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.
Chapters 7-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary
After moving to Greenwich Village, Claude spends more time with Tony, who lives next door to him. They watch “the artists, the quacks, the would-be bohemians” from the outside (169). He goes to Harlem only on weekends, noting that by 1955, heroin has essentially taken over the entire area. He compares it to a plague and a ghost haunting the community. He adds that people with addictions are often driven to steal from their own families to support their addiction and describes the way this has torn many families apart. Claude recounts a conversation with a 13-year-old sex worker named Elsie, who points out that Claude’s family is no different from other families: They would not want him to visit them if he did not bring them money.
Claude also describes the power that “the numbers” (betting) have over Harlem (172). Numbers are a local institution and almost everyone participates, driven by impoverishment and desperation. Claude sees this as an indirect effect of the heroin epidemic, as is the proliferation of sex workers on the streets. He describes theft and sex work as common practices even among formerly respectable families who have assiduously avoided drugs. One day, he runs into Danny, who is going through withdrawal. This has a profound effect on Claude, who realizes how toxic heroin truly is.
Claude has an interaction with another very young sex worker named Sadie. He tries to talk her out of doing sex work, asking her how it would make her mother feel. Sadie dismisses this and says she will keep doing sex work until she gets enough money to buy heroin. Claude learns that it is common for mothers to know their daughters are doing sex work and to let them do it to support their substance use disorder.
Claude starts to worry about his siblings, particularly Carole and Pimp. Carole, who was once independent and smart, has become deeply embroiled in their mother’s evangelical Christianity, which Claude sees as backward and nonsensical. Pimp wants to follow in Claude’s footsteps on the streets.
Claude also notes that police violence against people with heroin addictions in Harlem has increased. Everyone in the neighborhood knows that one police officer, known as Schoolboy, uses people with heroin addictions as target practice, but no one does anything about it. He notes that Harlem is being neglected by everyone in power—the politicians, the police, and the business community—and he understands that this is motivated by racism. Harlem’s politics are also hamstrung by the fact that so many men are convicted felons, which means they cannot vote. The women essentially run the community, but Claude claims that they support one light-skinned congressman who does not actually do any good for Harlem. For most residents, Claude says, getting high is the only way to escape their misery.
Pimp starts getting into trouble on the streets, so Claude spends more time in Harlem, trying to keep him on track. They both know that their peers expect Pimp to carry on Claude’s legacy, but Claude fears for him. He decides he will never kill anyone and will never go to jail.
On a visit to Harlem, Claude learns that a friend called Knoxie has come out as gay. Claude finds Knoxie at a bar, and while he is initially uncomfortable around him, he moves past those feelings. In Harlem, he notes, no one is particularly upset by the presence of queer men or women, who are generally accepted as part of the community. Knoxie has also become a successful and popular drug dealer.
Claude addresses the general sentiment about gay people that dominates Harlem: no one is particularly upset by the presence of gay men or women, and they are generally accepted as part of the community. Claude describes one of the Harlem’s most famous thieves, a gay man named Broadway Rose who would protect other men in prison if he believed he might be able to have sex with them. However, Claude does not believe that gay men feel romantic love for one another and sees their relationships as fundamentally different from those between straight lovers.
Claude feels increasingly confused by Harlem and starts thinking more deeply about what motivates the actions of people with addictions, sex workers, and gay people. While he doesn’t understand why some people are gay, he understands that heroin addiction might come from trying to escape from miserable circumstances. Similarly, he believes some sex workers do sex work because they have no other way to make money, while others do it because they enjoy it.
Carole has started attending Mrs. Rogers’s church, which upsets Claude. He goes to her church service one day, wondering what is drawing Carole there, and he sees June Rogers, Mrs. Rogers’s daughter, for the first time in years. He is immediately attracted to her and decides to go to church more frequently. He pretends to have had a genuine religious awakening to get Mrs. Rogers’s approval and even performs what he calls his “saved scene” (191), pretending to be overtaken by God’s spirit and rolling around on the floor, praying. Mrs. Rogers tells him he is almost saved and needs to keep coming back to church until he is. Disgusted, Claude gives up and stops going. He accepts that Carole and Mrs. Rogers need religion just as everyone in Harlem needs something, but he knows he is not a believer.
Chapter 8 Summary
One night Claude meets up with Danny, who tells him about the death of their mutual friend, Jim Goldie. Jim had been at Warwick and had then become a successful street criminal in Harlem. After serving two years in Elmira, a maximum-security prison in upstate New York, Jim became involved with criminals his peers believed to be part of the Mafia. While guarding the door of a gambling joint, Jim was shot and killed. Danny claims that Jim, with four bullets in his head, walked a block until he found a police officer and told him he had been shot before dropping dead.
Claude, Danny, and many of their peers attend Jim’s funeral. Claude believes they all contributed, even indirectly, to Jim’s death, because they were all involved in street crime. He calls Jim the community’s “Horatio Alger,” as he had become very successful in a very short period of time (199). He also notes that it is more acceptable for people with heroin addictions to die young because everyone expects them to, but Jim’s death is a genuine shock to the neighborhood.
Claude thinks about all the men from Harlem who were being executed in Sing Sing, another maximum-security prison in New York. When he and his peers were younger, they worshipped these men, but now they realize that defending one’s reputation or masculinity is not worth losing one’s life. Soon after Jim’s funeral, Carole tells Claude that Butch has fallen off the roof of a five-story building. While they never find out exactly what happened, rumors connect Butch’s death with his heroin addiction. Claude had always believed that if anyone could overcome addiction, it would be Butch. He visits Mrs. Crawford, Butch’s mother, but does not know what to say. As he leaves, she asks him why, since Claude and Butch skipped school and committed petty crimes together, Claude never started using heroin. Claude knows she is implying that he should have died instead of her son. Exhausted by death and loss, he does not go to Butch’s funeral.
He goes to Danny’s house and finds his friend packing a suitcase. Danny tells him that Butch’s death was God’s way of telling him and Kid to stop using heroin, so he is going to Kentucky to recover. As he watches Danny’s cab drive away, Claude prays for his friend.
Claude feels increasingly sickened by Harlem and realizes that the neighborhood he once knew and loved has disappeared. Wanting to find something that was “still intact,” he visits Pimp (204). Pimp admits he has started drinking wine and tells Claude about all the fights he has been having with their father. Claude feels like he is losing everything in Harlem. He decides to go back to the Village and stay there for a while.
Claude stops using marijuana and focuses on his schoolwork. One day, while talking to a night school friend on the phone, he hears a jazz record playing in the background and decides he wants to get his own piano. On two occasions, police come into the house where he is renting a room and, because Claude is Black and the house is owned by a white couple, believe he is a burglar and try to arrest him.
Claude continues avoiding Harlem, although he misses it. He knows he is the subject of rumors on the streets and does not want to know what people are saying about him. When he does go to Harlem, he meets up with jazz musicians and visits jazz clubs. As part of his job at the watch repair shop, he visits other parts of New York and begins expanding his horizons within the city. He also starts working out at a gym, where he meets a white musician named James Finley. Finley, who attended Julliard and composes film scores, connects Claude with white piano teachers, and Claude eventually starts playing informally with other musicians. However, he struggles to keep up with Black players and starts studying with a Black teacher known as The Professor. He gets his own piano and continues playing around the city with a small group of young jazz musicians. Feeling as though everything is settling into place, he is ready to visit Harlem again.
Chapter 9 Summary
During a visit to Harlem in the fall of 1956, Claude runs into an old friend named Billy Dobbs, who is in recovery and has converted to the Coptic faith. He tells Claude that this is “the true black man’s faith” and that both Islam and evangelical Christianity are exploitative and untrue (214). He adds that their mutual friend Lonnie is now a Coptic priest, which surprises Claude, as Lonnie has a violent criminal history. Driven by curiosity, Claude agrees to attend a Coptic class run by a man named Father Ford. There, Lonnie introduces him to Father Ford, who explains the Coptic faith to Claude, maintaining that it is the true religion of Black people around the world. Claude is fascinated by this, and he soon brings Tony with him to another lesson. While Tony is put off by the fact that practitioners do not drink or smoke, Claude keeps attending and starts fantasizing about going to Africa and immersing himself in Coptic history, although he knows he never will and becomes frustrated. He soon sees the Coptic religion as a masquerade like all other religions and stops going to classes.
Billy also becomes disillusioned with the Coptic faith, and a few months later, Claude sees him standing on a street corner, high on heroin.
Around this time, Dunny, Tito, Mac, and Alley Bush are released from prison and plan to become drug dealers, having no other way to make money and not wanting to return to their miserable family lives. Dunny warns Claude never to go to prison in upstate New York, where all the prisons are run by racist “Northern crackers” who mistreat the inmates horribly (226). Soon, they all go their separate ways, unable to recreate the gang dynamic they’d once had. Claude learns that all of his friends go back to jail within six months of starting to deal drugs. An exception is Turk, who is still trying to become a professional fighter and is doing very well for himself.
Claude runs into a friend from Warwick known as T., who is now working as a small-time “pimp.” He introduces Claude to a sex worker named Gloria with whom T. is in love. Claude is baffled by the idea of someone willingly marrying a sex worker, but T. maintains that he loves her and does not care what she does to make money. Claude feels guilty and ashamed for believing that sex workers are unlovable and realizes that he has not truly learned to accept all people as they are.
Claude starts to appreciate Harlem again, but in a different way: He enjoys looking at it from the outside and wants to eventually give something back to his old neighborhood. One day, he runs into a woman named Hildy who used to babysit him while his mother worked. They have an affectionate reunion and Claude introduces her to Tony as his aunt. As they say goodbye, Hildy asks Claude not to tell anyone that she lives in a basement. Claude feels sad that Hildy is ashamed of her situation.
He realizes that people in Harlem are showing each other more compassion and tenderness than they once did; for example, they are petitioning the city to open a treatment center for heroin addiction. Claude soon runs into Danny, who is back from Kentucky and has not used heroin in 14 months. However, he is still dealing drugs, which worries Claude. Danny gives Claude a $50 bill and tells Claude to give it back to him in three months if Danny still hasn’t used heroin. Danny argues that a person with an addiction is cured only when they can be around the substance they once used without abusing it. Three months later, he still has not used drugs, and despite the fact that he deals drugs, he has become a local symbol of triumph over addiction.
Danny tells Claude about a time when his niece, then three years old, knocked over a spoonful of heroin he had left to cook over a flame; enraged, Danny was about to throw her out of a window and was only stopped when his sister hit him in the head with an iron. He says that everyone has to discover for themselves why drugs are harmful and make their own choice to stop: Examples like this are not enough for people with addiction. He tells Claude that everyone has to pick their own time to “stop running” (239).
Chapter 10 Summary
Reflecting on Harlem over time, Claude says that in 1947 or 1949, the strongest influence was “the knife,” but in 1957—the moment from which he is narrating—it is drugs (241). When he was a child, fighting was the principal way men demonstrated their masculinity, and it was common for people to bet on street fights. He recalls when a man known as Big Bill convinced seven- or eight-year-old Claude to fight a boy named Rip. The two fought for three days and ultimately became good friends. He also remembers when a boy tried to rob him of a quarter when he was around 10, but rather than give up the quarter, he fought the boy, not caring if he got hurt and ultimately hanging on to the money.
While Claude had also joined a gang called the Buccaneers—“the teenage gangsters of the future,” they taught him everything he knows about survival on the streets (248)—since that time, with the arrival of heroin in Harlem, fighting is no longer the most important form of social power. Boys and young men are just as motivated to prove their masculinity as previous generations, but now they use drugs to do so. Claude says everyone in Harlem sees this change as inevitable.
One night in Harlem, Claude runs into Sugar for the first time in many years. She is walking in the middle of the street, clearly going through heroin withdrawals, and Claude tries to convince her to go to a hospital. When she refuses, he takes her to a drug dealer and buys some heroin for her. She tells Claude about her unhappy marriage, which ended when her husband admitted to having a heroin addiction and left her. Devastated, Claude watches her shoot up and silently regrets not being kinder to her when they were kids. He kisses her, leaves, and the two never see each other again.
Chapters 7-10 Analysis
Throughout these chapters, Claude addresses a number of social problems that plague Harlem, no doubt giving voice to the real Claude Brown’s feelings about them. His lengthy meditations on betting, sex work, and police violence do not move the narrative forward, but flesh out the social, economic, and political context in which the narrative takes place. They also demonstrate the ways that Claude is starting to mature, think critically, and reflect on his own experiences.
Although his interactions with sex workers often seem paternalistic, they inform his changing perceptions of women and sex. Claude is clearly upset by the fact that very young teenage girls are becoming survival sex workers, and although he cannot provide a feasible solution to their problems, he tries his best to be genuinely compassionate and nonjudgmental. His interactions with Knoxie and T., both of which are fundamentally about sex and morality, also draw attention to his general tendency to remain openminded, even when faced with deeply confusing realities. He does not understand queerness, but he likes Knoxie, so he accepts that queerness is valid; he realizes while talking to T. that he has always seen sex workers as unworthy of romantic love, and this conversation changes that.
The binary of The Urban North Versus the Rural South established earlier in the novel is undermined in this section by Dunny, who tells Claude that prisons in the North are as bad as—or possibly worse—than those in the South, and he defines what is bad about them in terms of racial oppression and violence. This once again draws attention to the novel’s relationship to earlier works from the Harlem Renaissance, albeit in a different way than its depictions of the urban/rural dichotomy have done up to this point. Like many Harlem Renaissance writers and artists, Brown is using Dunny’s experience to argue that the specific kind of racism that comes out of the American South is mobile and changeable: it can be imported to places that would otherwise perhaps be more progressive. Moreover, this kind of racism is endemic to social institutions all over the country, and it is its presence in those institutions—rather than between individuals—where it does the most damage.
Sugar’s brief, tragic return to the narrative signals the loss of Claude’s childhood innocence and adds to his growing awareness of interpersonal and generational trauma. The Sugar whom Claude once knew has been wiped away and replaced with a completely different person, but the love he once felt for her has remained. All he knows how to do is offer the old love to this new, suffering version of Sugar, but that is not enough to rid him of all the regret he feels about how he treated her. Like Tony Albee at the end of the novel, Sugar is an emblem of wasted talent and lost dreams, a product of the misery created by extreme social inequality and urban poverty.
Finally, this section foreshadows the trajectories of several major characters: Pimp, Danny, and Turk. While the latter two are doing well for themselves and will continue to be emblems of Black success in Harlem, Pimp is at the beginning of what will become his adult struggles. At this point, however, all three seem to be on similarly tenuous ground, and it is the reader’s best guess who will thrive and who will not.
