“Down These Mean Streets’’ joined that list. The memoir, Mr. Thomas wrote on his website, had “exploded out of my guts in an outpouring of long suppressed hurts and angers that had boiled over into an ice-cold rage.’’
The novelist Daniel Stern, reviewing the book in The New York Times, called it “another stanza in the passionate poem of color and color-hatred being written today.’’
In the memoir Mr. Thomas described how he was brought up as the only dark-skinned child among seven children, the son of a Puerto Rican mother, Dolores Montanez, and a Cuban father, Juan Tomas de la Cruz. His dark skin, Mr. Thomas recalled, made him feel like an outlier in his own family and neighborhood, where he was taunted about this looks. Even his father, he felt, preferred his lighter-skinned children.
He described the bravado, or “machismo,’’ that he affected on the streets. Protecting his “rep’’ led him to “waste’’ people who insulted him, he wrote. He sniffed “horse’’ - heroin - even though he knew the consequences. “The world of street belonged to the kid alone,’’ he wrote. “There he could earn his own rights, prestige, his good-o stick of living. It was like being a knight of old, like being 10 feet tall.’’
As a merchant seaman in the Jim Crow South, he wrote, he persuaded a white prostitute to sleep with him because, he told her, he was really Puerto Rican, not black. He then enjoyed stunning her by telling her she had just slept with a black man.
He returned home while his mother was dying in a poor people’s ward at Metropolitan Hospital and resumed his old ways - selling and using drugs and robbing people. In one holdup he wounded a police officer and landed in prison for seven years, a harrowing time he vividly evoked. It was in prison that he finished high school and began thinking about writing. He found, he wrote, that words could be used as bullets or butterflies. He called writing “the Flow.’’
