logo

68 pages 2 hours read

Walter Dean Myers

Scorpions

Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1988

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Background

Authorial Context: Walter Dean Myers and His Legacy

Walter Dean Myers was born in West Virginia in 1937. After his mother, Mary Green, died when he was two years old, his father, George Myers, struggled to care for his kids. Myers was taken in by foster parents, Florence and Herbert Dean. Florence was the first wife of his biological father, and Herbert was her new husband. They raised Myers in Harlem, New York, and he later adopted their last name as his middle name to honor them.

Though Myers grew up in the 1950s and ’60s—more than 20 years earlier than his protagonist in Scorpions—his childhood has many similarities to that of Jamal. Like Jamal’s Mama, the Deans provided Myers with a loving and devoutly religious home. Even so, Myers had a tough and lonely childhood. He had a speech impediment and “often found [himself] leading with [his] fists when teased” (“About Walter Dean Myers.” Walter Dean Myers website. 2023). He got in fights and was a disruptive student who struggled academically. Jamal, similarly, is most often aggressively defensive when confronted. Even though Jamal is smart and enthusiastic about some subjects, he struggles in school because the system is not designed to support or engage him.

Jamal has a creative outlet in drawing and painting, just as his author did. Myers discovered a love of writing when his fifth-grade teacher made all students read in front of the class, and he composed a poem that avoided words that tripped up his speech impediment. He learned to turn to books to help him escape the challenging parts of his life. “Reading,” he wrote, “pushed me to discover worlds beyond my landscape, especially during dark times” (“About Walter Dean Myers”), and particularly when his uncle was murdered when Myers was 14, leading his family to depression and alcoholism from the grief. He read voraciously and loved authors such as Dickens, Balzac, and Joyce, but none of them touched on his experiences as a Black boy.

In high school, Myers had an English teacher who recognized his talent and encouraged him to write. Though he dropped out of Stuyvesant High School to join the Army on his 17th birthday, he didn’t forget her advice. After he got out of the service and was doing odd jobs to make ends meet, he began writing at night. He started out with columns and articles for tabloids and men’s magazines. Then, he read the 1957 short story “Sonny’s Blues” by African American writer James Baldwin. The heart-rending story about brotherhood, loss, drug abuse, and unmet aspirations (topics that also come up in Scorpions) is set in Myers’s old neighborhood of Harlem. The story made Myers realize that he too could write from and about his experiences. When he tried, he kept returning to his youth: “Somehow I always go back to the most turbulent periods of my own life. I write books for the troubled boy I once was, and for the boy who lives within me still” (“About Walter Dean Myers”).

In 1968, he got his first break by entering and winning a writing contest put on by the Council on Interracial Books for Children with his picture book “Where Does the Day Go?” The publication of this picture book heralded a long and distinguished career in children’s literature. Myers wrote more than 100 books, including poetry, picture books, novels, short stories, biographies, memoirs, histories, and many bestsellers. His awards include the American Library Association’s Margaret Edwards Award, two Newberry Honor books (including one for Scorpions), five Coretta Scott King Awards, and the Michael L. Printz Award. In 2012, Myers was appointed as the third ever National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature by the US Library of Congress.

Myers was also an activist who pushed for more representations of African Americans and other marginalized communities in books for children. He believed that literature could help address ongoing systemic racism in the United States. In an editorial printed two years prior to the publication of Scorpions, he argued:

If we continue to make black children nonpersons by excluding them from books and by degrading the black experience, and if we continue to neglect white children by not exposing them to any aspect of other racial and ethnic experiences in a meaningful way, we will have a next racial crisis (“I Actually Thought We Would Revolutionize the Industry.” The New York Times. 9 Nov. 1986, p. 50).

Today, his many titles—especially Scorpions and Monster (1999)—are still widely read and taught in schools. He opened the door for more diverse authors and subjects in books for young people, and his legacy of bringing the Black urban experience into children’s literature carries on today.

Historical Context: Harlem in the 1980s

Scorpions is set in Harlem and mentions many landmarks associated with the New York City borough, like Marcus Garvey Park and 125th—Harlem’s “Main Street.” Originally founded as a Dutch settlement in 1658, the neighborhood, which covers much of northern Manhattan, became a fashionable residential area in the 19th century. During an economic depression that began in 1893, many of the high-rise apartment buildings were left vacant. Landlords began renting vacant units to African American tenants, and, by World War I, it had become a predominantly Black residential and commercial area. In the 1920s, it was the heart of a flourishing Black artistic movement commonly referred to as the Harlem Renaissance. Eastern Harlem (nicknamed “Spanish Harlem”) was also a center for New York’s sizable Puerto Rican community, to which Tito’s family belongs in Scorpions.

Discrimination kept African American and Puerto Rican residents of New York City confined largely to Harlem for many decades. The available housing grew increasingly overcrowded and was poorly maintained, with many landlords simply abandoning buildings when they no longer complied with safety codes. Public services like police stations, schools, and medical centers followed suit. High unemployment led to widespread poverty in the area. This deterioration of the neighborhood is seen in Scorpions. Both of Jamal’s parents find it difficult to secure a steady job. For example, the place where Jamal knows that Mack hangs out is a former grocery store that is now a crack house. Myers describes the disrepair in detail. It’s “mostly boarded over,” has a makeshift sign, and one window is covered in a “big cardboard ad for cigarettes” (36). Inside, there are depressing traces of the building’s former purpose, like a “few dusty cans of vegetables […] spaced unevenly on dusty shelves” (37). Even worse, the Scorpions’ headquarters is an abandoned firehouse, suggesting the breakdown of public infrastructure and services.

Scorpions also portrays the prevalence of drugs, gangs, and violence in Harlem. In the 1980s, criminal and gang activity was on the rise there. Gun violence was also more prevalent—1983 alone saw 523 gang-related murders in upper Manhattan. There was also a crack cocaine epidemic. Gangs like the Scorpions earned money and power by dealing the highly addictive, illegal drug, fueling the epidemic. Widespread poverty and diminished public services meant that there was little oversight of illicit activities and created a vicious cycle for children like Jamal becoming tempted by or dragged into a gang.

During the 1980s, local community-based organizations began trying to address the negative development trends in Harlem. More public housing was built, the public schools were re-organized, and improved healthcare facilities were developed. The Harlem that Myers depicts in Scorpions does not highlight these developments, but there is a small instance of a local landlord who owns a building near Jamal’s turning the trash heap behind their building into a garden that all the residents appreciate. This example of a local resident engaging others to lift up their own community is one of Jamal’s favorite things to look at and draw, an implied alternative to getting drawn into the dark, boarded-up dives of drug abuse and gang activity. In the end, the reader is left with the sense that Jamal’s ambiguous future is like that of his neighborhood—it could go either way. (Note: Today, Harlem has been significantly gentrified. The population is also no longer predominantly Black.)

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text
blurred text