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 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: "Roots"
Myers begins his memoir with an account of the world (and family) he was born into, explaining that this backstory cannot be separated from his own experiences: "While we live our own individual lives, what has gone before us, our history, always has some effect on us" (1). In Myers's case, this history can be traced back to the era of slavery; his great-great-uncle, Lucas D. Dennis, worked on a plantation in what would later become West Virginia. After the Civil War, Dennis moved to Martinsburg, West Virginia, where his family "merged" with another family—the Greens—ultimately leading to the birth of Myers's mother, Mary Dolly Green (3).
Molly, however, died while Myers himself was too young to remember her. What's more, his family life was complicated by the fact that Molly was his father's, George Myers's, second wife. George’s first wife, Florence, was the woman who actually raised Myers. Myers therefore details Florence's background as well, explaining that her mother was a German immigrant who married a Native American man. However, while Florence herself was biracial, her family didn't approve of her marriage to George Myers, which ended in divorce after the couple had two daughters, Geraldine and Viola.
Florence eventually remarried, this time to the man—Herbert Dean—who would become Myers’s adoptive father. Herbert had declined to go into his own father's hauling business—and later left his hometown of Baltimore—to marry Florence: "The woman […] was white, and that posed a problem in Baltimore. Perhaps, Herbert thought, it would be less of a problem in New York" (5). The couple therefore settled in Harlem, where they eventually brought Florence's daughters, Geraldine and Viola, to live with them. When they did, they also met the five children George Myers had had with Mary, and soon adopted the youngest son—Myers himself—as well.
Chapter 2 Summary: "Harlem"
The first home Myers remembers clearly is Harlem, which he describes as a "magical place, alive with music that spilled onto the busy streets from tenement windows and full of colors and smells that filled [his] senses" (7). In fact, some of his earliest memories involve dancing in the street to music playing on radios; people would toss pennies to him, and he used these, as well as the account Florence opened for him at the local grocery, to buy treats like chocolate and ice pops. He would also spend time following Florence around the house as she did chores.
Initially, Florence sometimes took work outside the home as a maid, but after Myers got into a series of accidents—overindulging on popsicles; falling off a set of climbing bars at his babysitter's home—she decided to stay home and devote more attention to her son. This pleased Myers, who was somewhat spoiled; on one occasion, for example, he deliberately broke a watch his parents had given his sister, Geraldine ("Gerry"). Florence responded by spanking him, and then began sending him to her sister-in-law, Nancy, during the work week.
Although Nancy lived in a neighborhood with few other black people, Myers says that he was too young to be bothered by this at the time. However, the area was home to many Jewish families, and some of the boys who hung around his aunt’s bakery persuaded Myers to join them in fights with the local Jewish boys.
Although Myers generally liked Nancy’s neighborhood, his favorite memories are of the time he spent with his mother, whether walking around town shopping or simply listening to her read aloud from magazines: "The sound of Mama's voice in our sun-drenched Harlem kitchen was like a special kind of music, meant only for me" (14). Myers says he believes his mother was more open with him than with others, recalling how she would sometimes yodel for him. In turn, Myers was eager to impress Florence by learning to speak well and to read: "I liked words and talking, and wanted to be able to look at the magazines and tell her the stories as she did for me" (16).
Chapter 3 Summary: "Let's Hear It for the First Grade!"
When Myers was ready to begin school, a problem arose: his reading skills were equivalent to a second-grader's, but he had a speech impediment, so his teacher recommended that he not skip a grade. Still, Myers liked school on the whole, and only got in trouble once his first year (for dumping glue on a boy’s lap).
Things changed in second grade, when students began to make fun of the way Myers talked. Myers—who until then hadn’t really noticed his speech problems—eventually snapped and punched one of his bullies, but being sent to the principal didn't make much of an impression on him. His punishment—writing lines—also didn't have the intended effect: "I took a ruler and made a straight line down the left-hand side of each page. That straight line was going to be my 'I' for each of the five hundred times. But when I wrote out the first 'I will never, never…' I learned that I couldn't fit the sentence on one line. Life was not fair" (20).
Around this time, Myers explains, his family moved to a new apartment on Morningside Avenue—a "wide and beautiful" street (20). Although initially designed as a one-bedroom apartment, the new home seemed large and luxurious to the Deans. Much to Myers's delight, his mother entrusted him with a key to the new apartment so that he could let himself in after school (Herbert had been drafted into the Navy when the U.S. entered World War II, and Florence and Myers’s sisters were working outside the home). Unbeknownst to Florence, Myers used his key to sneak comic books discarded by a next-door neighbor into his bedroom.
Despite Myers's love of reading, things were not going well in school or speech therapy: "The trouble was that to me, the words seemed clear. I found it frustrating when a teacher would ask me to repeat a phrase over and over, or when a teacher said that I did not know a word because I did not pronounce it correctly" (25). Myers's sensitivity over his speech contributed to his conduct problems, which eventually caused his third-grade teacher to fail him in most subjects. He was allowed to proceed to fourth grade, but Florence spanked him and told him he would need to study over the summer.
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
One of the most prominent themes in Bad Boy is the relationship between individuals and the communities they belong (or wish to belong) to. Although some of these communities are chosen freely, others (like one’s racial or class group) are not, and as Bad Boy progresses, it becomes clear that Myers struggled with this realization quite a bit as a young man. As a narrator, however, he not only accepts it but suggests that individual people can only be understood within the context of these larger forces: Bad Boy is a personal memoir, but Myers begins not with himself but instead with his family and his ancestors, including many who died long before his own birth. What’s more, he explicitly calls attention to this fact in the opening lines of the book, explaining that he must “consider the events and people who came before [him]” in order to make sense of his own experiences and identity (1).
The fact that Myers traces his ancestry all the way back to the Civil War is a hint that race and racism will also loom large in the book. Herbert and Florence—Myers’s parents, as well as an interracial couple—move to Harlem in the hopes of escaping prejudice, and in some respects succeed; as a young boy, Myers isn’t “really aware of racial differences,” and is perfectly comfortable visiting the predominantly white neighborhood where his aunt lives (humorously, he is more bothered by the fact that his aunt makes him take naps than anything else) (12). As Myers grows older, however, he begins to realize that racial inequality does in fact exist in New York, and that while it may take less immediately obvious forms in the North than it does in the South, it can still dramatically impact his life and the choices that are available to him.
Finally, the first chapters of Bad Boy establish Myers’s love of language. His initial desire to learn to read, however, stems not from the stories Florence reads to him, but from a wish to be more like his mother. This suggests that Myers in some sense views language both as a way of defining who he is and of establishing or cementing his relationships to others. For the moment, these two impulses align with one another; Myers wants both to resemble and feel close to Florence. As time goes on, though, the two desires begin to clash with one another—something Myers hints at when he says, “Years later, when I had learned to use words better, I lost my ability to speak so freely with Mama” (15).
The role and purpose of language are also at the heart of Myers’s struggles at school. Despite his skills as a reader (and, as will later become clear, a writer), Myers has trouble expressing himself thanks to a speech impediment. This is no doubt frustrating in and of itself, but it is also a blow to Myers’s self-image; he notes, for instance, that teachers often assume his difficulty speaking means that he is unintelligent or ignorant. It also leads to bullying, which in turn causes Myers to lash out at his attackers. Myers’s speech impediment is therefore symbolic of the broader problems he will have articulating and defending his identity as he grows older, with his childhood misbehavior serving as a warning about the violence that can erupt when people feel that they have no voice.
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