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 20-24: “Harlem”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 20 Summary: “Home, Sweet Harlem”
After finishing with the Merchant Marine, Piri comes back to New York and finds that his mother is sick and in the hospital. He visits her one time before she dies. He stays at his parents’ home for a couple of months and develops a “yearning desire to see what Poppa’s other woman looked like” (196). He breaks into his father’s things and steals a photo of her, which he tears up. His father finds out that Piri stole the picture and hits Piri. Piri affects a stereotypical black southern drawl and his father hits him again. Piri goes looking for a knife to kill his father with, but his little sister, Miriam, who reminds Piri of his mother, prevents the two from continuing the fight.
Chapter 21 Summary: “Hung Down”
Piri returns to Harlem and soon becomes hooked on heroin: “Heroin does a lot for one—and it’s all bad. It becomes your whole life once you allow it to sink its white teeth in your blood stream” (200). Piri starts to sell drugs himself in order to support his habit, working for a drug dealer nicknamed “Turkey.” Making good money and doing a lot of drugs, Piri is satisfied until there is a city-wide shortage of heroin, and he loses his supply of both drugs and money. Hoping to quit heroin, Piri seeks the help of his old friend, Waneko. Waneko and his mother agree to help him, and they lock Piri in a room, so he can kick the habit cold turkey. They tend to him and after a few days of torment, Piri is over his addiction and vows to never use heroin again: “dying is easier than this has been. Never—never—nunca mas” (210).
Chapter 22 Summary: “Real Jesse Jameses”
It is a couple of months later and Piri is working at a restaurant as a dishwasher. His friend, Louie, visits him at work and tells him he has a way of making some quick money by pulling off robberies with two men he knows. The men’s names are Danny and Billy, and they are two “paddies” who are experienced stick-up artists. Danny and Billy want Piri to prove his mettle by pulling off a robbery, and Piri immediately walks into a cigar store and holds up the place. By proving that he has “heart,” Piri is accepted, and the group of four commit robberies throughout New York City for the next year. Robbing businesses is stressful, and to deal with the stress, Piri starts using heroin again. One day, Piri robs a used-car business and viciously beats the old salesman. He starts to feel guilty about what he’s done, and hears his mother’s voice inside his head, saying “Mi negrito, mi negrito, what have you done?” (221).
Chapter 23 Summary: “Wish It Were You, Trina”
The group of four decide to stop robbing, and Piri starts to make money by selling marijuana. At a party, he meets one of his friend’s cousins, a woman named Dulcien. They have sex and Dulcien becomes pregnant. Piri finds out about the child while he is working in a restaurant in Washington, D.C., and quickly returns to New York. Trina has found out about the pregnancy and is upset. Piri tells her, “I don’t dig her; if I marry anybody, it’s going to be you” (225). Dulcien wants Piri to live with her and their child, but Piri refuses.
Chapter 24 Summary: “If You’re Gonna Pray—Then Pray Big”
After a year off, Danny, Billy, Louie and Piri start doing robberies again. They have a plan for robbing a downtown night club. Before the robbery Piri prays: “‘Saint, I said, if you can hear me, I’m gonna pull a score tonight. Make it be a good one, with mucho bread, so it will be my last job. Let there be thousands—millions.’ Why not? I thought. If you’re gonna pray, then pray big.” (229). The robbery goes badly, and an off-duty cop shoots Piri in the chest, while Piri, in turn, shoots the cop. Wildly running away from the scene, Piri tries to make it back to his home: “If I can only get back to Harlem, I’ll be all right” (234). Another police officer arrests a barely-conscious Piri and the police take him to the hospital. At the hospital, Piri loses consciousness, thinking to himself “Mommie…I don’t…Mommie, no quiero morir” (238).
Chapters 20-24 Analysis
Piri’s mother features prominently in this grouping of chapters, even though she dies in the first pages of Chapter 20. When Piri is about to get into a deadly fight with his father, it is his sister’s resemblance to his mother that causes him to stop fighting. After he has savagely beaten an innocent man, it is his mother’s voice that he imagines asking him “what [he] has done” (221). And when he is grievously injured, it is his mother that he calls out to. In a way, his mother’s “ghost” is the most important character in these chapters. This ghost is both his moral conscience as well as his comfort.
Two other mothers are featured in these chapters as well: Waneko’s mother and Dulcien. Waneko’s mother nurses Piri back to health, and is in this way a kind of surrogate mother figure to Piri. Dulcien, meanwhile, is the mother of Piri’s child. However, Piri does not protect and guide Dulcien in the way that his own mother and Waneko’s mother protect and guide Piri. Instead, Piri flatly refuses to support Dulcien in any meaningful way. For Piri, mothers are there to give selflessly to him, but he feels no actual compunction for not giving back to mothers who sacrifice so much for him. Piri is always ready to take things from women, and mothers in particular (as when he stole a much-needed ten dollars from a young mother he was dating in Chapter 11), but he is unwilling to sacrifice anything at all for a woman.
