Authors: Walter Dean Myers
“Are you in trouble?” she asked.
“I think so,” I answered.
“Whatever happens,” she whispered, “don't stop writing.”
I waited and waited, and then the door opened and I was invited into the interior office. I was asked about the time I had had scarlet fever. Scarlet fever?
My bout with scarlet fever came the summer when I was eight, and I had all but forgotten it. I had been hospitalized for three weeks, most of it in a glass-walled cubicle in Williard Parker Hospital on the East Side. At the end of the three weeks, when I was cured of the fever, the doctors had recommended that I be put into a facility for disturbed children until my “nervousness” subsided. Mama had refused and brought me home. But what was that about now?
“Are you having problems?” asked a school administrator, wearing his look-how-calm-I-am expression.
I didn't answer. It was clear that Mama had told them about the scarlet fever incident and must have
explained that I was a nervous child. Still, I had violated the rules of attendance and certainly the rules of Stuyvesant. Mama and I were asked to sit in the hallway. A secretary brought Mama some coffee. We didn't speak as we waited.
Finally we were asked in again. I could remain in the school if Mama and I agreed to put me under the supervision of a city agency. Mama asked if I would go along with it and I said yes. I was officially disturbed.
A
s part of the new attention being paid to me I had to report to someone at a city bureau for an interview. Here a stern-looking man with white hair looked over my record and then announced, gravely, that I was in trouble. He became annoyed when I smiled and informed me that my truancy was “no laughing matter.” I knew that, of course, but what had struck me as funny was that every time I got into trouble, the first thing that happened was that someone would think it their official duty to inform me of the fact.
He told me that if I continued staying out of school, I would be eligible for a juvenile facility. There was, on the cluttered desk between us, a badge that added weight to his argument. He had me agree to a lot of obvious things, such as that I knew my situation was
serious, and that I was aware that I wouldn't be given many more chances. I had been warned about my attendance during my junior year, but my records hadn't been turned over to a city agency at that time.
It was apparent that the man interviewing me took my reluctance to answer his questions as insolence. He asked me if I thought I was better than everybody else. I answered no, of course. What we never discussed was how desperately I wanted to hide my feelings from him, or how ashamed I was of my predicament. I listened as he told me how I should be living my life, what I should have been doing with my opportunities, and how ashamed I should have been for giving everyone so much trouble. I looked down at my shoes. Thoughts of suicide flickered through my mind.
By the time I left, my stomach was churning. I got the A train at Chambers Street and stood as it lurched up to 125th. I had my books with me and looked through one of them. The words didn't make any sense, as all I could hear was the last recitation of my sins.
That night I met Frank. I had promised Mama I would be home early, but I needed someone to talk to in a bad way. There was nothing Frank could do to help me, but I didn't know anyone else who could, either. We sat on the park bench across from my house as it grew dark.
By this time I knew Frank's story well. His father had been a vaudeville dancer and singer and had achieved quite a bit of success in the black entertainment outlets. Some blacks were able to cross over into the white markets in the forties if their talents were not too much connected with the blues or low-down black music. The singing Mills Brothers, the dancing Nicholas Brothers, and Fats Waller had all crossed over, establishing their popularity in both white and black venues. Frank's father had bought a house in a fairly exclusive neighborhood on Long Island, which is next to New York City. Most of the year he traveled throughout the United States and Europe while Frank and his mom stayed home. Things were good for them until the father died.
Neighbors who had been kind to the black family of a famous entertainer were less than kind to the widow. Frank was beaten up a lot by neighborhood kids who taunted him because he was black. His mother couldn't or wouldn't do much about the bullying, and Frank responded by staying in the house as much as possible. Things went from bad to very much worse in one horrible incident.
Frank and his mother were on a bus going from New York to Long Island. His mother had been drinking and was loud, and the bus driver decided to put
them off the bus. Mrs. Hall refused to get off the bus, and the driver tried to push her off.
Frank didn't remember anything that had happened after that. His next memory was of waking up in a hospital, secured to a bed. Later he learned that he had stabbed the bus driver and two other passengers to death. He was locked away in Creedmore, a New York City mental institution, from the time he was thirteen. When he was sixteen, his mother was able to get him out. She sold the house and moved into an apartment, and they lived together for a while. Then there was another incident. He and his mother were at a party. There was an argument, and he passed out. This time there was one dead victim.
Frank's first three victims were white adults. The last victim was black and close to Frank's age. Frank was put away again, this time for three more years until his mother got him out again. He was released under the custody of a priest from St. Joseph's, which was why he was in the Morningside area.
What I saw of Frank was an extremely mild-mannered young man, even when he was drinking beer, which he did a lot. When he found out that I didn't drink, he said he would make sure that I never started, that it was a bad habit. When I asked him why he drank if it was so bad, he said it was because there was
so much stuff that he didn't want to remember.
“And when you drink you don't remember it?”
“No, I still remember it,” he said, laughing.
We both laughed. I think he wanted to remember the things he had done and that in a way, it was all that he had in his life.
He still saw his mom once in a while, but he didn't like seeing her anymore. She kept telling him not to be crazy and asking him what he was doing with his life. He didn't remember too much about his father, only the way he had heard his father sing sometimes when he came home and sang to his mother. The last song he had heard his father sing was “Blue Velvet.” When he had drunk enough beer, Frank would sing the song his father had sung, in a baritone deeper than his normal voice, the alcohol slurring the words in the darkness of the park.
As the time drifted toward midnight, Mr. and Mrs. Dodson came along on the other side of the wide street. She stopped when she saw me sitting on the park bench, and crossed over. She asked me if I was all right, and I said yes. She asked me if I wanted to go across the street with her, and I said no. I realized that the Wicked Witch was just being kind. I wondered if Mama had told her anything about my situation. As she turned to leave, I felt good about her for the first time.
I told Frank what had happened and told him I had been warned about being sent to a juvenile facility. He said that if things got too bad, he and I could live together. Frank was trying to get a place of his own. A guy on 123rd Street had offered him a job. He was to go to the guy's house at nine and get a package to take downtown. Frank also described the guy as a “creep.”
I volunteered to go with him, and we walked down to the apartment. It was in one of the brownstones. We were buzzed in and went into a dimly lit apartment. There were dirty dishes in the sink, and food from the garbage had spilled onto the floor. The smells of incense and sweat mingled with cooking odors from another apartment. The apartment consisted, as far as I could see, of two rooms. The other room was dark, but I sensed something was going on in it. There were a number of people in the room we were in. The man Frank had gone to meet, a stocky dude in his twenties with his hair conked, asked him who I was, and Frank said I was just a friend. The guy glanced at me and told Frank to have a seat. I had a knife, an Italian stiletto that I had bought on 42nd Street, and I touched the pocket it was in with my elbow to make sure it was there.
The guy was putting something in paper bags at the table. Frank and I talked quietly. I glanced at one
of the men against the wall, and it looked as if he was skin-poppingâshooting heroin under his skin. A lot of people thought you wouldn't get hooked if you skin-popped instead of injecting the drug directly into a vein. I didn't know one way or the other. There were two girls in the apartment, and I wondered if they were dopers too.
We sat there for nearly twenty minutes before Frank was given a package to take downtown. He was warned that if anything happened to the package, he would be in big trouble.
We took the package Frank was given to an apartment downtown near Roosevelt Hospital. Frank offered me five dollars, which I think was half the money he had made for delivering the package, but I didn't take it. We bought some potato chips and ate them on the way uptown as the new day broke over Harlem.
When I got home Mama was upset. She tried talking tough to me, but I just went to my room and closed the door. I thought a lot about living with Frank. Frank didn't read, and we didn't have a lot to talk about except what was bothering us. On the other hand, I thought, if I had a place away from my parents, I would have a place to bring a girl if I ever lucked out and got one.
The last book on the class reading list from Stuyvesant was
The Stranger
, by Camus. In
The Stranger
the protagonist, Mersault, has a chance meeting with an Arab, a stranger, that results in Mersault's killing the man. In examining Mersault's life, the judges see his detachment and come to the conclusion that a man who is so detached from normal human feelings is more likely to kill. Mersault is found guilty of murder.
As I read the book, it came to me that I could understand Mersault's distancing himself from the murder and also the lack of understanding on the part of the judges examining him. Murder was an essentially evil act. But what would happen if you could separate yourself from the act? Would it still be evil? When Frank blacked out, and awakened to discover that he had killed his mother's attackers, he had also removed the evil from the murder. Or had he?
Another idea I found, or imagined I found, in
The Stranger
was the use of detachment as a resource. Camus had given his hero a life that was not livable in any normal way. How would he get on with loving people who fully expected him to share a range of emotions with which they were familiar and with which they were accustomed to dealing? Although the state's prosecutors are made to seem almost ridiculous in the
book, weren't their judgments the same as those of the ordinary people the hero would face every day? But Camus gives his hero a way out, though not one that many people would choose. He allows him a random act of violence that removes him from the dilemma of his life. I wanted to write about this deliberate detachment, about what people could do if they could remove themselves from the emotions they were expected to have.
I had to go to Bellevue for testing. The tests were given by a man who looked, to me, like the Joker in the Batman comics. The tests lasted nearly all day. There were intelligence tests and tests I recognized as psychological.
Bellevue was a city hospital, huge in dimension and unbelievably depressing. The walls of the long corridor where I was sent might once have been green, but as I sat on a wooden bench, waiting for the Joker to call me in for the next test, they were grimy gray with patches where the paint had peeled off, serving as landmarks for the roaches that scurried on irregular routes from floor to ceiling. A friend once said that it was a perfect hospital because once you were there for fifteen minutes you didn't mind dying.
The tests complete, I was given the name of a Dr. Holiday and told that I must see her, at Bellevue, the following week.
I was confused. I had not, to my knowledge, been accused of committing a crime, and yet I was now involved in a system of tests and appointments. I began writing about the process of going from agency to agency, being categorized, being advised of my shortcomings, and having dire warnings sent my way. I recorded everything carefully, writing in minute detail. But as I dealt with what was happening to me by becoming more and more the detached observer, I was becoming Mersault, the character, and not Camus, the author.
T
he pace of my writing increased. When I was spending lots of time in Central Park instead of going to school, I would read three or four books a week. When I started back to school again, I tried to limit my reading to two books a week, and I filled my time by writing furiously. I could not do the assigned homework. I could open the textbooks, I could read the assignments, but then I would be drawn back to my own writing or reading. There were more notebooks with stories, more sheets of paper from U.S. Radium, where my father worked, covered with poems, or short critiques of books or plays. I tried to connect the books I read: a biography of Friedrich Nietzsche with his
Thus Spake Zarathrustra
, Arthur Koestler's
Darkness at Noon
with Karel Capek, getting most of my connections
from works of criticism, reviews, or casual mentions by my English teacher, who seemed to have read everything.
For a while I went to school every day, but soon I began missing days again. When I did attend, the teachers knew that I wouldn't be able to answer most of their questions, so they rarely called on me. I felt bad about not going to school but relieved at not having to sit in the classes and listen to lectures I could barely understand or to the chatter of students who were worried about grade point averages and S.A.T. scores. There was no doubt, either, that they were better students than I was. I was very unhappy and wrote droopily sad poems about death and isolation that reflected the way I felt. In a way I was mourning for the self I thought I had been, and at the same time I was becoming absorbed in the self I had become. Mine was the humiliated consciousness, ashamed of its every face, its every nuance. I was smart, which had come to mean that I was cutting myself off from people whose interests reflected their not being smart. My sole interests were literature and philosophy, which made me a bad student at the school I had selected. What I wanted was to hide myself, to not show the ugliness I felt. I was big, over six feet tall, too large to hide, too gross in movement and posture not to be noticed.
On warm days, instead of going to school, I would go to Central Park and spend the day reading. I began
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
, by James Joyce. I instantly felt that I knew Stephen Daedalus. He was an interested observer of the life around him, as I felt I was. His mother was a source of great conflict to him, as was mine. Ultimately, he would have to turn from her, which I felt was terrible. I didn't know if I would have that much conviction.
Poor Mama. She didn't know what was going on with me, and couldn't have known in a hundred years. We were, in our separate ways, looking to establish our respective identities. I didn't ever know who she really was. Years later, after her death, my dad would talk of how strange she had sounded when he first met her. She had a Pennsylvania Dutch accent peppered with German expressions that he didn't understand and, typically, laughed at. That was his way. I think, through the lens of many years passed, that she had counted on the constant of always being able to love me. The one picture I had seen of her as a young woman showed her in a shimmering blue dress, her dark hair framing her face, a fragile grace holding her in the studio photographer's chair. I would have liked to have talked with her after she had had her picture taken. I would have liked to have sat across from her
when Fats Waller, tinkling the keys of the piano seductively with his thick, powerful fingers, rolled his big eyes at her. What had she expected of life?
Mama, too, had given me my first reading voice. She had helped me to move past just understanding the letters that made up words, and had coaxed me into making the words my own so that they danced in my head even away from the printed page. Then, in my teen years, I had developed my own voices, one that was still the child, her child, but another voice that was intellectually sophisticated in ways she did not understand. If I had told her that I had pain, she would have held me in her arms and comforted me. But to tell her that it pained me to question the meaning of morality would have, I think, puzzled her. I had not put away childish things, but neither were my understanding or my words only those of a child.
Stephen Daedalus did not grant his mother's request to pray with her before her death. Mersault moved away from the death of his mother. Mama was my key to life. Long before my father could or should have shown me the way to become a man, she had held me in her arms in silent definition of what it meant to be human.
During the summer I had gone to the Apollo to see Duke Ellington and Billie Holiday. Ellington's band
was immediate, smooth, and magical. Billie Holiday came on at the end of the program to a wildly enthusiastic audience. She missed her first singing cue, then slurred her words in a whiskey vibrato. Someone in the audience yelled that she needed another shot of heroin. Somehow Ellington got her through a couple of numbers before she was hustled off the stage. There was an ugliness about Billie on the stage that filled the entire theater and lingered long after she had left. What had she expected from life?
To get to Dr. Holiday's office, I had to walk down a long gray corridor that seemed buried deep in the bowels of the hospital. I knew that if I had not scored so highly on the I.Q. tests, I would have been considered just bad, or rebellious. But I was certifiably bright and, therefore, disturbed. There were benches along the walls outside the doors with their frosted glass and their neatly printed names and titles.
“Are you angry about something, Walter?”
“No,” I answered, truthfully.
“What kinds of problems are you having?”
I shrugged.
“Sometimes it's hard being sixteen, isn't it?”
I didn't know. I had never been sixteen before, and I didn't know what other kids were doing about it. Was there something about sixteen that was different?
Dr. Holiday was a beautiful black woman with a very pleasant scent. I didn't tell her that, even when she mentioned that, according to the tests I had taken, I seemed to have some difficulty in seeing colors. I wanted to tell her that I did have some small difficulty in distinguishing colors, but that I could detect odors very well. That, along with the fact that I could push up on the end of my nose and make oil pop out of my pores, was just one of my special talents. She told me how bright I was. Thank you. She told me what a good school Stuyvesant was. Thank you. She told me that the clinic was a place in which I could talk about anything I wanted to and at any time. She was confused about my name. She kept calling me Walter Dean when my name was Walter Myers. Hello!
After a long talk in which I tried my best to be as smart as she wanted me to be, she told me to come back the following week at the same time. I was not to forget the appointment or that I had made a deal with the school and with the city. When I came out of Dr. Holiday's office into the corridor, there was a thin black girl sitting on one of the wooden benches, her legs more twined around each other than crossed, her head in her hands. I wondered how I had looked on my side of the wall.
Home. Mama asked me if I had gone to the agency
and I said yes. She asked me how it had gone and I said all right. She didn't know what else to ask.
That night I started my homework and quickly put it aside. I had picked up a copy of
Ulysses
, by James Joyce, and I started that. I read until midnight, stopping only to eat some spaghetti Mama had made. I had stopped eating meat, questioning the right of men to kill and eat animals, and so she had made the meatless sauce separate from the pasta sauce she and my father had, just for me. I had heard that
Ulysses
was difficult reading, and I wanted very badly to be able to read and love it; but by the time I turned out the light, I knew it was beyond me. I felt that Joyce had let me down, even as God had.
The newspapers were full of stories about the Rosenbergs. Ethel and Julius Rosenberg had been executed the previous June, accused of spying for the Soviet Union. In a very real way I imagined my own execution. It would be the day of my graduation or, at least, the day on which I was supposed to graduate. I went to school only sporadically now, and was falling further and further behind. When the day came that my class graduated and, for the most part, moved on to college, I would be turned out into the world. But my being turned out would not be like Mersault's, stumbling toward his own execution. Mine would be
the death of the Arab, senseless, anonymous, recorded only by the official records.
I ran into the gang that had attacked Frank in the park. I was reading in Central Park, at the sailboat lake, when four of them came along. One of them recognized me and called out to the others. They were out of their neighborhood, and weren't nearly as confident as they would have been if they had been in Harlem. One of them produced a knife, and I took mine out, flicked it open, and went straight toward him. Several white people started moving away from the benches. The kid with the knife, my age or younger, quickly backed off. One of the others told me to stay where I was while they went to get a gun. Sure.
The gang thing scared me. I didn't mind at all hurting people. That was the one thing I had in common with them, and they understood that. But that wasn't the life I wanted to lead. It was no better than being condemned to the garment-center labor force. Sooner or later, I knew, I would have it out with either all of the gang or some of them. On the way home I imagined myself facing them, blacking out, and waking to find that I had killed them all.
My next session with Dr. Holiday went well. She asked me about my family life and asked me if I had ever had sex with a girl. I answered that I had. I knew
the answer I was supposed to give. I was black and sixteen. If what I had heard from other kids my age was true, they were all having sex. Then, just before I left, she asked a final question.
“Do you like being black?”