Piri's father loses his job and the family struggles through the Great Depression, relying on the WPA for income.

Piri's family moves to Italian-American Harlem, where local kids mock his skin color and he gets into repeated street fights.

An Italian boy throws asphalt in Piri's eyes, nearly blinding him permanently; Piri refuses to identify his attacker and earns his father's respect.

Piri's family moves back to Spanish Harlem, where he fights a local kid named Waneko and earns a place in the TNT gang.

Piri's family moves to Long Island, where a white girl named Marcia publicly rejects him at a dance by calling him a 'black thing.'

Piri applies for a door-to-door sales job but is passed over because of his skin color while his white friend Louie is hired immediately.

Piri meets Trina, a beautiful Puerto Rican girl newly arrived from the island, and falls deeply in love with her.

Piri viciously beats his brother Jose after Jose insists that Piri is Puerto Rican, not black, and need not identify as Negro.

Piri's father confesses over breakfast that he has always been ashamed of his dark skin and has exaggerated his Puerto Rican identity to compensate.

Piri and Brew join the Merchant Marines, travel through the American South, and sail around the world, experiencing racial discrimination at every port.

Piri returns from the Merchant Marines to find his mother dying in the hospital and visits her one last time before she dies.

Piri becomes addicted to heroin; his friend Waneko and Waneko's mother lock him in a room to help him quit cold turkey.

Piri and three accomplices attempt to rob a nightclub; an off-duty cop shoots Piri in the chest and Piri shoots the cop.

Piri is tried for the nightclub robbery and sentenced to five to fifteen years of hard labor in Sing Sing Prison.

Released from prison on probation, Piri successfully resists the temptations of drugs and his old criminal habits through prayer and self-awareness.

Piri Thomas grows up the dark-skinned eldest son of Puerto Rican immigrants in Harlem, struggling with poverty, street fights, and a fraught relationship with his father. After his family's moves to Italian Harlem and then Long Island expose him to intense racial rejection, Piri returns to Spanish Harlem and begins to embrace a black identity. He joins the Merchant Marines with his friend Brew and travels through the racist American South, cementing his self-identification as a black man. Returning home to find his mother dying, Piri spirals into heroin addiction and eventually armed robbery, culminating in a catastrophic nightclub holdup that leaves both him and a police officer shot. Sentenced to five to fifteen years in prison, Piri serves his time and eventually earns parole, emerging a changed man. Upon release he faces and overcomes the temptations of his old criminal and drug-addicted life, ending the memoir on a note of hard-won hope.

The major milestones of Piri's journey from Harlem childhood to hard-won freedom.

A twelve-year-old Piri runs away from home in the middle of the night but discovers his father is playing dominoes, not working.

Japan attacks Pearl Harbor; Piri's father soon lands a job at an airplane factory and the family's fortunes begin to improve.

The TNT gang gets into a street rumble with a rival gang called the Jolly Rogers over a territorial dispute.

Piri hits his teacher after she refuses to let him use the restroom; a neighbor named Miss Washington shields him from the pursuing principal.

Piri, Crip, and Louie break into a grocery store at night to steal hidden cash; Crip and Louie are caught by police but Piri escapes.

Piri takes his white hospital coworker Betty to Spanish Harlem; a stranger makes a racist remark about them and Betty stops Piri from retaliating.

Piri spends several months homeless in Harlem and enters a relationship with an older woman named Lorry, his friend Pane's sister.

While waiting for Trina at a party, Piri yields to peer pressure and uses heroin for the first time.

In Norfolk, Piri and Brew meet Gerald, a mixed-race aspiring writer who argues that people of blended heritage have the right to choose their race.

On his merchant ship, the chief mate calls Piri 'boy' while asking for coffee; Piri retaliates silently by serving him a cold cup.

Back in Harlem after the Merchant Marines, Piri quickly becomes hooked on heroin again and begins selling drugs for a dealer called Turkey.

Louie introduces Piri to experienced criminals Danny and Billy; Piri immediately walks into a cigar store and robs it to prove his nerve.

Piri gets a woman named Dulcien pregnant; Trina finds out and is devastated; Piri refuses to live with Dulcien or support their child.

After four years served, Piri's request for parole is denied by the board and he must remain in prison at least two more years.

Piri visits Trina after his prison release but she says nothing to him; he accepts that the past cannot be recaptured.

From a childhood prank of running away at midnight to the Pearl Harbor attack that lifted the Thomas family out of Depression poverty, Piri's early years are full of small moments with large consequences. His teenage years bring gang rumbles, petty crime, a doomed friendship with a white coworker named Betty, and his first encounter with heroin. Adrift in early adulthood, Piri meets the aspiring mixed-race writer Gerald in Norfolk and experiences the quiet indignities of shipboard racism before returning to Harlem and falling back into addiction. He proves himself to a new crew of criminals by robbing a cigar store on the spot, and his relationship with Trina is damaged when he fathers a child with another woman. After four years in prison his first parole bid is denied, and even after his eventual release, the reunion he fantasizes about with Trina turns cold and silent.

The supporting scenes and secondary turning points that shaped Piri's path.

Piri's father vents furious rage over the family's poverty but then suddenly brightens and invites everyone to play a beloved family talent show game.

A young Piri holds his breath underwater in the bathtub trying to impress his father, and for once his father responds with genuine warmth.

After injuring Piri badly in a street fight, the Italian boy Rocky feels guilty and personally escorts the blinded Piri home to his family.

Brew tells Piri that conditions are far worse for Negroes in the South than in Harlem, convincing Piri he must experience it himself.

Piri imagines an elaborate fantasy about a white woman on a packed train who enjoyed their accidental contact, casting himself as 'Black's Best.'

Before shipping out with the Merchant Marines, Piri visits Trina and tells her he has no time to say what he should have said long ago, but that he digs her.

Brew's girlfriend Alayce begins to describe being raped by white men; Brew gently cuts her off and holds her close before she can finish.

Brew fails to return to the ship at a New Orleans port stop and Piri never sees Brew or Alayce again.

In a Texas brothel Piri pretends to speak only Spanish; as he leaves, he tells the prostitute she was just 'fucked by a nigger.'

Piri steals a photo of his father's mistress; his father discovers this and they fight violently until Piri's sister Miriam, resembling their dead mother, halts them.

Two inmates named Claude and Big Jules stage a formal prison wedding complete with a preacher and attendants; Piri watches and feels sick inside.

During a family prison visit, Piri learns that Trina has married another man and obtains drugs from a friend to numb the grief.

A prison riot erupts; Piri chooses to be herded back to his cell rather than join the rioters and feels deeply ashamed of his choice afterward.

Piri befriends a Nation of Islam member named Muhammad in prison and converts to Islam, taking the name Hussein Afmit Ben Hassen.

Piri runs into his old friend Carlito, now a desperate heroin addict shooting up in an apartment, who offers him a fix; Piri refuses and walks away.

Piri's inner life is shaped by a series of quiet but resonant turning points, from a rare moment of warmth with his difficult father to his gradual and painful acceptance of his black identity. His friend Brew's firsthand account of Southern racism pushes Piri to go south himself, and encounters with Brew's girlfriend Alayce and a Texas prostitute force Piri to confront the full weight of what it means to be black in America. The disappearance of Brew at a New Orleans port, and a violent confrontation with his father back home, deepen Piri's sense of isolation and forward momentum. In prison, he witnesses a mock wedding between two inmates that disturbs him deeply, learns of Trina's marriage to another man, and chooses his future freedom over solidarity during a prison riot. His spiritual conversion to Islam and his final refusal of heroin when offered it by a ruined old friend mark the culmination of his long struggle toward an authentic self.

The pivotal decisions, revelations, and emotional reckonings that define Piri's inner life.