If you lived on a block in Harlem where nearly every family had been destroyed by heroin, these might be a few of the reasons you would find a deteriorating tenement a more inviting place to live than home. "The Children of Ham" is Claude Brown's account of about a dozen teen-agers who banded together to fend for themselves and provide a place of relative security in these garbage-strewn fire traps—a place that their families failed to provide, a place to belong, a space to live in and interact free of the "monster" heroin that dominated their homes and the narrow Harlem side street out front….

The youths transformed several apartments into habitable places they called "spots," where they could be when there was no other place to be. Here, as Claude Brown tells it, they encouraged each other to stay clean and stay in school, or...