Notebook Confirm your understanding of the selection by writing a brief summary of Bad Boy by Walter Dean Myer's

Bad Boy: A Memoir Chapters 1-3 Summary & Analysis

Chapter 1 Summary: "Roots"

Myers begins his memoir with an account of the world (and family) he was born into, explaining that this backstory cannot be separated from his own experiences: "While we live our own individual lives, what has gone before us, our history, always has some effect on us" (1). In Myers's case, this history can be traced back to the era of slavery; his great-great-uncle, Lucas D. Dennis, worked on a plantation in what would later become West Virginia. After the Civil War, Dennis moved to Martinsburg, West Virginia, where his family "merged" with another family—the Greens—ultimately leading to the birth of Myers's mother, Mary Dolly Green (3).

Molly, however, died while Myers himself was too young to remember her. What's more, his family life was complicated by the fact that Molly was his father's, George Myers's, second wife. George’s first wife, Florence, was the woman who actually raised Myers. Myers therefore details Florence's background as well, explaining that her mother was a German immigrant who married a Native American man. However, while Florence herself was biracial, her family didn't approve of her marriage to George Myers, which ended in divorce after the couple had two daughters, Geraldine and Viola.

Explanation:

Bad Boy is a 2001 memoir spanning roughly the first seventeen years of YA writer Walter Dean Myers’s life. In it, Myers explores how the time he spent growing up in a mixed-race, working-class family in 1940s-and-50s Harlem impacted his eventual career as a writer. Myers first explains his complicated family history: Myers’s biological parents were both black, but he was adopted at a very young age by his father’s first wife, Florence—a half-German, half-Native American woman who later remarried a black man named Herbert Dean. Myers adored his adoptive parents, and fondly recalls how his mother instilled an early love of language in him by reading aloud to him in their “sun-drenched Harlem kitchen.” Despite his strong reading skills, Myers initially had trouble in school, largely thanks to a speech impediment that made him the target of bullying. In turn, Myers would lash out at his attackers and get into trouble himself. As he moved through elementary school, however, teachers began to recognize his potential and take steps to help him succeed by providing him with books to read, enrolling him in speech-therapy classes, and eventually moving him to an accelerated class that would allow him to graduate early. Myers also benefited from the friendships he was forming, not only with the local boys he played basketball with, but also with fellow students of different races and backgrounds.

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