Manchild in the Promised Land

“Incredible! No Negro writer ever told the whole street thing in Harlem: Claude Brown is the first.”

—Tom Wolfe,
New York Herald Tribune

“The first thing I ever read which gave me an idea of what it would be like day by day if I'd grown up in Harlem.”

—Norman Mailer

“This is a magnificent book, not a good book, not an interesting book, a magnificent book.… It is a guided tour of hell conducted by a man who broke out.”

—Dick Schaap,
Books

“It is written with brutal and unvarnished honesty in the plain talk of the people, in language that is fierce, uproarious, obscene and tender.”

—Romulus Linney,
The New York Times Book Review

“Sprung from the alley, a rare cat … As a survivor among the dying and the dead, Brown tells it like it was—and like it still is.”

—Nat Hentoff,
Book Week

“He writes about his life—and Harlem—with frank, brutal, and beautiful power. Mr. Brown's graphic narrative will make you laugh, cry, think, and possibly understand.”

—Atlanta Journal

“Brown's Harlem is alive in a way that no black ghetto has heretofore been brought to life between book jackets.”

—Daniel A. Poling

“Sometimes a unique voice speaks out so clearly and with so much passion that it comes to speak for an era, a generation, a people … and we have to listen.”

—William Mathes,
Los Angeles Times

TOUCHSTONE
Rockefeller Center
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com

Copyright © 1965 by Claude Brown
Copyright renewed © 1993 by Claude Brown
All rights reserved,
including the right of reproduction
in whole or in part in any form.

All the names in this book—with the exception of public figures, judges, staff members at the Wiltwyck School for Boys, Mr. Alfred A. Cohen, the Reverend William M. James, Mr. Louis Howard, and the author—are entirely fictitious, and any resemblance to the names of living persons is wholly coincidental.

First Touchstone Edition 1999

T
OUCHSTONE
and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

20 19 18 17 16

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Macmillan edition as follows:

Brown, Claude, date.

Manchild in the promised land / Claude Brown.

   p. cm.

ISBN 0-02-517325-1

1. Brown, Claude, date. 2. Afro-Americans—Biography.

3. Afro-Americans—New York (N.Y.)—Social conditions.

4. Harlem (New York, N.Y.)—Social conditions. 5. New York (N.Y.)—Social conditions. I. Title

E185.97.B86A3      1990

974.7'10049607302—dc20

[B]            90-34905            CIP

ISBN-13: 978-0-684-86418-1
ISBN-10:         0-684-86418-5
eISBN-13: 978-1-4516-2617-9

To the late
E
LEANOR
R
OOSEVELT
,

who founded the Wiltwyck School for Boys.

And to the
W
ILTWYCK
S
CHOOL
,

which is still finding Claude Browns.

I
WANT
to talk about the first Northern urban generation of Negroes. I want to talk about the experiences of a misplaced generation, of a misplaced people in an extremely complex, confused society. This is a story of their searching, their dreams, their sorrows, their small and futile rebellions, and their endless battle to establish their own place in America's greatest metropolis—and in America itself.

The characters are sons and daughters of former Southern sharecroppers. These were the poorest people of the South, who poured into New York City during the decade following the Great Depression. These migrants were told that unlimited opportunities for prosperity existed in New York and that there was no “color problem” there. They were told that Negroes lived in houses with bathrooms, electricity, running water, and indoor toilets. To them, this was the “promised land” that Mammy had been singing about in the cotton fields for many years.

Going to New York was good-bye to the cotton fields, good-bye to “Massa Charlie,” good-bye to the chain gang, and, most of all, goodbye to those sunup-to-sundown working hours. One no longer had to wait to get to heaven to lay his burden down; burdens could be laid down in New York.

So, they came, from all parts of the South, like all the black chillun o' God following the sound of Gabriel's horn on that long-overdue Judgment Day. The Georgians came as soon as they were able to pick train fare off the peach trees. They came from South Carolina where the cotton stalks were bare. The North Carolinians came with tobacco tar beneath their fingernails.

They felt as the Pilgrims must have felt when they were coming to America. But these descendants of Ham must have been twice as happy as the Pilgrims, because they had been catching twice the hell. Even while planning the trip, they sang spirituals as “Jesus Take My Hand” and “I'm On My Way” and chanted, “Hallelujah, I'm on my way to the promised land!”

It seems that Cousin Willie, in his lying haste, had neglected to tell
the folks down home about one of the most important aspects of the promised land: it was a slum ghetto. There was a tremendous difference in the way life was lived up North. There were too many people full of hate and bitterness crowded into a dirty, stinky, uncared-for closet-size section of a great city.

Before the soreness of the cotton fields had left Mama's back, her knees were getting sore from scrubbing “Goldberg's” floor. Nevertheless, she was better off; she had gone from the fire into the frying pan.

The children of these disillusioned colored pioneers inherited the total lot of their parents—the disappointments, the anger. To add to their misery, they had little hope of deliverance. For where does one run to when he's already in the promised land?

“Run”!

Where?

Oh, hell! Let's get out of here!

“Turk! Turk! I'm shot!”

I could hear Turk's voice calling from a far distance, telling me not to go into the fish-and-chips joint. I heard, but I didn't understand. The only thing I knew was that I was going to die.

I ran. There was a bullet in me trying to take my life, all thirteen years of it.

I climbed up on the bar yelling, “Walsh, I'm shot. I'm shot.” I could feel the blood running down my leg. Walsh, the fellow who operated the fish-and-chips joint, pushed me off the bar and onto the floor. I couldn't move now, but I was still completely conscious.

Walsh was saying, “Git outta here, kid. I ain't got no time to play.”

A woman was screaming, mumbling something about the Lord, and saying, “Somebody done shot that poor child.”

Mama ran in. She jumped up and down, screaming like a crazy woman. I began to think about dying. The worst part of dying was thinking about the things and the people that I'd never see again. As I lay there trying to imagine what being dead was like, the policeman who had been trying to control Mama gave up and bent over me. He asked who had shot me. Before I could answer, he was asking me if I could hear him. I told him that I didn't know who had shot me and would he please tell Mama to stop jumping up and down. Every time Mama came down on that shabby floor, the bullet lodged in my stomach felt like a hot poker.

Another policeman had come in and was struggling to keep the crowd outside. I could see Turk in the front of the crowd. Before the cops came, he asked me if I was going to tell them that he was with me. I never answered. I looked at him and wondered if he saw who shot me. Then his question began to ring in my head: “Sonny, you gonna tell 'em I was with you?” I was bleeding on a dirty floor in a fish-and-chips joint, and Turk was standing there in the doorway
hoping that I would die before I could tell the cops that he was with me. Not once did Turk ask me how I felt.

Hell, yeah, I thought, I'm gonna tell 'em.

It seemed like hours had passed before the ambulance finally arrived. Mama wanted to go to the hospital with me, but the ambulance attendant said she was too excited. On the way to Harlem Hospital, the cop who was riding with us asked Dad what he had to say. His answer was typical: “I told him about hanging out with those bad-ass boys.” The cop was a little surprised. This must be a rookie, I thought.

The next day, Mama was at my bedside telling me that she had prayed and the Lord had told her that I was going to live. Mama said that many of my friends wanted to donate some blood for me, but the hospital would not accept it from narcotics users.

This was one of the worst situations I had ever been in. There was a tube in my nose that went all the way to the pit of my stomach. I was being fed intravenously, and there was a drain in my side. Everybody came to visit me, mainly out of curiosity. The girls were all anxious to know where I had gotten shot. They had heard all kinds of tales about where the bullet struck. The bolder ones wouldn't even bother to ask: they just snatched the cover off me and looked for themselves. In a few days, the word got around that I was in one piece.

On my fourth day in the hospital, I was awakened by a male nurse at about 3
A.M
. When he said hello in a very ladyish voice, I thought that he had come to the wrong bed by mistake. After identifying himself, he told me that he had helped Dr. Freeman save my life. The next thing he said, which I didn't understand, had something to do with the hours he had put in working that day. He went on mumbling something about how tired he was and ended up asking me to rub his back. I had already told him that I was grateful to him for helping the doctor save my life. While I rubbed his back above the beltline, he kept pushing my hand down and saying, “Lower, like you are really grateful to me.” I told him that I was sleepy from the needle a nurse had given me. He asked me to pat his behind. After I had done this, he left.

The next day when the fellows came to visit me, I told them about my early-morning visitor. Dunny said he would like to meet him. Tito joked about being able to get a dose of clap in the hospital. The guy with the tired back never showed up again, so the fellows never got a chance to meet him. Some of them were disappointed.

After I had been in the hospital for about a week, I was visited by
another character. I had noticed a woman visiting one of the patients on the far side of the ward. She was around fifty-five years old, short and fat, and she was wearing old-lady shoes. While I wondered who this woman was, she started across the room in my direction. After she had introduced herself, she told me that she was visiting her son. Her son had been stabbed in the chest with an ice pick by his wife. She said that his left lung had been punctured, but he was doing fine now, and that Jesus was so-o-o good.

Her name was Mrs. Ganey, and she lived on 145th Street. She said my getting shot when I did “was the work of the Lord.” My gang had been stealing sheets and bedspreads off clotheslines for months before I had gotten shot. I asked this godly woman why she thought it was the work of the Lord or Jesus or whoever She began in a sermonlike tone, saying, “Son, people was gitting tired-a y'all stealing all dey sheets and spreads.” She said that on the night that I had gotten shot, she baited her clothesline with two brand-new bedspreads, turned out all the lights in the apartment, and sat at the kitchen window waiting for us to show.