Harlem, His Harlem (Manchild in the Promised Land, by Claude Brown)
Belfrage, Sally
MANCHILD IN THE PROMISED LAND, by Claude Brown. Macmillan. 415 pp. $5.95. Claude Brown speaks straight from the Harlem dead end. He is able to reproduce what no one quite has before: the...
...In between encounters with Justice he played hookey, stole, fought, pushed pot, sniffed cocaine, played the Murphy, and went through the range of choice that Harlem offers its young...
...Brown tells us exactly how it happens, and it all fits, there is nothing unreasonable about the choices people make when given these alternatives...
...Neither he nor any Harlem expert could diagnose that illness which is so urgently sought —the one that is curable through some sort of local anesthetic...
...I'd be going to jail soon, and I'd be doing a lot of time...
...It doesn't seem to occur to them that what he gets from his experience of Harlem might not be what they seek...
...Heroin, "the plague" from which there was no escape, caught even his brother Pimp, even Sugar, the girl who was straight...
...Others in the bag with Brown should be given his book to judge...
...Claude Brown speaks straight from the Harlem dead end...
...He came of age to a future of "going the crime way, that's all there is to it...
...You can also emerge still fixed in the same armchair, just as white...
...Liberal critics approached their task with generosity and a pent-up store of sociological warmth...
...Presented with the raw material from which they spring, the reader has no trouble understanding riots...
...He is able to reproduce what no one quite has before: the sensation that there really isn't anywhere further to go...
...Claude Brown's escape will give no clues to city planners: it is important principally because he is able to become our witness...
...For his critics, it was not enough for Brown to come out of there and tell how it was, he should have erected and evaluated a whole complex of causes and cures...
...Brown knew that if he pursued "the crime way" past the age of 16, his permanent police record would make him unhireable...
...We all know as well as he does, if we really want to know, that the disease is not confined to a limb of the body politic, but afflicts us all...
...Already a son has gone ahead to find a place and work, and one by one the others follow...
...Manchild is a beautiful record of experience—not a substitute for life or for fiction, not a tract nor an explanation...
...Old friends there were now thieves, addicts, prostitutes, or in jail—"strung out," busted, or dead of an overdose...
...From within you can see out to where you started and be appalled...
...But there is nothing North, only more of the same and worse: they come to an end of hope...
...Touched by Papanek's belief in him, he left Harlem and began night school...
...In the South, working a cotton field twelve hours a day for $3, living in a shack on grits and Koolaid, a man and his family look to the promised land: "one no longer had to wait to get to heaven to lay his burden down...
...It is built, as much as written, of passion and immediacy, surrounding the reader until he lives inside its life...
...Brown's Harlem is the underside of the world we inhabit, the equal and opposite reaction to the approved majority way...
...This society can crush its white children too, but it doesn't always get at their hope...
...Claude Brown was bequeathed no sense of the possible beyond a beating, a police court, Bellevue, the reformatory...
...Perhaps some of the attention sprang from guilt as much as appreciation, as if the cash were somehow conscience money, given to Brown instead of to SNCC or whoever's silence one sought that month...
...Time sneered briefly, and Paul Goodman wondered why "Claude," as a member of the group which has the "only .. . chance for a free and exciting early education" (his italics), should turn out "stupid...
...Brown, however, neither apologizes nor explains nor competes with the experts in the answer game...
...Then, a sudden change, apparently resulting from a brief visit to Wiltwyck...
...Not everyone was in favor...
...The public noises were quick and loud, and not quite real...
...The rest of us have only ourselves to judge...
...One wonders at the series of strange reactions to the book...
...that though his book is seen sociologically by outsiders since that is the outside "set" on Harlem now, Brown himself might view his life in simpler terms...
...Television shows, maybe a movie...
...Brown has written an extraordinary document...
...Because his life, after all, was all his and all he had: he loved and hated in it, suffered and tried, and it was a lot worse to live through than to look at, like all other-people's lives...
...But somewhere in the middle he was sent to the Wiltwyck School, whose influence in general and director, Ernst Papanek, in particular, seemed to plant an idea of another world—an idea which stayed dormant for some years more while he spent three terms in a reformatory...
...Book clubs immediately want Manchild and a university wanted the author for writer-inresidence...
...burdens could be laid down in New York...
...How does anyone possessing this most basic of human resources understand anyone without it...
...He studied, played piano, read, talked, went out with a white girl, and revisited Harlem...
...He should have possessed a larger vocabulary, a greater political commitment, the perspective of history, a True Writer's sense of organization...
...Even Tom Wolfe got sent to Harlem, so obviously antithetical to the Tom Wolfe scene...
...he has also received an excessive sum of money for it, and inordinate coverage in the media...
Vol. 13 • January 1966 • No. 1
