired of it one day. I felt I was going to crack up, just blow up. I said, “Look, I'm tired. You take this job; you just take it and shove it,” and I walked out of the shop. I didn't know where I was going. I didn't have any money; I didn't have anything, but I couldn't feel too bad about it or the least bit frightened. I was aware that I hadn't
had anything all my life. I'd had jobs, money, and expensive clothes, but I still hadn't had anything.

I didn't even have a slight understanding of what it was all about, what I was trying to accomplish, what I was supposed to accomplish. I had no idea of where I was going. I went to Central Park and started walking around. I didn't understand anything about me. It was crazy to expect Goldberg to understand. I couldn't feel any kind of animosity toward anybody, toward anybody in the world. I'd hoped that one day I could go back and say, “I'm sorry if I offended you people,” and that they would forgive me. I realized that I had said some pretty nasty things to them. They were all little people, and I was demanding that they suddenly become big, tremendous, and understand this gigantic problem that the entire nation was trying to resolve and had been struggling with for years.

I was demanding, “Now, look, Goldberg, look here, now. You understand this problem because you've been here all this time. You've been close to me. My mother been buying the pig tails and the neck bones from you as long as I can remember. She's been paying you the rent, she's been pawning stuff to you whenever we got up tight. So if anybody should give us some kind of understanding, you should.”

But Goldberg didn't owe us anything. If I had said this to him, he probably would have said, “Look, what do you want from me? What do you want? I owe you nothing.” And he would have been right, because he didn't owe me anything. I had been demanding a whole lot of understanding, but, shit, I didn't understand him, so why should he understand me?

One night I stayed uptown, and about six o'clock in the morning I left to go home to get a bath and shave and go look for a job that day. I planned to go to school that evening. I had a little briefcase with me, with my French textbook in it, and a couple of notebooks.

I was coming up 145th Street toward Eighth Avenue, and I heard somebody call me. It was Jake Snipes. He was coming out of a Japanese restaurant with a takeout order. I said, “Hey, Jake, how you doin'? What you doin' out so early in the mornin'?”

He started telling me about his chick who wanted some chop suey. “At five-thirty in the mornin'. Ain't that just like a bitch, man?”

“Yeah, man, that's just like a bitch. You sure she's all right?”

“Man, she better be all right. This chick's got to make me some money.”

I smiled. Jake was a pimp.

“Damn, Sonny, you look kind of under the weather, man. What's it all about?”

“Man, I got to get out here and find me a gig.”

“Damn, man, why don't you stop workin'? All your troubles'd be over.”

“I'm not like you, Jake. I don't have any chicks out here hustlin' for me. I got to get me a job and work. That's the only way I know, man.”