Down These Mean Streets

It is 1944 and a 16-year-old Piri moves with his family to Long Island. Piri doesn’t want to move to Long Island, feeling that he “belonged in Harlem” (81).His friend Crutch tells him “there were a lot of paddies out there, and they didn’t dig Negroes or Puerto Ricans” (81). Piri gets along well in Babylon (a suburb of Long Island) at first, playing baseball with his classmates. He goes to a dance and flirts with a “paddy” girl named Marcia. He thinks that the flirting went well, until he later overhears Marcia talking with her friends about the encounter. “Imagine the nerve of that black thing,” she says (85).Piri storms out of the dance and takes out his frustrations on his white friend Angelo: “I hate them. I hate you. I hate all you white mother jumps” (86). The chapter ends with Piri vowing to never go back to the school in Long Island again.

Dissatisfied with Long Island, Piri spends a lot of his time partying back in Harlem. His mother, who is in failing health and will soon die, tells him that his father is seeing another woman. Piri gets a job as a kitchen attendant at a hospital, and strikes up a friendship with a blonde girl named Betty, who also works there.