Down These Mean Streets

Piri meets up with Brew and his girlfriend, Alayce. Alayce is black, like Brew, and claims that Piri isn’t a Negro, but a Puerto Rican. Brew maintains that Piri is a “member of the black man’s race”, explaining that “When you’re born a shoe, yuh stays a shoe” (159). Alayce says that she doesn’t blame Puerto Ricans for not wanting to be black: “anything’s better’n being a li’l ole darkie” (159). She goes on to say that black women have it especially hard, which angers Brew, who tells a story about a confrontation he had with two white men down in the South. Two white men had threatened to sexually assault him and, despite initially adhering to the “ABC’s” his mother taught him, Brew ends up physically assaulting the white men. Brew had to escape to the North in order to avoid being arrested. Alayce then starts to tell of the time when she was raped by white men, but Brew cuts her short and gently holds her (163). Before shipping out with the Merchant Marine, Piri visits Trina, telling her, “I ain’t got time to tell you what I should’ve when I had time, but I dig you a whole lot” (165).