Bad Boy: A Memoir

Over the course of Bad Boy, Myers encounters several different kinds of communities—his family, his church, his schools, and Harlem at-large among them. For various reasons, however, Myers struggles (at one point or another) with his relationship to each of these groups. In part, this is because certain kinds of community membership seem, to the teenage Myers, to threaten his own unique identity; he remarks, for instance, that he “wasn’t born with a hyphen linking [him] to Africa,” and consequently resents the idea that he should feel a sense of automatic kinship with people of the same race (177).

Nevertheless, Myers consistently expresses a desire to feel connected to others and to be a part of something larger than himself. As a young boy, Myers feels at home with his family and his church community, although even these group memberships are not entirely straightforward. Myers is adopted, and while he considers his adoptive parents his true family, he is also “curious” about his biological family and seemingly eager to understand his place in it; when he meets his brother Mickey, he takes note of the “light” skin and “reddish hair” that resemble his own features (37). Myers also experiences some difficulty fitting in at school on account of his speech impediment, but is nevertheless able to make a few close friends—most notably Eric.

As Myers grows older, however, his connection to those around him disintegrates. In some ways, Myers suggests, this is an inevitable part of growing up; he writes, for instance, that he failed to be Florence’s “ally” in her fights with her father-in-law because he “was fully absorbed in discovering who [he] was” (105). Myers’s isolation, however, is also the result of tension between the groups Myers identifies with; his growing intellectualism distances him from his parents, but his family’s relative poverty is a reminder that he doesn’t truly fit in with his college-bound classmates at Stuyvesant either. Eventually, Myers’s disillusionment causes him to voluntarily sever ties with former friends like Eric, and to reject offers of help from neighbors like Mrs. Dodson. By the time he is a senior in high school, his only real friend is Frank Hall, and their relationship hinges not so much on a sense of belonging, but rather on the knowledge that they are both outcasts: “He was an alien on this planet, and I was drawn to him for that reason” (181).

Eventually, Myers does find a comfortable place for himself in “a world of book lovers and people eager to rise to the music of language and ideas” (206). Myers is only able to get to this point, however, after reconciling the tensions within himself—most obviously, by finding a way to identify as both black and as a writer. This suggests that Myers’s early attempts to fit in fail in part because he is seeking a group that will provide him with an external source of identity; he talks, for instance, about wanting to have “a school sweater, a school jacket, the symbols of belonging” (107). The communities Myers eventually claims a place in are, by contrast, reflections of his inner sense of himself.

Myers grew up on the cusp of the Civil Rights movement, which took place roughly between the mid 1950s and the late 1960s. In fact, Bad Boy mentions some of the major victories leading up to the movement, including the desegregation of major league baseball (1947), the desegregation of the armed forces (1948), and Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which overturned “separate but equal” and desegregated public schools. The tone of Bad Boy, however, doesn’t follow this hopeful upward trend. At the same time that the country is moving closer to racial equality, Myers himself is becoming more and more disillusioned about his prospects as a young black man.

Myers’s upbringing in Harlem—a northern and predominantly black community—shields him from the more obvious (and often legalized) forms of racism that existed in 1940s and 50s America. Myers also belongs to a mixed-race family, and encounters white people every day at school and at church, all of which initially suggests to him that racism is predominantly a problem somewhere else:

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 occasional news story. In sports, the area in which I was most interested, there seemed to be a good representation of blacks (36).

As Myers grows older, however, his interests shift, which in turn causes him to become more aware of structural and implicit racism (i.e. racism that is unspoken, or that is maintained less by individuals and more by institutions). The curriculum in the schools Myers attends, for instance, is almost entirely silent on black history and culture, except in its discussions of slavery. As a result, even the well-meaning teachers who encourage Myers to pursue his love of reading and writing are implicitly asking him to choose between his race and his ambitions: with only white authors to look up to as role models, Myers begins to “accept […] the idea that whites were more valuable than blacks” (85-86). What’s more, this idea seems borne out in the world around him; Myers wants to be a writer, but the black community he grows up in is almost entirely working-class. Even as a teenager, Myers understands that this economic gap between white and black people is itself a form of racism; when he is moved to an “outside job” at the garment center, for instance, he describes feeling that his boss “saw [him] as just another one of the hundreds of blacks who were fit only for manual labor” (124-25). Increasingly, however, Myers feels that there is nothing he can do about this kind of structural inequality, since attending college is a financial impossibility for his family.

Myers never completely buys into racist beliefs himself; it’s the very fact that he knows his own talents that fuels his resentment of his lot in life. With that said, he does arrive at the conclusion that there is “no advantage in being black,” and therefore learns to hate the fact that he is black (179). Over time, however, Myers slowly rediscovers the positive aspects of his racial experience. As a boy, for instance, he loved Harlem, and as an adult, he celebrates the culture of the neighborhood in Bad Boy:

Black businessmen walked side by side with black orthodox Jews. Uniformed members of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association could be seen outside Micheaux’s bookstore. White-dressed women, followers of the charismatic religious leader Father Divine, might be giving out leaflets (49).

Perhaps even more importantly, Myers learns as an adult about the African-American literary tradition, which enables him to reframe his love of language as an outgrowth rather than a rejection of his heritage. Although Myers never glosses over the impact of racism on his life, he ultimately implies that his experience of being black has been a positive one.

Other than Myers himself, Florence and Herbert Dean are by far the most prominent characters in Bad Boy. Although Myers isn’t biologically related to either of his parents, he shares a closer relationship with them than many children do with their blood relatives; because his sisters Geraldine and Viola are years older, Myers is in many ways raised as a single child, enjoying virtually exclusive attention as a young boy—or, as he puts it, “I claimed Mama for my own and was jealous of any attention she paid to her daughters” (10). As this quote suggests, Myers’s relationship with Florence is particularly all-consuming; the two spend so much time together and share so many secrets with one another that Viola jokingly suggests they get married.

As Myers grows older, however, his relationship with his parents changes, which in some ways is an inevitable part of becoming an adult. When Myers begins to go to school, for instance, he establishes ties and connections to people outside his family. On the flip side, the death of his uncle Lee (and his father’s ensuing depression) leads Myers to the realization that, as he puts it, he isn’t “the center of the universe”; his parents also have lives outside their relationship to him (65). As he enters adolescence, Myers is also, like most teenagers, increasingly preoccupied with finding and asserting his identity as an individual, which to some extent means distancing himself from his parents.

Other sources of tension, however, are more specific to Myers’s circumstances. In particular, the love of language that his mother helped inspire (and that initially drew the pair closer together) becomes a wedge between Myers and his parents. Myers’s level of education quickly surpasses that of his parents, which impedes their ability to understand one another; although Florence in particular continues to do what she can to support her son—she even cooks him separate meals when he decides that eating meat is unethical—Myers realizes that she is “puzzled” by the issues that now dominate his life (168). Herbert, meanwhile, cannot read at all, and views his son’s interest in literature with some level of suspicion. As Myers puts it, “The printed words were a code that forever separated us” (190).

Myers depicts his decision to enter the military as a decisive break with his parents, explaining that he “needed to be strong enough to walk away, to invent a new life for [himself] without [Florence]” (197). As an adult, however, Myers appears to be on good terms with his parents, visiting them and showing them his work. Although Florence and Herbert are still not able to relate to every aspect of the man their son has become, their love for their son is as strong as ever, and in some ways leads them to a deeper understanding of him. For instance, Myers describes a visit to his elderly and hospitalized father as follows: “I brought him the only gift that had meaning to me, a book I had written. He looked at it and put it down on the white hospital table next to the bed and smiled” (189).