Confabulated stream of consciousness

Reviewed in the United States on May 23, 2020

I know that this book has been in print a long time, and it has been suggested that it was a "classic."

And so that prompted me to read it just so that I could say I had.

After I finished it, I came away with several thoughts:

1. The events are just a little bit too unlikely.

a. An eight-year-old gone from home for weeks at a time/hit by a bus / thrown into the river / hit by a car/ beaten with a chain? (p.12)

b. Drinking as a 6 year old? (And remembering it?) 11 years of street life experienceat seventeen, and therefore starting from 6 years old? (p.161)

c. A brother with the name "Pimp"?

d. (p.31) Characters talking like what no-acting Halle Berry does in her slave movie-roles? ("Gettin' mannish with a little high yaller girl.") At, what, 9 years old?

f. Being introduced to many books about people (by Mrs Cohen), even though just a few chapters earlier he said that he couldn't read. And given that he spent a total of 6 hours in school up until the age of 15 (p.156), how likely was that?

g. (p 155, 100). Black guys that are not interested in white ladies? Or at least curious? it's also somewhat confusing, because he did have the relationship with Jewish Judy. And it was the best one in the book.

h. He was able to play jazz piano after 6 months? Um, okay.

2. The recall ability is just a little bit too hard to believe.

Brown wrote this book when he was about 27 years old, and he has all of this instant recall of just about EVERY SINGLE WORD from conversations that happened 17 years ago.

3. The reading / organization is generally pretty poor. It feels like stream-of-consciousness writing. The characters just come in and out with no introductions and nor really proper exits. Excessive overuse of the word "cat" and a certain self-referential racial slur that black people like to use.

4. Claude Brown walks a very fine line between being interesting and being dislikeable.

Let him tell it, he has made a name for himself at 14 years old. (Everybody is afraid of him, and so he doesn't have to knock out her tooth to make a point. [p 139.]) And he knows how to teach everybody everything. And he knows how to come in contact with people who can teach him all of the tough stuff.

Remember that all of this purported hard stuff that he did was before he was 16 (i.e., old enough to go to jail), and so he didn't actually have the experience of doing Hard Time.

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The book could also be read in many other ways:

1. A retelling of the story of some number of black people in a Northern City that get along just fine with everybody, and then it is ruined by Southern Blacks.

(If you want to read that story, a better choice would be "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," by Thomas Sowell. And that is because even if I was only 5% sure that it happened in the way that Thomas Sowell documented that it did, that is 5 times more certain than I am sure that *any* of these events happened in a way even close to what the author said.)

More generally, it could be the story of some black people having problems in one place and bringing them with them to the new place. In that case, the opportunities for comparison are boundless.

Brown repeatedly mentions the South, even though his parents had been gone from there for 25 years. He says (p.268) that "This was the sort of Life they had lived on the plantations. They were trying to bring the down-home live up to Harlem."

2. It could be read as a window into people who have the mental illness that leads to excessive recidivism. (I have a number of relatives/acquaintances who stay in and out of jail, and they cycle back so much that I can only conclude that..... They just like it because it's the way they're made up.)

The author kept cycling in between reform school / prison, even though sitting in a nice comfortable classroom has to have been better than that.

3. It could be a real life example of do-gooder white people who are using black people as self-actualization therapy.

a. There were examples of all of these volunteers coming from places like Austria and Norway and working with these inmates in the way that somebody volunteers to work with animals in a zoo.

b. A lot of these reform schools were pet projects of people such as Eleanor Roosevelt. None of them was able to successfully complete their experiment, and they are all closed as of about 40 years ago.

4. It could be read as an example of the romanticized way that white people like to envision "inner city" black people. (Several million copies of this book are in print, and I suspect that real "inner city people" didn't purchase a single copy.)

5. It could be read as a long chronicle of the acedia that happens when people fall out of their element. (In this case, it is Southern blacks moving North.) It has been observed before that "the emancipated Jew is more frustrated than the ghetto Jew. And that the segregated negro is much less frustrated than the one that is trying to assimilate."

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There are quite a few strange characters here.

1. The cliched Troubled Inner City Youth.
2. The black Anti-semite. (p.272).
3. The black people creating strange religions. In this book, Black Copts and things that have resonances with later Hebrew Israelites. Also, the beginnings of the Nation of Islam.
4. Black Egyptologists.
5. Black Muslims. (All of chapter 14. The upshot is that Prislam is not at all new.)
6. Real life people from that era. (Father Divine. Adam Clayton Powell. Elijah Muhammad.)

Verdict: Not worth a second read. I don't exactly regret having read it, but I just didn't get that much out of it.