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.
Quiz
Reading Check, Multiple Choice & Short Answer Quizzes
Reading Check questions are designed for in-class review on key plot points or for quick verbal or written assessments. Multiple Choice and Short Answer Quizzes create ideal summative assessments, and collectively function to convey a sense of the work’s tone and themes.
Chapters 1-3
Reading Check
1. What is Myers’s relationship to Florence?
2. Where do Florence and Walter Dean move to escape the prejudice they face as an interracial couple?
3. What sort of work does Florence do?
4. What makes Myers a target for school bullies?
Multiple Choice
1. By beginning his memoir with his family’s history, Myers implies that this history influences which of the following?
A) his sense of right and wrong
B) his choice of community
C) his sense of identity
D) his love of language
2. Which of the following best describes Myers’s depiction of Harlem?
A) chaotic
B) calm
C) dull
D) vibrant
3. To whom does Myers suggest he owes his passion for language?
A) Nancy
B) Florence
C) Herbert
D) Viola
4. Which of the following passages best explains the root of Myers’s conduct problems?
A) “I would become very angry if kids laughed at my speech, or even if I thought they were laughing” (Chapter 3)
B) “At age eight I was bigger than most of my classmates and nearly as tall as Mama, who stood barely over five feet” (Chapter 3)
C) “Actually, I liked the principal’s office. It was interesting to see the teachers come and go” (Chapter 3)
D) “The idea that the comics were forbidden added to their appeal” (Chapter 3)
Short-Answer Response
Answer each of the following questions in a complete sentence or sentences. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. How does racism shape Florence’s relationships with both Myers’s father, George Myers, and Herbert Dean?
2. Why do Myers’s parents begin sending him to spend the day with Aunt Nancy?
3. What does Myers make of Nancy’s largely white neighborhood?
4. How does Myers do in school, and why?
Chapters 4-6
Reading Check
1. What is the name of the boy Myers befriends in fourth grade?
2. Why does Myers have to have surgery in fourth grade?
3. What does Mrs. Conway give Myers?
4. Who is Mr. Lasher?
Multiple Choice
1. The books that Myers throws at people could be seen as symbolizing which of the following?
A. his struggles communicating
B. his discomfort with gender norms
C. his athletic ambitions
D. his rejection of his family
2. Which of the following passages best reflects Myers’s naivete regarding racism?
A) “In sports, the area in which I was most interested, there seemed to be a good representation of blacks” (Chapter 5)
B) “[W]e read in the Amsterdam News about a black man in the South who had been lynched by hanging. So we decided to hang Richard” (Chapter 5)
C) “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” (Chapter 5)
D) “Black families, often working very hard to make ends meet, wanted to clearly define which behavior was acceptable and which was not” (Chapter 5)
3. Which of the following best describes how Myers’s relationship with reading evolves in the fifth and sixth grades?
A) He becomes more interested in Black writers and connecting to his roots.
B) He uses reading as a way to connect with formerly estranged family members.
C) He loses interest in language and reading as he becomes more involved in athletics.
D) He feels a growing disconnect between his public persona and his identity as a reader.
4. Which of the following events marks a change in Myers’s relationship with his mother?
A) Myers publishes a poem about Florence in the school magazine.
B) Mrs. Parker tells Florence about Myers’s misbehavior.
C) Myers falsely blames Florence for injuries he sustained misbehaving.
D) Florence attends the dance recital Myers participates in.
Short-Answer Response
Answer each of the following questions in a complete sentence or sentences. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. How does Myers react to meeting his brother, Mickey, and his biological father, George Myers?
2. What sorts of opportunities does Myers see as available to him as a Black person?
3. How does Myers respond to having his poem published in the school magazine, and why?
4. What does Mr. Lasher mean when he tells Myers’s mother, “We need more smart Negro boys […] We don’t need tough Negro boys” (Chapter 6)?
Chapters 7-9
Reading Check
1. What event sparks Herbert Dean’s depression?
2. Why does Eddy prevent Eric from taking Myers with him to the party?
3. Why does Herbert never talk to Myers about his writing?
Multiple Choice
1. How does Lee’s death change Myers’s relationship with his parents?
A) It causes him to blame them for Lee’s death.
B) It causes him to take sides in their relationship.
C) It causes him to feel closer to them.
D) It causes him to be more aware of them as people.
2. Which of the following best explains Myers’s growing struggles with writing?
A) He fears the mockery of his friends and family.
B) He can’t relate his experiences to anything he is reading.
C) He is no longer close to his mother, who was his inspiration.
D) His classes have made writing feel like a rote activity.
3. Consider the following passage: “When a librarian at the George Bruce commented that I probably wasn’t reading all the books I took out, I began to space out my visits. I wanted her to think that I was a reader” (Chapter 9). This most speaks to the relationship between which of the following?
A) identity and community
B) language and family
C) family and community
D) race and identity
Short-Answer Response
Answer each of the following questions in a complete sentence or sentences. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. What is Myers’s experience learning about slavery in school like?
2. What does Myers mean when he says he “did not want to do something that was commendable only as a Negro accomplishment” (Chapter 8)?
3. What appeals to Myers about Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s poetry?
Chapters 10-12
Reading Check
1. Who moves in with Myers’s family in 1951?
2. What happens to the money Myers saves to buy a typewriter?
3. What sport does Myers hope to win a scholarship playing?
Multiple Choice
1. How do Herbert’s views on white America differ from those of his son?
A) Herbert advocates ignoring white America as much as possible, whereas Myers wants to assimilate into it.
B) Herbert wants to assimilate into white America, whereas Myers wants to ignore it as much as possible.
C) Herbert believes racial equality will ultimately prevail, whereas Myers is more skeptical.
D) Herbert is skeptical that racial equality will ultimately prevail, whereas Myers believes it will.
2. Which of the following best symbolizes Myers’s frustrated dreams for his future?
A) the garment center
B) speech therapy
C) the lottery
D) the typewriter
3. Which of the following best describes Myers’s impression of Langston Hughes?
A) meek
B) proud
C) ordinary
D) impressive
Short-Answer Response
Answer each of the following questions in a complete sentence or sentences. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. How do the family’s changed financial circumstances exacerbate Myers’s sense of isolation?
2. How does Myers react when his boss at the garment center moves him to a different job, and why?
3. What does Myers mean when he says that he “wanted to be in the system that [he] was walking away from, but [he] didn’t know how to get in” (Chapter 12)? What does this say about his reasons for skipping school, getting into fights, etc.?
Chapters 13-16
Reading Check
1. What does Florence cite as the cause of Myers’s anxiety?
2. What is the name of Myers’s psychologist?
3. What book does Myers see as paralleling his relationship with his own mother?
4. How does Myers respond when asked if he likes being Black?
Multiple Choice
1. As a teenager, how does Myers hope to use his writing?
A) to protest societal injustices
B) to find and connect with people like himself
C) to earn a living
D) to inspire people with beautiful and thought-provoking art
2. Myers likely bonds with Frank for which of the following reasons?
A) He sees Frank as having a secret side similar to his own.
B) He sees Frank as a link to white American society.
C) He sees Frank as a fellow outsider.
D) He sees Frank as someone he can feel superior to.
3. Consider the following passage: “[Florence] had a Pennsylvania Dutch accent peppered with German expressions that he didn’t understand and, typically, laughed at” (Chapter 15). This suggests a parallel to which of the following symbols or motifs?
A) Myers’s speech impediment
B) books and literature
C) the typewriter
D) the garment center
4. Myers's sense that being Black is something “imposed” on him reflects which of the following?
A) harmony between personal identity and language
B) harmony between personal identity and society
C) tension between personal identity and language
D) tension between personal identity and society
Short-Answer Response
Answer each of the following questions in a complete sentence or sentences. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. Why does Balzac’s writing appeal to Myers so much?
2. How and why has Myers’s relationship with Florence changed since he was a young boy?
3. What does Myers see as the relationship between race, career, and gender?
Chapters 17-19
Reading Check
1. What happens when Myers tries to return to school in the spring of 1954?
2. What prompts Myers to join the army?
3. What piece of literature inspires Myers to draw on his experiences as a Black man when writing?
Multiple Choice
1. Which of the following passages best illustrates the impact Myers’s sense of voicelessness has had on his relationship with words and literature?
A) “It was not the language of Sassoon but the violence of war that attracted me” (Chapter 17)
B) “[T]here was no breadth to my world, no experience that would tell me what to do now that I was in trouble” (Chapter 17)
C) “I wanted to think of myself as someone different. Different meant that you were not responsible for the normal things in life” (Chapter 17)
D) “I imagined people asking whatever had happened to me. Did he simply fall by the wayside?” (Chapter 17)
2. Which of the following best describes how Myers describes his time in the army?
A) an experience that permanently distanced him from his parents
B) a source of inspiration for his later writing
C) a waste of his young adulthood and talent
D) an evil that nevertheless helped him grow into himself
3. Where does Myers suggest he ultimately finds both fellowship and affirmation of himself as an individual?
A) in the army
B) in blue-collar jobs
C) in the writing community
D) in his church
Short-Answer Response
Answer each of the following questions in a complete sentence or sentences. Incorporate details from the text to support your response.
1. How does Myers describe his attempts to write during the spring of his senior year?
2. How does Herbert respond to Myers enlisting, and how does Myers interpret that response?
3. Why does Myers ultimately return to writing?
Quizzes – Answer Key
Chapters 1-3
Reading Check
1. Florence was Myers’s father’s first wife; she ended up adopting Myers and raising him with her second husband, Herbert Dean (Chapter 1).
2. Harlem (Chapter 1)
3. housecleaning (Chapter 2)
4. his speech impediment (Chapter 3)
Multiple Choice
Short-Answer Response
1. Florence is biracial—half German and half Indigenous American—but her marriage to George Myers, who is Black, does not sit well with her family. When she later marries Howard Dean, also a Black man, the couple moves to Harlem in the hopes of finding a more accepting environment (Chapter 1).
2. Myers is a mischievous child who gets into trouble fairly regularly (e.g., breaking his sister’s watch). However, since Florence often works outside the house, she can’t spend all day looking after him and sometimes sends him to Nancy, Howard’s sister (Chapter 2).
3. Nancy is one of the only Black people in her neighborhood, but Myers doesn’t think anything of this: “[A]t my age, which was probably five, I was not really aware of racial differences” (Chapter 2).
4. Although initially successful, especially at reading, Myers increasingly struggles at school. This is largely due to his speech impediment: Myers grows frustrated with students who tease him and teachers who misinterpret the impediment as unintelligence, and he begins acting out. This causes his grades to slip (Chapter 3).
Chapters 4-6
Reading Check
1. Eric Leonhardt (Chapter 4)
2. He gets appendicitis (Chapter 4).
3. a book of fairy tales (Chapter 5)
4. Myers’s sixth grade teacher (Chapter 6)
Multiple Choice
Short-Answer Response
1. Myers is interested in his biological family and sees meeting them as a way to orient and better understand himself; he notes that Mickey (whom he soon befriends) is “the same light color [Myers] was” (Chapter 4). However, Myers doesn’t really view his biological father and siblings as his true family, and he maintains a polite but distant relationship with the former.
2. Although Myers doesn’t feel the impact of racism on a daily basis, his ideas about who he can be as a Black person reflect an absence of Black representation: “What I knew about black people […] was primarily what I saw on 125th Street, in the newspapers, and in church. Blacks were entertainers, or churchgoers, or athletes” (Chapter 6). He therefore decides he wants to be an athlete even though he actually prefers reading and writing.
3. Myers is proud of having his work published and sees it as affirming a part of himself—his passion for language—that he’s mostly kept hidden: “It was the first time I had seen my name in print, and it made me feel important” (Chapter 6).
4. Mr. Lasher’s remark suggests that he sees education as a means of curbing racial inequality and that he therefore doesn’t want Myers to “throw away” his natural intelligence (Chapter 6).
Chapters 7-9
Reading Check
1. the murder of his brother, Lee (Chapter 7)
2. because Myers is Black (Chapter 8)
3. because Herbert can’t read (Chapter 9)
Multiple Choice
Short-Answer Response
1. The experience of learning about slavery is alienating for Myers. The curriculum doesn’t touch on the subject in detail or with sensitivity, leaving Myers to make sense of the discrepancy between slavery and America’s purported values himself. The result is that he “[feels] on some level that those enslaved blacks had somehow deserved to be enslaved” (Chapter 7).
2. Myers recognizes that Black Americans have a harder time getting ahead in life than white Americans and is frustrated. On the one hand, his desire to surpass “Negro accomplishments” reflects his rejection of racial inequality as fundamentally unfair; at the same time, his ideas of what constitutes a “real” accomplishment reflect white America’s values and his own internalized racism (Chapter 8).
3. Myers enjoys Browning’s writing because it’s “personal”: Writing and reading are very private activities to Myers, and he can relate to Browning’s work in a way he can’t to more stylized poetry (Chapter 9).
Chapters 10-12
Reading Check
1. Herbert’s father, William (Chapter 10)
2. Florence spends it on the lottery (Chapter 11).
3. basketball (Chapter 12)
Multiple Choice
Short-Answer Response
1. The precariousness of the family finances strains Myers’s relationship with his parents (and their relationship with one another): Each is too preoccupied with their own worries to connect with one another. Tight finances also make it difficult for Myers to feel accepted at school: “I longed to have a school sweater, a school jacket, the symbols of belonging. They were out of the question as we struggled just to make ends meet” (Chapter 10).
2. Because a white boy takes over Myers’s former job at the ticketing machine, Myers sees the change as confirmation that his race will prevent him from ever advancing in life: “They saw me as just another one of the hundreds of blacks who were fit only for manual labor” (Chapter 11). Myers ultimately quits and finds a different job.
3. Myers wants to be part of elite (or at least middle-class) America—someone who works with “ideas” and “shape[s] them into a kind of power” (Chapter 12). However, he increasingly feels that a number of factors—most notably his race, but also his class, his speech impediment, etc.—will prevent him from entering that sector of society, so he increasingly rebels against it in frustration.
Chapters 13-16
Reading Check
1. a childhood scarlet fever infection (Chapter 13)
2. Dr. Holiday (Chapter 14)
3. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (Chapter 15)
4. He says that he does, but the question prompts him to think more deeply about race than he previously has (Chapter 16).
Multiple Choice
Short-Answer Response
1. Myers likes that Balzac’s work is character-driven, but more than that, he particularly relates to the title character of Père Goriot, whom he sees as an outsider like himself: “Away from the book I imagined myself to be Goriot, toiling away just beyond the edges of a world he could not enter” (Chapter 13).
2. Myers has developed (and strongly identifies with) intellectual interests that he feels his mother can’t understand. He has consequently grown distant from her, with even their shared appreciation for language now an obstacle between them: “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” (Chapter 15).
3. Dr. Holiday’s question about being Black causes Myers to realize that, as much as he doesn’t want to identify with his race, ideas about race have permeated his understanding of categories like career and gender: “When I thought of the major careers, I thought of whites, not blacks. When I thought of maleness, I thought of whites with political or economic power and blacks with muscle” (Chapter 16). Consequently, he views these as “subdivisions” of race.
Chapters 17-19
Reading Check
1. He finds that the school has closed for the summer (Chapter 17).
2. Frank gets into trouble with some drug dealers and leaves town. Lonely and worried about his own safety, Myers decides to enlist (Chapter 18).
3. “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin (Chapter 19)
Multiple Choice
Short-Answer Response
1. Myers says that while he continued to write, his work became increasingly fragmented and detached: “I was removed from the logic that had once made my stories and poems easily accessible. […] I was having difficulty understanding material I had written only days before” (Chapter 17). This difficulty he experiences in expressing himself mirrors Myers’s increasingly fraught sense of who he is.
2. Herbert tells Florence (within earshot of Myers) that the army will “make a man” of Myers. Myers suggests that his father meant this as reassurance, sensing Myers’s insecurity with regards to his masculinity: “He wanted to somehow reassure me that I could be a man, whatever that was supposed to mean” (Chapter 18).
3. Myers works a string of blue-collar jobs from which he feels increasingly alienated. He begins writing again without any plans of publishing his work, but “need[ing] to think of [him]self as a person with a brain as well as a body” (Chapter 19).
Related Titles
By Walter Dean Myers
