Harlem, His Harlem

Claude Brown speaks straight from the Harlem dead end. He is able to reproduce what no one quite has before: the sensation that there really isn’t anywhere further to go. In the South, working a cotton field twelve hours a day for $3, living in a shack on grits and Koolaid, a man and his family look to the promised land: “one no longer had to wait to get to heaven to lay his burden down; burdens could be laid down in New York.” Already a son has gone ahead to find a place an...