Read Online Bad Boy by Walter Dean Myers - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Walter Dean Myers
Ads: Link
Huck Finn . I also loved Little Men and, after reading it twice, got Little Women from the library. I thought Little Women was quite possibly the worst book ever written.
Although I was a reader, I did not associate books with writing. I liked to look at pictures of writers, and none of the writers whom I was studying in school had any relation to anything I knew as being real. Theywere all, as far as I knew, dead. Those who werenât dead were probably English, which meant about the same thing to me. That year I also discovered a book that alluded to sex. It was one of my better finds for the year.
When my mom was home, I would come home for lunch. When she was back working in the factory or cleaning apartments, she gave me money for lunch. I would use the money to buy adult paperbacks with girls on the cover. There werenât any real girls whom I particularly liked, although Dorothy Dodson was becoming interesting, but the idea of having a girlfriend appealed to me. So when, after a few months, the girls in the class made a ranking of all the boys according to which ones were âhunks,â I was hopeful. The class had shrunk to ten boys, and I came out eighth. So much for girls. My grades were good, and our class basketball team, with Eddie Norton as captain, was the second best in the school. I was still taking speech therapy classes, but I wasnât fighting anymore.
What I was doing was spending more and more time alone in my room, reading or writing. Mama started playing the numbers, and I learned how to get the winning number from the radio by adding up the race results. Sometimes we watched televisiontogether, but more and more we did so in silence.
As the year wore on, my father made an effort to come out of his depression. Occasionally we would go out to Rockaway Beach, and he would fish off a jetty. Mama and I had no interest in fishing, and so we would walk along the beach. I liked the smell of the sea and the mystery of crabs scrambling onto the shore. Mama was just glad to get out of the apartment.
A WRITER OBSERVES
H arlem. As I grew older, I began to see things differently. At thirteen I wanted to see the world around me the way I thought a real writer would have seen it, full of magic and marvels and breathtaking beauty, which would inspire me to write the kinds of poetry I had read in school. I wanted to look at the world through the eyes of a Shelley or a Byron, to feel the inspiration that guided their pens. I didnât have a typewriter, and so I wrote everything in black-and-white-covered composition books.
I had traveled to other parts of New York City, but my world, of course, was Harlem. Physically, Harlem was one of the most beautiful areas in the world. Bounded by Central Park to the south, and lying between the Hudson and East Rivers, it was built upin the 1890s as an ultramodern urban environment for middle-and upper-class whites. The expansion northward from the center of the city was too rapid, and the new housing, including elegant brownstones and magnificent apartments designed by the countryâs leading architects, was soon a money-losing proposition for the many investors. Soon apartments originally designed for one family were being cut up into two-and three-family dwellings, and blacks, who had been confined previously to the West Forties, were allowed to move in. By the First World War, the community was a ghetto in the making. Its residentsâ struggle to maintain their dignity despite absentee landlords and poor city services was intense and ongoing.
One morning I started my formal observations, beginning at 125th Street and the Hudson River. The Harlem part of the river was dotted with ancient wooden piers. Some older men were fishing off the end of the pier I went down, and a heavyset woman was lowering crab baskets over the side. I had brought romantic images of Mark Twainâs Mississippi River with me when I went to the Hudson, but it wasnât to
Although I was a reader, I did not associate books with writing. I liked to look at pictures of writers, and none of the writers whom I was studying in school had any relation to anything I knew as being real. Theywere all, as far as I knew, dead. Those who werenât dead were probably English, which meant about the same thing to me. That year I also discovered a book that alluded to sex. It was one of my better finds for the year.
When my mom was home, I would come home for lunch. When she was back working in the factory or cleaning apartments, she gave me money for lunch. I would use the money to buy adult paperbacks with girls on the cover. There werenât any real girls whom I particularly liked, although Dorothy Dodson was becoming interesting, but the idea of having a girlfriend appealed to me. So when, after a few months, the girls in the class made a ranking of all the boys according to which ones were âhunks,â I was hopeful. The class had shrunk to ten boys, and I came out eighth. So much for girls. My grades were good, and our class basketball team, with Eddie Norton as captain, was the second best in the school. I was still taking speech therapy classes, but I wasnât fighting anymore.
What I was doing was spending more and more time alone in my room, reading or writing. Mama started playing the numbers, and I learned how to get the winning number from the radio by adding up the race results. Sometimes we watched televisiontogether, but more and more we did so in silence.
As the year wore on, my father made an effort to come out of his depression. Occasionally we would go out to Rockaway Beach, and he would fish off a jetty. Mama and I had no interest in fishing, and so we would walk along the beach. I liked the smell of the sea and the mystery of crabs scrambling onto the shore. Mama was just glad to get out of the apartment.
A WRITER OBSERVES
H arlem. As I grew older, I began to see things differently. At thirteen I wanted to see the world around me the way I thought a real writer would have seen it, full of magic and marvels and breathtaking beauty, which would inspire me to write the kinds of poetry I had read in school. I wanted to look at the world through the eyes of a Shelley or a Byron, to feel the inspiration that guided their pens. I didnât have a typewriter, and so I wrote everything in black-and-white-covered composition books.
I had traveled to other parts of New York City, but my world, of course, was Harlem. Physically, Harlem was one of the most beautiful areas in the world. Bounded by Central Park to the south, and lying between the Hudson and East Rivers, it was built upin the 1890s as an ultramodern urban environment for middle-and upper-class whites. The expansion northward from the center of the city was too rapid, and the new housing, including elegant brownstones and magnificent apartments designed by the countryâs leading architects, was soon a money-losing proposition for the many investors. Soon apartments originally designed for one family were being cut up into two-and three-family dwellings, and blacks, who had been confined previously to the West Forties, were allowed to move in. By the First World War, the community was a ghetto in the making. Its residentsâ struggle to maintain their dignity despite absentee landlords and poor city services was intense and ongoing.
One morning I started my formal observations, beginning at 125th Street and the Hudson River. The Harlem part of the river was dotted with ancient wooden piers. Some older men were fishing off the end of the pier I went down, and a heavyset woman was lowering crab baskets over the side. I had brought romantic images of Mark Twainâs Mississippi River with me when I went to the Hudson, but it wasnât to
Similar Books
