56 pages • 1 hour read
Claude BrownManchild in the Promised Land
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1965A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Shared Expectation of Failure
Throughout Manchild, many of the novel’s major characters are united by their belief that certain circumstances cannot be overcome or improved. This is one of Naturalism’s most important contributions to the text. In Naturalist literature—particularly its American strain—the impersonal forces of nature and society have already determined an individual’s fate, and struggling against that fate will only cause unnecessary pain. While Claude ultimately shows that this is not necessarily the case, the ubiquity of this shared expectation of failure in the novel points to its fundamental importance in the material world on which the novel is modeled.
For most of the novel, Claude sees himself as doomed to a life of crime and all of its seemingly inevitable consequences: imprisonment, addiction, and an early death. This is apparent in the way that he essentially transfers his street life into the various reform schools he attends, becoming a petty criminal while he is supposed to be learning a new way of life. As a child, he has only seen himself as a criminal, so that is what he thinks he is fated to be forever. Moving between the streets and carceral institutions, he has a hard time changing his vision of his future. Thus, once he is released from Wiltwyck, his expectations for the future are no different: “I’d be doing the same old things, but I’d be doing them better because I was older and bigger and hipper now” (93). When changes do happen, they are extremely uncomfortable for Claude because he is not in control of them: “The Harlem that I had dreamed of and wanted to get back to seemed gone. I didn’t know this place. I didn’t know what to do here. I was like a stranger” (109). Even as he holds onto the belief that he cannot hope for anything beyond a short life of petty crime, the social, political, and physical landscape around him is changing without any regard for Claude’s ability to keep pace with it.
Claude eventually realizes that he can make changes in his life, but he can never quite let go of his old sense of fatalism. After his last conversation with Reno, he says, “I felt as though I had let him down. I was saying, ‘Look, man, we aren’t destined. You just bullshitted yourself and messed all up.’ But I guess he hadn’t, really. He’d just made his choice, and I’d made mine” (400). In other words, he accepts that individuals can make radical changes to their lives but does not assign value to those changes. In this sense, he subverts the very notion of failure as he once understood it: Reno can be as happy and successful in a life of street crime as Claude can be in a life on the straight and narrow. Ultimately, Claude recognizes that fate does not exist, but also that the distinction between a “good” choice and a “bad” choice is not always clear.
The Importance of Communal Knowledge
In addition to being united by a generally shared sense of pessimism, the Harlem community in Manchild is united by certain forms of collective knowledge. Characters share an awareness of how certain social relationships should be constructed and presented, how certain things should be properly communicated, and how the everyday, material world should look and function. Within the world of the novel, this communal knowledge creates a culture apart from that of white society, which is largely very hostile to Black people, especially Black men. In addition, through the many references to collective knowledge, Brown shows readers of all races what Black Harlem culture looked like at this particular moment in history.
One piece of knowledge that many characters share is the fact that people who abuse heroin die young. Reflecting on Jim Goldie’s funeral, for example, Claude says, “He died so young, and he wasn’t even on stuff [heroin]. It was okay for the junkies to die that young. Everybody expected them to” (200). Claude’s father repeats this sentiment when the family discovers that Pimp is using heroin, saying, “And when that boy go out here and get himself killed, it ain’t gon be nobody to blame but you and your mama. Y’all killin’ that boy” (361). Similarly, most characters in the story share an awareness that certain things are expected of hardened street criminals. Claude learns this as a small child after a fight in which he hit another boy with a Pepsi bottle: “I knew [the other boys] admired me for this, and I knew that I had to keep on doing it. This was the reputation I was making, and I had to keep living up to it every day. […] All the other cats out there on the streets expected this of me” (247). The novel’s frequent engagement with the question of one’s reputation speaks to this, for what is “reputation” if not a collective understanding of how something or someone should behave based on how they have behaved in the past?
For many characters, knowledge is also deeply painful. When Claude’s mother realizes that Pimp is using heroin again but cannot fully accept it, she says, “Sonny Boy, I don’t know where that boy is. I don’t know what he’s doin’. I don’t know nothin’ no more. I just don’t know. Sometimes I think I’m better off not knowin’. I don’t want to know nothin’ no more” (370). This dread of knowledge is informed by the community’s shared understanding of what happens to people with drug addictions. Ultimately, collective knowledge might bind people together, but it is not necessarily liberatory: In this instance, and in many others throughout the novel, it instead simply highlights the desperate socioeconomic and political conditions Black Harlem residents faced and the way those conditions shaped their understanding of the world.
The Urban North Versus the Rural South
While Manchild is fundamentally an urban novel, the dialectical relationship between urban spaces and rural spaces is crucial for its depiction of Harlem. This dialectic is typically represented in terms of North (urban) and South (rural), highlighting the continuing relevance of America’s violent racial history and also allowing Brown to further explore generational differences between older characters who were raised in agricultural communities and younger characters who know only city life.
Brown represents rural landscapes as being stuck in the past. When Claude is sent to the South to stay with his grandparents, he learns how to plow fields and slaughter farm animals; he is also taught to communicate with white people in a way that mimics antebellum relationships between enslaved people and enslavers, saying “yas suh” and “yas’m” (which, he notes, he no longer says once he returns to New York) (38). He calls the southerners he meets “dumb country people” (39) and says, “I saw a lot of things down South that I never saw in my whole life before, and most of them I didn’t ever want to see again” (40). Much later, thinking about stories of abuse his grandfather had told, he says, “I couldn’t imagine them treating him nice, because I didn’t know anybody in the South who was treated nice” (263). For Claude, the rural South is a landscape of superstition, cruelty, and deprivation, hardly changed by the abolition of slavery.
Thus, reflecting on his parents, Claude says:
It seemed as though the folks, Mama and Dad, had never heard anything about Lincoln or the Emancipation Proclamation. They were going to bring the South up to Harlem with them. […] It seemed as though Mama and Dad were never going to get out of the woods until we made them get out (262-63).
His parents’ insistence on clinging to older habits and beliefs is a consistent source of tension in the family: “They were in New York, but it seemed like their minds were still down there in the South Carolina cotton fields. Pimp, Carole, and Margie had to suffer for it” (263). The parents cannot guide their children through the urban world in which they grow up—and apart from—the parents.
Thus, the southern-rural/northern-urban divide in the novel is also a generational one, and while Brown does not represent a clean break between the older and younger generations—Claude keeps returning to Harlem; he stays connected with his parents—he does suggest that the urban North allows Black men in particular to fashion new identities for themselves. This is particularly evident in the conversion of some of Claude’s friends to the Muslim faith and their talk of revolution—a development that contributed to the actual emergence of the Black Power movement in the 1960s and 1970s.
