E3W Literature | University of Texas

Claude Brown
Manchild in the Promised Land
Touchstone, 1999
416 pages
$14.95

Reviewed by Kate Benjamin

When the Watts Riots erupted in Los Angeles in 1965, Time Magazine sought the reaction of Harlem residents. They expressed their shock that anyone who lived in the suburban tracts of single-family dwellings would feel the need to burn the shopping centers, businesses and homes they had at their disposal. 1965 also saw the publication of Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, an incendiary tale of the author’s childhood on Harlem’s streets in the 1940s and 1950s. Acclaimed (at twenty-eight) by Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe and jazz writer Nat Hentoff as a new voice in the tradition of Baldwin and Wright, Brown wanted to “talk about the experience of a misplaced generation…sons and daughters of former Southern sharecroppers…who poured into New York City during the decade following the Great Depression.”

We first meet Sonny (Brown) at thirteen lying in a pool of blood on the floor of a fish-and-chips joint, shot by a woman whose drying sheets and bedspreads his gang was stealing. We learn that this is not his first criminal act, but one in a career dating from age six. Sonny’s is a world of shoplifting (especially from “Goldberg” proprietors), chronic truancy, and throwing kids off roofs. Survival on the streets is to be “bad,” and Sonny is. In and out of youth facilities, however, he is placed at the Wiltwyck School for Boys in upstate New York, sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt, to whom Manchild is dedicated. The school’s director, Dr. Ernest Papanek, is, it seems, the first person to believe that Sonny’s life does not have to end in a hail of bullets and encourages him to attend school. It will take considerable time for Sonny to attempt to do so.

Meanwhile Sonny deals pot and cocaine, but his first attempt at snorting heroin terrifies him and he starts to break away from his street and home life, moving to Greenwich Village, taking up jazz and trying straight life, work, night school, new friends. After two hundred pages, Manchild, like Sonny, chills, jarringly changing in tone from jagged high to reminiscent reverie. The writing becomes more introspective, and the dialog more self-conscious, a shift that may be due to the book’s original sprawl: following a short piece submitted to Dissent at the request of Papanek, Brown then wrote some fifteen hundred pages from which Manchild is culled.

While the focus remains throughout on Sonny’s family and friends, their incarcerations and deaths, Brown provides the movements that roiled Harlem: Haile Selassie and the Coptics in the 1940s and 1950s and the Muslim movement of the 1950s. As Sonny contemplates college (Brown eventually attended Howard University), he is drawn back to Harlem to visit and ultimately to live, asking the familiar faces how they survived “our childhood, our childhood…covered with blood.”

In a later time, Brown might have given voice to protest the politics of “benign neglect,” of marginalization and exclusion, of ghettoization and virulent racism. But Manchild is a mid-century document, written by a young man taken in hand by a caring adult, and whose upward trajectory didn’t allow for additional passengers. Manchild still sells more than thirty thousand copies a year. It appears on many high school reading lists, and on many lists of books banned from high school reading lists. The Wiltwyck School for Boys, by the way, closed in 1981, due to lack of funding.