Bad Boy: A Memoir

Florence Dean is Myers’s adoptive mother. She had at one point been married to Myers’s biological father, George Myers, but divorced him long before Myers himself was born (to George’s second wife, Mary Dolly Green). Florence later married Herbert Dean, and the couple adopted Myers when they took custody of Florence’s two daughters by George, Geraldine and Viola.

Florence’s life is difficult in many ways, both before and after her marriage to Herbert. She was born the daughter of a working-class German immigrant and a Native American man, but despite the fact that she herself was mixed race, her family didn’t approve of her marriage to George, who was black. Later on, the strain of her husband Herbert’s depression and the growing financial burden on the family lead Florence to drink heavily and play the lottery recklessly. In some ways, Myers hints, Florence was a disappointed woman whose life had not lived up to her dreams:

The one picture I had seen of her as a young woman showed her in a shimmering blue dress, her dark hair framing her face, a fragile grace holding her in the studio photographer’s chair. I would have liked to have talked with her after she had had her picture taken […] What had she expected of life? (168).

Nevertheless, Myers depicts Florence as a loving and devoted mother. In fact, he credits her with sparking his interest in reading and writing (as well as language in general); Myers was the baby of the family, and when he was very young, Florence kept him close to her while she listened to soap operas on the radio or read romance stories aloud. Florence continues to support Myers’s interest in language even after his education and skills outstrip her own; he remembers, for instance, once hearing her “proudly explaining to a friend on the phone that her son ‘types stories for a living’” (206).

Herbert Dean is Myers’s adoptive father; he took Myers into his home (along with Myers’s half-sisters Geraldine and Viola) after marrying Florence. As a young man, he had refused to carry on with his own father’s hauling business on the grounds that it was becoming an obsolete line of work. Although he toyed with the idea of becoming a musician, he eventually settled into work as a janitor, occasionally seeking out extra work at the docks.

The fact that Herbert never learned to read causes some strain in his relationship with his son, as do his fairly traditional views on masculinity. Herbert served in the Navy during World War II, and consequently approves of Myers’s decision to join the Army at age 17. Furthermore, though he is certainly aware of the prevalence of racism in American society, Herbert urges Myers to overcomes his obstacles through old-fashioned perseverance: “My dad’s advice on race was very simple. ‘The white man won’t give you anything, and the black man doesn’t have anything to give you. If you want anything out of life, you have to get it for yourself’” (112). For all of these reasons, Herbert doesn’t seem fully able to understand the depths of Myers’s despair as a teenager, which stems from his son’s intellectual ambitions and his deep resistance to leading the same working-class life that Herbert has.

With all that said, Herbert is not a harsh or uncaring father. For instance, he goes out of his way to find a typewriter for his son after Florence spends the money Myers had planned on using to buy one. While Myers was disappointed in the quality of the typewriter, it seems likely that Myers simply couldn’t appreciate the gesture for what it was as an adolescent. Like his relationship with Florence, Meyer’s relationship with Herbert is often a source of regret to the more mature and thoughtful Myers who narrates Bad Boy; for instance, while Myers felt the strain of Herbert’s depression keenly in the months following Lee’s death, he admits in his memoir, “Looking back, I think that it might have been I who had become distant as well” (72).

Frank is a local man Myers first meets when he is 15; while practicing basketball in the hopes of earning a scholarship, Myers sees a group of boys harassing and ultimately attacking a man with “light, mottled skin and sandy brown hair with a streak of even lighter hair near the front” (135). Myers helps him fight the boys off, and the man tells him his name is Frank. Eventually, Myers learns more about Frank’s backstory—in particular, the fact that he has twice attacked and killed people while in a dissociative state, and that he is currently in the keeping of a local priest.

None of this deters Myers from making friends with Frank, despite his mother’s disapproval. For one, Frank is “mild-mannered” and even somewhat timid when he’s in his right mind (158). More importantly, though, Myers is increasingly depressed about his future and estranged from old school friends like Eric; as a result, he spends more and more time talking and drinking with Frank, whom he sees as a social outcast and therefore a kindred spirit. Eventually, Myers even helps Frank with the odd jobs the latter picks up delivering packages (presumably containing drugs). Eventually, one of these deals goes wrong, forcing Frank and then Myers to leave New York City to escape the drug dealers.

Eric is perhaps Myers’s closest childhood friend. Like Myers, Eric has a mischievous side; in fourth grade, the two boys meet while serving as “cookie monitors,” licking the cream from cookies they were supposed to be delivering back to the classroom (29). As the boys grow older, Eric proves eager to share with Myers the (mostly incorrect) information he has learned about girls and sex. Eric is also Myers’s academic equal, participating in an accelerated program with him and accompanying him to Stuyvesant High.

Unlike Myers, however, Eric is white, and the boys’ different experiences of race begin to cause tension as they enter high school. Eric is able to attend parties and events that Myers is not, which means that his social experience of school is very different from his friend’s (although Myers, in fairness to Eric, notes that his friend railed against this racism). Myers also implies that Eric’s family is at least slightly more financially secure than his own, so when Myers—realizing he will likely be unable to afford college—begins cutting classes in despair, Eric continues to study diligently. Ultimately, the two boys drift apart, with Myers repeatedly rejecting Eric’s offers to spend time together.

Dr. Holiday is the psychologist Myers is sent to after Stuyvesant concludes that Myers is “disturbed” (154). In many ways, Myers’s sessions with her are no more successful than his conversations with the school guidance counselor; he dodges Dr. Holiday’s attempts to learn more about what he is truly feeling, and silently judges her for getting his name wrong (she calls him “Walter Dean” rather than “Walter Myers”). Nevertheless, she is not as clueless as Myers at first assumes; at the end of their second session together, Dr. Holiday—who is black herself—asks Myers whether he “likes being black.” Although Myers replies that he does, it’s clear that much of his frustration stems from his troubled relationship with his own blackness; he has accepted the ideas and assumptions underlying the white history and literature he has studied in school, and consequently can’t imagine a way to embrace his racial identity while also pursuing his interest in language and writing. In other words, Dr. Holiday correctly identifies a major source of Myers’s self-destructive behavior, although he himself doesn’t fully realize it at the time.

Although Myers never mentions her name, the English teacher he has during his senior year at Stuyvesant plays a pivotal role in his development as a writer. She gets to know each of her writing students personally, and tailors reading recommendations to each one. This benefits Myers in several ways, including by encouraging him to draw a connection between his reading and writing habits, and by exposing him to new styles and genres of literature. He learns, for instance, to distinguish between the styles and themes that preoccupy different writers: “Where Anatole France’s work had been about ideas and wit, and Thomas Mann had been about precision and the ordering of character and plot, Honoré de Balzac, to me, was all about character” (148). Myers’s teacher also takes the time to go over each work with her students, which leads to additional insights: “When I handed in my report about Penguin Island, my teacher gave me back a report pointing out all the weaknesses of the work and reminding me that I did not have to love every word in a book to appreciate it” (145). Finally, but perhaps most importantly, it is this teacher who, when she sees Myers sitting outside the guidance counselor’s office, encourages him not to stop writing “whatever happens” (153). It is these words, and his teacher’s faith in his abilities, that encourage Myers to once again begin writing many years later.

Mr. Lasher is Myers’s sixth-grade teacher. Like several other instructors Myers has, Mr. Lasher plays a crucial role in his education and consequently his development as a writer. On the very first day of class, Lasher warns Myers that he won’t tolerate Meyers’s misbehavior, but it soon becomes clear that in spite of the sternness of this warning, Lasher really has Myers’s best interests in mind; when he accompanies Myers home to speak to Florence after their first altercation, he explains that Myers is gifted, and that society “need[s] more smart Negro boys” (57). Myers’s relationship with his teacher turns around after this and, bolstered by Mr. Lasher’s confidence in him, Myers begins to do very well in school. Lasher is also the teacher who recommends that Myers be put in an accelerated program, giving him further opportunities to learn and grow.

Mrs. Finley is Myers’s English and homeroom teacher in ninth grade. Her relationship with her students gets off to a rocky start, when the boys in her class decide to try chewing tobacco and begin throwing up in class. Although Myers and his classmates continue to act out for the rest of the school year, he feels sympathy and gratitude for Mrs. Finley in retrospect. In part, this is because she introduced him to new forms of writing, including the confessional poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and narrative poems like Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” However, Mrs. Finley also viewed her students as aspiring scholars, and Myers suggests that her faith in them made an impression despite all their misbehavior: “I […] think that all the kids in that SP class took away something very special, the notion that each of us had intellectual gifts to spend as we chose” (100).

Mrs. Conway is Myers’s fifth-grade teacher. The two get off to a bad start when Myers throws a book at a student laughing at his speech impediment, and things worsen as Myers continues to misbehave. Their relationship shifts, however, when Mrs. Conway gives Myers a book of Norwegian fairy tales to read while Myers is sitting at the back of the class as punishment. Myers enjoys the book, so Mrs. Conway gives him permission to read it in class every day, and then discusses the stories with him when he finishes. She then gives Myers another book to read, and begins to read his poetry aloud in class, laying the groundwork for Myers’s later growth as a reader and writer.

William Dean is Herbert Dean’s father and Myers’s grandfather. He is old-fashioned and set in his ways; when cars began to replace horses, William consistently refused to change the way his hauling business operated, causing his two sons to strike out on their own, rather than take over the family business. William is also deeply religious and openly scornful of women who don’t (in his mind) know their place. All of this causes friction when William moves in with his son’s family; “Pap” uses a slop bucket rather than a toilet, refuses to eat anything with cheese (which he says is “for poor white trash”), and generally makes Florence’s life miserable (107). His presence also places an additional financial burden on the family, contributing to Myers’s growing despair over his future educational prospects.

Lee is Herbert’s brother who, like Herbert, left home rather than take over their father’s hauling business. Unlike Herbert, however, Lee ended up in jail before Myers was even born, and is not released until the summer before Myers enters fifth grade. Just two years later, and on the night before Myers’s twelfth birthday, Lee is killed by muggers. The loss devastates Herbert, who withdraws from his family and becomes deeply religious during a year-long bout with depression. The incident is also Myers’s first real experience with death and grief, and alters the way he thinks about both himself and others.

Mickey is Myers’s older brother. Though the two boys are full siblings, they don’t truly meet until Myers is roughly 10, when George Myers moves to Harlem with Mickey and several of his other children. Myers considers the Deans his real family, but is interested in Mickey nevertheless—the two boys closely resemble one another—and strikes up a friendship with him. The two share an interest in sports, but Myers is “laid-back, almost passive” and reluctant to join Myers in fights (84). When Myers enters the elite Stuyvesant High, he begins to drift apart from his brother.

Gerry and Viola are the daughters of Florence and her first husband, George Myers, making them Myers’s half-sisters. The girls are adopted by Florence and Herbert Dean at roughly the same time Myers himself is, but are already in their teens by the time Myers is old enough to remember much; they marry and move out by the time Myers is 12.

Mrs. Dodson is a neighbor of the Deans in Harlem, and when Myers is young, he refers to her as the “Wicked Witch of the West.” His animosity stems from the fact that she discouraged Florence from allowing Myers to read comic books and play with toy guns. Later on, however, Mrs. Dodson approaches a depressed, teenage Myers when he is sitting on a park bench and tries to get him to talk to her. Myers insists that he’s fine, but realizes that Mrs. Dodson is “just being kind” and begins to think better of her (159).

Mrs. Dodson’s daughter Dorothy, meanwhile, shares Myers’s interest in reading and is eventually placed in an accelerated school program alongside him. She doesn’t like Myers, but Myers himself grows mildly curious about her as he enters adolescence and begins to think about girls and relationships.

Nancy is Herbert Dean’s sister and Myers’s aunt; Myers describes her as a kind woman, “as fat as she was tall” (12). When Myers was very young, Nancy owned a bakery and would sometimes care for Myers on days Florence was working. In practice, this meant allowing Myers to play in front of the bakery, where he would sometimes get into tussles with other boys. Later on, Nancy establishes a marriage brokerage business that “brought immigrant women together with American men and helped them marry” (117).

Imogene is Myers’s younger sister (the youngest child of his biological parents, George Myers and Mary Dolly Green). Although she doesn’t initially move to New York when her father does, she joins him when Myers himself is roughly 12. Myers meets and likes her—he describes her as “bright, beautiful, and feisty” and thinks she is “a lot like [him]”—but doesn’t grow to know her well because her father restricts her and her siblings’ freedom to wander the city (91).

George Myers is Myers’s biological father, as well as the father of Myers’s full siblings (Mickey, Imogene, Gertrude, and Ethel) and his half-sisters (Geraldine and Viola). Myers, however, only truly meets his father in the summer after fourth grade, at which point he describes him as a “smallish, brown-skinned man” who “greets[s] [Myers] formally” (37). Myers doesn’t say much else about George, though he does note that his biological father gives his children less leeway to explore New York City than the Deans give Myers himself.