Where Did We Get To After Walking These Mean Streets?
By Amiri Baraka
It seems I’ve been drafted to give the last word on a whole generation, a whole epoch of human life, struggle and whatever realization. The real boundaries of our lives are material as well as in our heads. The question is how do we use one dimension against the other. How do we fly when flying is illegal, how do we create beauty if it has been decided that actual beauty must be kept out of our reach. Poverty is designed to do that, poor education, now the destruction of public education.
Most of us in here I wd suppose are familiar with the low ways of this place. We know the American Dream mostly by its advertising. I was almost given an assignment recently by NPR to name a song that summed up The American Dream. Instead I sent three songs that demonstrated to me The American Dream vs. The American Nightmare.
Piri Thomas was one of us, one of the post-World War 2 children, grandsons and daughters of the slaves and earlier immigrants who tried to make a go in this American world, even though we were weighted down by slavery, colonialism, racism, discrimination, white supremacy, national oppression and the lies of a nation full of hypocrites and aggressive or passive oppressors. We are all a people whose minds and lives have been twisted by the desires of the powerful. They are sick but so are we. Part of the horror of America is that the oppressed too often side with their oppressors. They don’t want to slay them as Fanon reminded us, they want to be them.
I begin this way because what Piri has taught me. And we hung out for a couple of minutes a few times. I have some great flicks of us, overnighting in Newark, with the families, talking and drinking and laughing and cursing about America. This diseased thing.
I have spent much time and energy railing against the white out or bourgeoisification of our minds. Mainly the Afro American struggle to get past what DuBois described when he said, “Many people have suffered as much as we, but none of them was real estate.” The Double Consciousness! To see yourself through the eyes of people that hate you.
That before you can struggle against your enemies you must be able to distinguish yourself from them. To develop, to quote DuBois again, to develop a “true self consciousness.” To know who it is you are, and at the same time to know your enemy, with as much precision, the time, place and condition, as is possible.
And certainly education helps, that is why it so expensive. But not just book learning but the ground work of not only perceiving reality clearly but understanding it and being able to use it in a way that makes you grasp what you must do to move forward, to whatever degree of self determination, self respect and self defense. This world is alive with predators.
And what I learned from Piri is that it is the same struggle, but with perhaps slightly different “looks” as they say in football players’ jargon. Piri’s Down These Mean Streets came out in 1967, I myself had just been convicted of possession of two guns and a poem in the Newark Rebellion. The Judge said the poem, Black People, was a prescription for “Criminal Anarchy.” It was in Trenton State Prison that I met the author of Howard Street, Nathan Heard, who was serving a nine year sentence for armed robbery. Howard Street, published 1968 is a tale akin to Down These Mean Streets, it could be called Mean Streets of Newark.
It is that time, the middle sixties when all the dispossessed, in whatever fashion, took the lead from the Civil Rights Movement’s beginnings, the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the mi-50’s that ended up successfully eliminating the southern law that Black people ride in the back of the bus. That would have included Piri and all yall brown skin brothers and sisters whether you spoke Spanish or not.
But even earlier Puerto Rican nationalists had tried to waste Harry Truman and even attacked the US congress in 1954, led by Lolita Lebron to rain fire down on the legislators of the colonial power. In 1957 Kwame Nkrumah led the people of Ghana out of the shackles of British colonialism with the people singing “I’ll be Glad When You’re Dead You Rascal you!” The next year the UN stopped stopped referring to Puerto Rico as a colony.
But in rapid fire, after they blew up Dr. King’s house in Montgomery, Alabama, there was another event that shook up the world, Jan. 1 1959, the Cuban Revolution. In 1960, Malcolm X appeared on television in Mike Wallace’s The Hate That Hate Produced, in July I went to Cuba and met Fidel Castro and Che Guevara.
The world was in a torrent of change and this is the world Piri had struggled through the East Harlem barrio in. Tied to ignorance and poverty by colonialism, white supremacy and racism. These evils combined to throw him into jail for seven years. He mentions Claude Brown’s Manchild in The Promised Land, which came out in 1965 and Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, about the struggle against colonialism in Algeria and around the world which appeared in 1961. These are also texts of the time, descriptions of the struggle against slavery and colonialism as they reconfigured themselves in the 50’s and 60’s in the US against the post-slavery black slaves and the post-colonial colonial victims.
What made Down These Mean Streets and the others so heavy is that they appeared at the time of maximum rebellion against these evils of international oppression and greed, however they were called and no matter what euphemistic terms were used to disguise them.
But for me, what rings heaviest in Down These Mean Streets was the internal struggle that all these authors that Piri also cites, had to fight. The struggle between those who see the truth and those who are blind. Within our own ranks. The struggle within Piri’s family between those who would be white and those who must submit to their actual brownness. The fight with his brother and father are terrible records of that turmoil that still ravages our communities. The Double Consciousness—seeing ourselves through the eyes of people that hate us.
Piri’s commitment, after the confusing passage through el barrio, to find out what’s goin on, like Marvin Gaye said.
“I’m a Negro”, says Piri to his younger brother, Jose.
“You aint no nigger,” says Jose.
“I ain’t?”
“No, you’re a Puerto Rican.”
“I am, huh?” He looks at Jose and says, “…course you gotta say that Cause if I’m a Negro, then you and James is one too and that ain’t leaving out Sis and Poppa. Only Momma’s an exception. She don’t care what she is.”
This is followed by an actual fight, a rumble between brothers, but really a struggle between two ways of thinking. Piri leaves the house and declares he is going south with his Afro American roadie, Brew, to find out what’s really going on. To find out what the problem with being “negrito” is by journeying into the hell of the deep south. He finds out.
The funny aspect of what Piri is finding out, even as he is being beaten by the police and called a “nigger” is that as he explains “at least you could call me a Puerto Rican nigger.”
But most important is that Piri learns the truth of the Pan Africanist understanding. The truth of DuBois and Marti, that African slavery has made an African diaspora throughout the world that has spread the pain, destruction, poverty and oppression and with that, self hatred & hatred throughout the world. Where ever the Blackness of enslaved Africa has touched, whoever has been touched is so weighted with those evils. Not just in the United States, where many of the people, who would scream and be committed to suicide if they understood it, are certainly of mixed blood. Even the whitest of us.
But this is a bottom root, at the same time a cover for the real struggle between most people and their exploiters, the imperialists, the monopoly capitalists, whatever their color, though Europe and now the US can stick its foot up anybody’s behind with its Nay Toe.
Piri discovers this before he explodes out of his residence on the mean streets into seven years in the joint. And when he gets out he has become a sharp and burning voice as to what these mean streets are and who and what has made them this way and how they must be fought. I miss him today as I miss my comrade Louis Reyes Rivera, two voices of the actual in a world badly in need of the truth.
Down These Mean Streets opened the door for many into the world of the Puerto Rican Barrio. Just as Manchild and Howard Street let the intrepid check out the Black hoods of West Harlem and Newark. These were occasioned by the movement of the people in the real world, the large and small rebellions, the will to make revolution.
Those literary movements that issued out of the same mid century rumbling and explosions and actual revolutions—the Beats, The Black Arts Movement, The NuYorican—carried the legacy of the struggles in the real world. It is no coincidence that all these tales make reference to jail, the joint on the inside, the bigger one we move through daily. What Piri told us in Mean Streets I could confirm years later in Pedro Pietri’s Puerto Rican Obituary and Mikey Pinero’s The Book of Genesis According to St. Miguelito or to Miguel Algarin, Papaleto Melendez, Jose Angel Figueroa, Sandra Esteves, Louis Reyes Rivera…
Piri sd he didn’t want to be a cowboy or an athlete, that he was dreamer who wanted to think, make stories and find out things. El Diablo Grande has been trying to cover all our heroes and the great writings of those dreamers and thinkers and those who wanted to find out things. It is our work to resist, and not be cooled out and struggle once more to make revolution! Punto!
From June, 2013
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