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I started going to night school�� Most of the cats who were out there on the corners dealing stuff now were the newcomers. Most of the cats I came up with were in jail or dead or strung out on drugs. I’d been out on street life long before these cats ever knew how to role a reefer. I could do what I wanted �� and not worry about anybody naming me lame. I’d been through the street life thing. At seventeen, I was ready to retire from it. I’d already had ten or eleven years at it.





Claude Brown. Born in 1937. This “fictional�� autobiography tells of his youth and young manhood in Harlem. If you’re like me, you spend time wondering, ‘what’s true��? Well the first person narrator, whose name is definitely Claude Brown, though he’s usually called ‘Sonny�� in dialog, is certainly the same age as the writer, 15 years old in 1952. The way Harlem ‘was�� when he was different ages certainly has the ring of truth to me, but I wouldn’t really know. The names of all the characters? Probably not true, maybe some are. The names and tales of his family? Who knows? The general experiences he had? Sure, probably the way it was. Specific things he did? Maybe some made up. Was he really in those reform schools at those young ages? I guess he was.

The first sections of the book find Sonny at a very young age. Before he was even ten he was on the streets, stealing, fighting, sometimes out all night. His dad would beat him if provoked enough, his mother fretted and worried but could do nothing with him. In this part of the book Claude Brown is not likable at all. I just sort of shuddered every once in a while.

Later in the book, reflecting back on his youth in the forties, Claude says this.

Throughout my childhood in Harlem, nothing was more strongly impressed upon me than the fact that you had to fight and that you should fight. Everybody would accept it if a person was scared to fight, but not if he was so scared that he didn’t fight.

As I saw it in my childhood, most of the cats I swung with were more afraid of not fighting than they were of fighting.

Thus the youngster fights, even though he’s afraid, and gains a reputation as a tough guy, way tougher than his age would warrant. So at the age of eleven he spends his first time in the Wiltwyck School for Boys (which does exist, in Esopus New York), where he makes new friends who then reenter his life back on the streets. As a young teen Sonny goes back and forth between Wiltwyck more than once.

But Sonny tells us that as he began to approach the age of eighteen, getting in trouble became something that he became more fearful of. He didn’t want to actually end up in jail for a serious crime, and he tells us that he resolved that he would never kill anyone, even though he carried weapons sometimes.

The book takes us up to around 1960, Claude in his early twenties. Over the last few years he’s moved out of Harlem, down to the Village, got a job or two, finished high school, started playing a bit of piano, had an eye-opening fling with Judy, a white Jewish girl, which doesn’t last - but still goes back to Harlem frequently, sees the plague that heroin brought in the late fifties, the coming of the Black Muslims, the way they take over a small section of Harlem and preach to the people about standing up, taking pride in themselves as blacks, rejecting the white merchants who suck all the money out of Harlem. They never rope Sonny into their movement, but he sees the good it does.

At the end of the book he’s still hanging loose, doesn’t really have concrete goals, but is no longer in the City, is off somewhere starting more schooling.

He’s a young man who looks back on the streets as his real home, but who somehow turned out different from most of his old friends. It’s a story that’s hard to take sometimes, but ultimately inspiring. And if you’re white, and lived through those times quite differently than Claude Brown did, it really makes you think.

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