Manchild in the Promised Land (50 page)

Saturday night is a time to try new things. Maybe that's why so many people in the older generation had to lose their lives on Saturday night. It must be something about a Saturday night with Negroes.… Maybe they wanted to die on Saturday night. They'd always associated Sunday with going to heaven, because that was when they went to church and sang all those songs, clapped and shouted and stomped their feet and praised the Lord. Maybe they figured that if they died on Sunday morning, the Lord's day, they'd be well on their way.

Everybody has this thing about Saturday night. I imagine that before pot or horse or any other drugs hit Harlem good and strong, the people just had to try something else, like knifing or shooting somebody, because Saturday night was the night for daring deeds. Since there was no pot out on a large scale then, I suppose one of the most daring deeds anyone could perform was to shoot or stab somebody.

Many of the chicks in the neighborhood took some of their first really big steps on Saturday night. Some cats—or as a girl I knew might say, “no-good niggers”—talked many girls into turning their first tricks on a Saturday night just because the cats needed some money. That's how that thing goes on Saturday night. I recall talking a girl into a trick on a Saturday night. She said it was her first, but I like to tell myself it wasn't. If it was, that was okay. She was a part of Harlem, and Saturday night was a time for first things, even for girls turning their first tricks, pulling their first real John.

Saturday night has also been a traditional night for money to be floating around in places like Harlem. It's a night of temptation, the kind of temptation one might see on Catfish Row at the end of the cotton season on the weekend. Most of the people got paid on Friday night, and Saturday they had some money. If they didn't get paid on
Friday, there was a good chance that they'd be around playing the single action on Saturday in the afternoon. By the time the last figure came out, everybody might have some change, even if it was only eight dollars—one dollar on the 0 that afternoon. It was still some money.

Then there were all the crap games floating around. The stickup artists would be out hunting. The Murphy boys would be out strong. In the bars, the tricks would be out strong. All the whores would be out there, and any decent, self-respecting whore could pull at least two hundred dollars on Saturday night in some of the bad-doing bars on 125th Street.

As a matter of fact, Reno used to say, “The cat who can't make no money on Saturday night is in trouble.” There was a lot of truth to it, because there was so much money floating around in Harlem on Saturday night, if anyone couldn't get any money then, he just didn't have any business there.

It seemed as though Harlem's history is made on Saturday nights. You hear about all the times people have gotten shot—like when two white cops were killed on 146th Street a couple of years ago—on a Saturday night. Just about every time a cop is killed in Harlem, it's on a Saturday night.

People know you shouldn't bother with Negroes on Saturday night, because for some reason or another, Negroes just don't mind dying on Saturday night. They seem ready to die, so they're not going to take but so much stuff. There were some people who were always trying to get themselves killed. Every Saturday night, they'd try it all over again.

One was Big Bill. When I was just a kid on Eighth Avenue in knee pants, this guy was trying to get himself killed. He was always in some fight with a knife. He was always cutting or trying to cut somebody's throat. He was always getting cut or getting stabbed, getting hit in the head, getting shot. Every Saturday night that he was out there, something happened. If you heard on Sunday morning that somebody had gotten shot or stabbed, you didn't usually ask who did it. You'd ask if Big Bill did it. If he did it, no one paid too much attention to it, because he was always doing something like that. They'd say, “Yeah, man. That cat is crazy.”

If somebody else had done it, you'd wonder why, and this was something to talk about and discuss. Somebody else might not have
been as crazy. In the case of Big Bill, everybody expected that sooner or later somebody would kill him and put him out of his misery and that this was what he was trying for. One time Spanish Joe stabbed him. He just missed his lung, and everybody thought he was going to cool it behind that. But as soon as the cat got back on the street, he was right out there doing it again.

Even now, he's always getting in fights out on the streets on Saturday nights. He's always hurting somebody, or somebody's hurting him. He just seems to be hanging on. I think he's just unlucky. Here's a cat who's been trying to get himself killed every Saturday night as far back as I can remember, and he still hasn't made it. I suppose you've got to sympathize with a guy like that, because he's really been trying.

Harlem is full of surprises on Saturday night. I remember one in particular.

I was down on 116th Street. I was going to visit someone, and I decided to call before I got there. I went into the bar on the corner to call. I saw a familiar face in the bar. We had stopped hanging out together when I was about nine and never started again. We just weren't that tight any more. We'd had our fights. We were all right; we'd speak if we saw each other. I was just surprised to see him in that neck of the woods. I didn't think he ever went anyplace outside our neighborhood. I guess a lot of people had the same idea. It just goes to show how little we all knew about him.

I walked up to him and said, “Hey, Dad, how you doin'?” I guess he was just as surprised to see me down there, and I thought he was going to ask, “Hey, son, what you doin' down here?” I was all set to tell him, “I got a friend down here who owes me some money, and I need it tonight, because I got to take this chick out, so I came down to see him.”

But he didn't say it. He just asked me if I wanted a drink. He didn't act too surprised to see me. He was out, and this was Saturday night. He'd been in Harlem a lot of Saturday nights, and he'd gotten that big, nasty-looking scar on his neck on a Saturday night.

Despite the fact that he didn't ask me what I was doing there, I said, “I got to get uptown. I got to call somebody to wait for me. I hope this chick don't stay in that phone booth too long.”

He said, “No, I don't think she'll be in there on the phone too long.”

I didn't pay much attention to it. I said, “She looks like one of those who can really talk.”

He just said, “Yeah,” and kind of smiled.

I looked at the woman again. She looked as though she might have been about thirty-three, something like that. I would look over there every couple of minutes. She would look over to the bar at me and smile. I just forgot about the phone and started talking to Dad about my job and what I'd done that night, how I was catching hell, how everything I touched just turned to shit, sort of halfway crying.

It dawned on me that he had been standing there all by himself when I came in, and I'd never known him to do this. I never thought that he would go to a bar by himself, especially some strange bar, just to stand around and drink. He usually brought his liquor home when he wanted a drink.

I said, “Say, Dad, you waitin' for somebody down here?” I knew a friend of his who worked with him. Although I hadn't seen him in a long time, I figured they were still friends. I knew his friend, Eddie, lived down there, so I said, “Dad, you waitin' for somebody? Is Eddie around?”

He didn't answer the first question, but to the second one he said, “No, I haven't seen Eddie now in about a month.”

I said, “Yeah? Well, doesn't he still work on the job with you?”

He said that Eddie had an injury; some crates fell on him. “It's not too bad, but he can't be doing that heavy work around the dock, so he stayed off. He's collecting compensation for it. He's taking it easy, the way I hear it.”

I said, “Oh.” After that, I thought about the first question, but I figured it wouldn't be too wise to repeat it. I thought, Well, maybe he's waiting for his woman. And I laughed, because I always thought of Dad as the kind of cat nobody but Mama could take. With her, it was just habit.

After a while, the woman from the phone booth came up. She said, “Hi.”

I looked at her and said, “Oh, do I know you?”

Dad introduced her. He said, “Ruth, meet my oldest son.”

She smiled and said, “Hello. So you're Sonny Boy.”

I said, “Yeah.”

She said, “I knew it was you the moment I saw you sittin' there next to your daddy on that stool. You two look so much alike. If
he was about ten years younger, he could pass for your older brother.”

I said, “Yeah, that's something that people are suppose to tell fathers and sons, huh, that they look like brothers?”

She threw both of her hands on her hips and looked at me in a sort of defiant way, but jokingly, and said, “Supposin' it is, young man? That's beside the point. I'm telling you that you and your daddy look alike, even if this is what people are suppose to tell you. Now, you can believe it if you want to. All I'm interested in is saying it, and I said it. You can take it from there.”

I looked at her and said, “Okay, I believe it.” I had the funniest feeling that this woman knew what was going on. I knew this was his woman.

I couldn't feel anything about it. I guess I'd just never given too much thought to the idea of Dad playing around. I couldn't imagine anybody else ever wanting him. In the case of Mama, I think, if it had been her, I would have felt good about it. She deserved to get out and get somebody who would treat her like she was something, like she was a person. Because of this feeling about Mama, I suppose I should have felt bad that Dad was being unfaithful, but I didn't. I didn't sec any way in the world to dislike this woman. She seemed to be a nice person.

Dad asked her if she wanted a drink.

She said to me, “What you drinkin', junior?” I told her I was drinking a bourbon and soda with lemon. She said, “Umph. That sounds like something with a whole lot of sting in it. Maybe I'll try one.”

She moved closer to Dad and put her hand around his waist. She looked at me as if to say, “Well, young man, that's the way it is. So how you gonna take it?”

Dad never even looked at me. He just picked up his drink, as if to say, “Shit, he's old enough. If he's not, fuck him.” He emptied his glass, put it down, and called to the bartender.

When the bartender came to bring Ruth one, Dad got another whiskey, straight. We sat there for a while and started talking. The woman didn't seem to be the least bit ill at ease. She seemed completely relaxed, and she looked pretty, in her own way. She was kind of plump, but she looked like she might have been a very nice-looking girl when she was about twenty.

I guess she was pretty for Dad. He was forty at the time, so I
suppose anything under thirty-five would have been real nice for him. They seemed to have something. He had a patience with her that I'd never seen him show with Mama. I didn't think he was capable of showing this to any woman. She seemed to be able to play with him, and he took more playing from her than I'd seen him take from anybody else.

It made me wonder just how long had he known her and just what was going on with them. All I could see was that, whatever they had with each other, they were really enjoying it. I decided that was enough. I didn't feel as though I had the right to judge them or even have an opinion about them. Whatever they were doing, it seemed to me that they weren't doing it to anybody but themselves. Mama would never be hurt, because there was a good chance that she'd never know. New York was a big city, and they seemed so tight that they must have been tight for a long time, a real long time.

I asked her, “Pardon me, Ruth. Haven't I seen you uptown? Do you live up around 145th Street?”

Dad still never looked at me. He said, “Sonny Boy, I think you better grab that phone there now. The booth is empty. If you don't get it while it's empty, you're liable to be here all night.”

I got up and went to the phone booth. When I came out, Dad and his lady friend were gone. That was understandable. I guess I really messed up with that question about 145th Street.

I didn't feel bad toward Dad. It was just that I had never seen it as being possible for him to pull a chick on the outside, a nice-looking chick like this Ruth. She seemed to be a person with a nice personality, and she didn't look bad for a woman her age. Maybe she did something for Dad too. He acted like a different person altogether with her. Maybe she was the one who made him relax. He must have been a different person. I'd never seen him act like that with anybody. At home he was always shouting and raising hell, threatening somebody, a real terror.

I was kind of sorry that I had started prying into the woman's business. I knew I'd never seen her uptown. I suppose Dad knew it too. I was supposed to act as old as he had treated me. One of the things had been to treat the lady like she was just a friend of Dad's and to be cool behind it. But then I had just gone on and messed over her. I knew this was something I'd never get a chance to do again. I knew I'd never get a chance to say, “Look, Dad, I'm sorry I said that, and I shouldn't
have,” because I knew that this wasn't supposed to be mentioned ever, not even to him.

The next time I saw him, I would just have to speak first, about something that was far removed from the night at the bar and from Ruth. But I hoped that I would get a chance to let her know somehow that I was sorry that I hadn't played my part properly.

I didn't feel as though he was hurting Mama. I felt she didn't know about it, and what she didn't know wouldn't hurt her. Maybe it was just that she wasn't missing anything, because I didn't feel they were in any great love anyway. It just didn't bother me as I might have thought it would. It just seemed to be one of those Harlem Saturday night surprises.