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.
Summary
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
BetaThemes
The Liminal Nature of Race
One of the deepest struggles of Piri’s life is his struggle with conceptions of what race he is, both his own conceptions as well as the conceptions of others. Speaking broadly, Piri is not quite black, yet not quite white, either. The child of a light-complexioned mother and a dark-complexioned father, he is on the threshold between white and black. He feels as though he has to make a choice, even though, at the same time, he feels both black and white. Speaking with Brew, Piri says “I still can’t help feeling both paddy and Negro. The weight feels even on both sides even if both sides wanna feel uneven. Goddammit, I wish I could be like one of those lizards that change colors. When I’d be with Negroes, I’d be a stone Negro, and with paddies, I’d be stone paddy” (180).
The only way Piri can conceive of himself as integrated within society is to imagine himself as another being altogether: a chameleon. Piri wants to be whole, to be completely something: “Jesus, if I’m a Negro, I gotta feel it all over. I don’t have the ‘for sure’ feeling yet” (128). But when it comes to race, he simply cannot be wholly black or wholly white. It is not that Piri cannot accept the “fact” that he is black, for many blacks wouldn’t consider him to be black. Such is the case with Alayce, who says “He’s a Porto Rican and that’s whar he is. We’s Negroes and that’s whar we’re at.” (159). Part of the issue is that being part black means to be fully black to many people: “A black man’s so important that a drop of Negro blood can make a black man out of a pink-asshole, blue-eyed white man” (120).
The intellectual named Gerald, who Piri meets in Norfolk, claims that race is a choice: “if a white man can be a Negro if he has some Negro blood in him, why can’t a Negro be a white man if he has white blood in him?” (176). Gerald’s contentions make an impression on Piri: “What he said about choice had shattered my own ideas on the matter” (179). In the end, Piri becomes reasonably content with choosing to identify as a black man. In this way Piri is like Gerald, and even like his father, who chooses not to be black: “I don’t like feeling to be a black man. Can you understand it’s a pride to me being a Puerto Rican?” (150). Piri is able to reconcile to himself to the liminal nature of race by making a choice, not by discovering the “truth” about which race he is. The truth for him, his father, and Gerald is that they must make a choice as to what race they identify with and then do the best they can with that choice.
Taking After Pops
Multiple times Piri talks about how he and his father look alike: “Damn, I thought, I sure favor Poppa” (132); “I look like Poppa, I thought, we really favor each other” (121).Piri shares his father’s dark skin, and even wonders if it is the reason why they don’t get along: “maybe it’s ‘cause I’m the darkest in this family” (22). Perhaps there is some truth to this idea, for Piri’s father is ashamed of his skin color: “I don’t like feeling to be a black man,” he says (150). In this way, Piri’s father’s self-hatred becomes redirected towards his child, whether consciously or unconsciously. For his part, Piri worries that he is too much like his father when it comes to race: “I’m close to being like Poppa—trying to be white on both sides” (145). Piri is trying to conceive of himself as a black man, and his father’s example is a hindrance to this.
Piri, though he never admits to it, shares personality traits with his father as well. Both he and his father change jobs frequently. Both of them bridle under authority: “Poppa was saying that foreman or no foreman, he wasn’t gonna take crap from nobody” (41). And both of them are intensely violent people. At one point, Piri and his father get into a malicious fistfight and Piri looks for a knife because he “wanted to kill [his father]” (199). Both men’s violence extends to battering women. A young Piri worries that his mother will be beaten by his father for his running away: “it wasn’t fair that she should get whipped for something she didn’t do” (6).For his part, Piri at least attempts to punch Trina (113), and offhandedly mentions hitting other women when he talks about “beating my girl for money” (204). The very fact that they are so similar, especially in their negative traits, is a reason why they clash so much.
Piri’s Homophobia
In his teen years, Piri has an experience in which he and some friends have sexual acts performed on them by homosexual men in return for money. Piri claims to be extremely resistant to doing this, and expresses his resistance in very strong terms: “I ain’t gonna screw no motherfucking’ fag. Agh—I’m not gonna get shit all over my peter, not for all the fuckin’ coins in the world” (55). Nevertheless, Piri does join in, claiming he does it because he wants to “belong […] with the rest of his friends” (55). Despite Piri’s claimed disgust about the experience, he does spend a lot of time describing it, even admitting that he liked it on some level: “If I didn’t like the scene, my pee-pee did” (61).
Later in life, while he is in jail, Piri talks about the allure of homosexual acts: “there always was the temptation of wanting to cop some ass” (262).And it is a temptation to Piri: “But I ain’t gonna break. One time. That’s all I have to do it. Just one time and it’s gone time. I’ll be screwing faggots as fast as I can get them” (263). It may be a temptation to him, but at the same time, he claims to be disgusted by homosexual relationships: “My God, what an unreal world. Look at Big Jules’s face, he really is serious. This faggot is gonna be his wife, for better or for worse, until death do them part. And it came to me, scared and hard, that this was what I had to fight against. This farce[…]” (263-4).Similar to how Piri has to choose his race, Piri seems to be determined to choose to not have homosexual relationships. He says that Claude and Big Jules’s wedding made him “sick inside” (264). Yet it is “inside” himself that he feels tempted by this kind of relationship. His outward attitude towards homosexuality does not match his inner attitude, due to a self-hatred either for succumbing to homosexual experiences earlier in life or for simply having some homosexual desire himself.
