The Children of Ham By Claude Brown Stein & Day, 225 pp., $10 Manchild in the Promised Land was a sweet epic: it sang. Any follow-up would have to be like cutting your heroin with Dr. Scholl’s Foot Powder. It was the book, a milestone; and for Claude Brown, I’d guess, something of a millstone, too. Trouble with minority writers is: a) either life has rung so many changes on them that they can’t tell prose from semi-pros; or b) they can write well because they’ve lived just a few blocks south of ground-zero, at least half-safe. Brown was special: really street-wise—-thief, dealer, convict, gut-shot gun-shot survivor—and, express astonishment, a mellow, honest stylist as well. In its neighborhood Manchild is Citizen Kane; it won’t be flagged down.
Surely not by Claude Brown. I respect his attack. The Children of Ham is modest on purpose: no more than 13 character sketches: a commune of parentlorn adolescents who have crash-padded it in one cadaverous Harlem brownstone. They’re real tight with each other: a big isotope of the defaulting nuclear family. And, like the Marines, Brown will recruit just a few good men and women: intelligent, almost all bookish, very motivated. Otherwise, of course, their sometimes glib-precious rhetoric would sound Madison, not Lenox, Avenue. His style is simple, what I call subject-announced. Sentence after sentence repeats a subject-verb beginning: He is, Dujo is. Brown uses the first person, but it’s a kind of editorial I: here confidant, there novelist or sociological field-worker. He wants, I think, to be on location with the cast; it was his strength. But now it seems lame. After all, since Manchild, published in 1965, Brown has gone to Rutgers Law School, which is more than some blocks south of ground-zero.
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