SOURCE: "The Environment as Enemy in a Black Autobiography: Manchild in the Promised Land," in Phylon: The Atlanta University Review of Race and Culture, Vol. XXXII, No.1, Spring, 1971, pp. 53-9.

[In the following essay, Baker focuses on environment in Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land.]

The concept of the environment as enemy is far from new; Zola and the naturalistic school of the nineteenth century took the concept as a starting point. Moreover, the concept is not new to black literature, for the Chicago of Bigger Thomas and the New York of the "invisible man" bring about the fall of the protagonists in Native Son and the Invisible Man just as surely as the mines in Germinal and the gin shops in L'Assomoir bring about the fall of the protagonists in those works. Like Zola and other naturalistic writers, Wright and Ellison have portrayed the vast web of forces surrounding man as inexorable; the environment ultimately brings either death or degradation to their respective protagonists. To deal with the environment as an injurious or hostile force in Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, therefore, is not to enter a world of strange literary conventions. However, the conventions here are somewhat modified. In Manchild in the Promised Land, there is no ineluctable march of naturalistic events; there are no long and bitter tirades against a hostile universe, and no scenes where the protagonist is portrayed as the mangled and pitiable victim of negative forces. Brown's work, therefore, can neither be rigidly classified as "naturalistic" nor as an "angry" autobiography in the manner of the narrative of William Wells Brown. Brown has not only portrayed the negative aspects of the environment, but also the positive aspects: not only the defeats brought about by the antagonistic environment, but also the victories won and the beneficial changes that resulted from the battle.

Manchild in the Promised Land presents the struggle of one black male child to escape from the throes of a colonial system; Harlem, or the initial environment, is the colony whose codes and inimical effects the protagonist has to escape. The protagonist's struggle is defined in terms of various shifts in environment, and the reader emerges with a balanced view of his struggle due to the combination of romantic nostalgia and clinical realism in the narrator's technique of description. This philos-aphilos relationship between the narrator and the environment gives Brown's work a critical objectivity that makes the book useful for socio-historical purposes; moreover, the changes in environment that define the protagonist's struggle reflect a historical process with a degree of accuracy that also makes the work valuable as social history. An examination of the struggle presented in the work, therefore, will reveal not only how Brown's use of the environment as enemy constitutes a modification of a literary convention, but also will show what the work tells about the struggle of blacks in a recent epoch.

The picture of the environment as a hostile force begins to emerge in the first lines of Manchild in the Promised Land; the protagonist at the age of thirteen is fleeing an unknown assailant, and lodged in his stomach is a bullet, "trying to take my life, all thirteen years of it."¹ And the narrator's earliest memory is of the Harlem riot in 1943 when the population rebelled against the inimical environment surrounding it. The dark picture continues to unfold when the narrator reveals that his father has killed a man, and the landlord of the building in which he lives has clubbed a man to death for urinating in the hall. Both his father and the landlord represent the "old order" to the narrator, and the legacy of the old order consists of "liquor, religion, sex, and violence" (p. 291). In fact, the narrator says that "the Harlem tradition [of violence] had come from the backwoods" (p. 289), and he continues with the following reflection on the members of the old order: "They didn't seem to be ready for urban life" (p. 289).

The environment then is one conditioned by a violent past and overseen by men—both black and white (pp. 298-99)—who do not understand the generation to which the narrator belongs. This lack of understanding made life at home unbearable, and as a result, the protagonist took to the streets. He defines his early habitat in the following passage:

I always ran away [from youth shelters] to get back to the streets. I always thought of Harlem as home, but I never thought of Harlem as being in the house. To me home was the streets. I suppose there were many people who felt that. If home was so miserable, the street was the place to be. (p. 428)

The life of the streets consisted of fighting, stealing, smoking marijuana, and learning the "code" of the gang (p. 270). The narrator says: "Throughout my childhood in Harlem, nothing was more strongly impressed on me than the fact that you had to fight and that you should fight." (p. 263) The things he and his contemporaries fought for were "manhood, women, and money"; the code was simple, with its emphasis on violence drawn from the quality of life:

By the time I was nine years old, I had been hit by a bus, thrown into the Harlem River (intentionally), hit by a car, severely beaten with a chain. And I had set the house afire. (p. 21)

It is the meaning of this violence, however, that is of significance in any consideration of the environment as enemy, and that meaning is given in the words of the narrator. When he is urged to join the Black Muslim movement in order to rebel against white society, the narrator says:

The revolution that you're talking about, Alley, I've had it. I've had that revolution since I was six years old. And I fought it every day—in the streets of Harlem, in the streets of Brooklyn, in the streets of the Bronx and Lower Manhattan, all over—when I was there stealing, raising hell out there, playing hookey. I rebelled against school because the teachers were white. And I went downtown and robbed the stores because the store owners were white. I ran through the subways because the cats in the change booths were white. (p. 340)

The street life, therefore, is revealed as a form of rebellion against the environment, an environment which, in effect, constitutes a colony held in check by white society "downtown." The accuracy of the narrator's estimation is reinforced by a statement from John Henrick Clarke's Harlem, A Community in Transition. Clarke says:

Harlem is not a self-contained community. It is owned and controlled by outsiders. It is a black community with a white economic heartbeat. Of the major retail outlets, national chains and local merchants, only a handful are Negro-owned. In the raging battle for integration and equal job opportunities for Negroes, little is heard about the Negroes' long fight to gain control of their community. A system of pure economic colonialism extends into politics, religion and every money-making endeavor that touches the life of a Harlem resident.²

Through violence, stealing, indeed all aspects of the street life, the protagonist pits his skill against the pressures of the environment, but so conceived, the rebellion is destined to failure: "It was doomed to fail, right from the word go." (p. 340)

Indeed the inevitable failure of rebellion against the antagonistic environment can easily be seen; it takes the form of a deterministic pattern through three changes of environment that occur in the early part of Manchild in the Promised Land. The first change occurs when the narrator is sent to the South for a year because he has refused to attend school; the second change occurs when he is sent to Wiltwyck, a correctional institution for boys; and the third when he is sent to Warwick, another correctional institution. By the time he was fifteen, the narrator had suffered "exile" or incarceration three times for his rebellious activities against the initial environment. If the battle was indeed between the narrator and his environment, clearly, the environment was the early victor.

And yet the paradox of the penal system does not fail to operate in Manchild in the Promised Land, for in all three of the "secondary" environments the protagonist became more skilled in the techniques of waging a battle against the initial environment. In the South, he learned to lie with proficiency; in Wiltwyck, he met companions who engaged in criminal activities with him on home visits; and in Warwick, he learned something new about crime from everyone he met. The irony of the penal system is captured by the narrator's statement that "We all came out of Warwick better criminals." (p. 146) The initial environment was thus a fiendishly insidious antagonist, for not only did it punish the rebel, but it also embodied the punishment in a form that made further sins unavoidable. The first three secondary environments, therefore, are little more than adjuncts—additional arms, if you will—of the enemy, and this can be seen in the code that characterized Wiltwyck and Warwick: it was the code of the streets from which the protagonist was sent. And the adverse effects of these secondary environments can be seen in the romantic nostalgia of the narrator.

The secondary environments bring about a mode of perception that proceeds out of the imaginative rather than the rational faculty, and this mode of perception conditions the nostalgia of the protagonist. For example, on returning home from the South, he says:

When I came out of the subway at 145th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue, I thought there had never been a luckier person in the world than me. . . . I was so happy to see them, to see it, to see it all, to see Harlem again. (pp. 52-3)

There is a certain pathos in these lines when one reflects on what the environment actually means—what the "blood and vomit" that the narrator sees on his arrival at home actually mean; and the pathos of the romantic vision is seen again when the narrator speaks of Harlem on his return from Wiltwyck. He says: "Oh, Lord, Harlem, let me git to you! It was an exciting feeling—going home." (p. 107) Finally, the same romantic nostalgia is seen just before the narrator's return from Warwick:

All I wanted to do was get back to Harlem. I wanted to get back to Jackie and pot and the streets and stealing. This was my way of life. I couldn't take it for too long when I was there, but this was all I knew. (p. 156)

The already low aspirational level is further lowered by the secondary environments, and these environments simply increase the protagonist's desire to continue his futile rebellion. On leaving Wiltwyck, his only desire is to get high on heroin, and on leaving Warwick, his only desire is to get back to stealing and smoking marijuana. When the end result of the return to the place so nostalgically yearned for is considered, only the narrator's desire to return can be seen as romantic. Yet this romanticism helps to preserve a balanced point of view, for it keeps the book from falling to the level of a puerile denunciation of the environment. The romanticism, in other words, acts as the philos that removes Manchild in the Promised Land from the category of the "angry" autobiography. Moreover, this romanticism functioned as one motivation for the actions of the narrator's youth, and as such it has a place in his story and quite possibly in the stories of others of his generation. The world of the Harlem streets was glorious because it stood in contrast to the miserable homes and the correctional institutions, which seemed to be the only alternatives.

Nonetheless, the ultimate effect of romantic nostalgia was adverse, for it led the narrator to give up the idea of school altogether, to move out of his parents' home, and to adopt the code of the Hamilton Terrace environment at the age of sixteen. At the age of sixteen, therefore, he was dangerously close to being destroyed by the environment. He was living in the area where the worst criminals in Harlem lived, and he was selling drugs. He says, "I was going the crime way. That's all there was to it." (p. 173) The next stops that life held out to him at the time were Coxsackie, Woodburn, and then Sing Sing. Clearly the environment was the victor at this point, and it had taken its toll in human lives and suffering. As the narrator says, "Most of the cats I came up with were in jail or dead or strung out on drugs." (p. 179)

But it is at this point of ultimate despair, at this point of the "everlasting nay," that the advantage in the battle begins to shift to the protagonist, and it is this shift that removes Manchild in the Promised Land most decisively from the naturalistic category. Heretofore, there has been no linear development, only the inexorable pendulum of the narrator's moves from an antagonistic initial environment to equally antagonistic secondary environments and back again; the expansion has been simply vertical as the protagonist has become more deeply involved in the life of crime. Now, at the age of seventeen, the first horizontal expansion of the book occurs as the narrator moves to Greenwich Village. In effect, the movement is equal to a movement from the colony to the mainland; the narrator starts on the road to development outside the ghetto. The horizontal expansion is not only defined in terms of the physical move, but also in terms of the narrator's point of view toward life. In commenting on the change, he says:

I was free. For the first time in my life I didn't have the feeling that I had to go to Coxsackie, to Woodburn, and then to Sing Sing. I had the feeling now that anything could happen, anything that I decided to do. It seemed a little bit crazy, but I even had the feeling that if I wanted to become a doctor or something like that, I could go on and do it. (p. 185)

For the first time the narrator has a feeling of freedom and a higher aspirational level. Moreover, he is now able to reflect objectively on the enemy. There is no romantic nostalgia in his clinically realistic descriptions of the drug "plague" that swept through the community in the fifties, and he is far from romantic as he describes the lesbians, the homosexuals, the poor police protection, and the poor politicians who went to make up the colony.

In chapter eight he sees that the type of hero the community set up was a criminal such as Jim Goldie, and in chapter nine the narrator makes his first analysis of the "black reflection" that began in the early fifties.³ In chapters ten, eleven, and twelve, the narrator reflects on the old order of the Southern black man, on the effects of drugs on the community, and on his own future as well as the future of his younger brother, who started taking drugs at an early age. All of these chapters reach a new high in objectivity; all of the inimical aspects of the Harlem environment are seen critically as the narrator adjusts his perspectives and grows to maturity. In chapter thirteen, there is a marvelous description of what Saturday night means to blacks, and in chapter fourteen, the narrator's view of the early era of "black reflection" continues as he describes the rise of the Muslim movement in Harlem. He concludes the chapter by saying: "If they [the Muslims] don't do any more than let the nation know that there are black men in this country who are dangerously angry, then they've already served a purpose." (p. 349)

Finally, in chapter fifteen, the point of farthest horizontal expansion occurs. The narrator's move to Greenwich Village has allowed him to withdraw from the hostile environment for a time, and he has been relatively successful in the white world. But when he pursues his retreat to its limits and attempts to have an affair with a Jewish girl, he is defeated by the white world. This defeat provokes a retreat to the initial environment, but that initial environment can no longer be as injurious as previously, since the narrator has adjusted his perspectives and matured. He says, "It was as though I had found my place and Harlem had found its place. We were suited for each other now." (p. 372) The narrator is surely the victor at this point; in chapters seventeen and eighteen, his victory is confirmed by his discovery of the beneficial forces in the initial environment. He meets Reverend James, and through the funds of a church council, he gets away from the environment altogether. The last chapter deals with the changing nature of the community, the new luxury apartment buildings, and the new brand of policeman who is interested in protecting the community. By the end of the last chapter, it not only seems as though the protagonist has escaped a hostile environment, but also that the environment itself is a tame and beneficent place. One is almost tempted to ask if the environment had ever been hostile, or if the environment was indeed the enemy. And it is precisely at this point that one can see just how superb a work the author has managed to produce for the social historian, for he has presented an unimpassioned, objective, and factual account of an epoch. By maintaining a balance between romantic nostalgia and clinical realism, by keeping the philos-a-philos relationship in balance, the author has been able to present a work that neither succumbs to the ideological rigidities of naturalistic conventions nor the subjective distortions of angry autobiography.

That the environment is the enemy, however, can clearly be seen by a statement made near the end of the book: "It seemed as though most of the cats that we'd come up with just hadn't made it. Almost everybody was dead or in jail." (p. 419) By the end of the work Alleybush, Kid, and K. B., all childhood friends of the narrator, are in jail; Jackie, Debbie, and Trixie, three of the main women in his life, are prostitutes, while a fourth, Sugar, is a drug addict. Butch and Tony, two of his best friends in youth, have died as a result of drug addiction; and Pimp, the narrator's younger brother, is in jail on an armed robbery charge. The price exacted by the environment is thus a monumental one, and if any message emerges clearly, it is that only the exceptional, only the few made it—many met death at an early age. Danny, one of those who made it out of the environment, was a man capable of miracles, for he was "strung-out" on drugs, accomplished his cure, and came back to the same environment where he had met his downfall.⁴ Turk, the fighter who is the number two contender for the heavyweight crown at the end of the book, is also an exceptional figure, a person capable of the philosophical reflections seen throughout the last of the book.⁵ But the most exceptional figure of all is, of course, the narrator himself. The fact that he was able by an act of will to turn around and follow the straight road after ten or eleven years of crime is truly remarkable. And even if allowance is made for a certain amount of egocentricity and exaggeration, yet clearly the narrator was ahead of a great number of his companions. In innumerable instances throughout the work, his leadership potential and above-average abilities are revealed.⁶ Danny, Turk, and Sonny (the narrator)—these are the only ones left when Manchild in the Promised Land closes on a note of nostalgia with the narrator at five years of age describing the sights of the streets to his unbelieving father.

And one can sympathize with the father because it is hard to believe that in the ultra-civilized, twentieth century city such an environment could exist; yet it does exist, and one can only marvel at the restrained manner in which the author has presented his story. Though the environment described by the work is clearly the enemy, its landscapes are not totally bleak, and the possibility of victory exists. The tactics of Brown's victory should be of ultimate concern not only to the social historian, but to mankind in general.

¹ Claude Brown, Manchild in the Promised Land (New York: Signet Books, 1965), p. 1. All citations from Manchild in the Promised Land in the text are from this edition. Hereafter referred to in the notes as Manchild.

² John Henrik Clarke, Harlem, A Community in Transition (New York, 1964), p. 8.

³Manchild, p. 172. The narrator says: "In the fifties, when 'baby' came around, it seemed to be the prelude to a whole new era in Harlem. It was the introduction to the era of black reflection. A fever started spreading. Perhaps the strong rising of the Muslim movement is something that helped to sustain or even usher in this era."

⁴Manchild, pp. 255-62. In response to Danny's plan to stay in Harlem after being cured, the narrator says that it would be a "miracle" if it could be done (p. 257).

⁵Manchild, pp. 368-72. The dialogue between the narrator and Turk at this point is particularly apt as an illustration of Turk's character.

⁶Manchild, pp. 82, 104, 141, and 155. On page 155, not only does the wife of the director of Warwick encourage the narrator to finish high school because he has a good head on his shoulders, but also the narrator says, "I just ran the place, and I kept it quiet." If he came even close to "running" an institution with 500 criminally inclined young men in it, he was clearly exceptional.