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 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This guide and source material contain references to anti-Black violence/slurs, antisemitism, anti-gay bias, sexual assault, domestic violence, and drug and alcohol use.
Claude Brown—also known as Sonny or Sonny Boy—the novel’s 13-year-old narrator and protagonist, has just been shot in the stomach while attempting to steal some bed sheets from a clothesline. He runs into a fish-and-chips shop along with his friend Turk, and his mother soon arrives, screaming hysterically. Turk wants to know if Claude is going to tell the police he was there, and Claude thinks to himself that he will. An ambulance arrives and takes Claude and his parents to Harlem Hospital. Claude learns that his friends have offered to donate blood, but the hospital will not accept blood from people who use narcotics. Over the next several days, many people come to visit him as he recovers.
On the fourth day, a man identifying himself as a nurse wakes Claude in the early hours of the morning and sexually assaults him. His friends Dunny and Tito visit the next day, and they joke about the assault. A woman named Mrs. Ganey visits and tells Claude that, fed up with frequent robberies, she had put out new bed sheets as bait and waited at her window with a shotgun to catch the thieves. She claims that Claude’s getting shot by someone else rather than her was “the word of the Lord,” and Claude is happy when she leaves (3).
That night, Claude dreams he is back in the fish-and-chips shop surrounded by dozens of images of his screaming mother. He then dreams about a boy who had been thrown off a roof in his neighborhood. He remembers when the building superintendent, Mr. Lawson, caught Claude’s younger brother, Pimp, putting graffiti on the walls; in response, their father beat Pimp with an ironing cord, and their mother called the police to make him stop. Later in the chapter readers learn that Pimp got his name from a neighborhood sex worker, Minnie, who helped get their mother to the hospital when she was in labor.
Claude is released from the hospital after 11 days, and after three weeks of recovery, is sent by a judge to the New York State Training School for Boys. He reflects back on his friendships with Danny, Butch, and Kid, all four years older than he and responsible for teaching Claude to skip school and steal. He also recalls how the older boys taught him “catting,” or staying away from home all night (10). These activities result in Claude being taken to one of New York’s various Children’s Centers to be picked up by his parents, a cycle that continues for many years. His parents begin having serious talks with him about behaving himself, and “neighborhood prophets” predict that he will die before the age of 21 (12). Claude enjoys this period of his life, appreciating his friendships and accepting that both committing petty crime and being its victim are simply his fate.
The narrative of Claude’s pre-shooting experience continues. He is expelled from several schools, and after being falsely accused of trying to push another boy out of a window, is sent to Bellevue, a psychiatric hospital, for the first time. During a Manhattan Children’s Court hearing, his mother promises the judge that Claude will not be in New York when the fall semester begins.
Claude describes Mrs. Rogers, who lives next door. She is an evangelical preacher and the mother of Claude’s friend Danny. She and Claude’s mother are friends, but Claude and his father think she is a fraud and a hypocrite. Claude claims that his father has religious experiences on Saturday nights, when he drinks whiskey, eats a big meal, and sings spirituals at home. Claude understands that when his father has enough whiskey, he is less likely to be physically abusive.
After going to court, Claude steals money from a store cash register so that he can go to the Roosevelt Theater. He remembers how Butch had taught him to “ring” cash registers and hopes one day he can be as good a thief as Butch (21-22). At the theater, he finds his friend Bucky, who has recently moved to the neighborhood with his mother and many siblings. Knowing that his family often cannot afford food, Claude often invites Bucky over for meals. He remembers one particular instance when he brought a dozen eggs and a loaf of bread to Bucky and his sisters, Dixie and Debbie.
Later that day, Aunt Bea, his mother’s sister, is visiting from the South, and Claude learns that he will be going to stay with Bea for the rest of the summer. The two women speculate about whether someone has put a curse on Claude and caused him to behave so badly. Claude expresses anxiety about being around “crackers,” or “real mean white people” (33). Two weeks later, he leaves for the South, where he will remain for a year.
Chapter 2 Summary
A year later, Claude’s mother and Pimp bring Claude home to New York. Claude wonders if his father missed him and looks forward to seeing his friends, his sisters, Carole and Margie, and the girl he likes, Grace. He says he had fun in the South and learned farming skills, church songs, and new slang from his grandparents. He describes his grandfather as “evil,” but says he no longer hates him the way he initially did (37). His grandmother Is physically aggressive and often hit him with a switch, but Claude grew closer to her after he attempted to walk back to New York and she brought him home, explaining that she beat him only because she wanted him to be better. Ultimately, Claude sees the South as “a crazy place,” and he is happy to be back in New York (41).
When Claude arrives home, friends and neighbors come over to greet him and he is happy to see everyone except his father, whom he still does not like and who he knows has been physically abusive to Carole and Margie. He notices how much the city seems to have changed and realizes that many people have moved, been incarcerated, or died. He hangs out with Bucky, Bulldog, and Knoxie, and the three commit petty theft and get into fights. He also meets Sugar, a girl in Carole’s class who has a crush on him. He describes Sugar as “ugly” and does not want to kiss her because she has “buckteeth,” but they become friends. His mother predicts that Claude will marry Sugar.
A few months later, Claude gets caught robbing a store with Bulldog and another boy named Toto. He is sent to the Youth House by a Black judge, Judge Bolin. He enjoys being at the Youth House, but continues stealing and fighting, and eventually the other boys are scared of him. During a visit from his parents, another boy accuses Claude of beating him up, and Claude calls him a “lying faggot” (52). This is deeply upsetting to his parents. After several weeks at the Youth House, Judge Bolin orders Claude and Toto to go to the Wiltwyck School for Boys, a reform school in upstate New York. He hopes he can steal a new suit before he goes away, because a new suit will signify that his street life is thriving. He is inspired by Mr. Jimmy, a local hustler who plays craps with Claude’s father and is always well dressed.
Claude breaks into a Romanian nightclub with Knoxie and Bucky after closing time and steals several bottles of champagne. The next night, they throw a party for Claude’s 11th birthday and people from all over the neighborhood attend. Sugar, looking and acting more mature, takes Claude into a quiet room; he says he does not remember everything that happened between them, but “it seemed like the world had changed colors” (59). The next day, his father reminds him of a street game Mr. Jimmy plays in which he tricks people into betting on the location of a pea that does not exist; he is afraid Claude will live his life like the victim of Mr. Jimmy’s hustle. Claude’s mother takes him to the Wiltwyck School office, and a white woman named Mrs. Grimes takes Claude by train to Wiltwyck.
Chapter 3 Summary
Claude knows he cannot run away from Wiltwyck, but he plans to starve himself until he is sent home. He does not like the first counselor he meets, a man named Simms, and insists on speaking to Mr. Stillman, an administrator who has more authority. On his first afternoon at Wiltwyck, Claude joins the other boys, who are sledding, and is approached by Mr. Stillman. Rather than ask to go home, Claude asks Mr. Stillman where he can get a sled, accepting that he is “really in” Wiltwyck (66). He also begins to accept and adjust to the school’s social structure, becoming friends with K.B., his partner in stealing and fighting. K.B. frequently asks Claude to tell him stories about girls while he masturbates. After K.B. claims to have ejaculated for the first time, the rest of the boys in the dorm try to do the same.
After several months, Claude and K.B. are transferred (despite their protests) to Aggrey House, where Simms is a counselor. Claude realizes he has become a problem at Wiltwyck. He describes the counselors he likes, particularly Nick, who has a lot in common with the students and is fair to everyone. About six months after Claude’s transfer, Dr. Ernst Papanek becomes the new director of Wiltwyck. For Claude, he is “one of the best things that could ever happen to any boy who got into trouble” (72); he especially appreciates that Papanek has ended corporal punishment at the school and does not lie or condescend to the students. He also becomes close to a counselor named Mrs. Meitner, a Holocaust survivor who teaches the students judo. She shows Claude pictures of her family, who died in concentration camps, and he briefly thinks he is in love with her.
Claude describes visits the Wiltwyck students take to a “nice rich old white lady’s house up in Hyde Park,” which turns out to be Eleanor Roosevelt’s house (79). He goes home for his first visit and notices that everything seems different; his relationship with Sugar is especially strained. He and some other Wiltwyck boys steal and stay out all night. He also goes to court with his father as part of a lawsuit against a bus company; one of the buses had hit Claude several years before. Claude feels embarrassed about his father’s obsequious behavior in front of the judge, and the lawyer and compares him to a “pig” that is about to be slaughtered but does not know it.
He is happy to return to Wiltwyck and resume gang life with Tito, K.B., and his new friend J.J. Vassar College, a woman’s school, sends a large group of college students to teach the Wiltwyck boys how to ski, play musical instruments, paint, and the like. Claude takes piano lessons from a woman named Cathy. Some of the boys have illicit sexual encounters with the Vassar women, and the program is eventually ended. After Claude has been at Wiltwyck for two years, he goes home for a long summer visit and reconnects with his old Harlem friends. He notices that heroin—which he initially knows as “horse”—has become popular with men and older boys across New York, and he wants to try it in order to keep up with everyone else.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
In these chapters, readers learn about Claude’s family background as well as the larger historical, social, and economic world in which he is growing up. Readers are also introduced to some of the most fundamental questions that the novel will ask: How can people find happiness in a society that violently marginalizes them? Is the search for happiness among marginalized groups the same as among privileged, dominant groups? What happens when someone believes they are fated to be unhappy forever? The questions are relevant not only for Claude, but for the rest of his family, particularly in a culture in which The Shared Expectation of Failure is predominant.
The representation of pseudo-religious practices occurs in conjunction with these questions. Claude’s mother attends informal, unsanctioned church services at the home of a neighbor, while his father finds a kind of spirituality in heavy weekend drinking. The novel portrays both as toxic in different ways, but this is also an acknowledgment that people will inevitably seek out happiness in ways that might be harmful for them and for others. The novel also clearly identifies Claude’s parents’ ways of practicing religion as the root of his own religious skepticism.
The novel’s depiction of the South establishes a dichotomy between The Urban North Versus the Rural South and also sets the text firmly in the tradition of the Harlem Renaissance. While Harlem Renaissance writers and artists certainly did not portray the North as without racism, they did locate in northern urban Black culture an opportunity to talk more freely about racial oppression. This section of the novel also highlights Claude’s growing attachment to Harlem and his sadness when he is made to leave it for any reason, a pattern that will repeat itself throughout the text.
In these chapters, Claude has his first encounters with authority figures who will be significant in his life. The most important of these is Dr. Ernst Papanek, a fictionalized version of the real Austrian psychologist of the same name who became the director of Wiltwyck in 1949. His friendship with Mrs. Meitner is also important: Their conversation about the Holocaust helps him expand his awareness of world events and is the first of many times that he will find he has things in common with people in other marginalized groups.
The novel uses foreshadowing to introduce heroin, which will prove to be the most destructive force throughout the novel. The Wiltwyck boys’ eagerness to try it, despite the fact that they do not even know what it is, underscores their dedication to street life and emphasizes the fact that they truly think they are destined to be criminals and may even want to be. It also draws attention to their extreme youth and naïveté, which will ultimately serve to make many of the later events all the more tragic.
By opening with something that happens to Claude at age 13 and then rewinding to age six, the novel immediately subverts the linear structure common to coming-of-age narratives. It also foregrounds the violence that will be so essential to the rest of the story: Starting with the shooting of an adolescent for attempting to steal something as relatively insignificant as bed sheets highlights the acceptability of this kind of violence in Claude’s community as well as the desperation with which impoverished people hold onto their material possessions.
