Fifty Books Project 2023

Manchild in the Promised Land

By Claude Brown

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.

I have long had a sweet spot in my reading heart for the street memoir.  Growing up in the suburbs, the tales of boys like me who had to make it in the tough neighborhoods of urban America provided a vision of heroism laced with social reality;  it made my humdrum existence seem all the more humdrum, but since I was just a train ride away from Manhattan, since I could find the neighborhoods on a map, since their stories were so similar to the ones my father told, I felt I had some purchase on the larger world through reading them.  Down These Mean Streets, by Pedro Pietri;  Hawk, by Connie Hawkins; The Basketball Diaries by Jim Carroll:  I somehow thought reading books about being street smart made me street smart.

Claude Brown’s work was kind of the ur-text of the genre for me:  the tale of a young boy in Harlem who fights, steals, runs from the cops, has sex, gets shot, and does drugs just a few years before I was born, told in prose that captured his intelligence while never apologizing for his lack of heart.  Re-reading it now has been a kind of nostalgia – for a crime-ridden New York, but also for an innocent me that believed I could read my way out of privilege.  

Brown’s prose is clear and straightforward.  His style is the refusal to have a style:   he tells you what happened, how he reacted immediately and then how it affected his longer term thinking about Harlem, family life, crime, being black in America and growing up.  While obviously this book is about being black in 1950s America, it strikes me (now that I am so much older than the protagonist and the author) as being largely about growing up.  Growing up in the chaos of urban poverty, growing up without guidance, growing up Black, but mostly about growing up.  Making mistakes and learning from them.

Granted, Brown’s mistakes were much more dramatic than most people’s:  he is involved in gangs and their requisite violence, he is getting drunk and high before he is a teen, he is in and out of juvenile facilities and he is shot in a robbery attempt.  He lives by his fists and his willingness to hurt people before they hurt him.  But then he begins to read.  While at the Warwick youth facility, the wife of the director of the facility begins to lend him books and while he only reads the first couple to be polite, he soon becomes hooked and reads whatever he can get his hands on.

Reading gives him the capacity to question his surroundings in ways that are both political and self-reflective.  He had previously refused to go to high school, but now returns to Washington Irving at night.  He had been dedicated to a life on the streets of Harlem, but now he moves downtown to get away from the craziness of his family and his friends.  He takes up the piano. In short, his intellectual journey becomes a physical journey as he begins to learn how to live in the world.

There are several moments in the novel that make me think about present social conditions.  His taking up reading offers a moment of reflection about education.  He has never had any use for school yet he is curious and longs for greater education.  His reading is a kind of ultimate student-centered pedagogy and reflects that idea’s strengths and weaknesses.  His long period of incarceration – his early teen years are spent shuffling among juvenile “reform” schools – are a warning to our politicians who love to cut social programs like basketball and community centers.  These are the places that, for all their weaknesses – Brown regularly reports how much better a criminal they made him by giving him a chance to get to know the slightly older more experienced criminals from around the city – slowly but surely steer Brown back to school and on to college.  Finally, the war on drugs was much on my mind while reading this.  One turning point in the narrative is when Brown, after much scheming and maneuvering, gets to try heroin for the first time, gets sick and swears the stuff off.  That decision colors the rest of the plot as we watch heroin devastate Harlem.  Brown’s younger brother and many of Brown’s friends become junkies.  Much of Brown’s later success (he graduates high school in this volume and will go on to get a degree from Howard University and do years towards a law degree) is attributable to his avoiding heroin addiction.  The picture this gives of heroin as a scourge that does not simply destroy individuals, but guts entire communities is a powerful rejoinder to our current thinking about legalization.  

There is a slight tone of the self-congratulatory here:  though Brown refuses to give himself much direct credit for being almost the last one of his childhood peers that avoids jail and/or drug addiction, he does reflect on how his path is different from his many prison-bound friends.  More disturbing than the immodesty on display here is the amorality of his attitude.  While Brown is very upset when his brother becomes addicted to heroin, gets caught in a robbery, and gets sent to state prison for three years, his brother simply takes this ruinous turn of events as his fate.  When Brown discovers one former girlfriend is a junkie and another is a sex worker, he wishes this were not the case, but tells himself (and us) that this is their decision – they have the right to live their lives their own way.  While he reflects on the weakness of his parents and the disconnect in their rural cultural values, he seems to think this is an inevitable cost of growing up.

 Finally, while Brown acknowledges towards the end that the women of Harlem have it tougher than the men, there is a casual sexism to this that is unnerving in 2019.  Brown regularly refers to women as bitches and whores – he seems incapable of expanding his vocabulary beyond these two.  Interestingly, the only woman he does not see as a casual sex object is the white girl he dates at the end of his time at Washington Irving.

Still, these are minor points.  The book is endlessly informative and entertaining and provides a gripping, first-hand account of the Harlem of legend, those years between Renaissance and gentrification.