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
BetaChapters 14-16: “Suburbia”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 14 Summary: “Learning Some New ABC’s”
Brew has been staying with Piri at Piri’s parents’ place. Around the breakfast table, Brew tells Piri what his mother taught him about getting along with white people: “A—accept. B—behave. C—care” (134). On the way to signing up for the Merchant Marine, they take a packed train. Piri is pressed up against a white woman. He becomes sexually aroused, and, to his surprise, the woman enjoys the experience. Later, back at his parents’ place, Piri imagines an elaborate conversation the woman on the train later has with one of her friends, wherein the woman says, “I was never so ashamed of myself” (141). Piri calls this his “mental production of ‘Beauty and Black’s Best’” (141).
Chapter 15 Summary: “Brothers Under the Skin”
Piri tells his brother, Jose, that he is planning on going down south “to see what a moyeto’s worth and the paddy’s weight on him” (143). Jose is adamant that Piri is not a moyeto: “We’re Puerto Ricans, and that makes us different from black people” (143). Jose goes on to explain to Piri that he and Piri’s other brother, James, have always had to explain to others why Piri’s skin is so dark. Piri asks rhetorically if his brothers had to make excuses for him and then punches Jose and they fight. Piri viciously beats Jose. His father pulls Piri off his brother and away from what Piri calls a “Cain and Abel scene” (147). Piri asks his father “what’s wrong with not being white?” and he leaves (147).
Chapter 16 Summary: “Funeral for a Prodigal Son”
Around the breakfast table the next morning, Piri tells his family that he loves them all, but that he needs to find resolution for his confusion over his own race: “I gotta find me” (149). His father, who shares Piri’s dark complexion, says “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 tells his father that his father’s belief in his white status is “just a dream” (151). His father confesses to Piri that he has went as far as making his accent heavier in order to make himself “more of a Puerto Rican than the most Puerto Rican there ever was” (153). Piri, having packed all of his things for going down to the South, says goodbye to his father “gently,” and leaves (154).
Chapters 14-16 Analysis
In these chapters, in which Piri is back staying with his family in Long Island, we see that Piri is starting to conceive of himself as a black man. In his sexual fantasy involving the woman on the train, Piri calls himself “Black’s Best.” Piri starts to pull away from his own family, feeling that his brother, Jose, cannot understand Piri’s racial struggles since Jose’s skin is so light. Regarding his father, Piri believes that he is in denial over the fact that he is a black man. Unlike Piri, Piri’s father has never allowed himself to perceive of himself as a black man. Piri, here, finds a proud independence from his family: his skin color is different from his family’s skin color, except his father, and his mind is different from his father’s because Piri can accept his skin color, while his father cannot.
