Manchild in the Promised Land

Claude’s mother is a former sharecropper from the South. She is depicted constantly fretting over her children, particularly Claude and Pimp; late in the novel, she says she hopes she does not have grandsons because she does not want to raise more boys. She is a religious woman who attends the informal evangelical church services presided over by their neighbor, Mrs. Rogers. Despite her Christian faith, however, she holds onto some traditions rooted in the culture of antebellum slavery, including a belief in root doctors, or healers who can use herbs, potions, and spells to curse or bless people.

While her relationship with her children is often strained, Claude’s mother ultimately wants what is best for them. She does not always understand why they want what they want and sometimes discourages them from pursuing goals that seem too ambitious. For example, when Claude tells her he wants to become a psychologist, she tells him to “get all those crazy notions” out of his head (269)—an instance of dramatic irony that reveals that she has no idea of the purport of what she is saying. She, in other words, is limited, and she believes that Black people should not strive to move past the limitations and restrictions imposed by white society. That she is afraid of upsetting white people becomes apparent when she tries to avoid asking the landlord to reline her windows even though the apartment is freezing. While she is often hesitant to make changes or accept help, and despite the fact that she often has a generally pessimistic attitude, she genuinely wants her children to be happy, healthy, and safe.

Like Claude’s mother, his father emigrated to Harlem from the South. He is a full-time laborer who is emotionally distant from his wife and psychologically and physically abusive to both Claude and Pimp. One of the main reasons Claude wants to stay out all night as a child is that he does not want to be around his father. However, his father becomes less abusive when he drinks, which he usually does on the weekends; Claude refers to this as “[getting] religious” (18-19). His father is suspicious of organized religion and does not believe women—including Mrs. Rogers—should preach, but he seems to find a small amount of comfort and happiness while drinking whiskey and singing spirituals. As a small child, Claude sometimes joins him in this, and the two are able to bond, however briefly.

Claude’s feelings about his father change for the worse during a visit to court as part of Claude’s injury settlement. He no longer sees his father as tough, but rather as desperate and sycophantic: “I knew now that he was just a head nodder” (84). While their relationship remains distant throughout the novel, the two seem to reach a kind of unspoken peace by accepting that they are simply too different to truly get along. This is particularly true after Claude meets his father’s longtime girlfriend, Ruth. He sees his father in a new light after this, noting that he can, in fact, be patient and relaxed: “I’d never seen him act like that with anybody. At home he was always shouting and raising hell, threatening somebody, a real terror” (296). He realizes that his father is much more complicated than he ever knew, and this seems to help him let go of some of his anger and resentment.

Pimp is Claude’s younger brother and one of the people with whom Claude is closest in the novel. Pimp, who was given his name by a neighborhood sex worker after she helped the boys’ mother get to the hospital during her labor, idolizes Claude from the start of the novel. He hopes to cultivate a life in street crime, which worries Claude tremendously. When Pimp reaches his teen years, Claude is concerned that their mother sheltered him too much and wants to help Pimp see that the world is much bigger than Harlem. Pimp enjoys visiting Claude in Greenwich Village and especially likes spending time with the musicians, artists, and bohemian types that Claude befriends there. He expresses a brief interest in becoming an Air Force pilot, and Claude reveals at the end of the novel that Pimp, in prison for armed robbery, has started writing poetry. But despite the best efforts of Claude and his mother to keep Pimp on the right track, Pimp starts using heroin at a young age.

The narrative depicts Pimp as fairly unconcerned about his own future, having come to terms with what he sees as his fate. When he is arrested at the end of the novel, he says to Claude, “Shit, Sonny, I don’t feel too bad about it, man, and I hope you don’t, because, well, hell, everybody’s got to pay some dues someday, and I guess it’s my time to pay” (382-83). He seems fairly malleable, willing to do or say whatever the people around him in a given moment would like him to do or say. While Claude has developed a more cordial relationship with the boys’ father, Pimp carries a huge amount of unresolved anger toward him throughout the novel. During a conversation with Claude about Harlem, he reveals himself to be thoughtful and self-aware, having clearly considered his place in the world, but he seems ultimately convinced that he will never be able to have the things he wants and quietly accepts his less-than-ideal circumstances.