Manchild in the Promised Land by Claude Brown

I'm reading this book because once I got in a spat with Virginia Sheriff, back when we were still speaking to each other. He got a little self-righteous when I gave him a hard time for being a former English teacher and not knowing who Cyrano de Bergerac was. He gave a list of books that he taught to bash my Euro-centric ideology.

Of course I'd read most of the books on the list, only this one not - and when I asked him for more books he blew me off. Oh, so maybe I'm at least as well-read on African and African-American literature? Not so self-righteous now, mister?

So, I finally started this book while on the plane and I really like it. It's thinly fictionalized autobiography - I don't know the fiction and the bio, so it flows together seamlessly.

Claude Brown, born in 1937, grew up in Harlem with parents from the South. What I know about Harlem about that time was the Harlem Renaissance, especially Langston Hughes, which painted a beautiful, interesting picture. Brown paints a different picture altogether - of violence and desperation and criminality and torn social fabric and survival. It's fascinating.

But a few points I especially note (I'm maybe halfway through).

• His views on homosexuality, how people just are and he has no problem with it, are refreshing indeed.
• He seems pretty conflicted about women and I find his thoughts fascinating. He may have been intolerable as a young playa but I get the feeling he still treated most women as people.
• I'd be very interested to know about birth control used then - or not. Especially all the prostitutes - how did they avoid pregnancy?
• The devastation of the community wrought by heroin is really well-developed and makes a lot of sense. It seems to parallel what I hear from people remembering the height of the crack epidemic in New Orleans.
• He didn't really embellish what made him decide to get out, what made prison not seem inevitable after his hard living. I think this illustrates how usually it's not one thing or one person that makes another person decide to get out, but a confluence of factors making it a reality.

Well, much more to say, but I want to go back to reading while waiting for Gail! (Oh, and for some reason I can't access the blog from M's computer - it's blocked for some reason. I can see there are comments but I can't read them! I'm not ignoring commenters - I'll get to them as soon as I can.)