Let’s go into the
author’s family life. Born in NYC in 1928, he and his family were part of
Harlem’s tiny Spanish-speaking community. Race forms a nasty undercurrent in
the story, and not just in terms of segregation, but his family life as well.
He’s a dark-skinned boy, and his darkness is something of an embarrassment to
his family. Growing up, he fits in with the other Puerto Rican kids, but they
can get things he can’t. Then his family moves to Long Island to work in the
wartime industries, and things get worse. His father intends to leave their old
life behind, but for dark-skinned Piri, racial hostility replaces the roughness
of the streets. No more Puerto Rican for him, he’s now a Black kid, and treated
like one by his classmates. He retreats back to his old neighborhood, settles
in with the lowlifes as his new family, slides further down into vice and
crime, and ends up doing time for shooting a cop.
In contrast to the
Langston Hughes Harlem, I consider this a book about the sleazy underbelly of the
community. The young Piri Thomas lives in a world of drugs, pimps, hookers,
trannies, loose women, poverty, crime, and all the things that Neil Jordan,
Larry Clark, and Harmony Korine would put in their movies. Much of the book
takes place on the fringes of society, a place where the people never see the
best part of the city, and the people in the better parts never see this
neighborhood. There’s no “discovery” scene like in Go Tell It On the Mountain, where the narrator visits a museum and
sees that there’s more to the city than his own sphere. Both Piri Thomas and
James Baldwin put their stories in Harlem, and they were born around the same
time, but there is a difference between the two. Baldwin’s characters climb out
of their consigned world by working their way out, while in Piri’s case, he
stays there because it’s a comfort zone. There’s also a sense of nihilism, in
that Piri actively looks for trouble, almost with a suicidal attitude. Lastly,
in Go Tell It on the Mountain, the
narrator is trying to break from under his parents’ hypocrisy, while Piri
Thomas sees no hypocrisy at all; his father’s abusive behavior is obvious, and
the boy has no illusions about it.
Throughout the book, I kept wondering if
things were really that bad in 1940’s Harlem. Bill Cosby (before he was outed
as a creep) once said “in the old days you couldn’t play hooky from school,
because behind every drawn curtain, there was an eye.” While reading Down These Mean Streets, I got the
feeling that either Piri’s neighborhood had no such eye, or his parents didn’t
care. I wonder if the cult of “the good old days” doesn’t apply, because
dysfunctional families had no support and no hope?
