97 pages • 3 hours read
Walter Dean MyersBad Boy: A Memoir
Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2001A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: "I Am Not the Center of the Universe"
Viola and Geraldine left home in 1949, leaving Myers with more time to think about how to navigate life and put the values he was learning into practice: "But there was something else going on, and that was the idea that while I wanted to be good—and my idea of being good was a very tolerant one—I also wanted to be like other kids so I would have friends" (66). By this point, however, both Myers’s athletic ability and his reading skills had outstripped those of other children his age, causing him to feel increasingly isolated.
Nevertheless, Myers was looking forward to his twelfth birthday; Florence had forgiven him for lying about the beating, and had promised him a party, a glove, and a bat as rewards for his success in school. The day of his birthday, however, Myers learned that his uncle, Lee, had been mugged and killed the previous night. Both the funeral and the drive home were strange experiences for Myers, who saw his adult relatives crying and then watched passers-by going about their daily life, unaware of Lee's death.
Lee's death deeply affected Herbert; he returned from the morgue "wild-eyed and nearly incoherent” and, in the weeks and months that followed, sunk into a state of depression (70). He became detached from his family and the outside world, delving deeper into religion and spending hours listening to church programs on the radio.
Herbert remained in this state for roughly a year, exacerbating the growing sense of isolation Myers was experiencing not only at home but at school. On Mr. Lasher's recommendation, Myers and his friend, Eric, had joined an accelerated class to complete the seventh and eighth grades in one year. Myers enjoyed being around other gifted students, but his race sometimes placed him in uncomfortable positions, particularly during discussions of slavery (75).
Nevertheless, Myers excelled at school and spent increasing amounts of time reading and writing while at home. The flip side of this, however, was that he spent less time talking to his mother, who was also suffering as a result of her husband's depression; among other things, Florence began playing the lottery frequently.
Chapter 8 Summary: "A Writer Observes"
Myers began taking walks around Harlem, attempting to describe his hometown the way he imagined a writer would. Harlem had a rich history, Myers explains, having first been built as an elite neighborhood for wealthy white residents before becoming the center of New York's black community. Myers, however, still struggled to write about Harlem in a way he found satisfying, in part because the neighborhood was so familiar to him: "I had brought romantic images of Mark Twain's Mississippi River with me when I went to the Hudson, but it wasn't to be. There were a few old boats moored on the next pier, one that looked like a coal scow, but nothing even vaguely romantic" (79).
Myers also tried to write about his neighbors: the Dodsons (including Mrs. Dodson, whom Myers resented for trying to stop him from reading comics); Melba Vale (a moderately famous flamenco dancer some disliked for "trying to be 'not just another Negro'"); and Bodie Jones (a boy whose "dad or uncle played in Count Basie's band") (83, 84).
Partly thanks to his observations, Myers was becoming increasingly aware of race as a major factor in American life; Myers would watch, for instance, as Harlem's largely black population boarded the train each morning for "jobs as laborers, cleaning people, messengers" (85). Despite this, Myers resisted strongly identifying with the black community, wanting instead to emulate the writers he loved rather than to achieve "something that was commendable only as a Negro accomplishment" (85). Eventually, however, his frustration with his lack of progress led him to temporarily give up writing.
Meanwhile, Myers’s relationships with his peers were evolving. He had become good friends with his brother, Mickey, but occasionally grew frustrated with Mickey’s “laid-back, almost passive” demeanor and reluctance to fight (84). These kinds of gender norms, as well as racial prejudice, were also beginning to shape Myers’s friendships with his fellow students: at one point, he and several other male classmates got in trouble for attempting to drive a bus to prove themselves "macho," and a boy named Eddie stopped Myers's friend Eric from bringing him to a party simply because Myers was black (86).
Chapter 9 Summary: "Sonnets from the Portuguese"
By the summer after the seventh and eighth grades, Myers’s educational and athletic achievements had caused him to grow even more isolated; he continued to play and enjoy basketball, for instance, but had a hard time relating to the older boys he matched in skill. Myers’s determination not to end up in a blue-collar, low-wage “‘Negro’ job” also set him apart from his teammates (92). The result, Myers explains, was that he lived a kind of double life, hiding his literary interests behind a masculine and “fairly rough” demeanor (92).
Once back in school, Myers joined his fellow students in making life difficult for their ninth-grade teacher, Mrs. Finley: he and his male classmates chewed tobacco in class and routinely started spitball fights. Myers did, however, appreciate some of the literature Mrs. Finley asked them to read, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s emotional sonnets and Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
[It] did not have the elegance of any of the sonnets we had read, nor did it have the soaring language of a poem by Shelley or Byron. It was poetry designed to tell a tale […] It had a symbolism that wasn’t in the other poems, and it also involved the poet’s ideas about the moral responsibility of the mariner (99).
Other writers gave Myers more difficulty, and he sometimes struggled to see himself in the British authors the class studied:
The prints we saw of Shelley and Byron were of ethereal young white men with flowing hair. Mrs. Finley made them sound as if they were naturally brilliant, and I studied the images, trying to discern who they were. It was clear they were like no one I had ever known (97).
Despite living in Harlem, Myers explains, he was unaware of the work of black writers like Langston Hughes.
Myers and his classmates never settled down, and at the end of the year Mrs. Finley scolded them for wasting their talents. This itself made an impression on the students, however, and Myers and his classmates left Mrs. Finley’s class with confidence in themselves and their abilities. For Myers, however, academic success meant drifting further away from his parents; Herbert, for instance, never commented on Myers’s poems, which he later learned was because his father couldn’t read.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
Bad Boy is a coming-of-age story, and Lee’s death marks a major turning point in Myers’s growth. As the title of the chapter (“I Am Not the Center of the Universe”) suggests, the event shatters Myers’s childish self-centeredness. His previous certainty that his parents’ lives revolved around his own hopes and desires is common in young children, but obviously mistaken; Lee’s death disrupts a day that was “supposed” to belong to Myers, and then throws his father into a profound depression that prevents him from fully attending to Myers’s (or Florence’s) needs. At the time, Myers struggles to cope with this shift in family dynamics, which makes the fact that Bad Boy is a memoir especially significant. In retrospect, Myers is able to see Herbert less emotionally and more clearly: as a man, with human strengths and weaknesses, rather than simply as Myers’s father.
In some ways, Myers’s recognition that his parents have lives and concerns beyond him goes hand in hand with another dawning realization—namely, that society at large doesn’t necessarily care about his own hopes and dreams. Although he sometimes lashes out in frustration, Myers is by and large a “good” boy, in the sense that he wants to lead a life consistent with the values he has learned. He also initially believes that leading this kind of life will pave the way for him to achieve his goals: “I believed in a certain fairness. Over the long haul things would have a way of working themselves out toward an essentially good position […] By accepting [my school’s] values, I imagined, I would move into a society that would find me as wonderful as I found it” (66). Increasingly, however, it seems that this may not be the case. Although Myers adores much of what he reads in school, he is also slowly becoming troubled by the fact that virtually all of his role models are white, since this raises the question of whether there is room for him in the world of literature he wants to join.
Of course, there is a long history of black literature in the United States—including in Myers’s own neighborhood. At the time Myers was attending school, however, the work of these writers hadn’t yet become part of the curriculum. Instead, the work of white (and predominantly male) writers was taught on the assumption that it embodied universal artistic standards. To be sure, Myers finds many things to admire and draw on in the literature he studies, including some elements he can relate to his own experience; he enjoys and imitates Elizabeth Barrett Browning ("Aurora Leigh," "How Do I Love Thee?"), for instance, because her work focuses on the writer’s subjective thoughts and feelings. Nevertheless, the exclusive focus on white authors leads Myers to unconsciously adopt some of the values of a racist society—including, most obviously, a hatred of his own blackness. He admits, for instance, that he “secretly […] wanted to be an English poet” (97). This desire contributes to Myers’s growing struggles as a writer; he finds himself unable to write about the things he has direct knowledge and experience of (for instance, life in Harlem) because he is trying to see it the way writers like “Byron and Shelley” would (80). Myers’s growing immersion in the literature he studies also cuts him off from his community in other, more concrete ways—for instance, by distancing him from working-class men like his father, who never learned to read.
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