Down These Mean Streets

Piri Thomas is a child of Puerto Rican immigrants living in the New York City area, primarily in Harlem. Piri has a dark complexion that makes him question whether he is black or white. Piri’s quest to come to terms with being a self-identified black man takes up a large part of his narrative. Eventually, he is able to accept that he is black and not seek to deny it, in the way his father denies being black.

Piri has trouble getting along with his father, who he feels treats him differently than he does his siblings, perhaps because Piri is so similar to his father in many ways. For a while, during his young adulthood, Piri develops a heroin addiction, which he is able to kick with the help of his friend, Waneko. When a young teen, Piri joins a gang and gets involved in fistfights and petty crime. This eventually leads to Piri committing robberies as a young adult, which leads to his being sentenced to five to fifteen years in jail. In jail, Piri learns that defending his “rep” is less important than earning his freedom from jail. When Piri is released from prison, he is tempted to go back to his old ways, but he is able to resist and looks forward to a drug-free, non-criminal life.

Pops is Piri’s father. He is an immigrant from Puerto Rico who works various manual labor jobs. Pops, like Piri, has dark skin. Piri describes him as being like a “colored man with a paddy heart” (125).Pops’ hatred of his own skin color is probably a main reason for his fraught relationship with dark-skinned Piri. Besides having the same color skin, Piri and Pops share character traits: they are both violent, both unfaithful to their partners, and both bounce from job to job, striving for something better. Pops and Piri do not reach reconciliation by the end of the book and remain at odds, despite Piri’s frequent lamenting of their troubled relationship.

Moms is Piri’s mother. She is a light-skinned Puerto Rican immigrant. Piri loves his “fat little Moms” (18) very much and loves to joke around with her: “I’d go through the rest of my life making like funnies if I was sure Momma would be happy” (19).Moms doesn’t have a problem with Piri’s skin color and playfully calls him her “negrito” (234).Furthermore, Moms doesn’t seem to care about race at all: “She don’t care what she is”, Piri says, when talking about the possibility of himself being black (143). In Piri’s young adulthood, before he goes to jail, Moms dies of some “killing germs” (195).Piri’s last words to her are “Bendito, Momma, I’m sorry” (196). The memory of Moms acts as a kind of conscience to Piri. When he savagely beats a car salesman, he hears her voice saying “Mi negrito, mi negrito, what have you done?” (221).

Brew is one of Piri’s best friends, his “ace-boon coon” (187). Brew is a black man from the South who fled to the North after assaulting two white men who were threatening him. Brew believes that Piri is a black man, regardless of his Puerto Rican heritage. To Brew, the color of one’s skin, and not one’s culture or heritage, is what defines one’s race. Brew encourages Piri to embrace his blackness and to reject white American culture. Brew travels with Piri for a while in the Merchant Marines but disappears during a port stop. Piri hopes that Brew and his girlfriend Alayce have decided to live in the South together, never hears from Brew again. 

Trina is the love of Piri’s life. She immigrates to America from Puerto Rico in her teens. Piri describes her as a “beautiful girl–dark, curly hair, large black eyes, red mouth, and a real down figure” (111). Although they date for years, Piri never has sex with her, wanting to wait for marriage. Piri nevertheless does have sex with other girls, even impregnating a girl named Dulcien. Because of his fathering a child with another woman, when Piri goes to jail, the warden does not allow him to write to Trina and Trina moves on with her life. She ends up marrying another man and having a couple of children. When Piri meets her again after prison, they don’t really connect and Piri realizes that “nothing stays the same” (326).

Jose and James are two of Piri’s siblings. They are light-skinned and have white features. Piri gets in a fistfight with Jose over whether or not Piri is black, with Jose claiming that Piri is not black, but rather Puerto Rican.

Danny and Billy are two white, or “paddy,” criminals who commit robberies with Piri and Piri’s friend Louie. They are experienced criminals and are the ones who introduce Piri to “stick up” robberies. They end up in jail, along with Piri, after a botched nightclub robbery.

Muhammad is a Nation of Islam adherent who introduces Piri to the Nation of Islam’s take on the Islamic religion while Piri is in jail. Piri becomes a Muslim while he is in jail, but stops being a follower once released. Muhammad reminds Piri of his friend Brew, in that they both held the view that the white and black “races” should be regarded as separate and different, with Muhammad holding that blacks are superior to whites.