Manchild in the Promised Land

Claude Brown was born in Harlem in 1937. By the age of 13, he was a streetwise kid and "master thief" (Brown, Ham 1). Over the next four years, he spent several months at a time in various juvenile detention halls, and his account of his experience in Manchild is that he became inured to psychological and physical violence and brutality. His father was only too ready to smack him for disobedience, which made home life often unendurable. But there was also violence in the streets that became Brown's real home.

Brown became adept at casual theft, and though he did not make a career out of violent crime, he and his peers were attracted to the culture of violence: "The weather permitting, on Saturday nights my hoodlum-wannabe friends and I would hang out on 146th Street waiting to see who would get killed. We were rarely disappointed" (Brown, "Language" 2B).

Manchild in the Promised Land, Brown's autobiographical novel, was published in 1965, when Brown was 32 years old and a Rutgers Law School graduate. As Manchild has it, his psychological odyssey out of the trap of streetwise drugs hustling to university education had begun unexpectedly. He was 17 and on the brink of hardening his life of petty drug crime (marijuana dealing) because he was no longer a juvenile and could not avoid having a record if he were to be arrested. When he was mugged by a heroin addict, his choices were rather simple: kill the

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derstands only that he will not return to Warwick or a similar institution; the "next stop" is a prison at Coxsackie, Woodburn, or Elmira (158). Sonny overcomes his destructive prophecy, but in the faces and experiences of the many others from his street-life days, he sees it in operation. His final meeting with Reno, whom he has not seen for some years, is instructive. Reno can talk over old times only by getting high. After a couple of drinks, Sonny feels he would be unfriendly not to tell Reno that "we aren't destined. You just bullshitted yourself and messed all up" (426). The lesson of Reno's life is that choices have consequences. Reno, says Sonny, made his, "and I'd made mine" (426). Culture can be defined as what is socially learned, experienced, and shared by members of a society. This includes the sharing of values or philosophy, and undoubtedly Sonny is influenced by the culture of Harlem. The culture of poverty is the lesson of experience of powerlessness and the inability to make choices because of a lack of money. The values of streetwise life define and entrap Sonny in his childhood, but his epiphany of self-scrutiny helps him overcome what is destructive about those values and escape what is destructive about
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 5620
Approximate Pages = 22 (250 words per page)