Manchild in the Promised Land (55 page)

The policemen in Harlem seemed to resent the Muslims, but they also seemed to be afraid of them. Especially the white police. They weren't violent. I'd never seen or heard of any Muslim violence before i960. The policemen would come down, and they would watch. Every-body was afraid of the Muslims at first, all the politicians and the law-enforcement agents. They weren't advocating overthrow of the government. They weren't advocating riots. They weren't advocating anything but economic boycott of white stores and giving money to colored enterprises. White policemen would stand around, and they would look at these people as if to say, “These niggers are dangerous, but what's gonna happen?”

Sometimes white people would come out, and they would stand around and listen. Many people who weren't interested in what the Muslims were saying for the sake of enlightenment—the preachers or ministers or professional people in the community—would stand there and look around.

Most people would just laugh at them, but as they started getting bigger crowds and having bigger rallies, people began to wonder, “Should they be stopped?”

The police always looked as if they wanted to snatch them down from their soapboxes, but they never had any reason. Many times, these guys would stand up there and purposely single out white policemen and say, “Look at them. Look what they're doing to us. They've got us all bunched up here in some little hole in the wall. That's what this is. This is a hole in the wall on the island of Manhattan, where they stuck the majority of the black people. And they got their white devils to
guard us. You see ‘cm? This is just like being in jail, and you people think you're free.”

One of them would point at a white policeman and say, “Look at the white devil, standing around us with a gun, and all we're doing is talking to one another. Ain't this somethin'? We can't even talk to one another in this little hole in the wall that they call Harlem, and stuck us into, without them putting some guard at the door, guarding us with a gun. That's what he's doing there, standing up there near that lamppost. That's just the way the guards do in jail. (The guy probably knew, because there was a good chance that he'd been in jail at one time or another.) Then all the people in the crowd would turn around and look at the cop.

This was enough to scare the hell out of anybody. But there was nothing the cops could do to stop them, because they had permission to speak. Even the colored cops were made to feel uneasy. The speakers would point to them and say, “Yeah, you put a badge on some black men, and they'll do anything that the white men wants 'em to do to other black men. You can put a badge on some black men, give them a gun, and tell them, ‘You go out there and guard your black brother. And if he does anything wrong, you shoot him.'”

Most of the time, the colored policemen would laugh, or they would try to fake a laugh. Many times you could tell that they were pretending. The crowd would usually laugh at them when the Muslims said these things. Many people would turn around and look at the cops and laugh in their faces.

Had the police tried to arrest them, I think everybody would have resented it. The Muslims had become a part of the community. They became the Seventh Avenue speakers. After a while, no one would come down there to speak but them. At the time when the Muslims first started coming down there, Seventh Avenue was something like Union Square, down on Fourteenth Street. All types of Harlem radicals would get up and speak. Sometimes they'd have debates. Sometimes one speaker would get up and vigorously contradict what the speaker before him had just said. Then, about 1956, people were afraid to get up on Seventh Avenue and try to contradict anything that the Muslims had said, because just about all the people down there around that time were Muslims, and they didn't want to hear anything other than what the Muslims were saying. It was very hard for anybody to contradict anything that the Muslims were saying, because, right away,
they would be labeled an Uncle Tom. What the Muslims were saying was a colored thing. They were saying, “Let's get more and more for the black man.” Anybody who got up there and opposed this was a traitor to the race. He was saying, “Give to the white man, even more.”

Then the Muslims started coming around with their newspapers. I think that even the people who weren't interested in or were indifferent. to the Muslim movement sort of sympathized with them. If the Muslims were trying to sell papers, people would buy papers, just to give some money to the cause.

The Black Muslim movement was closer to most Harlemites than any of the other organizations, much closer than the NAACP or the Urban League. These were the people who were right out there in the street with you. They had on suits, but their grammar wasn't something that would make the average Negro on the street feel ill at ease. The words that they used were the same words that the people on the street used. You could associate these people with yourself; you knew some of them. Since the leaders of this group had come from the community, the crowd could identify with these people more readily than they could with anybody else.

The Muslims were the home team. They were the people, talking for everyone. This was the first time that many of these people had ever seen the home boys get up and say anything in front of a crowd. This was the first time that many of these people had ever seen home boys who had been junkies, pimps, or thieves speak to crowds of people and sound so serious about it. It became a community thing.

I suppose the Muslims did the same thing in other places, other Harlems throughout the nation. They must have gotten members and speakers right out of the community. This was a way in which they couldn't lose, because when a guy got up on 125th Street and started talking about how Goldberg who's got the haberdashery right there on the corner paid him something like forty dollars a week for two years, when he was a grown man, and how he started working for Brother So-and-So, down at his rib joint on 116th Street, and is now making seventy-five dollars a week, everybody's got to get up and say, “Yeah, yeah. That no-good Goldberg ought to go.”

The people would holler, “Yeah! Yeah! Them goddamn Jews killed my Jesus too!” It's easy to build up this sort of feeling among the home folks when one of the people in the neighborhood, the boy who
used to work in the butcher store and became a Muslim, says, “Mr. Greenberg didn't sell you any good meat. Some of that meat was years old. Some of that meat had been in there for days, and it was almost blue, because it had spoiled so long. But he'd shellac it or something to make it look like it was unspoiled, to make it look like it was almost fresh.”

The people could believe these speakers. They knew them. They knew that they had worked at these places and that they should know what they were talking about. The Muslims became a very influential force in Harlem. They would never have been able to take over, because they couldn't acquire any political power. For one thing, many of their recruits had been in jail. Once a person goes to jail for a felony, he loses his voting rights. But if the Muslims were to run a candidate for Congress in Harlem, there might be a good chance that they could get enough support. I know if they had done this in i960, they could have gotten quite a bit of support from sympathizers. Today they might stand an even better chance.

I haven't seen too many of my Muslim friends lately, but I imagine they're still involved. I hear about the things that they're doing now. The Muslim movement is a good thing. It's good because these cats know they're angry, and they're letting everybody else know they're angry. If they don't do any more than let the nation know that there are black men in this country who are dangerously angry, then they've already served a purpose.

T
HERE WAS
a piano in the auditorium at Washington Irving, and sometimes I used to go there in the evening and play it before I went up to my classes. I'd just tinkle on it softly so that I wouldn't disturb anybody. One evening, when I was coming out of school I was stopped. Somebody just said, “Hey, there.” It was a girl, and she sounded as if she knew me.

I looked around and pointed to myself, as if to say, “You mean me?”

“Yeah, you, the virtuoso.” She was a white girl, and I'd never seen her before. I didn't know who she was. She wasn't an especially attractive girl. She had a kind-looking face, but you couldn't say any more than that. I went over to her, and she said, “I was listening to you play this evening. You're quite good.”

I said, “Well, thanks, anyway, but I'm not that serious about it.”

She said, “Well, maybe you ought to be. I tried playing piano for years, and I never made that much progress. How long have you been at it?”

“Oh, about three years.” She looked at me as if to say, “You're joking!” I still had the feeling that this girl was just trying to flatter me. I said, “Why? How long did you think I'd been playing?”

“From the sound of it, I thought you had been playing at least five years or more.”

I just looked at her, sort of skeptically, and said, “How long did you play?”

“I played for about eight years.”

“Eight years? That doesn't sound too long. You look as though you're only about sixteen as it is.”

“That's nice to know.” I liked the way she said it, very calmly, as if she was going to act mature. And she was doing okay at it.

I said, “Do you still play?”

“Occasionally. I think I'd like to be a teacher, teach music.”

“So, what are you doing here, at Washington Irving?”

“Oh, I have to get another course to graduate, and I have to go in the evening because they don't have it up there.”

“Oh? They don't have it up where?”

She said, “I attend school at Music and Art during the day.”

“I know some one who used to go there. By the way, I'm Claude Brown. Who are you?”

She told me her name was Judy Strumph. I said, “I'm glad to meet you, Judy. Are you going out?”

She said, “Yeah, I'm going to the subway.” I asked her where she wanted to go in the subway. She said, “I'm going home.”

“Yeah, I figured that much, but where's home?”

“It's uptown.”

“Why don't you just come over here in the cafeteria with me and have a cup of coffee?”

“Okay, I have some time.”

She seemed very relaxed. She wasn't overly friendly, and she wasn't frightened. It was interesting to meet a young girl like this. She looked about seventeen.

We went into the Automat and had two cups of coffee and a couple of slices of pie. We sat and talked. She was very interesting; there was something beautiful about her manner. She was too plump to be attractive. Her hair was kind of kinky; it wasn't long, blond, or soft. She was just a very plain-looking girl. She could have been a country girl, or maybe a hillbilly, from her looks.

We talked about music, and I told her what I'd been doing. She told me that she had been playing piano and violin since she was a very little girl. Everybody in her family played some musical instrument.

I asked her if she liked jazz. She told me she liked it but didn't know too much about it. She said her brother had a lot of jazz albums; the only artists she knew of were the ones he had the records by. She said she had never been to a jazz concert because no one had ever offered to take her.

“If you'd like to go, I'd be happy to take you sometime.”

“Yes, I'd like to, but I couldn't go on a school night because I have to get home. I live uptown from here, so I would prefer that it's on a weekend or sometime like that.”

“Okay, that's all right. We'll make it on the weekend.” She seemed kind of puzzled when I said, “Meet me down here this Friday night, about eight o'clock.”

“Okay, but I don't have a class on Friday night.”

I said, “I know, but since this is a place that we both know, it'll be
easy for you to find me down here. So if you come down here and meet me, you won't have any trouble.”

She looked at me for a while, and she said, “Why couldn't you come to my house and pick me up?”

“Judy, I don't think that would be a very wise thing to do. I like you, and maybe you like me. We could probably be good friends. But I don't think this is something you should spring on your folks right now.”

“Oh, my folks are rather broad-minded. We're Jewish, you know.”

“I didn't know, but I sort of suspected it.”

“My parents are not prejudiced, and they would treat you nicely They would show you the same hospitality they would show any other fellow.”

“Judy, this is usually the way it is in theory. Many parents don't know how they really feel about Negroes until something like this happens, right in the home. They feel that Negroes are nice people, and they sympathize with them, but they feel they shouldn't be around their daughters or their sons. ‘They're nice people as long as they stay away from us.' There are exceptions. I've met some and they were beautiful people. It's possible that your family might be an exception, but just in case they aren't, let's not let them ruin anything that we might be interested in.”

“You sound as though you've had experience.”

“No, but I've heard about these cases.”

She said, “Okay, I'll meet you down here on Friday night.”

Friday night came around, and I had my doubts about whether or not she'd show up. I didn't really feel certain that she would want to come down there.

I went to class and left early. I came out about eight o'clock. She was standing there with a pretty dress on. She was a very serious-looking girl. There was something attractive about her, but I think it was attractive only after you had spoken to her. She was the kind of girl you would never notice before you spoke to her.