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Pimp thought his whole problem was not being able to get away from Harlem. "Man, this place is ... it just ruins me, Sonny. I feel like I'm being smothered to death sometimes. If it weren't for you, I guess I could have spent my whole life here and never been downtown, except for the trips that you take in grade school... My whole life has revolved around Harlem, man, uptown. Shit, I don't know anything, man."

Moves back to Harlem, in with a crowd of young jazz musicians. Passes the entrance exam to Columbia, but no money, can't go. Sells cosmetics, likes it okay. "I had a funny feeling about everything, about the past, about my childhood, and I kind of wondered if the childhood had been real, if we had all gone through all that stuff. I wondered if it weren't really just a dream." He's twenty-one.

Claude meets Judy at night school, a young Jewish girl. They fall for each other, hard. But come summer she disappears. "For a long time, I was sorry I'd ever stopped that time when Judy called to me in the hall with that "Hey, there." I remembered it for a long time. For a long time, I expected the phone to ring or thought I'd get a letter. Nothing came."

The rise of the Black Muslims in Harlem, starting in the mid-50s. "The Black Muslim movement was closer to most Harlemites than any of the other organizations, much closer than the NAACP or the Urban League ... (They) were the home team. They were the people, talking for everyone." 125th Street & 7th Avenue, they took it over, that's where they did their speaking. But no mention of Malcolm X. Can't yet decide why.

Throughout my childhood in Harlem, nothing was more strongly impressed upon me than the fact that you had to fight and that you should fight. Everybody would accept it if a person was scared to fight, but not if he was so scared that he didn’t fight.

As I saw it in my childhood, most of the cats I swung with were more afraid of not fighting than they were of fighting.

After that, it seemed that Tito, Dunny, Mac, and Alley Bush all went their separate ways. We were too old to hang out any more, and the Harlem we’d known was gone. In three years, it had all gone. Everybody had changed so much, and we didn’t need one another any more. There was nothing else for us to do but say good-bye to the old way of life and we had known and try to find something new.

I had started hanging out with a new group. I found a new groove in the Harlem thing. I was with the young jazz musicians now. I was still living down in the Village, but now I had a companion in my room with me. It was a piano, something that I had needed or a long time. I played it from four to eight hours a day, and I liked it ... For the first time in ages, I felt as though I was really doing things. [age 19]

I gave my gun away when I moved out of Harlem. I felt free. This was one of the things that made me feel free, that I didn't need a gun. I didn't need any kind of protection, because I wasn't afraid any more. I had been afraid in Harlem all my life. Even though I did things that people said were crazy - people who thought that I must not be afraid of anything - I was afraid of almost everything. [age 17]

"I was pulling farther away from the Harlem scene. I'd go up to Harlem and party, but I wasn't for going to jail any more. One thing began to scare me about jail - the fact that if I went to jail and got that sheet on me, any time I decided that I didn't want to go the crime way, I'd have a lot of trouble doing it with ... that sheet on me. I decided to move out of Harlem." He's maybe seventeen.

I said, "Look man, you don't ever, long as you live, have to worry about me messin' wit any more horse [heroin] as long as I live." I was sick for about two days after that. I didn't even want a reefer. I didn't want anything, anything, that was like a high. I started drinking some of Dad's liquor after that, but I was scared of those dry highs. Anyway, that was the big letdown with horse.
[At age thirteen]