A second chance at ‘Manchild’ – Harlem
Scribner recently published Claude Brown’s 1965 memoir “Manchild in the Promised Land” as a Scribner Hardcover Classic (with a new introduction by Nathan McCall), and plans to issue the book as a trade paperback (in association with Touchstone) in December.
If you have read Brown’s chronicle of growing up in Harlem during the 1940s and 1950s, these reissues might give you a reason to pick up the book again. If, like me, you didn’t quite get around to reading it all those years ago, then please pick up this brutally honest and touching coming-of-age story.
We live in a time when almost everyone publishes a memoir. Unlike so many modern memoirists, Brown (1937-2002) actually had a story to tell, meaningful experiences to share. His book sold millions of copies and became one of the standard works of modern literature about the African-American experience. (The publisher calls this work a novel, but it also made Time magazine’s list of 100 Best Nonfiction Books. It was not sold as a memoir originally, but it is based on Brown’s life. I will let literary scholars argue the point of fiction vs. nonfiction.)
In his preface, Brown tells us he wants “to talk about the first Northern urban generation of Negroes. I want to talk about the experiences of a misplaced generation, of a misplaced people in an extremely complex, confused society.”
Brown’s parents, like many of their generation, traveled to Harlem from the rural South, seeking more economic opportunity in the Northern cities. From a young age, Brown becomes part of the street life, at first playing hooky from school, then stealing, and later running con games and selling drugs. He almost dies, once from a gunshot to the leg after he and some friends are caught stealing bed sheets, and once from a near-overdose during his first attempt trying heroin, which Brown calls “the plague wave” that destroys so many lives in Harlem.
If Brown’s book were just the remembrances of a street punk, it would not have become a classic. His story is one of transformation. Brown, after going through several juvenile homes, eventually moves to Greenwich Village, attending night school and immersing himself in the area’s jazz scene. He takes up the piano, practicing seriously. At the end of the book, he is preparing to go to college (Brown later graduated from Howard University and attended law school), and comes to terms with a changing Harlem and his street experiences.
Brown has an epiphany the leads him to another direction. A young boy walking a dog approaches him in Harlem. The boy, who knows of Brown’s street reputation, tells Brown he wants to be like him, but Brown urges the boy not to look to him as a hero. Brown tells one of his buddies who sees the exchange, “I don’t have time for any cocaine right now. I’ve got to go and do something, and I’ve got to do it before another little boy with a dog comes up and asks me what I do.”
Brown dedicated the book to Eleanor Roosevelt, who helped found the Wiltwyck School for Boys in New York, and to the school itself. Brown attended Wiltwyck, and came under the influence of its director, Ernst Papanek, and a counselor (and Holocaust survivor) Mrs. Meitner. His portraits of these quiet mentors are among the most touching in this story. Papanek, Brown writes, “wasn’t tall or short, and he was real straight, with a bald head and a kindly face. He didn’t look real bold, but he seemed to have a whole lot of confidence, as if he knew he could handle Wiltwyck.” To Brown, Papanek, who encourages him to pursue school, “was the best thing that had ever happened to Wiltwyck and maybe one of the best things that could ever happen to any boy who got into trouble and was lucky enough to meet him.”
He has a schoolboy crush on Mrs. Meitner, who takes an interest in him and shares her family’s history with him. He knows she likes to paint and make costumes, and one day paints a portrait of Felix the Cat and a sorcerer for her. “Both paintings were so good that nobody but the guys who saw me painting them believed that I had done it,” Brown writes. “But Mrs. Meitner knew I had painted them, and she liked them. That was all that mattered.”
Brown does not sanitize his language. He’s not interested in sounding literary, and his straightforward, conversational style makes his story, with its insights into human character, all the more powerful.
Read more: The Herald-Sun – A second chance at ‘Manchild’
“Manchild in the Promised Land” By Claude Brown (Scribner, $30)
By Cliff Bellamy
cbellamy@heraldsun.com; 419-674