The recent death on Oct. 17, 2011, of writer and poet Piri Thomas, author of Down These Mean Streets, brought back memories for those of us who walked those same streets with him.
His voice will not be silenced, since his work is now part of the curricula in many high school and college literature programs, as well as in American, Black and Latin American Studies.
He broke the ground for other voices. Until Piri, East Harlem—also known as Spanish Harlem or El Barrio—was a blank page in the history and literature books.
Many years before Occupy Wall Street, Piri wrote in his Afterword to the 30th anniversary edition of Down These Mean Streets published Nov. 25, 1997:
The truth is that when the economy goes into a slump, Americans of all colors fall into worse living conditions. These bad living conditions are not the fault of other colors, so let's quit looking for scapegoats; sadly, the real culprit is, and has always been, a breed named greed. What else can it be, except greed, when it's a known fact that two-percent of the population receive 98% of the national wealth? This inequality certainly has to affect the welfare and education of the children of the other 98% of the population, who are forced to get by with a measly 2% share of the national wealth. Besides, who created their wealth in the first place?
Down These Mean Streets - Vintage Books
Piri Thomas knew poverty. He knew racism. He knew prison. He knew drug addiction.
He lived it, and spent most of his adult life inspiring young people—especially those who are incarcerated—to find a way out of the trap this society has constructed for them.
You may no longer walk those streets, Piri, but your footsteps will echo through time.
Though often mentioned as a Puerto Rican author, his father was Cuban. He spoke of his early childhood in an interview with Carmen Dolores Hernández:
CDH: I am curious about your name. It's not a Spanish name.
PT: I was born on September 30, 1928 in Harlem Hospital. You can get no more Harlem than that. It was the hospital where they sent all the little black ones, all the little brown ones; the other hospitals didn't accept them, they were for whites. When I arrived in this world they wanted to assimilate me as they did the Native Americans, who forgot their culture. They named me John Peter Thomas in the hospital. Whoever heard of a Puerto Rican named John Peter Thomas? My brothers called me Piti, my father called me Pete, but Mami called me Piri. My father's last name was Tomás.
CDH: When did your parents come to the United States?
PT: My father, Juan Tomás de la Cruz, a wonderful father, an athlete who played baseball, was born in 1907, in Santiago de Cuba. I'm half Cuban. I am Puerto Rican in spirit and soul and I also love Cuba. I don't know that much about cubanos, however, because I loved Mami so much I wanted to be whatever she was. She was from Bayamón, in Puerto Rico. Her name was Dolores Montañez.
CDH: Did your parents meet in the United States?
PT: Well, the story is -according to family legend- that my father's parents died of yellow fever in Cuba when he was very small. He was raised in a Yankee orphanage, a Christian mission. He lived in Cuba until he was 16 and learned to speak perfect English. He went to Puerto Rico and stayed there for a year because he wanted to come to the United States and the Jones Act of 1917 had made Puerto Ricans citizens of the United States, whether they wanted to or not. He stayed there for a year, working and learning Puerto Rican mannerisms and ways of speaking because Cubans and Puerto Ricans speak a little bit differently. Then, from Puerto Rico, my father came up here. He got himself a little apartment and since he was a baseball fan he made friends with some baseball players. My mother's parents, on the other hand, had died and she had to work as a housemaid. Sometimes she went back to her family and her sister, Catín, looked after her. When my father came to this country in the nineteen-twenties, Catín was in New York. She was the one who met my father first. She had sent for my mother, who was suffering a lot because some of the people she worked for were terrible, abusive people. My mother passed through child abuse. But she was beautiful and her faith in God made her rise above all that brutality.
As the darkest child in the family, who resembled his Afro-Cuban father more than his lighter-skinned Puerto Rican mother, racism defined his life, and he was the first Latino writer from New York to hammer home that theme in his work.
In Race and Mercy: A Conversation with Piri Thomas by llan Stavans, he discusses why.
IS: Race is an issue ubiquitous in your work. In fact, very few Latino writers today are brave enough to discuss it in such plain, uninhibited ways as you do.
PT: Children have a spirit of discernment and the ability to perceive and to sense and to feel and they can look at a person and see the look of contempt or the outrage or the disgust on people's faces. It is very easy for children to read people like people read books. I was one of those children. So when you ask of racism and bigotry, yes, I began at the first stage of life in the barrio. As I grew older it grew harder.
I remember the first time I went to the South with my friend Billy. I sat in the front of the bus and when the bus got to the Mason Dixon line, our driver got off and a new driver got on. Immediately, he said "all the colored to the back" and all the coloreds got up and went back and I just sat there. And he said "I want all of you colored people to go to the back" and I said "look I am puertorriqueo" and he looked at me and said "I don't care what kind of nigger you are" and he put his hand into his side pocket. Using the better part of my discretion and with a great nudging on my arm from Billy, because he knew we would be killed, I grudgingly but with dignity went to the back of the bus and sat for the rest of the ride staring at the back of his head determined that I would never forget this incident. And they'd call me "nigger!" and if it wasn't nigger they'd call me "spik." Racism was a horror to bear because most times it wasn't quite said. It was worse because they dug into your psyche with one little look of contempt or their nose would flare as you passed them as if they had smelled dirt. So I came to my mother enraged and feeling this, saying "mire mami, they called me this." So my mother said "listen to this, my son, I want you to learn this and remember it for the rest of your life. I want you to know that there is no one in this world better than you, only maybe better off, with money and so forth, and maybe only better off. You have your sense of beautiful dignity. Nobody can take that away. Only you can give it away or sell it, entiendes ?" My mother said, "they don't have to kill you with hatred my son, envy will suffice." Wisdom from my mother.
He also spoke of this in the interview with Hernández:
CDH: In Down These Mean Streets you seemed to be torn between identifying yourself as a black man or as a Puerto Rican..
PT: Of course! Can you imagine what it is to sit down to dinner and us Puerto Ricans being what we are, a sancocho, you look around and there is my sister, white as milk, with her straight hair, a little curly, but straight. And my brother Frankie with his blue eyes, white, very white. He tossed his head and his hair just fell backwards, pacatán and I tossed my head and my hair didn't move at all because it was kinky.
CDH: So you became racially conscious at home?
PT: Yes, but in my home there were no differences. It all began when I went out of my home and began to go to school. One time the principal called me to his office and asked if Lillian Thomas was my sister and I answered "Yes, she's my sister." I was black and she was white. And he asked, "From the same mother and father?" And I said: "Yes, of course". He was stunned and looked at my sister and made her into a nigger in his mind. I lived in Long Island, where we moved after my father won in the numbers game and my mother had saved some of the money she made sewing, because she was a slave to her sewing machine. In Long Island I felt like a coffee bean in a glass of milk. Wherever I looked there were those people of the KKK. Those people were everywhere, like beans on rice.
My husband, who is a black Puerto Rican, who grew up on Piri's block in the Barrio, said, when he learned of his death, "He was the first writer who spoke for me."
His work was the catalyst for the formation of a new movement. This was addressed in his obituary in the LA Times:
Thomas was a pioneer of "Nuyorican" literature, the poetry and prose produced in the wake of a massive emigration of Puerto Ricans to New York in the 1950s.
"He was at the vanguard of mainstream Puerto Rican literary achievement in the U.S., along with Esmeralda Santiago, Miguel Algarin, Pedro Pietri and Jesús Colón," said Daniel Gallant, executive director of the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, an arts organization in New York City that Thomas helped found in 1973. "His work helped to open the doors of the publishing and academic worlds to numerous Latino authors, and helped open the eyes of mainstream American readers to the sometimes harsh realities of Nuyorican life in the 1960s and beyond."
The PBS Independent Lens series produced a docudrama Every Child is Born a Poet: The Life and Work of Piri Thomas:
Combining poetry, documentary and drama, EVERY CHILD IS BORN A POET explores the life and work of Piri Thomas, the 75-year-old Afro-Cuban-Puerto Rican poet and author of Down These Mean Streets. A landmark of modern American literature, this 1967 autobiographical novel continues to be taught in schools for its groundbreaking bilingual style and its realistic portrayal of youth, imprisonment and search for racial identity.
Like the novel, the film traces Thomas’ path from childhood to manhood in New York City’s Spanish Harlem from the 1930s to the 1960s: his home life during the Great Depression, membership in barrio youth gangs, travels as a teenage merchant marine, addiction to heroin, notorious armed robbery of a Greenwich Village nightclub, six years spent in prison and eventual emergence as a writer.
As the first writer of Puerto Rican ancestry to receive national recognition in the United States, Piri Thomas is not just a cultural icon, but also a community treasure. His poetry has inspired and influenced generations of students, artists and activists. But Thomas is not simply a writer. When he started on his own path towards self-reclamation and self-respect, he also made a commitment to help others do the same. Since his release from prison in 1956, Thomas has devoted himself to the development, health and well being of young adults. As a social worker, he pioneered violence prevention and drug treatment efforts. As an educator, he has promoted literacy and taught writing in order to stimulate artistic expression—not only as a means of human enrichment, but also as a tool of individual and community survival. And as a poet, Thomas’ rhythm and style pre-figured rap by decades.
Though his work is now accepted in many high school and college programs, that hasn't always been the case, and he spoke of the banning of his book and those of other writers:
As a writer I have always fought for the right to write. For writing is a time-honored means of communication. Lack of communication, the refusal of some to understand, or outright refusal to learn about other human beings is based on fear. Fear is what keeps people apart. The seven members of the Island Tree School Board, Levitown, Long Island, have voted to remove from the shelves of the district junior high school and high school libraries nine books: The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers, edited by a most honored brother, Langston Hughes, A Hero Ain't Nothing but a Sandwich, by Alice Childress, A Reader for Writers, by Jerome W. Archer, Slaughterhouse Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., The Fixer, by Bernard Malmud, Go Ask Alice, whose author is anonymous, The Naked Ape, by Desmond Morris, Soul on Ice, by Eldridge Cleaver, and my own autobiography, Down These Means Streets. Laughing Boy, by Oliver La Farge, was placed back on the shelves while Black Boy, by Richard Wright, was placed on a restricted list. How dare a few have the arrogance and presumption to decide what is suitable to be read and written!
History has taught us that in any suppression of human rights and dignity the first to be negated are the writers and poets. We should all know about the burning of the books during the dark days of the birth of Nazism in Germany. Book-banning, is, to my point of view, becoming a dangerous threat to our freedoms in this land of the free and home of the brave. Down These Mean Streets was published in 1967. Ever since, there have been attempts to suppress it in Salinas, CA, Teaneck, NJ, Darien, CT, District 25 in Queens, in addition to this latest effort on Long Island.
I have personally appeared, where possible, at some of the places where the book was banned, not to defend its having been written, but to assert its right to be read. In Darien, 2000 schoolchildren, mostly blonde and blue-eyed, came to the high school auditorium to learn about a world that had been kept from them: Puerto Rican life in East Harlem. The ignorance of those young students about the realities of life outside their hothouses was appalling. But their sincerity in wanting to learn caused me to spend over 8 hours talking with them and many of their parents. In District 25, College Park Queens, in 1971, Down These Means Streets was removed from the library shelf of the local schools over the strong protest of teachers and librarians. And despite a valiant court battle by the New York Civil Liberties Union, it was banned, its critics say, because of obscenity (it was reinstated in 1976). In the course of the community dialogue over the banning, a youngster spoke up. "If Piri Thomas' book is as dirty as you who are banning it say it is, please go to the boys' and girls' bathroom right here in this school, and you'll really see something dirty written on the walls."
Thomas continued to write, but more importantly, he spent his time speaking to young people, particularly those who are incarcerated.
I tell the brothers in prison, and I tell the sisters in prison, you are not a less-than. That's what the word minority means. It's another word for less-than. Another word for niggers and spics. You can say minority, if you are talking about a political office, but not about a human being. We are not minorities, we are each one a majority of one. Similar to each other, but like fingerprints not the same. That was my sense of dignity they could not take away. Papa said no one can take away your sense of dignity, no matter how much they beat you. Only you can give it away. Or sell it.
His final words in the Afterword are a fitting way to close and a proposal for future action.
In writing Down These Mean Streets, it was my hope that exposure of such conditions in the ghetto would have led to their improvement. But, thirty years later, the sad truth is that people caught in the ghettoes have not made much progress, have moved backwards in many respects--the social safety net is much weaker now. Unfortunately, it's the same old Mean Streets, only worse.
I was taught that justice wears a blindfold, so as not to be able to distinguish between the colors, and thus make everyone equal in the eyes of the law. I propose we remove the blindfold from the eyes of Lady Justice, so for the first time she can really see what's happening and check out where the truth lies and the lies hide. That would be a start.
Viva the children of all the colors! Punto!
“The cruelest prison of all is the prison of the mind.”
― Piri Thomas