Claude Brown's childhood growing up in Harlem in the 40s and 50s. "It was real wrong to call somebody a nigger in front of a paddy boy. That's the way they felt. It made me feel a little bit bad myself. This sort of cooled everything down. But saying "nigger" wasn't the main thing to me. The main thing was that these cats were try to f**k over this paddy boy. And this paddy boy was more man than any of those cats there. I didn't care. Between us, there was no nigger thing. There was no white, no color thing. To me, he was a beautiful cat; and if you dug people and if people had something that was beautiful about them, they were raceless. And that was the only f***ing thing that mattered." "We were always the ones that people said would probably be in jail or dead before we were twenty-one. I think a lot of those "good boy" cats believed their parents when they were telling them that kind of stuff." "The real hip thing about the "baby" term was that it was something that only colored cats could say the way it was supposed to be said. I'd heard gray boys trying it, but they couldn't really do it. Only colored cats could give it the meaning that we all knew it had without ever mentioning it -- the meaning of black masculinity." "But I knew she had a lot of animal in her, and all I wanted was a chance to unlock that animal and let it out. There's just something fascinating about religious chicks anyway. It's the high potentiality for corruption that's so fascinating." "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." Speaking about the garment center boss Goldberg and his relationship to the Negro, the "boy" who worked for him: "He never saw our generation. He saw us only through the impressions that the older folks had made." "He never even tried to see us, and he tried to treat us the way he had treated them. Most of the older folks were used to it. They didn't know Goldberg from Massa Charlie; to them, Goldberg was Massa Charlie. I suppose the tradition had been perpetuated when the folks moved to the North and took the image of Massa Charlie and put it into Goldberg. Perhaps Goldberg was unaware of it."