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 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: "Arithmetic Summer"
Myers began taking math lessons with his sister Viola's husband. He hated the rote learning involved in these tutoring sessions, but the trade-off was that he was allowed to keep going to Bible school, which he genuinely enjoyed. In fact, it was partly a religious feeling that inspired Myers to turn over a new leaf at school the coming year: "I wanted to be good and do God's will, as I was being taught in church" (28).
The school year started off well, with Myers befriending a white boy named Eric Leonhardt; the two served as "cookie monitors," fetching treats and milk for the class from a local bakery. However, Myers’s teacher was strict and warned Myers early in the year that she wouldn't tolerate misbehavior—something Myers was able to avoid until spring, when he got into a fight with another boy. As Mrs. Parker told Myers off in front of the class, he picked up a book and threw it: "I meant to throw it into the corner to show how mad I was. [Mrs. Parker] saw me getting ready to throw the book and jumped to one side. The book hit her on the shoulder, and she screamed" (31).
Mrs. Parker threatened to send for the police and put Myers in reform school. Before she could even inform Myers's mother, however, an emergency arose: the fight had caused Myers's stomach to start cramping, and when Florence took him to the hospital, he had to have his appendix removed.
The school principal brought Myers two books to read while he recovered from surgery, but by the time he was discharged from the hospital, he was beginning to grow bored: "I always had to be doing something. I had a very hard time sitting still and doing nothing. I would fill any space with some kind of physical activity" (33). He therefore went for a bike ride against his doctor's orders, reopening his stitches and returning to the hospital for a night. Afterwards, Florence quit her job at a button factory to look after Myers, and Myers was promoted to fifth grade without actually finishing out the school year.
Chapter 5 Summary: "Bad Boy"
In retrospect, Myers says, the summer of 1947 was pivotal for black Americans, thanks to efforts to desegregate professional sports and the U.S. military. At the time, however, Myers was "not aware of a race 'problem' other than what I heard from older black people and an occasional news story" (36). Nevertheless, he was interested in sports, and would occasionally see famous black athletes like Joe Louis in Harlem.
Meanwhile, Myers’s biological father had moved to Harlem, and Myers met both him and several brothers and sisters that summer. Myers was curious about his biological family and struck up a friendship with his brother Mickey. Nevertheless, he continued to feel that the Deans were his true family, and even met Herbert Dean's brother, Lee, who had recently been released from jail.
Because he was still recovering from surgery, Myers largely stayed out of trouble that summer. The exception occurred when he and some other boys—having read about a lynching—decided to "hang" another boy. A minister caught them, and the boys’ parents forced them to whitewash a fence. This was a relatively lenient punishment, however, since beatings were an accepted practice in the neighborhood: "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" (40).
That fall, Myers entered a new school and quickly got in trouble: his teacher, Mrs. Conway, required him to read aloud, and Myers threw a book at a student who began laughing at his pronunciation. Myers continued to struggle throughout the year, eventually punching a classmate. In response, Mrs. Conway sent Myers to the back of the classroom, telling him he was a "bad boy” (45). However, she also gave him a book of fairy tales to read, which Myers ended up enjoying so much that Mrs. Conway gave him permission to read each day during class. Myers says this is when he began to understand his love of reading: "Reading a book was not so much like entering a different world—it was like discovering a different language" (46). Over time, Myers's relationship with his teacher improved; he earned good marks at the end of the year, and the school magazine even published a poem of his entitled "My Mother.”
Chapter 6 Summary: "Mr. Irwin Lasher"
Myers describes the sights and sounds of Harlem in the summer of 1948: “It [was] common to hear loudspeakers in the music stores fill the area with the sounds of jazz and to see strollers adjust their rhythms to the beat set down by Count Basie“ (48). Myers focuses in particular on 125th Street, explaining that when black workers convinced shop-owners there to begin hiring them, the area became more diverse and busy, complete with movie theaters and arcades.
Around this time, Myers decided he wanted to be an athlete: it was a field open to black Americans, and he spent a lot of time playing basketball with friends. He also continued to read voraciously, but hid this “secret vice” from boys who would tease him for it: "[T]hough by now I was fighting older boys and didn't mind that one bit, for some reason I didn't want to fight about books. Books were special and said something about me that I didn't want to reveal" (52).
Myers, in other words, had realized that reading wasn’t "what boys did" (52). For similar reasons, Myers initially joined his friends in mocking a group of girls dancing in the gym, despite actually enjoying dancing himself. Ultimately, however, Myers ignored his friends’ and his father’s disapproval and took part in the performance the girls were practicing. Myers was simultaneously becoming more interested in girls and sex, thanks in part to the information (and misinformation) his friend Eric shared with him. He also began to earn a bit of money for himself by carrying packages.
The first time Myers acted out in sixth grade—accidentally kicking his teacher, Mr. Lasher, in the process—Lasher spoke to Myers’s mother: "'We need more smart Negro boys,' he said. 'We don't need tough Negro boys'" (57–58). From that point on, Lasher went out of his way to help Myers, placing him in day-long speech therapy sessions, encouraging him to tutor other students, and recommending him for an accelerated class the following year. Myers's newfound sense of being "special" improved both his grades and his behavior, with one notable exception: he blamed Florence for injuries he'd actually gotten trying to hitch a ride on the bumper of a car (58). His false claim that Florence had beaten him stunned and hurt her, and caused strain between her and her husband. Myers consequently believed it was "God's revenge" when he later injured both feet jumping off a roof (58).
Chapters 4-6 Analysis
As Myers approaches adolescence, questions of personal identity become more pressing. It’s around this time that Myers learns to love reading on its own terms (rather than as a way to feel close to his mother), and he soon begins thinking of himself as a reader. The appeal of books lies partly in what he calls the “clarity” of the language compared to his own; implicitly, Myers is drawn to the written word because he has so much trouble speaking aloud. Books, however, also appeal to something even more fundamental in him: “The ‘me’ who read the books, who followed the adventures, seemed more the real me than the ‘me’ who played ball in the streets” (46). Myers, in other words, finds that books speak to a part of his personality that is largely separate from the community and environment he has grown up in.
To be sure, Myers also sees his love of reading as a potential way of bonding with others; he talks, for instance, about feeling a “connection" with the other children he sees at the local library (52). Already, however, Myers recognizes a tension between his growing identification as a reader and his desire to fit in with those around him. This is especially clear in the realm of gender. Myers grows up in a community with relatively traditional views toward gender roles, and although Myers easily conforms in some ways (he enjoys sports and, to some extent, even fighting), his interest in the arts is conventionally associated with sensitivity and therefore femininity. As a result, Myers hides his interest in reading from most of his friends, which ultimately contributes to a growing divide between his sense of himself as a reader and his place in the Harlem community.
Race also begins to play a larger role in these chapters, though not necessarily in young Myers’s mind; as he says, he was still mostly oblivious to racism at the time—so much so, in fact, that he participates in a mock lynching without understanding the implications of what he’s doing. On some level, however, he has already begun to absorb the lessons of a racist society. His desire to become an athlete, for instance, stems partly from the fact that it is one of the few areas he sees black people represented: “What I knew about black people—or Negroes, which was the preferred term at that time—was primarily what I saw on 125th Street, in the newspapers, and in church. Blacks were entertainers, or churchgoers, or athletes” (50). Furthermore, those around him are aware of the existence of racial inequality, including white teachers like Mr. Lasher, who see in Myers part of the solution to the problem.
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