Manchild in the Promised Land

by Claude Brown

The children of these disillusioned colored pioneers inherited the total lot of their parents—the disappointments, the

anger. To add to their misery, they had little hope of deliverance. For where does one run to when he’s already in the promised land?

Then he asked me if I knew what a fool was. I said a fool was somebody stupid. Dad said I was right, but there was more to it than that. He said it takes a stupid person to keep looking for something that is never there.

After reading about a lot of these people, I started getting ideas about life. I couldn’t talk to the cats in the cottage about the people in the books I was reading. I could talk to them about

Most of the cats I knew who were junkies said they did it because they wanted to, but I knew they did it because they wanted to be down. It was a hip thing to do, to know about—to be nodding. Not only that, it seemed to me that the junkies were running from things.

Using hard drugs has a lot to do with trying to belong to something. This is brought out in this book in a different way.

You were suddenly relieved of any obligations. People just stopped expecting anything from you from then on.

Me, I needed to get out of Harlem.

The solution I finally found. Getting out of Harlem was his point. It would seem that most people would want to get out of Harlem after the Harlem Renaissance ended in the early part of the 20th century.