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I chuckled at the thought of it. Piri Thomas is not "interviewed." He is encountered. He does not respond to "questions" with "answers." He responds to stimuli with evocations. For Piri Thomas is not just writer, poet and playwright; he is orator, actor, dancer, musician, commentator, and performer. He communicates with his fingertips, eyebrows, and shoulders. He grunts and hisses. He laughs and screeches and roars. He whispers and sighs. He spins and sweats and drums and cries. He emotes.

His words are "bullets" or "butterflies" and he demonstrates both with candor. He has written several books since DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS, and though none of them have received the same critical acclaim, his popularity has never abated the first Puerto Rican writer in the U. S. to gain such recognition, he is a legend in his community. He has carried this responsibility with dignity, since being launched from the mean streets to the literary world. A living, literary icon that persists in a world where those mean streets have evolved from zip guns to Uzi's, and where a holler and quick feet have been replaced by cellular phones and sleek sport cars.

He lives in the verdant hills of Berkeley, California, a far cry from the streets of "EI Barrio." A white picket fence and trim lawn surround his home. A "Dick and Jane" image from elementary school textbooks at P. S. 72. Few who dreamed that dream ever lived it. Piri has. But wherever he goes, "El Barrio" goes with him, so he chooses his bullets and butterflies with care. He has traveled the world on missions of peace and justice. He has shared his thoughts with heads of state and the literary elite alike.

Once, when we met after several years and were catching up on our lives, I slipped into street talk and said to him, "Oh, man I got all kinds of shit going on." He stopped me cold. "Don't use that word, bro. Whatever you're doing is not "shit. " If you talk about it like that, you'll think about it that way, and that's what it will amount to. Your work is too important to be defined by a four-letter word from the streets."

Simple wisdom. A clear message. Piri cares. It is that caring spirit that drives him to create, to perform and to inspire others. Whether he is in the auditorium of a university, in a neighborhood center, in a cell in prison, or at home in his studio, there is certainty in one thing. The ivy covered walls, the clapboard siding, the steel bars, or the picket fence may surround him, but they would never confine him. He takes two words, "truth" and "justice," tucks them under his evocative wings as ballast and takes off on one of his "flows. " You never know where he's going, or when he's coming down, but you know you're in for an exciting ride.

CINTRON: Piri, tell me a little about your background and what influenced you to become a writer.

THOMAS: We are all influenced by others sometimes, whether we like it or not. That's why it's very important to have the wisdom to be influenced by those who can bring good energy (wisdoms), that one can recognize immediately. I, like others. I like yourself, Humberto, grew up in a mean world. I was born in Harlem Hospital--the only hospital in East Harlem that would accept Blacks and Browns. We lived in three worlds: home, school and the streets. The world of my home for the most part was polite and courteous, spiritual and full of wisdom; strong medicine if one chose to listen. In school, it was the hope that you would be assigned a teacher that cared enough to not put you down. To tell the truth, most of my teachers were kind, but others only saw it their duty to teach you to count to 100 and learn enough English so you could push the garment district wagons orbecome supers, porters and janitors, and assistant's assistant to the assistant lavaplatos (dishwasher), as found in one of Pedro Pietri's brilliant poems, "Puerto Rican Obituary."

Bueno, after my beautiful mother Dolores (Doña Lota) passed on when I was fifteen years old, I was on my own, but instead of allowing Mami's spiritual wisdoms to guide me, I got caught up in the sun vival of the streets where most anything goes, a reality of not having; and surviving was a 24-hour special. So I made some big mistakes here and there that landed me in prison. But I knew in my heart that I meant to survive, but with grace. In prison you learn or you burn. I was determined not "to serve time," but rather make time serve me, to educate my mind, not eradicate it. I proceeded to get myself together while in prison; reading and writing, all forms of creativity, helped me do just that.

CINTRON: You talk about writing in prison, but it was many years later before you published DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS.

THOMAS: I got out of prison for Christmas, 1957 and DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS was published in 1967.

CINTRON: What motivated you to start writing? How much of your writing was done in prison? How much after you came back to the streets? I'm not clear chronologically.

THOMAS: I started writing in prison. Although I had failed English in the school system, as a child somebody had recognized my potential, a teacher, in Babylon, Long Island, where we had moved when my father had hit the bolita (numbers) for a little money right after the war began. And this teacher had recognized that I had a talent for expression because when I wrote a composition she assigned, I spelled out how much I loved her and her brunette hair and her hazel eyes. However, I did not dig her pronouns and adjectives and all that shit, you know, because I didn't know what she was talking about. So after she sent the papers back to everyone she called me to her desk and there was this written note there on the paper and it said, "Son, your punctuation is lousy, your grammar is nonexistent. However if you wish to be a writer some day, you will be," and then it said, "P.S. We both love my wife." Signed her husband.

I learned two things from that. I learned that there was somebody who recognized a beauty in me and I also learned that it could be dangerous to mess around with somebody else's wife. I always had a gift for gab. We used to play the Dozens, insulting each ocher in rhyme. But I didn't begin writing in earnest till I got to prison and I realized that first I had to complete my education. So me and Indio, a beautiful Puerto Rican brother who was in for drugs, decided to take the high school equivalency test. We studied and studied and we took the test. When the test results came back we had both passed with dynamite marks. I was so proud; you know, getting chat diploma was my first great feeling of achievement, because when the certificate came it did not say Comstock State Prison. It said University of New York. I could present it with pride.

So then I began to write and the words chat I could not spell I wrote phonetically. I began to write my feelings. I began to make my inner journey, to find out who I was and where I came from. Because outside there was no rest, no pause, it was 150 miles-per-hour-survival. So I went back into time to see the scenes and relive the feelings I had over again. To be with my family again, because that's what kept me going in prison. I would time travel. I would go out there and walk the streets with my familia. And when it got too heavy for me, I put my arms around myself in the darkness of my cell, C513. I would hug myself very hard. I'd kiss my arms just so that love wouldn't die. And I began to write about the cruelty . . . the inner sense of the beauty, the whole thing. I wrote a thesis, studying psychology on my own in prison, about what was going on in my mind, and before I knew it I had poetry flowing out of my soul.

I went before the parole board. They hit me with me two more years. I thought I would go crazy, but my writing helped me to overcome the rage that was building up in me and kept me from being a walking time bomb. I determined that if I had to die I would do it on my feet and not on my knees. That was how it was for me. And although prison is a tough pill to swallow, I had to deal for control because too many brothers in prison, and I'm sure the sisters, too, were becoming psychopaths or vegetables because of the damage to their feelings. And so I wrote and I wrote and I ended up with a manuscript; I was like a monk writing beautifully, looking after my penmanship. Every word was a work of art. Those two years passed quickly, and this time I got my parole.

There was a chaplain inside who I called The White Haired Saint. He never preached to us, he was a friend, someone you could have confidence in. He was also someone I learned from. With him I studied theology, like the Book of Daniel and Revelations. All the energies . . . Buddha, Confucius . . . I absorbed whatever I could understand.... So when I finally came out of prison, I had a doctorate in the art of living. Anyway, I gave him the manuscript and said, "Claude, will you see this gets out?" Because I knew that if they opened it and saw what it was they would destroy it. He said, "Don't worry." He took it. Then, when I had gone through the gates, he came over and said "Here, you forgot your writings."

When I got out, I started to work. I did all kinds of work. My first job was in the garment district, I was a handyman. I also had a part-time job at Macy's. Between the two, they nearly worked me to death. I got married to Daniela Calo in 1959, and we had two children, Ricardo and San-Dee. I didn't want to go back to the gravity of the streets so I joined my Aunt Angelita's Pentecostal Church, Iglesia Rehoboth on 118th St. between Lexington and 3rd Ave. From the church I began working with gang kids, where I met a brother, Ricky Leacock, a great vanguard documentary film maker. And he introduced me to Angus Cameron, an editor at Alfred Knope Cameron was of Scottish background, a fine naturalist, and he respected humans, not for their color but for what they were as humans. I went home for my manuscript after he made an appointment for me, but when I got home I couldn't find it. So I asked, "Where's my manuscript?" and was asked in return, "Woo, was that important?" The children had got into it and wrinkled it up a bit, and somehow it was thrown into the incinerator by mistake. The only copy. I felt the tears jump into my eyes and I fled into the bedroom. We were living in Brooklyn at the time, twelve stories high. I sat down on the bed and looked out the window, and all of a sudden a feeling within me rose and said, "Mira, no te pongas con eso . . . lo escribiste una vez . . . lo puedes escribir otra vez . . . y mejor." ("Look, don't let it get to you . . . you wrote it once . . . you can write it again . . . only better.") I'm telling you this so you know what it is to have a will of strength . . . a spirit . . . that is always there, because otherwise you'll die.

Out of that was born DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS. Up to that point, I had called my work HOME SWEET HARLEM. Once, when I got the manuscript back from Angus Cameron, someone had written on it, "A man who himself is not mean, can walk the mean streets." I liked those words, "mean streets." Later I found out that Angus had been quoting from Raymond Chandler, who had also known some mean streets.

Fortunately, I was able to remember practically every word of the manuscript and I wrote it better. I could remember every word because life is about feelings . . . good, bad or indifferent, and the feelings of those experiences had been branded indelibly into my soul. All I had to do was tune into those feelings and they were transposed into the present time with all theemotions and feelings of that particular time. Everyone can do it if they don't doubt themselves.

CINTRON: Talk to me about jail, social injustice and literature.

THOMAS: Let me tell you something about prison, my friend, because it was behind bars where I first realized that the cruelest prison is the prison of the mind. That's where one--inside or outside--can really do some hard time. The political prisoners, they are free of the prison of the mind since they believe in their cause. I decided that I wasn't going to live in prison. I was going to live with my mind in freeside, to stay in tune with the right feelings and energies. I did not wish to be behavior modified and programmed. So I said to myself, "Listen, Piri, they only got your body, bro, they ain't got your mind."

In prison you can't appear to be scared, you must wear your face cara de palo (wooden-face), so no one can read anything. And I chose those I wished to be with; after all, in prisons there are pecking orders based on crimes committed, with rapists, junkies and crooked cops doing time in that order.

I learned from some of the humans in there. There was this young white guy, a graduate of Princeton University who, with his girlfriend, murdered her mother for the insurance money and left her in a bathtub covered with plaster of Paris. He once said I was a conglomeration of a manifestation, and I asked what did that mean? He said, conglomeration means you are many things, and manifestation is what comes out of it.

I observed and I learned. I met brothers in prison with minds as beautiful and bright as brothers Malcolm X, George Jackson, Jeronimo Pratt and Mummia Abu Jamal, or sisters Dylcia Pagan, Carmen Valentin, and Alejandrina Torres among others. Brothers and sisters who stood tall and walked with a sense of dignity, not with arrogance. Those were the ones that drew my attention. And I was a healer. People would go into depression--and I would do my best to raise their spirits, knowing that if I lifted them up, I would be uplifted, too. I fought hard at times to keep from falling into depression. There are all kinds of prisons, but as I said before, the worst can be your own mind. Street logic imprisons your mind. You know, for all its horror, prison for me turned out to be a painful blessing. I was in a place where I would either die or be refined.

One time in prison, faced squarely with the reality of being locked up, I felt as if I could go insane. But my spirit rose above it and my soul grew stronger. A brother, nicknamed young blood had turned me on to read the book YOUNG BLOOD, by John Oliver Killens, whose words reawakened in me the feeling that I, too, could write. Years later I would meet John Oliver Killens, a beautiful black brother. He was an excellent teacher--my brother, and my dear friend. John was an attorney by profession, but a writer by choice of heart and soul. I could relate to his fine works, like THE COTILLION and AND THEN WE HEARD THE THUNDER--about racism and a riot between black and white American soldiers in Australia. I was inspired by Killens and Ralph Ellison, and the writings of many others as well. I read A.J. Rogers MAN AND SUPERMAN and THE POWER OF POSITIVE THINKING by Norman Vincent Peale. I was reading anything and everything that could help lift my mind up out of the horror of the reality I was living in. I found wisdom in the scriptures, in the holy KORAN, wherever I could find it, including some on the walls. I told myself, "I was not born a criminal from my mother's womb. I was born a beautiful child, just like any other child, into a criminal world, with all of the horrors of injustice constantly going on."

CINTRON: Was there anything to read by Puerto Ricans at that time?

THOMAS: As a child in the thirties in Nueva Yawk, only in Spanish. It would have been great to have books about our history in those days. Ther e are many fine writers out there like Pedro Juan Soto, who wrote about the New York Puerto Rican experience in Spanish, a book called SPICS. Why don't they mention his name as one of the fine pioneers? And Juan Antonio Corretjer, who said, "Aunque naciste en la luna todavia--puertorriqueno eres (Even if you were born on the moon, you are still Puerto Rican.)" The system was and still is intent on assimilation. I used to ask, "Mami, do we have any heroes?" In school I would ask about Puerto Rico and I was told, "It's a nice place to visit as a tourist." I wanted to know if we had heroes like The Colonists--the men and women who fought against England for dignity and independence. I learned eventually that Puerto Rico was and continues to be a colony of the United States, whose large corporations benefited from cheap, available Puerto Rican labor. So what was new in the world?

CINTRON: What effect did DOWN THESE MEANS STREETS have? What effect did publishing it have on your life?

THOMAS: I would say that the effect was tremendous. I was catapulted to national attention, which led to speaking engagements around the country, including the university of Erlangen in Germany. But, overall, it has been an uphill struggle for Puerto Rican writers in the U.S. to get mainstream recognition and publication.

NOt everyone was glad for me.Mami always said, "People don't have to kill you with hate, envy will suffice." I was in the Barrio visiting an old friend, and a dude comes up and starts looking at me kind of bad, so I smile and ask, "Hey man, what's the matter, why you look at me so bad?" He pointed a finger at me and said, "Hey man, you were born in the Barrio. Man, I was born in the Barrio. Man, You was in a gang, I was in a gang. Man, you were into drugs. Man, I was into drugs. Man, you were into stickups and went to prison, man I was into stickups and ended up in prison." "So? I asked softly, shifting my weight into a fighting position. "So, you didn't leave a fucking thing for me to write about." I shook my head sadly and said, "Now that's a fucking cop-out. How many books have been written about the Lone Ranger and Tonto, not to mention Tarzan and the Apes? You mean to say that out of all our people's combined experiences, I've written it all? Man, that is a cop-out." I saw the brother again some years later; he had gone back to school and graduated with a degree in social work.

Mami said we all have powers in us, one is of darkness and the other of light, and it's up to us to choose. Mami said, "It's OK to make money, hijo, but don't let the money make you." I who have been in prison have a high sense of principles reamed from Mami, and Papi, too. It was when I forgot their wisdoms that I grew ice cold to feelings and I had to struggle to come back to the warmth of light. I'm always talking about honor and dignity and some brothers have asked, "How come you always talking about honor and dignity, bro?" and I say, "Vaya, bro, lest we forget and sell our souls." So these are among the feelings of grace that are a source of strength for me.

CINTRON: Tell me what it has meant to you to be Puerto Rican and to be a writer.

THOMAS: Not too many Puerto Ricans in the U.S. were being published in those days. That word Newyorican hadn't been coined yet. It was coined on the Lower East Side but I never identified too much with Newyorican because I felt it kept me stereotyped to one place. I felt I was a bird. I hated tags, man. I have been in the struggle for justice with people who were of different political persuasions--the left, or moderate or liberal. I said to them, "I will struggle by your side for peace and justice, but I don't want to wear side-blinders so that I cannot see the situation on a scale of 360 degrees. It's not, 'My country, right or wrong.' " Hell, I didn't get rid of one slave master of the mind to get another slave master of the mind, not even if the master speaks my tongue. I'll fight for justice by myself if I have to. But thank goodness I've never had to.

Because of this attitude, the Puerto Rican Socialist Party dropped me as not being disciplined enough. But that and more will be in the sequel to DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS, which is titled A MATTER OF DIGNITY.

As Puerto Rican writers in the USA, we have made some progress. There is Felipe Luciano, who stopped writing but should get back to it some time, Pedro Pietri, Sandra Maria Esteves, Judith Ortiz Coffer, Nancy Mercado, Nicolasa Mohr, Tato Laviera, Victor Hernandez Cruz, Martin Espada, Aurora Levins Morales, Mayra Santos, Maria Arrillaga, Miguel Algarin, Papoleto Melendez, Jack Agueros, and many ocher beautiful poets and writers from the island and from the metropolis. I believe that those of us who struggled in the early days opened the door for these wonderful writers. And how many more are out there, with their stories waiting to be told?

But you know, when we so-called Newyoricans go to Puerto Rico, by and large we are rejected. Only now are some bridges beginning to be built, and the ties are in our shared African heritage. Because the power structure of official Puerto Rican Culture with a capital C leaves out a real integration of the African roots into Puerto Rican culture. The indigenous and the African are mentioned, but then Spanish influence is given preference over other cultural forms. So it is fitting that the rejects of official Puerto Rican culture sent out unity with the rejected Puerto Rican culture in the U.S.

CINTRON: You seem to move easily between fiction, autobiography, poetry and plays. How do you explain that?

THOMAS: It's very simple to me. To me, every child is a poet, and every poet is a child. Every child is born with a 360-degree circumference of creativity. Only we're inhibited by outside influences that cast doubts upon what we can do and tell us that we have to be a specialist in this or that field in order to have respect. And I have felt that words are words are words are words are words and they are just like musical notes. You can take musical notes to make salsa, you can take musical notes to make blues, you can take musical notes and make a samba. I am a musical instrument. We all are born out of a sound of rhythm and feelings and flows and when we speak our essence can flow out like a song. My essence as Piri flows out this way. And if we don't look at it that way it's unfortunate, because we lose the joy of doing and the ability to create, to tune into the flow. If you doubt your ability to do this, you won't be able to do it. Hey doubt kills! You doubt your creativity and then you kill yourself when you say, "I can't do it." The only doubt that I really want to have is that I continue to doubt injustice. Because I'll always doubt that. But I will never doubt my creative energies and I will allow no one to doubt for me. I can always feel another person's doubt on me. I dislike it and I say, "Will you kindly doubt for yourself, I didn't ask you to doubt for me."

CINTRON: Your first book was called DOWN THESE MEAN STREETS and you later wrote a play called THE GOLDEN STREETS. Now symbolically there seems to be a convict here. Can you tell us about THE GOLDEN STREETS and how it contrasts with the mean streets you came from?

THOMAS: Ladies & Meesters, did you ever hear about the Puerto Rican dude getting of the Marine Tiger, the banana boat, and walking down into a strange, alien world with his cardboard suitcase in hand, checking out the scene? He comes upon a $5.00 bill, and he kicks it out of the way. His buddy says, "What the hell you doing, that's a $5.00 bill," and he replies, "Hey man, I heard the streets here were paved with S20.00 bills, I ain't going to stoop down to pick up no lousy $5.00 bill." To los pobres (the poor) from all over the world, to the immigrants of all kinds, America was always the Golden Streets. Even when people got pushed into the ghettos of Nueva Yawk, hey, at least they were there from the hope of being able to fit into the so-called American melting pot.

My mother Dolores Montañez was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, in Cerro Gordo which bilingually means Fat Mountain, and my father came from el Oriente de Cuba, Santiago. They both came to this country looking for better living conditions. Well, you know what they found! Hot and cold running cockroaches, king sized rats and horror, hunger and discrimination running free. And promises that never came to be. But they rolled up their sleeves and went to making a fortune of maybe $8.00--$9.00 dollars a week and in our home, poor as it was, my God, everything was clean. Dignity has no price. Just because you're poor doesn't mean you're bereft of your sense of dignity and honor.

And the assimilation that went on with us was terrible. They had no right to assimilate me the way they did--they took my name, Juan Pedro Tomas Montañez and turned it into John Peter Thomas. Who ever heard of a Puerto Rican named John Peter Thomas? That's why I called myself Piri, because that's what my mother called me, "Mira Piri, Mira Piri, and it wasn't till years later that I found out that I was like a boy named Sue. Piri is a woman's name, and that's beautiful to know h honor of Mami, who taught me our language, which I wasn't allowed to speak in school. I remember one day in school when I didn't understand what the teacher said about our homework, I asked my friend in Puerto Rican Spanish, "Que fue lo que dijo esa vieja'("What did that old lady say?") The teacher suddenly jumped on me, and loudly admonished, "Stop talking that burwburwbuburugubu. You must speak English, you're in America now. How else do you expect to become President of the United States if you don't speak English?" Heh, heh heh. I think my young mind said "Hell, she's got more faith than I do."

And out in the streets there were the looks, there were the words. They couldn't decide whether I was a nigger or a spic, so they called me both. But in spite of all the wrongs going on, I was a very happy kid. I used to smile at everybody, even at those who didn't smile back. My father Juan had to tell me. "Son, you have to learn who to smile at. You have to learn how to smell caca twenty miles away. And know the difference between that and flowers, since la caca comes in all colors and walks on two feet." Wisdom from the Barrio ways! My father was Juan Tomas, Johnny they called him. He was a fine baseball player, a fine athlete, very beautiful in his flow.

Altough the pull to assimilate us was great, it seemed that at the same time society really didn't care for us, especially the darker skinned ones. One Christmas eve, after hearing stories about Christmas in Bayamon, or Santurce or Mayaguez, or the La Perla slum or the Llorens Torres Housing Project, I asked my mother, "If Puerto Rico is so great, why are we living here?" Mami rubbed her thumb and forefinger together denoting "economics"--those who flooded here were the poorest of Puerto Rico, descended from a people conquered for 500 years. First there was Spain, then the island was given as booty to the U.S. after the Spanish American War, and was then ravaged by the carpetbaggers who rushed in to make a fortune. Anyone who had any chance at all to make it down there, they stayed. The bourgeoisie of Puerto Rico came to Nueva Yawk for a quick look and then split back to their rolling green hills of their Isla Verde. I did not get to see Puerto Rico until I was thirty-two years of age. But I knew all about it because the family were always into conversations about Puerto Rico and la familia. Mami always spoke about her sister, my aunt Catin and her husband Lolo Castro, a minister as well as businessman. We were told about young Tio Angel Luis who was studying to be a lawyer. Stories were told and repeated about everyone and everything, stories that disabled the feelings, the beauty of the island they came from. And I kept putting together the places from where they each had come until it formed the complete island in my mind and I felt its warmth.

The title The Golden Streets was meant to highlight the contradictions of the situation. Drugs like cocaine and heroin were eating the young in the forties. Somebody was making gold out of all that misery. Somebody was pouring the drugs into Los Barrios--we weren't growing poppy seeds. And all the this-can-make-you-happy advertising for firewater of all kinds, including rum, 5 Star Pete (prunejuice wine). Pouring drugs on a population is nothing new. It's a means of keeping a people subjugated. Japan kept China conquered with opium. Native Americans met the same fate. Not only were alcoholics made out of many, but they also were given blankets, supposedly for warmth, but which were contaminated with the deadly small pox virus.

It is a horror that there are humans who believe so ice cold like this. They believe that there are only two kinds of people in this world, those who rule and those who are ruled. And that's really ice cold! My being a writer gave me access to individuals and life styles representing different classes. Some people invited me so they could study me, not realizing that I also was studying them. In some of those instances, I saw ice cold that surpassed in evil whatever I had seen in prison. It was more like the mentality that produced fascism, capable of the evils committed in places like Dachau and Auschwitz, where I saw victims of the aftermath of World War II as a sixteen year old in the Greek Merchant Marine, on the S.S. Doris sailing under a Panamanian flag.

In tense situations I was always able to send out energies that I wanted others to fed. I learned to do that very well in prison. 'Cause in prison if the guards had ever read the rage in me, they would have killed me dead. Because I hated racism. The only thing that kept me from hating all those that were white, was that once as a young boy I said to my mother, "I hate all whites!" "How dare you?" Mami scolded me, "Why do you want to make the innocent ones pay for those who are racist? You must learn to smell the look."

CINTRON: Most writers when they make public presentations read their own literature. Tell me, Piri, how come you often recite other people's stuff?

THOMAS: Because this is the way I can help pass on the truth of others, their beauty, their wisdom, the sum of our experiences. I have a gift of being able to read the poetry of others. I love to read their work back to them and mirror to them their own feelings. I tune into their feelings and their beacon of soul-flows. I enjoy it because I learn from other sisters and brothers of all the colors. When I was younger I wanted to be original, but one can only add to the original of what was there in the first place. Poems are made by children like me, but only nature can sprout a tree. We all just add a little more flow of extra beauty.

CINTRON: You use the word "flow" in many different ways. What are some of the meanings?

THOMAS: To me "the flow" is that which creates without one having to "consciolize" and "thinkalize" and "workalize" and "what am I gonna doalize." When you get beyond what I'm going to write about, then you're in the flow. "The streets got kicks man, like a bargain shelf" The flow. You're dealing with flow. The feelings must come first, the intellectualizing follows. But the feelings should always be sincere, without the weight of justification for whatever wrongs have been committed. Most children are born with the power of the flow, meant to be utilized for good, but others, like Hitler, put it to use on a negative course. He could mesmerize people into rages as well as being silent party to the horrors committed in the name of a Super Race. Like most things on earth, power can be used for good or evil. That's what I mean when I speak about "flows." There are good flows and demon flows. Take your pick.

CINTRON: You were raised with a multi-cultural background. Tell me more about it.

THOMAS: Sí I sure was. My parents were squeezed in between the Irish, the Italians, the Jews, the Blacks and the Chinese--everybody was represented. We didn't have Puerto Rican movies in those days, only Hollywood and Mexican movies, with a Black film here and there. In those days, movies were our daycare centers. The Spanish language movies were from South America. Mexico had lots of revolution movies and lots of romantic ones, too. Since I could understand them, I could move through the different colors of the Barrio through movies.

I consider myself Un negrito, and I also have blood of the Taino, as well as the blood of the conquerors, the Spanish, and other Europeans along the way. Let me tell you a story. One time I had to take a bus ride to go ship out of Norfolk, Virginia I was about seventeen years old. When we got to the Mason Dixon line our bus driver got out and another bus driver got on, and that son of a gun was a deputy sheriff bus driver with all the rights to carry a gun. And the first thing he said was, "Okay, all colored in the back. All the coloreds in the back." And people got up and I had to decide what to do, and I said, "Hey man, I ain't colored, you know, I'm Puerto Rican." He said, "I don't care what kinda nigger you are, boy. Get your ass in the back or get off this damned bus now." That day I learned that as far as racist whites were concerned, I was more brother with Blacks than I was with that driver. I sure hoped not all whites were like him. I looked at his gun and remembered that discretion is the better part of valor. So I got up and I said to myself, "I'll file this one in the front of my mind."

CINTRON: When did you really begin to be aware of racism in its broader sense?

THOMAS: Let me start at the age when Papi hit the numbers and Mami saved some money and we moved to a foreign country called Babylon, Long Island. I couldn't stand Babylon. That was the home of the KKK. I was the only little grano de cafe (coffee bean) in a sea of white milk. My brothers could "pass," my sister could "pass." Nosotros los puertorriqueños somos así, podemos ser desde negro hasta amarillo. (We Puerto Ricans are like that, we can be anywhere from black to yellow.) I got tired of being asked if my sister was really my sister. So I went back to my Barrio, at the age of fourteen and was sleeping on rooftops and street steps and in back yards. I knew better than to wear out my welcome in the different homes that let me in, so I rotated them. They knew that I was practically an orphan. Sometimes, even with your parents still alive you could be an orphan in that sense. I loved my family but I could not bear the horror of my daily experience. My dignity didn't allow somebody to look at me and call me a nigger. Actually, the first time somebody called me a nigger I ran to the library on 110th street right off 3rd avenue and looked it up in the dictionary. "Niggardly" it said, and it turned out to be a word from Australian and it meant to be stingy. And I went looking for the guy to punch him in the mouth because I wasn't niggardly, Mami had taught us all how to share.

Ah, the mothers. We all had block mothers man, every other mother could be our mother because the mothers gave permission, and every father could be our father because the fathers gave permission. We were taught respect, we bowed our heads to authority. But when we bowed our heads to the school system teachers, they thought it was a sign of servility. They didn't realize it was a sign of respect. You bowed your head. Japanese do it, Chinese did it, all the humans that have respect and beauty in their hearts do it as a sign of respect and humility. But the system persisted to create the generation gap between the parents and the children, and the gender gap between the fathers and the daughters and mothers by other means.

So it was in prison when I began to look at all the injustices objectively, saving my emotions for the creativity. I learned that all of us, although we are similar, we are like fingerprints and cultures, not quite the same, so we should get to know each other, born of respect, speaking tongues of honor instead of with forked tongues. People can justify anything, including dropping the bomb on children and giving themselves medals for it. The children of Earth, from all the Sowetos of the world, have never been given a straight chance. Only a few have ever been allowed in the running. The majority of children of color have been left out of a system whose top priorities are building weapons of war that will be obsolete in a few years and spending billions on other things besides the welfare and quality education of all children. But on goes the spending of billions and billions on everything except the children, cutbacks on the poor being the order of the day. It's outrageous, the hypocrisy, while black children, brown children, red children, yellow children, white children, multi-colored children are dying because of the undisguised hypocrisy.

CINTRON: You obviously have belief in higher powers and life after death. Please tell me more about your thoughts on religion.

THOMAS: And as far as religion is concerned, my beautiful mother Dolores was a 7th day Adventist. After she passed on there was my 2nd mother, Momma Bishop, who was an espiritista. My father was a death bed Catholic who would only see the priest when he was ready to kick the bucket. In prison I studied different religions and asked myself, "Why can't we just put all the religions together and take the very best out of each and blend them with each other instead of constantly being at odds with each other?" Why can't we spell God, Good? G-O-O-D? Why can't we recognize God as a smile on the face of a child that is not being wasted. Children's minds wasted by all the violent crap shown on T.V. There could be the good side of people portrayed in the movies and on T.V., instead of the constant showing of negative sides so people can say, "See, look what kind of fucked up minds ghetto people got. Look, they want to kill cops." That's part of the propaganda they're feeding the Neo-Nazi skinheads, KKK, and all the rest of the haters who are looking forward to a race war in this country. Check out history. It's happened before, it's happening now in former Yugoslavia. It's not called "genocide" any more, it's now called "ethnic cleansing." What a horror! I say we all should be prepared to ward it off by building networks, finding common ground for a struggle among all colors; also there must be those who are for peace and justice, freedom and equality. White people who believe that dignity belongs to ever. everyone. We have to learn how to communicate with each other, not as colors, sexes, preferences, or geographic locations, but as earthlings, born of earth and universe, vaya, how dare anyone call a child a "minority"?

CINTRON: What helped you cross over from prison life to a literary career?

THOMAS: There were many things and many people who helped me along the way. But I give most of the credit to my darling beautiful wife who passed away, Betty Elder. That was her professional name. Betty Gross Thomas, a fine attorney. She rose to specialize in international law for human rights, peace and justice. I had the honor of traveling all over with her, to Geneva, Switzerland for United Nations meetings. I learned so much. She opened up a whole new world for me of Bach and Beethoven, sounds of classical music and multi-ethnic music. This negrito from 108th, 110th, 104th Street. My own brothers, sometimes they say to me, "Hey, what are you doing with a white woman? and I say, "Negrito, I didn't fall in love with her color. I fell in love with her soul. She's the finest." I've been very blessed because when she was ready to make transition (way before her time), she salt, "I know you will need a woman and I want you to know it's all right with me." And so when her spirit flowed I said, "Darling Betty, remember what you said about my needing another woman, well, you do the choosing, for if I go out cruising I'm gonna come out losing, because I'm sure to make a mistake. Vaya, sweetie, you choose the one that's to be for me."

Betty and I had met Suzie Dod in Cuba in 1985. She arranged trips to Cuba and Nicaragua in the early 1980s, very efficient, a real lover of peace and justice and the whole flow. This young woman had been born in the United States of Anglo Saxon parents and since the age of five months was raised in Puerto Rico, where her parents were missionaries. They worked in the mountains with the people in a project of social and economic as well as spiritual development, preaching the word while bringing scientific knowledge, modern conveniences, and health care to areas not yet reached. From the age of five months until she was seventeen years old she lived in Puerto Rico. Spanish was her first language all those years although she spoke English at home. Suzie Dod, Jennifer Suzanne Dot, Suzie we call her, came to study et Lewis and Clark College in Oregon, searching for her other identity. But she basically was an immigrant returning to her own land, and she never felt right in the U.S. She still feels very Puerto Rican in many ways. When she opens her mouth in Spanish she is Rican. She was raised where I was supposed to have been raised and I was raised where she was supposed to be raised. It's wonderful because her alma is Puerto Rican, just like my soul.

CINTRON: How's your Spanish now?

THOMAS: I almost lost my sense of Spanish because the assimilation had been so strong. When I was growing up at first I was thinking Spanish to speak English and it got to the point that I was thinking in English to speak in Spanish. And it wasn't until I went to Puerto Rico at the age of thirty-two that I decided, "Hey, I'm going to get it all back. Every bit of it back," but while I was in Puerto Rico as long as I didn't open my mouth I was Puerto Rican, but as soon as I opened my mouth everybody said, "Aha, tu eres del norte, verdad? (Aha, you're from up North, right?). But, I've earned my way back, and I can think in Spanish and English all at the same time.

CINTRON: What do you think is the biggest obstacle to unity among the various Latino writers and artists?

THOMAS: . We have been brainwashed by materialism and the obsession of being "el quitate tu pa' ponerme yo" (get out of the way so I can take your place). We don't kill each other with hate as much as we do with envy. What we need is a unity of "we" and then we can present a united front against injustice.

Who said the Barrios can't have their wise humans? Who said the Barrios can't have their philosophers? Who said the Barrios can't have their art, their painters, their writing, their poets? Who says that we cannot be all that? Does it only count on a level that because you have money then you're respected? Because you have pieces of paper, degrees, and so forth? When creativity and wisdom is such a natural freedom? Horse Shit! They had me into all that, and as a street kid I learned, "Fuck you all." I said, "I'm gonna take it from you just like they do in the gangster pictures and them Robber Barons and all those people who stole their way and made it big and later became humanitarians, philanthropists who seek to buy their consciences with blood money." I live with principles. I'm a man who came out of the streets, of drugs and eye droppers and all the rest of the shit, I went to prison, and I paid my dues. And I got a right to rise above all that. I am not going to live in the errors. And what people don't forgive me for the past, I forgive myself. I paid the dues and damned if I'm going to live my life with guilt.

CINTRON: How do you see the future?

THOMAS: I see the future--two sides of the coin. We either live in a truly democratic society or suffer the hell of a world order ruled by a cruel fascist system. In short, we will inherit the final solution. Those who are not considered members of a so-called superior race will vanish up in smoke from the face of the earth. We of all colors must unite, it's as simple as that. We must learn to respect each other. The power of the earth is in the hands of 600 or 700 families. All the minerals of the earth, all the wealth of the earth, everything of the earth. They are the self-appointed gods. They have the power of life and death over us economically as well as in might. I heard of Nazi Hitler when I was a kid, of a new world order and recently I heard Bush with his mouth opening up and talking about "a new world order." I said, "Whooah, hey, an order for whom?" I can't stress enough the importance of unity among all the colors. The handwriting is not on the wall, it's on our culitos, on our behinds, on our tushes.

Listen, I have been accused of being many things, among them of being a Communist. Vaya, people don't have to be Communists to know they're getting screwed. I've been to the ideologies. I been to the commercialized religions. I been to the polices and man, they seem to be in the same pew. So I have stayed with the children. They have truth. Thirty-seven years I've been with the children. And before that I was with the children because I was one of the children. Which I skill am in my way. And as a poet once wrote, "One hundred years from now it will not matter what my bank account was, the sort of house I lived in or the kind of car I drove. But the world may be different because I was important in the life of a child."