Bad Boy
Authors: Walter Dean Myers
Bad Boy
A Memoir
For Karen, Michael, and Christopher
E
ach of us is born with a history already in place. There are physical aspects that make us brown-eyed or blue-eyed, that make us tall or not so tall, or give us curly or straight hair. Our parents might be rich or poor. We could be born in a crowded, bustling city or in a rural area. While we live our own individual lives, what has gone before us, our history, always has some effect on us. In thinking about what influenced my own life, I began by considering the events and people who came before me. I learned about most of the people who had some effect on my life through family stories, census records, old photographs, and, in the case of Lucas D. Dennis, the records of the Works Progress Administration at the University of West Virginia.
The Works Progress Administration was a government program formed to create jobs during the Depression years. It did this by starting a number of projects, including state histories. Among the notes of the interviewers putting together a history of West Virginia, I came across this entry.
Life of a Slave
Lucas D. Dennis was one of the one hundred and fifty slaves that Steve Dandridge owned before the Civil War. This slave is ninety-four years old. He was born in Jefferson County. His mind is very bright, he still has two of his own teeth, his hair is gray and [he] wears a heavy beard which is also gray.
After the Civil War he came to Harpers Ferry and built himself a house, which is on one of the camping grounds used during the war. This house is on Filmore Ave. and the corner of a lane leading to where many soldiers were buried and later taken up and carried to their burial ground in Winchester.
He lives with his wife, she is eighty-four. He saw John Brown and remembers well the day he was hanged.
Lucas D. Dennis was my great-great-uncle. Prior to the Civil War, when West Virginia was still part of the state of Virginia, these ancestors of mine were slaves on a plantation called The Bower, in Leetown, Virginia. The 1870 census still listed Lucas D. Dennis
as living on the plantation, but I knew, from family stories, that he did indeed move to Harpers Ferry and that part of the Dennis family moved to Martinsburg, West Virginia, less than ten miles from The Bower. At the time of the interview with Lucas D. Dennis, the Dennis family in Martinsburg had merged with the Green family. One of the women of the Green family, Mary Dolly Green, later became my mother.
I have no memory of Mary Dolly Green. I know that she gave birth to me on a Thursday, the twelfth of August, 1937. I have been told that she was tall, with a fair complexion. Mary had five children: Gertrude, Ethel, George, me, and Imogene. Shortly after the birth of my sister Imogene my mother died, leaving my father, George Myers, with seven children, two of them, Geraldine and Viola, from a previous marriage. When I imagine my mother, I think of an attractive young woman with the same wide smile as my sisters'. I wish I could have known her. However, today, when I think of “mother,” I think of another woman, my father's first wife, Florence Dean.
Florence Dean's mother emigrated from Germany in the late 1800s. A cook by profession, Mary Gearhart settled outside Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, in New Franklin, Pennsylvania. There she met and married a Native American by the name of Brown. The couple
had one daughter, Florence. Mary Gearhart, a small, pleasant woman, worked at a number of restaurants before finding a job in a German hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia.
When Florence was old enough to work, she also came to Martinsburg. It was while working at the hotel that she met a young black man, George Myers. The two young people began to see each other socially and were married when Florence was seventeen. From this marriage came two children, Geraldine and Viola. Unfortunately, the marriage ended in divorce, and Florence returned to Pennsylvania. The fact that Florence had married a black man did not sit well with her German relatives, and she was made to feel unwelcome. She decided to move to Baltimore, Maryland, where she met Herbert Dean.
Herbert Dean lived in Baltimore with his father, stepmother, two sisters, Nancy and Hazel, and his brother, Leroy. His father, William Dean, was a tall, handsome, and opinionated man who had little use for formal education aside from reading the Bible, and even less use for women. He ran a small hauling business in Baltimore that consisted of several wagons and teams of horses. He expected his sons to enter the business when they were of age. When trucks began to replace horses and wagons, he scoffed at the idea,
labeling the trucks as a mere fad that would never last. Even as his business declined, he stubbornly stuck to his beliefs. By the time he was nine, Herbert Dean was already working, pulling a wagon through the streets of the city, collecting scraps of wood, cutting it for kindling, and selling it door to door to light the fires in the old coal stoves that most people had at the time. Herbert had left school after the third grade, realizing that he was needed to help support the family.
By the time Herbert reached manhood, his father's hauling business was no more than a way of making a few dollars on occasion, and when William Dean still declined to invest in trucks, both of the boys struck out on their own. Leroy decided to remain in the Baltimore area, and Herbert decided to try his luck in New York City. Herbert had met a woman who interested him. She had been married previously and had two children, but now she was single and still quite attractive. The woman, Florence, was white, and that posed a problem in Baltimore. Perhaps, Herbert thought, it would be less of a problem in New York.
Herbert and Florence married and moved to Harlem. Herbert first found work with a moving company owned by the gangster Dutch Schultz. Each morning, men would line up on the street corners, and the Schultz trucks would pick up as many men as they
needed that day. When Schultz was not hiring, there were occasional jobs to be had at the docks, loading and unloading ships. Eventually, Herbert found a permanent job as a janitor with the United States Radium Corporation in downtown New York.
As a young couple Herbert and Florence made the Harlem party scene. When Herbert's boyhood friend Chick Webb came to New York, he introduced Herbert to some of his show-business pals such as Bill Robinson and Fats Waller. Herbert even entertained the idea of getting into music and bought a slide trombone at a pawnshop. Florence hated the trombone, disliked jazz, and wanted to be reunited with her daughters, who were still living in Martinsburg with their father.
Herbert agreed to bring Florence's two daughters, Geraldine and Viola, to New York and drove down to Martinsburg in the black Ford he had bought. It was during this visit that he met George Myers, Florence's first husband, her two daughters, and George's children by Mary Myers.
The girls were brought to Harlem, and several months later it was decided that Herbert and Florence would also take the youngest boy, Walter Milton Myers.
H
arlem is the first place called “home” that I can remember. It was a magical place, alive with music that spilled onto the busy streets from tenement windows and full of colors and smells that filled my senses and made my heart beat faster. The earliest memory I have is of a woman who picked me up on Sunday mornings to take me to Sunday school. She would have five to ten children with her when she rang our bell on 126th Street, and we would go through the streets holding hands and singing “Jesus Loves Me” on our way to Abyssinian Baptist. I remember being comforted by the fact that Jesus, whom I didn't even know, thought so much of me. After church we would be brought home, again holding hands and singing our way through the streets of Harlem.
What life was about for me in those early years was being with the woman I was learning to call Mama. When Florence Dean was home, I would follow her from room to room as she cleaned, talking about anything that came to mind, knowing that she would always listen. Any house in which she lived was kept spotless. Mama had a time to sweep the floors and a time to mop them. There was a time to wash clothes and a time to iron them, fold them, and put them away. Each holiday meant taking all the dishes down from the shelves, even the ones we never used, and carefully washing and drying them, as well as the windows of the dish cabinet.
Mama didn't work outside the house when I first arrived in New York, but that changed from time to time. I remember that when I was four, a woman in the building was taken on as my caretaker during the days when Mama worked. Mama did what she called “day's work,” meaning that she cleaned other people's apartments and was paid by the day. The woman who took care of me gave that chore to her children, who delighted in torturing me by hiding in the closet and making believe they were ghosts. I was a bawler, screaming in fear at all the appropriate moments, which delighted them. I learned how mindlessly cruel some children could be.
We were far away from credit cards in those days, and the equivalent was an account at the corner grocery. Mama, who was determined that I should never be hungry, arranged with the grocer to give me food if I was hungry and to put it on her account. What I actually did when I had the chance was buy penny squares of chocolate. Soon every kid on the block knew that I could get “free” chocolates. One weekend both the grocer and I got a good talking-to, and my account came to a crashing end.
What I loved most about Harlem, though, was the music. There were radios everywhere, and little girls jumped double Dutch to Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, and Glenn Miller. My sisters, Gerry and Viola, danced with me in the house, but the girls in the street wouldn't dance with me, so I danced by myself. I had taught myself a little dance that I called “the boogie.” My dancing was amusing enough for people to throw pennies to me when I danced. When I had enough pennies, I would scoop them up and run to the grocer's to buy my favorite colored icy pops. I could keep this up for hours and loved it until one day I had a stomachache and went home crying. When Mama got home from work, she put me on the toilet and sat on the edge of the bathtub to comfort me. Within minutes I was being snatched up and rushed to Knickerbocker Hospital.
Mama had reasoned that the red liquid passing through my intestines had to be blood. At the hospital the doctors were equally alarmed until a few tests confirmed that I had consumed so many icy pops that the food coloring was going straight through. It was clear I needed more supervision during the day, and Mama found another baby-sitter, who took care of a number of children.
This woman had playground apparatus in her backyard, which I liked a lot. I was told not to play on the climbing bars, but I tried them anyway. Getting to the top was easy enough and not nearly as exciting as falling off, headfirst, onto the cement below. I've always had a big head, and I must have looked a sight that night, with bandages covering half my face, when Mama picked me up. She decided to stay home to take care of me for a while.
My two sisters were already in their teens and had the job of being young ladies. I was the baby of the family and the only boy and got most of the attention, which I enjoyed. I claimed Mama for my own and was jealous of any attention she paid to her daughters. When Gerry received a fancy watch as a present, I was annoyed. Gerry hadn't changed, and so I thought it was the watch that made her special.
“Can I have a nickel?” I asked Mama. A week had
passed since Gerry had received the watch, and Mama, her forehead dripping sweat, was doing the wash in a tub of scalding water, pushing the sheets down into the hot liquid with a stick. Mama shook her head.
“Can I have a nickel?” I asked again, wanting her to stop the washing and perhaps take me to the corner store for an icy pop.
“Later, Walter,” she said. “I'm busy now. Go play.”
“I'll break Gerry's watch,” I said.
“Boy, go into the living room and play!” she said, sternly.
The watch didn't break right away. I hit it with my shoe, and nothing happened. Then I hit it with my father's shoe, and it still didn't break. Then I hit it with both shoes as hard as I could until I saw a crack in the curved crystal. This I took proudly to Mama.
A spanking is a spanking is a spanking. Mama was strong enough to hold me by the corner of my shirt at the shoulder and lift me so that I could not get a firm footing on the ground. Then, still sweating from her efforts at washing the sheets, she laced into me with a folded belt that, from that time on, became “the strap.” Of course, she could have prevented the watch from being broken if she had only believed me when I told her that I was going to break it. Instead she covered my legs and hands with welts with the strap. When
Gerry came home from work, she wasn't pleased, either.
I needed discipline, but my adoptive father, Herbert Dean, hated to see me crying. So the next time Mama worked outside the house, I was sent to my aunt Nancy, my father's sister, who lived in downtown New York.
Division Street on New York's Lower East Side was as wonderful to me as Harlem. There were few black people in the area, but at my age, which was probably five, I was not really aware of racial differences. What was on Division Street was Aunt Nancy, her husband, whom we all called Mr. Harrison, the bakery she operated, pushcarts, a matzoh factory, and Jewish boys. Mama would take me to Aunt Nancy's on a Sunday night and pick me up the following Friday.
Aunt Nancy was as fat as she was tall. She was the biggest woman I had ever seen in my life and exactly the same color brown as my father. I liked her because she was a friendly woman, but I absolutely hated the idea that she would take naps in the middle of the day. What's more, she would insist that I take naps with her, which I thought was a terrible thing to do. I never wanted to go to sleep, not even at night when it was dark. Certainly I didn't want to go to sleep in the middle of the day. Still, every afternoon she would
come upstairs from the bakery and head for the bed.
In Aunt Nancy's living room was a cast-iron alligator ashtray that was nearly as tall as I was. It had glass eyes and hard cast-iron scales down its back. More than once I thought I saw one of its glass eyes look in my direction. It was not my favorite object.
Aunt Nancy spent most of the day working in the bakery. In the afternoons I was allowed to play in front of the store. That's where I met the boys who told me we could beat up some of the Jewish boys.
The Jewish boys always came downstairs with their mothers. They wore their hair long on the side and sometimes wore shirts that seemed too big. If you hit them, they wouldn't hit back but would run to their mothers. I followed the example of some of the bigger boys and hit the ones who wouldn't hit back. The problem was, of course, that if you chased them around the corner, where their mothers couldn't see them, they would fight back. After a while a Jewish boy would stand near the corner, hoping that one of us would make the mistake of chasing him to a position where he could send his fist into an unsuspecting nose. If the men who worked in the matzoh factory saw us, they sometimes would separate us and give everyone hot baked matzohs. Wonderful.
Mama didn't always have to work outside the
house. The greatest time I ever spent in my life was when she was home. During the day we would walk down the south side of 125th Street to the Smilen Brothers produce store or to Blumstein's, the largest store on 125th Street. The street was always busy, and black and white shoppers stopped in the shoe stores or bought charlotte russes to eat as they walked. We would walk east and then return on the north side of the street. The north side of the street had Herbert's Diamonds, a large jewelry store, and the better theaters. First we would stop at the RKO Alhambra to see what was playing, then the Loew's. Sometimes Mama would stop and look at the pictures outside the Apollo Theater, and sometimes, for a special treat, we would stop in the penny arcade. On rare occasions we would go all the way over to the East Side to the market stalls under the elevated railroad tracks.
If we didn't go out, we would listen to her soap operas on the radio.
Helen Trent
was her favorite. Mama also liked to read
True Romance
magazines and would let me sit on her lap as she read aloud.
The sound of Mama's voice in our sun-drenched Harlem kitchen was like a special kind of music, meant for only me. It was almost a secret language, one that only the two of us understood. I don't think she ever
used that special voice with my sisters or my father. She was small, barely over five feet tall, and I was soon too big to sit on her lap. Then she would sit at the kitchen table, and I would sit on a chair with wooden arms and a fabric body that I loved and listen to the sound of her voice as she half read, half acted out the stories of lost loves and sudden passions.
I think she liked talking to me. She could tell me things she wouldn't tell other people. Once she told me that she liked to yodel and that she had done so as a child. She yodeled for me, and I thought it was marvelous. When I told my father, he laughed, and she wouldn't yodel for him. Sometimes she would ask me simple questions, like what did I think the weather would be the next day, and stop whatever she was doing and wait for an answer. I would have the words in my head and would try to get them out as quickly as I could, putting them in as good an order as I could.
“Why don't you just marry Mama?” my sister Viola complained. “You always have something to say to her.”
I asked Mama about that later, and she said no, she already had a husband, Herbert.
Years later, when I had learned to use words better, I lost my ability to speak so freely with Mama.
I didn't want to learn to read so much as I wanted
to be like Mama. I liked words and talking, and I wanted to be able to look at the magazines and tell her the stories as she did for me. I told her that I wanted to do this, and she rearranged our chairs so we were sitting side by side in the kitchen, with her pointing out the words as she read them. Slowly, with Mama's help, I learned to read. Before long I could read well enough to read to Mama as she did the housework. What we had to read were Mama's
True Romance
magazines and a few Classic comics. I didn't understand much of what I was reading, but I was on my way.