Down These Mean Streets Essay Example

Down These Mean Streets Essay This book Down These Mean Streetsis a classic confessional autobiography. This book wasfirst published in 1967. It was written by Piri Thomas, he was a man of African descent living in Spanish Harlem. It relates how he was lost even within his own family and his identity through drugs, street fighting, and armed robbery, nearly becoming yet another statistic by the age of twenty two. In this book it tells all about the persons life. It tells how he has suffered through his life time, and what he has been through. He has been through alot, he has gone from his hometown in Harlem to Suburbia, Down South, Prison and the New York Town. It all started out being a child and he had done a few things that made his father hit him. He has been saying that Poppa wont hit me again. He lived in a town called Harlem. He was down by Park Avenue and Harlem Park Avenue, it was a scary place. Especially the dirty stone trestle of the New York Centralthat was right down the middle of the aven ue making long, sloomy tunnels at each street corner. He feared death. The reason he feared death was when he once had a bullythat lived by the gutter who was more dangerous than they knew him to be. His name was Dopey, he was a kid that always was drooling at his mouth. One day someone had told him to drink dirty street water and that set him off to the City Hospital. Then the next time they saw Dopey was when he was changed, he did not look droopy at all, he looked like an ordinary person except dead. They traveled alot they were at on 114th street where all Puerto Ricans lived, then to 104th street between Lex and Park Avenue. He lived in apartment 109. He went to a school named Patrick Henry. Strange eyes followed him going to that school, it was a man known as Waneko. This man Waneko was more like a gangster, he had border lines on blocks which separated other pe