A beautiful book, it made me laugh, cry, and think so many things I've never thought to think. Everyone should read it at least one time in their life!

Claude Brown's childhood growing up in Harlem in the 40s and 50s. "It was real wrong to call somebody a nigger in front of a paddy boy. That's the way they felt. It made me feel a little bit bad myself. This sort of cooled everything down. But saying "nigger" wasn't the main thing to me. The main thing was that these cats were try to f**k over this paddy boy. And this paddy boy was more man than any of those cats there. I didn't care. Between us, there was no nigger thing. There was no white, no color thing. To me, he was a beautiful cat; and if you dug people and if people had something that was beautiful about them, they were raceless. And that was the only f***ing thing that mattered." "We were always the ones that people said would probably be in jail or dead before we were twenty-one. I think a lot of those "good boy" cats believed their parents when they were telling them that kind of stuff." "The real hip thing about the "baby" term was that it was something that only colored cats could say the way it was supposed to be said. I'd heard gray boys trying it, but they couldn't really do it. Only colored cats could give it the meaning that we all knew it had without ever mentioning it -- the meaning of black masculinity." "But I knew she had a lot of animal in her, and all I wanted was a chance to unlock that animal and let it out. There's just something fascinating about religious chicks anyway. It's the high potentiality for corruption that's so fascinating." "It seemed as though if I had stayed in Harlem all my life, I might have never known that there was anything else to life other than sex, religion, liquor, and violence." Speaking about the garment center boss Goldberg and his relationship to the Negro, the "boy" who worked for him: "He never saw our generation. He saw us only through the impressions that the older folks had made." "He never even tried to see us, and he tried to treat us the way he had treated them. Most of the older folks were used to it. They didn't know Goldberg from Massa Charlie; to them, Goldberg was Massa Charlie. I suppose the tradition had been perpetuated when the folks moved to the North and took the image of Massa Charlie and put it into Goldberg. Perhaps Goldberg was unaware of it."

Had never drawn the lines between the Great Migration and the postwar drug epidemic before I read this. Amazing the distance between Brown's life in Harlem and my dad's on the LES at the same time.

I read this book as a teenager. I remember being really mostly being moved by it.

This book took me a long time to read. It is one of those stories that is so authentically written that it feels like you are living the author’s life day to day. That means it can get at times a little repetitive, making it easy to lose focus.

However, on balance, this book is a masterpiece. Perhaps the reason i put it down so many times is simply because I could not personally relate, and therefore could not get fully invested, in all of Claude’s daily struggles. To gain this level of insight towards the realities of living as a young black man in 1960’s Harlem is to understand a living hell.

Yet, he writes of friendship, loyalty, resilience and love. To see through Claude’s eyes is a gift because it reminds the reader of how hard some people in this world are fighting just to survive another day, let alone to achieve some form of societal success.

It may take you a while, but especially in the current context, I believe this to be an incredibly worthwhile read.

Probably the best streets-memoir I've ever read. Right up there with [b:Down These Mean Streets|95127|Down These Mean Streets|Piri Thomas|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1403192712l/95127._SY75_.jpg|1061744]. What impressed me most here was Brown's ability to write from a kid's point of view. The kid-logic, that feeling of being afraid without knowing that you are afraid, it's all spot-on. I also thought it was interesting how the adult half skips around in time to best present the various character arcs, and how kids who were mentioned maybe once in passing in the kid part take up several pages as grown ups. I found the chapters on the Coptic and NOI movements fascinating and the Harlem - Greenwich Village connection is also a personal favorite. I did find some of the adult dialog a little wooden at times, and then at other times completely natural, so I'm not sure if that's just my whiteness and the half-century between this book and now, or what. The tensions between New York Blacks and Jews is also a significant part of the book and that naturally had me on edge, but it's clear that Brown is on the side of humanity and against division.

The role that heroin plays in the book also moved me a great deal. Brown is constantly torn as to how to help those close to him who are struggling with addiction, or if it is even possible to help them. I can relate much easier to his relationship to the drug than I can to the more personal struggles with addiction that you get in [b:The Basketball Diaries|682745|The Basketball Diaries|Jim Carroll|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1493867556l/682745._SY75_.jpg|922689] or countless other books from back then.

This is a thoughtful, emotionally intelligent portrait and I highly recommend it.

This was a unique read for me. It's been described as epic, and it is very much an epic tale of youth in black Harlem. The earliest years of the author in this autobiography I found quite reminiscent of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Twain intended humor; I wasn't sure whether or not the author did, but the candid, direct commentary on life was very refreshing, despite some unsavory situations. The author continues his journey well into early adulthood, showing amazing insight and candor into general life changes as a youth, life as a black person in Big City America, and most especially as his own individual self making choices about if, when, and how to fit in with a group or strike out on his own. Even though this was set mostly around the 1950s and has some dated phrases, it's stunning how much it applies to present day intercity life. It makes the reader want to rethink very presumption that he or she may have made about black youth in our urban communities.

Sigh. The key takeaway from this book is that Harlem in the 50s was a super shithole. Teeming with uneducated, superstitious, incompetent parents who had kids that instantly became thieves, junkies and animals. Except for a few.
The secondary takeaway would be: commit all your crimes before you turn 18. That way you can still change your mind about being a criminal.
Tertiary lesson: Fuck white people. And sometimes Jews.
Fun stuff.