The scene [in "Manchild in the Promised Land"] is Harlem, the street, the trap, and the first word of Mr. Brown's narrative is the imperative, "Run!" But at the moment he could not run. He was 13 years old, a veteran of the street, and he had just been shot in the stomach while trying to steal some bed-sheets off a clothesline. (Later, much later, after he had moved downtown, he would twice be nearly killed again, by policemen who could not believe a Negro was merely living in a white man's building, not robbing it or raping someone or shooting dope.)

Run! But first he fought, which is how a boy grows up in Harlem: he talks tough about "the Man," the whites, and fights other Negroes. When he was nine, Claude Brown was a member of the élite thieving section of the Harlem Buccaneers, a notorious bopping...