Down These Mean Streets

After finishing with the Merchant Marine, Piri comes back to New York and finds that his mother is sick and in the hospital. He visits her one time before she dies. He stays at his parents’ home for a couple of months and develops a “yearning desire to see what Poppa’s other woman looked like” (196). He breaks into his father’s things and steals a photo of her, which he tears up. His father finds out that Piri stole the picture and hits Piri. Piri affects a stereotypical black southern drawl and his father hits him again. Piri goes looking for a knife to kill his father with, but his little sister, Miriam, who reminds Piri of his mother, prevents the two from continuing the fight.

Piri returns to Harlem and soon becomes hooked on heroin: “Heroin does a lot for one—and it’s all bad. It becomes your whole life once you allow it to sink its white teeth in your blood stream” (200). Piri starts to sell drugs himself in order to support his habit, working for a drug dealer nicknamed “Turkey.” Making good money and doing a lot of drugs, Piri is satisfied until there is a city-wide shortage of heroin, and he loses his supply of both drugs and money.