Bad Boy: A Memoir

“Years later, when I had learned to use words better, I lost my ability to speak so freely with Mama.”

As a young boy, Myers is very close to his mother, who not only sparks his interest in language, but also talks to him about things that, Myers believes, she didn’t discuss with others. He remarks, for instance, that Florence told him she liked to yodel, and even showed off her talent for him—something she wouldn’t even do for her husband. In this way, Florence and Myers come to share a kind of “secret language” private to their own relationship (14). It’s ironic, then, that the very love of language Myers learns from Florence eventually causes them to drift apart; Florence never had the educational opportunities Myers does, and as time goes on, she no longer knows how to speak to the issues that concern him. This in turn prevents Myers from speaking “freely” with his mother; late in the book, for instance, he imagines trying to explain his depression to Florence, saying, “If I had told her that I had pain, she would have held me in her arms and comforted me. But to tell her that it pained me to question the meaning of morality would have, I think, puzzled her” (168).

“The summer of 1947 was one of eager anticipation for black people across the country. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby, two black players from the all-black Negro Leagues, had finally been accepted into major-league baseball. Joe Louis was heavyweight champion of the world, and ‘Sugar’ Ray Robinson was the welterweight champion. The president, Harry S. Truman, was negotiating with black leaders to integrate the armed forces. The New York Amsterdam News, our local weekly Negro newspaper, suggested that the United States was now going to treat Negroes as equals for the first time.

“Most of my life revolved around school and church. The schools I went to were integrated, and the church always had whites involved in some capacity. Like many black youngsters raised in northern cities, I was not aware of a race ‘problem’ other than what I heard from older black people and an occasional news story.”

As a coming-of-age story, Bad Boy not only traces Myers’s development as a writer, but also his growing awareness of himself as a black man in America. As he says in this passage, Myers didn’t initially consider race (or racism) particularly important factors in his life, and the historical events he cites here seem to justify this optimism; as he says, they suggest that society is on the brink of “treat[ing] Negroes as equals for the first time.” However, by placing his own childhood understanding of race within the context of U.S. race relations more generally, Myers implicitly makes it clear that individuals can’t escape or opt out of the legacy of racial inequality—something that Myers himself begins to realize as a teenager.

“In Harlem the precise accents of northern-born blacks mixed with the slow drawls of recent southern immigrants and the lilting accents from the islands. Downtown, white people wore suits and white shirts to jobs in offices and stores. In Harlem, where the laborers lived, people wore bright colors deemed inappropriate for offices.”

As a teenager, Myers comes to resent aspects of his life in Harlem, largely because he views it as standing in the way of his dreams of becoming a writer. As an adult, however, Myers learns to appreciate the unique cultural experience of growing up in Harlem, as well as his experience of blackness more generally. Here, for instance, he depicts Harlem as a vibrant and diverse neighborhood that makes other parts of the city look drab and boring. Even more significantly, he draws attention to the many accents and voices of Harlem, all stemming in one way or another from black culture and communities. This observation both indicates the young Myers’s growing appreciation for language, and hints at the way in which, as an adult, he will rediscover his own voice by drawing on his experiences as a black man.

"I read the poem I had published over and over. It was the first time I had seen my name in print, and it made me feel important.”

From a very young age, Myers sees reading and writing as ways of establishing and affirming his identity; in this passage, for instance, the mere fact of seeing his name in print causes him to take pride in himself. The identity Myers forges for himself as a writer isn’t entirely without problems—looking back, he realizes that reading and imitating the works of almost exclusively white authors contributed to his sense of self-loathing as an adolescent—but it is one that he ultimately embraces once he finds a way to reconcile it with his racial identity.

“Mr. Lasher quietly explained to my mother that all the tests I had taken indicated that I was quite smart, but that I was going to throw it all away because of my behavior.

“‘We need more smart Negro boys,’ he said. ‘We don’t need tough Negro boys.’”

Having Mr. Lasher as a teacher is a turning point for Myers, who was previously a bit of a delinquent. It’s Mr. Lasher’s faith in Myers that inspires him to do better by improving his grades and behaving in class. In this passage, Mr. Lasher spells out his reasons for wanting to help Myers; although Lasher himself is white, he recognizes the need for greater diversity in the educated, professional classes. His words also introduce an idea that becomes increasingly clear over the course of the book—namely, that cultural standards of masculinity differ for white men (who are expected to wield social and economic power) and black men (who are expected to wield physical power). However, while Mr. Lasher and the other teachers who encourage Myers are well-meaning, they don’t seem to fully appreciate how difficult it will be for Myers to gain access to the predominantly white professional world.

“The next two days I couldn’t go to school. Mama brought me food and put in on a chair near my bed. She didn’t say anything to me, just looked at me as if she had never seen me before.”

Towards the end of sixth grade, Myers seriously injures himself trying to jump onto a passing cab’s bumper. When his father asks what happened, however, Myers panics and claims that Florence beat him, causing Herbert to become very angry at his wife. Florence is understandably deeply hurt by Myers’s lie, and although she quickly forgives him, the incident contributes to a rift between mother and son that only grows wider as Myers’s interests become further and further removed from Florence’s experiences. In this passage describing Florence caring for Myers after his injury, it’s particularly significant that she “look[s] at [Myers] as if she had never seen [him] before”; Myers is in some ways becoming a stranger to his family.

“Dad’s grief for his brother was as real as if it were a stranger who lived with us, a stranger who had taken my place in the center of the universe.”

 For Myers, part of growing up means coming to see his parents in new and more complex ways. Although Myers was never as close to Herbert as he was to Florence, the realization that his father has relationships, experiences, and emotions that don’t revolve around Myers himself still comes as a shock (all the more because Lee dies on the eve of Myers’s twelfth birthday—a day Myers expected would be all about him). Implicitly, Myers is also coming to understand that his parents are fallible, since Herbert’s depression after his brother’s death causes considerable strain on the family. Myers, however, isn’t fully able to cope with these realizations at the time, which exacerbates the tension within the household and gives his memories of Herbert and Florence a regretful tone.

“The black kids in the class wanted to identify with the values we were being taught, and the concept of being slaves was a clear deflection of those values. The teachers didn’t seem to notice that the black kids weren’t comfortable with the textbook. They also didn’t seem to notice anything wrong in our music class when we sang ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ the version with the ‘darkies’ being gay.”

The above passage introduces a tension that becomes clearer and clearer over the course of Bad Boy: Myers’s intelligence gives him access to educational opportunities that hold out the promise of a better life; in practice, however, that promise is still rarely extended equally to people of color. As a preteen, Myers still largely accepts the “values” he is learning in school—most notably, the idea that hard work and talent inevitably lead to success. Here, however, he is beginning to see the ways in which these values are contradicted by ongoing, unacknowledged racism in both the curriculum and society at large.

“'By this time there were two very distinct voices going on in my head, and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life, and establishing myself as a male. It was a fairly rough voice, the kind of in-your-face tone that said I wouldn’t stand for too much nonsense either on the basketball courts or in the streets. The other voice, the one I hid from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature.”

As Myers approaches adolescence and begins thinking about what it means to be a man, he becomes increasingly aware of being pulled in two different directions. As he puts it later in the book, a certain form of black and/or working-class masculinity is “expressed in muscle, in being someone who wouldn’t take any nonsense” (176). The problem is that while Myers doesn’t entirely dislike this view of masculinity (he enjoys and is good at sports, for instance), he isn’t comfortable with some of its implications—specifically, that an interest in language and ideas is feminine. On the flip side, the “vocabulary of literature” doesn’t seem compatible at this point with what Myers values about his life in Harlem. Although Myers says in this passage that he could “move easily” between these two “voices,” one of the main struggles of his life is to find a way to actually merge them by writing about his experiences as a black man.

“Things were seriously beginning to fall apart at home. Looking back, I can see that we were all trapped in our own unhappy circumstances. Pap didn’t like living in his son’s house. My father didn’t want the burden that it placed on his relationship with Mama, and Mama just hated that it seemed as if her life was being put on hold while Dad dealt badly with the economics of survival […] I feel rotten for having blamed him for being poor, and even more rotten for not realizing that I was doing it.”

The above passage gets to the heart of the Dean family’s problems during Myers’s high school years; each member of the family has become so wrapped up in their own private frustrations that they’re no longer attuned to what those around them are going through, and are increasingly unable even to talk to one another. The fact that Myers doesn’t exclude himself from this speaks to the ways in which his perspective on his parents has shifted over time. To some extent, Myers suggests, his teenage self still viewed his parents as existing solely to serve his needs, so he blamed his father for his own increasingly gloomy future prospects. It isn’t until many years later that Myers is able to recognize how unfair this was to Herbert.

“I would dream of meeting someone, a boy or girl who would be a secret reader as I was, who would feel the same sense of being alone as I did, who would want to meet me and be my friend. Together we would not be ashamed of being bright or liking poetry. The kids at Stuyvesant were all bright, among the brightest in the city, but my growing shyness made it hard for me to make connections. I longed to have a school sweater, a school jacket, the symbols of belonging. They were out of the question as we struggled just to make ends meet.”

Although a rigorous school like Stuyvesant should, in theory, be the kind of place where Myers could thrive, going there proves to be a disastrous decision. In part, this is because the school’s emphasis on math and science doesn’t correspond to either Myers’s talents, or his interests. On a deeper level, however, entering a school full of “bright” students does nothing to assuage Myers’s growing loneliness. In fact, it exacerbates it, because while Myers shares his classmates’ intelligence, he doesn’t share their financial security. The assumption at Stuyvesant is that most students will go on to attend college, but Myers quickly realizes that this is unlikely for him. As a result, he feels like an outcast, unable to even afford a sweater or jacket that might help him feel as though he “belongs.”

“Getting and doing for oneself was [Herbert’s] advice on everything. He talked constantly about having two lists. One list consisted of things you wanted, the other of things you were willing to work for. I don’t think that, having been raised in a segregated Baltimore, he ever imagined I would need to learn interaction with whites, or to deal with being black in any but a defensive manner.”

Although Herbert and Florence certainly aren’t unaware of how widespread racism is—in fact, they moved to New York partly in an attempt to escape it—they aren’t equipped to help Myers navigate the particular challenges he’s encountering in his life as a student. Herbert, for instance, largely embraces a very American ideal of individualism; he believes that it is each person’s responsibility to carve out for themselves the life they want, and within his own community this belief works, up until a point. Myers, however, is not only interacting with white society but learning to aspire to that society’s values, and Herbert’s advice has less relevance when it comes to addressing the racial and economic roadblocks standing between Myers and the life he wants to live.

“The idea that creative writing could be anyone’s job never entered my mind […] I didn’t know of any living person who made money as a writer. The few articles I had read dealing with writers spoke about how they had conceived their ideas, or what they were currently writing, never about money.”

Although Myers knows from a relatively young age that he wants to write, he doesn’t consider pursuing it as a career until much later. This speaks in part to Myers’s working-class background; he notes, for instance, that his father would talk about “‘good’ jobs in the post office or on the police force”—the implication being that these are the most prestigious jobs someone in their position can reasonably aspire to (116). It’s also significant, however, that Myers never hears any teacher or author talk about writing as a way to earn a living (and therefore as a career that Myers himself might be able to pursue). The underlying assumption is that art exists and deals with a world totally detached from economic concerns. Myers largely accepts this idea as a teenager, but pushes back against it as an adult, using his writing as a way of talking about issues like poverty and race.

“People wanted to look at me and make a quick and simple decision as to who I was. I was big and I played ball and I fought, and those qualities meant, to a lot of people, that I must have a very limited intellectual life. Others were satisfied to label me as a black person and attach to the label any definition they might have as to what that meant. There were those who accepted me as a reader but then would separate me, in their thinking, from anything they accepted as black. But my life was filled with the cultural substance of blackness.”

As Myers struggles to define his identity as a teenager, he constantly runs up against the assumptions of those around him—for instance, the dismissal of those who see him in purely racial (and often racist) terms, or the assumption by his teachers that his interests somehow mean he isn’t “really” black. Myers understandably resents these kinds of snap judgments, particularly because they reinforce a divide he already senses growing between his blackness and his growing intellectualism. However, Myers’s solution—to simply distance himself from his race—doesn’t work; he can’t escape the assumptions of others, and even if he could, cutting himself off from the “cultural substance of blackness” would only deepen his social isolation.

“When [Herbert] brought [the used typewriter] home and put it on the kitchen table, I wouldn’t touch it. It was not the machine I had imagined, or the machine I had worked so hard for. For the next months I hardly spoke to Mama, or she to me. I think that her hurting me made her feel worse than I felt. She began drinking even more.”

As Myers’s despair about his future deepens, his relationship with his parents deteriorates. Florence—who is preoccupied with her own problems, including the presence of Herbert’s misogynistic father—begins drinking and gambling to cope, eventually spending the money Myers had saved up for a typewriter. Myers is furious, as well as disappointed by the old-fashioned typewriter his father purchases for him instead. In retrospect, Myers clearly regrets the way he behaved; he realizes, for instance, how terrible his mother felt about what she did, and presumably also sees Herbert’s gift for what it was—a loving gesture made even more meaningful by the fact that he doesn’t really understand why writing is important to his son. At the time, however, the family seems to be falling apart under the weight of different pressures; although each member of the family clearly still loves the others, their preoccupation with their own concerns has made them unable to communicate with one another.

“I didn’t like fighting […] but something inside me was happy about being in the fight […] It was more a feeling that, when I was fighting, I stopped feeling the sense of helplessness that seemed to be overtaking me. I had hoped to become part of a special way of life. That life would have had to do with ideas and people who took those ideas and shaped them into a kind of power. But that life seemed, in my growing isolation, ever more remote.”

When Myers intervenes to prevent Frank from being beaten up, Frank asks him whether he likes fighting. The conflicted feelings Myers expresses in the above passage explain why he doesn’t answer directly. Although Myers doesn’t particularly enjoy fighting, it’s one of the few remaining areas of his life where he seems to have any control. What’s more, it’s a response to what Myers sees as a broken promise on the part of society; Myers once believed that if he acted in all the right ways, he could enter “a special way of life,” but it’s now becoming clear to him that that isn’t true. As a result, he sees no reason not to revert to former bad habits like fighting. Implicitly, this passage is also a commentary on the rates of violence in some poor communities and communities of color; as Myers says a few pages later, the desperation and loneliness he feels is “the same reasoning that some friends of [his] used when they joined gangs” (138).

“At sixteen I wasn’t always sure what I meant. I also did not know who my audience would be. Would I write for black people like the guys I played ball with? I didn’t think so. Would I write for a white world that I thought might exist but had never really experienced? And if I did, would my writing be accepted?

“In the fall of 1953 I wanted to write stories with secret meaning that would relate to people like me, no matter their color or position in life […] I also wanted to put down on paper the labyrinth of my own fears as well as a safe path through that labyrinth.

“During this period my writings from day to day were nearly incomprehensible even hours after I had finished them. All the pieces were there, but the puzzle of fitting them together was escaping me. I sensed I was losing control of my writing.”

The above passage captures the problem at the heart of Myers’s early struggles as a writer. In effect, Myers has accepted the idea that the values and norms of white society are universal, and that writing about black experience would therefore make him a niche writer. However, this leaves him with nowhere to go in his own writing; he can’t write for or about a world that he has “never really experienced,” but he resists writing about his own experiences for fear that he would be producing something “commendable only as a Negro accomplishment” (85). As a result, Myers’s writing becomes more and more “incomprehensible,” which is particularly ironic given that he began writing in part because he felt it allowed him to express himself more clearly than he could in speech.

“Sometimes Frank Hall would come to my apartment. He told me how great it was. I found out he was sleeping in hallways or in Morningside Park. Mama took an instant dislike to him, I think because of his eyes. They were always wide, red rimmed, and staring. His sandy hair was discolored in patches to a grayish blond. He looked black and yet nonblack, calm yet on the edge of turmoil, vaguely dangerous.”

As Myers drifts away from the rest of his friends and family, he grows closer to Frank. His reasons for doing so become clear in this passage, where he describes Frank as a person who doesn’t quite fit into any group; he is homeless, and his mental illness keeps him on the edges of society. Perhaps most importantly, at least from Myers’s point of view, Frank looks racially ambiguous, which jibes well with Myers’s internal conflict surrounding his blackness and his aspirations in life; as he puts it later, “Frank looked the way I felt” (181).

“I knew that if I had not scored so highly on the I.Q. tests, I would have been considered just bad, or rebellious. But I was certifiably bright and, therefore, disturbed.”

Despite Myers’s frustrations with his life, he recognizes that he has been lucky compared to some of his peers. As Myers learned all the way back in fourth grade, students (particularly students of color) who act out can be sent to reform school or potentially even prison. Myers’s “certifiable” intelligence, however, has caused multiple teachers to take an interest in him, and ultimately leads to more lenient treatment when he begins cutting classes; instead of being expelled from Stuyvesant, Myers is sent to see a psychologist.

“My next session with Dr. Holiday went well. She asked me about my family life and asked me if I had ever had sex with a girl. I answered that I had. I knew the answer that I was supposed to give. I was black and sixteen. If what I had heard from other kids my age was true, they were all having sex. Then, just before I left, she asked a final question.

“‘Do you like being black?’”

Myers frequently expresses frustration with the expectations others have of him; he comes to resent being black, in part, because the assumptions and stereotypes associated with blackness seem to deny him the opportunity to craft his own unique identity. Nevertheless, Myers often caters to those assumptions, probably because he has lost faith in his ability to convince people to see him in any other way, and simply wants things to go as smoothly as possible. Here, for instance, he provides Dr. Holiday with the answer he assumes he is “supposed to give”—that is, the answer she already expects is true. This is one reason why Dr. Holiday’s follow-up question is such a pivotal step in Myers’s development. In asking Myers whether he likes being black, Dr. Holiday is prompting him to think not just about the negative associations he has with blackness, but about what being black could and does mean to him. In other words, she opens up the possibility of thinking of race not exclusively as something forced on a person, but as an identity that can be personal in the same way that Myers’s identity as a writer is. Eventually, this will allow Myers to realize that he doesn’t need to reject his racial identity in order to be his own person.

“But it seemed to me that both of these concepts, career and maleness, were only subdivisions of the larger idea of race. When I thought of the major careers, I thought of whites, not blacks. When I thought of maleness, I thought of whites with political or economic power and blacks with muscle. My definition of a black man was, except for the rare instance, a man without an outstanding career, and a man who had to define his maleness by how muscular he was.”

Although Myers admits that he had never thought much about what being black meant before Dr. Holiday asked him, he quickly realizes that he has definite ideas about it, and that these ideas actually take precedence over other identities he’s spent more time consciously considering. This speaks to how pervasive Myers’s experience of racial inequality has been, and it also helps explain his troubled relationship to his own racial identity; because he essentially can’t imagine a black man living the kind of life he values (i.e. working as a writer), Myers tries to distance himself from being black. It is also worth noting that the common thread linking Myers’s descriptions of white and black masculinity is power; the implication is that in the absence of political and economic power, black men turn to physical power as a way of fulfilling gender norms.

“I had never sat down and said, ‘Let me think about being black.’ But somehow all the language of race, the history of what it meant to be black in America, all the ‘niggers’ and all the images of slaves, and all the stories about my people being lynched and beaten, and having to sit in the backs of buses, had piled up in the corners of my soul like so much debris that I had to carry around with me. Being black had become, at best, the absence of being white. The clearest thing I knew was that there was no advantage in being black.”

Despite not having consciously thought about being black, Myers has grown up in a society where it is all but impossible not to absorb others’ ideas about race. Although Myers himself doesn’t necessarily buy into bigoted stereotypes, he can see for himself that being black carries with it real-world disadvantages, so it’s not surprising that his overall impression of blackness as a teenager is negative. It is particularly significant that Myers describes being black as an “absence” (in this case, of the positive experiences and values Myers associates with whiteness). Because Myers has had few black role models in the areas of life that most interest him, his ability to imagine positive ways of being black is limited.

“It was years before I discovered the shame that hid [Herbert] from me. My father couldn’t read. He had no idea how to reach the person I had become and was too embarrassed to let me know.”

The distance Myers’s interest in literature causes between him and his mother is nothing compared to its effects on his relationship with his father. At the time, Myers likely assumed that Herbert viewed his interests as effeminate; he had, for instance, refused to come see his son years earlier in a recital because he “didn’t think young boys should be dancing around a stage in skimpy outfits” (55). In retrospect, however, Myers suggests that it was at least as much shame as disapproval that prevented his father from reaching out to him. The passage, in other words, is another reminder of both the power and the limitations of language; the problem isn’t simply that Herbert can’t read, but rather that he and his son can’t find a way to communicate across their differences.