Down These Mean Streets by Piri Thomas

    There’s a scene in this book where the teenage Piri, with his lowlife friends, visit an apartment full of transvestites. They smoke pot, engage in oral and anal sex (described with uncompromising and vulgar frankness) and lay down some beatings. Now keep in mind three things about this book; first, it takes place in the 1940’s, secondly, the protagonist is just a kid, and third, it’s on the reading list for some high schools.  I bet that had this book been released at the time it takes place, it would not only have been banned in every library, but also consigned to fuel the building furnace. I wonder if it’s assigned to Black high schoolers today because some educators thing the boys can relate to it? Maybe so, I can imagine they’d relate to it more than The Glass Menagerie.

    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?