39 pages • 1 hour read
Piri ThomasDown These Mean Streets
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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BetaChapters 17-19: “Down South”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 17 Summary: “Gonna Find Out What’s Shakin’”
Piri meets up with Brew and his girlfriend, Alayce. Alayce is black, like Brew, and claims that Piri isn’t a Negro, but a Puerto Rican. Brew maintains that Piri is a “member of the black man’s race”, explaining that “When you’re born a shoe, yuh stays a shoe” (159). Alayce says that she doesn’t blame Puerto Ricans for not wanting to be black: “anything’s better’n being a li’l ole darkie” (159). She goes on to say that black women have it especially hard, which angers Brew, who tells a story about a confrontation he had with two white men down in the South. Two white men had threatened to sexually assault him and, despite initially adhering to the “ABC’s” his mother taught him, Brew ends up physically assaulting the white men. Brew had to escape to the North in order to avoid being arrested. Alayce then starts to tell of the time when she was raped by white men, but Brew cuts her short and gently holds her (163). Before shipping out with the Merchant Marine, Piri visits Trina, telling her, “I ain’t got time to tell you what I should’ve when I had time, but I dig you a whole lot” (165). On the bus down to Norfolk, Virginia, Brew reminds Piri that it is different in the South: “forget ‘Glory, Glory, Hallelujah’ an’ quick memorize “Dixie’” (166).Once they make Norfolk, they go to the National Maritime Union and bribe the white “Mr. Paddy” for a job on a ship sailing in a few days’ time (168).
Chapter 18 Summary: “Barroom Sociology”
While waiting for the ship to sail, Piri and Brew spend some time in Norfolk. There, they meet a Pennsylvanian who is waiting tables and also “writing a book on the Negro situation” (170). The Pennsylvanian, whose name is Gerald, is multiracial, and is “tan-colored and not really very negroid-looking” (170).Brew takes exception to this northern interloper who wants to “write ‘bout Negroes’ warmth an’ harmony” (172), but not write about their troubles. The three of them have a strained discussion about race. Gerald maintains that he has a right to choose his race: “if, because of genetic interbreeding, I cannot truly identify with white or black, I have the right to identify with whatever race or nationality approximates my emotional feeling and physical characteristics” (176), which for him is his Spanish genetic background. Brew is unconvinced by Gerald, whom he calls “prissy” (172). Piri, though, says that he “found it hard to hate a guy that was hung up on the two sticks that were so much like mine” (178).
Chapter 19 Summary: “Las Aguas del Sur”
It is two days later, and Piri and Brew are set to board their ship. They have another conversation about race, and Piri discloses that he still “can’t help feeling both Paddy and Negro” (180). Brew says to Piri that “Yuh-all still sounds like yuh tryin’ to walk a fence. Yuh can’t do that man” (181).
They board the ship and are given jobs in the mess hall. Piri is assigned to the officer’s mess, where he works as a waiter to the ship’s officers. On Piri’s first day on the job, the chief mate calls him “boy” when asking for a cup of coffee. Piri passively-aggressively gives him cold coffee, and thinks to himself “Any of you cats that call me ‘boy’ is gonna get the same treatment” (184). The ship makes a stop in Mobile, Alabama, where Piri tries to eat at a restaurant that refuses to serve him. Piri wants to cause trouble, but Brew pulls him out of the restaurant before any trouble starts. At a port stop in New Orleans, Brew doesn’t make it back on the ship. Piri never sees him or Alayce again, and he thinks that “maybe they went back home together” (187). In Galveston, Texas, Piri visits a brothel and pretends that he can only speak Spanish, so that they don’t think he is a “nigger” (188). As he leaves his room the next day, he tells the prostitute: “I just want you to know […] that you got fucked by a nigger, by a black man!” (189). Piri later signs up on another boat as a coal shoveler. He gets in an argument with a white man on the boat and beats him up. Piri travels all around the world on ships and discovers that “any language you talk, if you’re black, you’re black” (191).
Chapters 17-19 Analysis
In the “Down South” chapters, Piri gets an education about the horrible things that can happen to black people in America at the time. Brew and Alayce have both been subject to terrible actions perpetrated on them by white people, and Piri understands better what is truly involved with being a Negro. Although he shares Gerald’s difficulty in identifying exactly what “race” he is, Piri nevertheless sides with Brew and definitively considers himself to be black. In Chapter 19, Piri takes action as a black man, rebelling against discrimination. Importantly, Piri is no longer just thinking about race, but is now out in the wider world, interacting with the world explicitly as a black man. Piri has made a choice and accepts himself as black, with all the difficulties and discrimination that doing so entails.
