Manchild in the Promised Land (46 page)

He'd be preaching this at Pimp as though he were one of them. It bothered Pimp. It would bother anybody. Dad never messed with me with this sort of thing. I was on my own, I was clean, and I was certain that I had as much money in my pocket as he had, if not more. I was his equal, and he couldn't run down all that nonsense to me.

Living in that house wasn't too hard on Carole and Margie, but for a boy it must have been terribly hard. Everybody was far away, way back in the woods. If Mama heard that one of her friends had come home and found her husband in the bed with some other woman, she'd say, “She should've poured some lye on her.” If somebody had poured some lye on her, she'd say, “Yeah, that was good for that old heifer, that old no-good whorish hussy.”

This was the way they felt about it. This was all the stuff that came from the backwoods. I suppose the Harlem tradition, the way of life in Harlem, had come from the backwoods. All that mixing up lye and throwing it in somebody's face, all that was just as backwoods as working
roots. These people just seemed to believe in that, like cutting somebody's throat. They didn't seem to be ready for urban life.

They were going to try to guide us and make us do right and be good, and they didn't even know what being good was. When I was a little boy, Mama and Dad would beat me and tell me, “You better be good,” but I didn't know what being good was. To me, it meant that they just wanted me to sit down and fold my hands or something crazy like that. Stay in front of the house, don't go anyplace, don't get into trouble. I didn't know what it meant, and I don't think they knew what it meant, because they couldn't ever tell me what they really wanted. The way I saw it, everything I was doing was good. If I stole something and didn't get caught, I was good. If I got into a fight with somebody, I tried to be good enough to beat him. If I broke into a place, I tried to be quiet and steal as much as I could. I was always trying to be good. They just kept on beating me and talking about being good. And I just kept on doing what I was doing and kept on trying to do it good.

They needed some help. The way I felt about it, I should have been their parents, because I had been out there on the streets, and I wasn't as far back in the woods as they were. I could have told them a whole lot of stuff that would have helped them, Mama and Dad and Papa, everybody, if they had only listened to me.

I remember how Dad thought being a busboy was a real good job. When I was working at Hamburger Heaven, I stayed there for a year, and I don't know how I did it. I was working for nine hours a day, six days a week, and going to school at night. He still felt that this was a good job, because he'd never made any money. He'd never made more than sixty dollars a week in his life until recently. I suppose when he was my age, he was only making something like thirty dollars a week and thought it was a whole lot of money. He figured if I was making forty-five dollars a week, that was a whole lot of money. The cat was crazy. I would spend forty-five dollars on a pair of shoes. To him it was a good job because when he was nine years old, he'd plowed the fields from sunup to sundown.

I came in one night and told Mama. I said, “Mama, I'm gon quit this job at Hamburger Heaven, because it's getting too damn hard on me.”

Dad was sitting over in the corner in his favorite chair reading the newspaper. He wouldn't look up, because we could never talk. We just never talked too much after we had our last fight.

I said I was going to school, and that plus the job was kind of rough on me.

After Dad couldn't take any more, he lifted his head out of the paper and said, “Boy, you don't need all that education. You better keep that job, because that's a good job.”

“Yeah, Dad, it's good as long as you can take it, but if it kills you, there's nothing good about that.”

He said, “Hard work ain't never killed nobody, unless they was so lazy that thinkin' about it killed 'em.”

I said, “I know one thing. It's not gon kill me now, because I already quit it.”

He said, “Yeah, well, it sure seems funny to me, you quittin' your job, talkin' about you can't do that and go to school. You ought to stop goin' to school. You didn't want to go to school when I was sendin' you there. Your Mama would take you in one door and you'd sneak out the other door. Even the truant officer couldn't keep you in school. Boy, I think you're dreamin'. You better stop all that dreamin' and go out there and get yourself a good job and keep it while you got it.”

I knew that I couldn't talk to him and tell him what was really on my mind without going to battle with him, so I just said, “Yeah, Dad,” to end it right there.

I remember when Pimp was thirteen or fourteen. He was in the eighth grade. He came home one day and said, “Mama, “I think I'm gonna become an Air Force pilot and fly a jet plane.” It seemed a normal thing that any little boy might say to his mother and get some kind of encouragement, but that didn't happen in Pimp's case.

Mama told him, “Boy, don't you go wantin' things that ain't for you. You just go out there and get you a good job.” A good job to Mama was a job making fifty or sixty dollars a week, and that was as much as anybody should have wanted, in Mama's opinion. Sixty dollars was damn good money. That was enough to retire off, the way they used to talk about it.

I guess I could understand their feeling this way. Their lives were lived according to the superstitions and fears that they had been taught when they were children coming up in the Carolina cotton fields. It was all right for them down there, in that time, in that place, but it wasn't worth a damn up in New York. I could understand why Mama couldn't understand Pimp and his troubles, because Mama had only gone through the fifth grade. Dad had only gone through the fourth
grade. How could they understand Pimp when they couldn't even read his textbooks?

Mama and Dad and the people who had come to New York from the South about the time they did seemed to think it was wrong to want anything more out of life than some liquor and a good piece of cunt on Saturday night. This was the stuff they did in the South. This was the sort of life they had lived on the plantations. They were trying to bring the down-home life up to Harlem. They had done it. But it just wasn't working. They couldn't understand it, and they weren't about to understand it. Liquor, religion, sex, and violence—this was all that life had been about to them. And a prayer that the right number would come out, that somebody would hit the sweepstakes or get lucky.

It seemed as though if I had stayed in Harlem all my life, I might have never known that there was anything else to life other than sex, religion, liquor, and violence. Sometimes I would try to tell Mama things in the slang terms. They had their own down-home slang expressions. I couldn't understand theirs too much, and they couldn't understand ours. The slang had changed. In this day when somebody would say something about a bad cat, they meant that he was good. Somebody would say, “That was some bad pot,” meaning it was good. You really got high. Or somebody would go to the movie and see Sidney Poitier in a film, and they'd say, “Man, that's a bad-doin' nigger.” They didn't mean that he was running out in the street cutting somebody's throat, carrying a gun, and cursing. But this was all that a bad nigger meant to Mama and Dad and the people their age. It was the bad-nigger concept from the South, but it didn't mean that any more.

I couldn't get it over to Mama that things were changing. The bad nigger to my generation was a cat like Paul Robeson. To Mama, that was a nigger who was crazy, who would go out and marry some white woman. Mama and Dad would associate a nigger like this with the ones they saw hanging from a pine tree down in the Carolina woods with blood on his pants. They'd say this wasn't a bad nigger to them, this was a crazy nigger, one that was going to get himself hanged.

I could sense the fear in Mama's voice when I told her once that I wanted to be a psychologist.

She said, “Boy, you better stop that dreamin' and get all those crazy notions outta your head.” She was scared. She had the idea that colored people weren't supposed to want anything like that. You were supposed to just want to work in fields or be happy to be a janitor.

I remember something she told Pimp. I think she thought she was
giving Pimp something that he needed, and she felt big about it. “Now if you just get a job as a janitor, I'll be happy and satisfied,” she said.

I jumped up when she said this, and I said, “Doesn't it matter whether he's satisfied or how he feels about it?”

Mama and Dad looked at me as if in two minutes time I'd be ready for Bellevue, or maybe they'd better call right away. They'd always look at me and say, “You better stop talkin' all that foolishness, boy. What's wrong with you? You better get all that stuff out of your head.”

I remember the times I tried to explain these things to Mama, just what was happening in Harlem, just what was happening between my generation and hers. I would tell her, “Look, Mama, don't you remember when I use to play hookey from school, steal things, and stay out all night? Do you know why I was doin' that?”

She would look at me and ask, “Yeah, why?” sarcastically, as if I couldn't possibly tell her anything. I didn't understand anything that she couldn't understand.

I'd tell her about rebellion, and she'd say, “Look, don't be tellin' me about no rebellions and all that kind of business. You might know some big words, but you don't know what you're talkin' about. I know a whole lot of people go around using them old big words, and they don't know a damn thing what it's all about.”

I'd say, “Look, Mama, when people start ruling people and they rule 'em wrong, in a way that's harmful to them, they have to stop them. They've got to rebel; they've got to get out from under their rule. Sometimes it requires a fight, but it's always going to require a little bit of commotion, a little bit of anger, and sometimes violence.

“You've got to stop them before they destroy you. That's all that's going on around here. Everybody is rebelling. You see all the young boys going around here using drugs. They're rebelling, that's all it is. They're rebelling against their parents. If there were any drugs around here when I was a little boy, I would've been using 'em too. I had to rebel. I had to get away from all that old down-home nonsense you been talking.”

She'd say, “Boy, you don't know anything about that, and you ain't got no business calling it nonsense.”

“Yeah, uh-huh. That's okay, Mama. Look, I'm trying to explain to you how this is. You gon listen?”

“I am listening, but I ain't hearing nothin' but a whole lot of foolishness.”

I'd say something like, “Mama, you know and I know, these parents are talking about being good and doing right, but they're not being good. You know everybody is screwin' somebody's wife or screw-in' somebody's husband around here.”

“You must know more about what's goin' on around here than I do, ‘cause I don't know no such thing.”

“Look, Mama, don't you realize that whenever anybody starts talkin' some nonsense about ‘be good, be good' and you can see that they're not bein' good, you're not gon pay too much attention to it? Right?”

She knew I was right, but she just didn't want to hear it. She'd say something like, “Boy, what you talkin' about?”

And I'd have to shout and say, “I'm talking about how you gon tell kids to be good when the kids arc too hip not to see that the parents aren't being so good their damn selves!”

She'd say, “Now, you wait a minute here, nigger. Don't you be gettin' so smart with me!” This was the way the discussion always went.

After I stopped and looked real disgusted, Mama would be ready to listen then. She would try to smooth my ruffled feathers. She'd say, “You mean to tell me that the only reason these kids is going around here messin' up, killin' themselves, and causin' their families a whole lotta trouble is that everybody's preachin' one thing and doin' another?”

I'd say, “It's something like that, but not all. Listen, what you mean is they're causin' their parents a lot of trouble. This is the way that most parents look at it. I don't think any parents look at the situation as if they could be causin' the kids some trouble and causin' them some embarrassment because they're going out doing the things that they're not suppose to do. But this is just what's happenin'.”

Mama would say, “Ain't no kids got no business judgin' their parents.”

“Mama, a lot of 'em aren't judgin' 'em. They're just going out and doing what they want to do too. They're not judgin' them; they're just gettin' revenge.”

“Well, they ain't got no business tryin' to get revenge, because parents are grown, and they ain't got to answer to nobody's children.” Then Mama would get all wound up, and she wouldn't listen to anything.

The attempts at discussion always ended with me feeling more de pressed about Pimp. I wondered if Pimp was going to be able to get a job in about a year, because he kept talking about quitting school and making some money. I didn't think he was ready to go downtown. But he had to, because there wasn't any money to be made uptown, not honestly. If he quit school, there was nothing for him to do but go down to the garment center and push one of those trucks, like every body else who quit school.

I wondered if he'd been listening to the cats on the street when they talked against going downtown. If he had, it would be twice as hard, because the stuff that those cats used to talk about that downtown thing was strong stuff for a young boy's mind, a young colored boy.

I remember Reno used to say, “Man, I'll never come out of jail owin' any time. They'll just have to keep me until I can walk away clean, not owin' nothin' to nobody, ‘cause I don't want to go downtown. Goldberg is never gonna get over me with the whip.”