The Children of Ham

Book excerpt: The children of Ham are a group of young people ranging in age from fourteen to twenty-two, who live in a condemned tenement in upper Harlem, a shell of a building owned by New York City. The children look out for themselves; they are a self-constituted family. They give to each other what they cannot get anywhere else: friendship and a sense of belonging. As you eavesdrop on their conversations, you learn about the families who abandoned -- or who abandoned them. Home for the children of Ham is this wreck of a house, the Harlem castle where they protect and sustain each other on hope as tenuous as life. It is their life that brims over in this book by Claude Brown. -- From publisher's description.