Bad Boy (3 page)

T
he summer of 1947 was one of eager anticipation for black people across the country. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby, two black players from the all-black Negro Leagues, had finally been accepted into major-league baseball. Joe Louis was heavyweight champion of the world, and “Sugar” Ray Robinson was the welterweight champion. The president, Harry S. Truman, was negotiating with black leaders to integrate the armed forces. The
New York Amsterdam News
, our local weekly Negro newspaper, suggested that the United States was now going to treat Negroes as equals for the first time.

Most of my life revolved around school and church. The schools I went to were integrated, and the church always had whites involved in some capacity. 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 an occasional news story. In sports, the area in which I was most interested, there seemed to be a good representation of blacks. Sugar Ray Robinson would drive slowly through the neighborhood in his brightly colored Cadillac and yell at us if we didn't get out of the street fast enough. We knew if we yelled back, he would jump out of his Caddy and box with two or three of us at once. Occasionally I would see Joe Louis walking slowly, almost majestically, along 125th Street.

Outside school and church there were the endless street games on 122nd Street. The block was safe to play on under the watchful eye of housewives who sat in the windows in the summer, catching whatever breeze there was in those days before air-conditioning. Women would sit in the windows, their arms folded before them resting on pillows used exclusively for street watching. Nothing would go on that they would miss.

A number of unexpected people entered my life that summer. The first was George Myers, my biological father, who had left West Virginia and settled in an apartment with his new wife and family in Harlem, a short distance from me. I knew that I had been adopted, although there had never been official proceedings to
make the adoption legal. In the black community, as well as the white, extended families were common. Sometimes names were changed and sometimes, as in my case, they weren't. In school I was known as Walter Milton Myers. The neighbors, knowing my parents were the Deans, often referred to me as Walter Dean. I preferred Walter Myers for the most logical reason: If you wrote out the initials WM and turned them upside down, they were still WM.

I knew that George Myers existed and that he lived somewhere other than in New York. I don't remember ever having a feeling that I was his son, or that he was my father, but I was curious to see him and the other children who were to be my newly discovered brothers and sisters.

George Myers was a smallish, brown-skinned man who wore thick glasses. He greeted me formally and shook my hand, which I liked. I met his wife, Tommy. The oldest boy, also named George, was my full brother, and he was the same light color I was. He was called Mickey.

Mickey had slightly reddish hair that was straighter than mine. He was about my height despite the fact that I was two and a half years younger. We hit it off very quickly, and he was clearly glad to have a friend in his new and, for him, very strange city. It
soon became clear to me that George Myers was not as well off as the Deans, probably because of the size of his family. Besides Mickey there was a set of twins, Horace and Harriet, and a girl, Gloria.

I knew I had three other full sisters—Gertrude, Ethel, and Imogene—who were not living in New York, and I was beginning to sort out my complex family ties. The woman who had given birth to me had had five children, of which I was the next to last, fitting in between Mickey and Imogene. These were my full siblings. The others were my half sisters and brothers. In effect, however, although I was not biologically related, I was raised in the Dean household as the baby of the family, and considered the Deans to be my “real” family.

The other person who now entered my life was my uncle Lee, finally out of jail. He looked a lot like my adoptive father, Herbert Dean. Uncle Lee had a habit of talking out of the side of his mouth. I asked him why he did that.

“So the screws can't see you talking,” he said.

The who?

He explained that the screws were the prison guards. He had been in jail so long that talking out of the side of his mouth just came naturally. Just as naturally, I started talking out of the side of my mouth.

Mama restricted my activities that summer because of my having had my appendix out. I also didn't get any beatings that summer for the same reason. Not that I really deserved any, because there was only one thing I did that remotely suggested that I was on the wrong track. Richard Aisles (whose son turned out to be a fine trumpet player and jazz musician) lived in the next building. Richard had hurt his eyes by staring at the sun, which provoked the other kids on the block. Johnny Lightbourne, a boy close to my age, suggested we beat him up, but then we read in the
Amsterdam News
about a black man in the South who had been lynched by hanging. So we decided to hang Richard.

We took Richard down into the church basement, threw a rope over the railing that ran around the gym, and were stringing him up when Reverend Abbott came along. Reverend Abbott was a young white minister from Georgia who was assigned to our church for the summer. When he caught us lynching Richard, he turned about five shades whiter.

“You can't—that's—I don't believe…” He sputtered on and on. I guessed he had come from an area of the country where being lynched meant something a lot more serious than we knew about.

He went to each of our homes and told our mothers, who were unimpressed with our ability to hang
Richard. Then he made us whitewash a wall, which was interesting, as none of us had ever done that before, and we proceeded to get whitewash all over ourselves. Even if I hadn't still been recuperating from my appendectomy, I don't think I would have received a beating for a simple hanging.

Beatings came easily in our neighborhood. None of our parents, with the possible exception of Robert Boone's mom, minded tearing our butts up. My mother used to tell me that she was going to do such a job on my particular butt that I would have to go down to Macy's to buy a new behind. The Boones were ultra-light-skinned blacks who had professional jobs and were upward bound. Light skin was a definite plus in our community, and it was common to talk in a negative manner about a person with very dark skin.

Beatings were not considered abuse. Black families, often working very hard to make ends meet, wanted to clearly define which behavior was acceptable and which was not. There was precious little anger involved with a beating, just a lecture explaining why you were getting one and why it was good for you. When there was nothing else to do, and we heard somebody was going to get a beating, we might even go so far as to gather around his door to hear it. Each kid knew just what he would get a beating for. At my
house, a red conduct mark on my report card meant a beating. A note that said my mother had to go to school to see about my behavior meant a beating. Everything else resulted in a backhand lick, a warning, or being sent to my room.

By September and the opening of school I was deep into sports and became a baseball fanatic. Along with the pleasure of playing baseball there was the joy of identifying with the ballplayers. I loved the Dodgers. Maybe it was because Mama loved the Dodgers and especially Jackie Robinson. All summer long, kids playing punchball—hitting a pink “Spaldeen” ball with your fist and then running bases drawn in chalk on the streets—had tried to steal home to copy Robinson. We even changed the rules of stoop ball, of which I was the absolute King of the World, to include bases when more than one kid played. You played stoop ball by throwing the ball against the steps of a brownstone. The ball coming off the steps had to clear the sidewalk and land in the street. If it landed before being caught, you could run the bases. My speed and ability to judge distances made me an excellent fielder. We did occasionally play actual baseball, but not enough kids had gloves to make a good game.

My new school was Public School 43 on 128th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, across from the Transit
Authority bus terminal. Mrs. Conway was my teacher, and it took me one day to get into trouble with her.

In the elementary grades I attended, reading was taught by having kids stand up one at a time and read aloud. Mrs. Conway had us up and reading as soon as the readers had been handed out. When it came to be my turn, I was anxious to show my skills. I read quickly, and there was a chorus of laughter in response. They were laughing at my speech.

“Slow down and try it again,” Mrs. Conway said.

I slowed my speech down and started reading from the top of the page. Johnny Brown started laughing immediately. Johnny always had something to say to make the class laugh. I threw the book sidearm and watched it hit his desk and bounce across the room.

“Don't you dare throw a book in my classroom!” Mrs. Conway, red-faced, screamed. “Into the closet! Into the closet!”

I had to stand in the closet for the rest of the morning. That afternoon Mrs. Conway divided the class into reading groups. I was put into the slowest group. I stayed there until the next week, when the whole class was given a spelling test and I scored the highest grade. Mrs. Conway asked me to read in front of the class again.

I looked at Johnny Brown as I headed for the front
of the class. He had this glint in his eye, and I knew he was going to laugh. I opened my mouth, and he put his hand across his mouth to hold his laugh in. I went across to where he sat and hit him right on the back of the hand he held over his mouth. I was sent to the principal's office and had to stay after school and wash blackboards. Later in the year it would be Johnny Brown who would be in Mrs. Conway's doghouse for not doing his homework, with her screaming at him that he couldn't be a comedian all his life. He went on to become a television comedian and is still doing well.

Being good in class was not easy for me. I had a need to fill up all the spaces in my life, with activity, with talking, sometimes with purely imagined scenarios that would dance through my mind, occupying me while some other student was at the blackboard. I did want to get good marks in school, but they were never of major importance to me, except in the sense of “winning” the best grade in a subject. My filling up the spaces, however, kept me in trouble. I would blurt out answers to Mrs. Conway's questions even when I was told to keep quiet, or I might roll a marble across my desk if she was on the other side of the room.

The other thing that got me in trouble was my speech. I couldn't hear that I was speaking badly, and I wasn't sure that the other kids did, but I knew they
often laughed when it was my turn to speak. After a while I would tense up anytime Mrs. Conway called on me. I threw my books across that classroom enough times for Mrs. Conway to stop my reading aloud once and for all.

But when the class was given the assignment to write a poem, she did read mine. She said that she liked it very much.

“I don't think he wrote that poem,” Sidney Aronofsky volunteered.

I gave Sidney Aronofsky the biggest punch he ever had in the back of his big head and was sent to the closet. After the incident with Sidney, Mrs. Conway said that she had had quite enough of me and that I would not be allowed to participate in any class activity until I brought my mother to school. I knew that meant a beating. That evening I thought about telling Mama that the teacher wanted to see her, but I didn't get up the nerve. I didn't get it up the next day, either. In the meantime I had to sit in the back of the room, and no kid was allowed to sit near me. I brought some comic books to school and read them under my desk.

Mrs. Conway was an enormously hippy woman. She moved slowly and always had a scowl on her face. She reminded me of a great white turtle with just a dash of rouge and a touch of eye shadow. It was not
a pretty sight. But somehow she made it all the way from the front of the room to the back, where I sat reading a comic, without my hearing her. She snatched the comic from me and tore it up. She dropped all the pieces on my desk, then made me pick them up and take them to the garbage can while the class laughed.

Then she went to her closet, snatched out a book, and put it in front of me.

“You are,” she sputtered, “a bad boy. A very bad boy. You cannot join the rest of the class until your mother comes in.” She was furious, and I was embarrassed.

“And if you're going to sit back here and read, you might as well read something worthwhile,” she snapped.

I didn't touch the book in front of me until she had made her way back to the front of the class and was going on about something in long division. The title of the book was
East o' the Sun and West o' the Moon
. It was a collection of Norwegian fairy tales, and I read the first one. At the end of the day, I asked Mrs. Conway if I could take the book home.

She looked at me a long time and then said no, I couldn't. But I could read it every day in class if I behaved myself. I promised I would. For the rest of the week I read that book. It was the best book I had ever
read. When I told Mrs. Conway I had finished, she asked me what I liked about the book, and I told her. The stories were full of magic events and interesting people and witches and strange places. It differed from
Mystery Rides the Rails
, the Bobbsey Twins, and a few Honeybunch books I had come across.

I realized I liked books, and I liked reading. Reading a book was not so much like entering a different world—it was like discovering a different language. It was a language clearer than the one I spoke, and clearer than the one I heard around me. What the books said was, as in the case of
East o' the Sun
, interesting, but the idea that I could enter this world at any time I chose was even more attractive. The “me” who read the books, who followed the adventures, seemed more the real me than the “me” who played ball in the streets.