Down These Mean Streets

In the opening chapter, a twelve-year-old Piri is out alone in the streets of Harlem at 2 a.m. He has had a dispute with his father and is seeking to make his father worry about him by running away from home. Piri is upset that his father beat him with a belt for breaking a glass jar of coffee, even though it was not Piri’s fault the jar broke. But, Piri realizes, his father is working the nightshift, so he feels “cheated out of whipping Poppa back with worry” (4).Nevertheless, he plans on spending the night on the roof of a nearby tenement building. On the way up to the roof, Piri comes across two “junkies” under the stairwell. One of them is using a belt, but “this belt wasn’t for whipping” (5).Instead, it is for shooting up heroin, which Piri will use later in life and get hooked on himself. Piri loses interest in the scene and begins to be concerned that his mother will worry about him, and he decides to return home. Returning home, he finds that his dad is not at work but is instead playing late-night dominoes with his friends. It annoys Piri that his father “had known about [his] cutting out and hadn’t even worked up a sweat” (7).