migrating black southerners, like Sonny’s grand-
parents, during the periods after World War I and
the Great Depression.
Brown lays out his purpose and fundamental
premise in the preface: “I want to talk about the
experiences of a misplaced generation, of a mis-
placed people in an extremely complex, confused
society.... These characters are sons and daugh-
ters of former Southern sharecroppers. These were
the poorest people of the South, who poured into
New York City during the decade following the
Great Depression.... To them this was the prom-
ised land” (vii). What “these descendants of Ham”
found was not an ideal “city upon a hill,” as did the
Puritans immigrants who settled New England,
but, instead, a “slum ghetto” (vii–viii). “There were
too many people full of hate and bitterness crowded
into a dirty, stinky, uncared-for closet-size section
of a great city” (viii). This is the mythical world,
full of curses, anger, and disappointment, Sonny
and the other children of “these disillusioned
colored pioneers” (viii) inherited. Calling atten-
tion to the thematic resonance of Brown’s Man-
child with the slave narrative, Sidone Smith points
out, “What previously were the harsh realities of
the plantation are transferred to the larger more
deadly plantation, the ghetto. There are no direct
overseers: instead, the overseer is now the greater
society surrounding the ghetto, forcing it into self-
destructive patterns of existence.” (156–157).
Brown captures the violence found in this ide-
alist world of dream deferred in the opening scene
of his text when 13-year-old Sonny Boy, a street
gang member since age 11, is shot during a rob-
bery. The first word of the text, “Run,” sets the pace
and tone for the remainder of the narrative; like
the fugitive slave, Sonny Boy is in flight, seeking
sanctuary in a community where “there is no hid-
ing place” to be found. Sonny has been, since age
eight, a ward of New York’s juvenile system, having
been institutionalized in every agency from War-
wick, a mental institution, to Wiltwyck School for
Boys, which was founded by Eleanor Roosevelt, to
whom Brown dedicates his autobiography, where
he spent two and a half years. In these institutions,
Sonny finds the wholeness and meaning not avail-
able to him at home, given his father’s verbal and
physical abuse and his mother’s passivity, or in
the public school system, from which he and his
friends, feeling imprisoned, are truant. Driven by
fear, he adopts the criminality that governs the
code of the streets, despite knowing firsthand the
dead-end life that lies ahead, having witnessed the
death and imprisonment of his friends and the
eventual devastation of his brother, Pimp, a hus-
tler and drug abuser. “It was fighting and stealing
that made me somebody” (61), Brown writes; “My
friends were all daring like me, tough like me, dirty
like me, ragged like me, cursed like me, and had a
great love for trouble like me.... Although none
of my sidekicks was over twelve years of age, we
didn’t think of ourselves as kids” (21–22).
Deeply influenced by Mr. Papenek, an adminis-
trator at Wiltwyck who provided him with a differ-
ent perspective on life, Sonny Boy, feeling alienated
upon his return from Wiltwyck, eventually leaves
Harlem and enters the white world of Greenwich
Village, where he becomes gainfully and legally
employed, pursues his education, becomes inter-
ested in his spirituality, and begins to find value
in music, particularly jazz. However, although
“Greenwich Village frees him physically from Har-
lem, it does not free him spiritually” (Smith, 165);
he is driven back home to Harlem by the racism
he encounters in the village, especially while he is
in an interracial romantic affair. Upon his return,
Sonny Boy (Brown) accepts existential responsibil-
ity for himself—for his own life and the choices he
makes—despite the inevitable struggles he knows
he still has to face. This decision, Sonny Boy con-
fesses at the end, was “a move way from fear, to-
ward challenges, toward the positive anger that I
think every young man should have” (413).BIBLIOGRAPHY
Brown, Claude. Manchild in the Promised Land. New
York: Macmillan Company, 1965.
Smith, Sidone. Where I’m Bound: Patterns of Slavery
and Freedom in Black American Autobiography.
Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1974.Wilfred D. Samuels334 Manchild in the Promised Land