Free Bad Boy by Walter Dean Myers

civil rights movement, was making it a better job. But it was Mrs. Dodson, WW of the W, who ran that family. Her three children, Robert, Dorothy, and Helen, were going to do the right thing, and no one knew the right thing better thanMrs. Dodson. My only real quarrel with her was that she also thought she knew the right thing for me. Which she didn’t.
    Melba Valle lived above us and was a part-time model and dancer. She did flamenco dancing, and we could hear her heels pounding on the ceiling and the distinct clicking of castanets. My mom hated her. She would get a broom and bang on the ceiling. I secretly bought a pair of castanets and taught myself at least to emulate some of the sounds I heard from above. Melba made the cover of Jet magazine, a really big deal in the black community, and at least once was in a dance program with Geoffrey Holder. Years later, at Geoffrey’s house, I asked him if he remembered her, and he said yes, but there was no obvious recognition on his face, and I wondered if he was just being polite. Melba had ambitions to be more than just someone who lived on the Avenue, and that attracted me to her. I also liked her warmth and openness, even to the kid who lived on the floor below. But there was a sadness to her as well. Many of the people in the building didn’t like her, claiming that she tried to make herself different from the others. It was the first time I had heard about people trying to be “not just another Negro.”
    Bodie Jones was something else. I’m not even sure how to spell his first name. It could have been Bo “D”or some other variation. His dad or uncle played with Count Basie’s band, and Bodie played trumpet as well. He was older than me and would make remarks about how I spoke. I always wanted to fight him, but he would back off (even though I’m sure he would have punched my lights out). One time he said, in front of Light Billy, Binky, and some other guys, that he was going to kick my tail. He put one hand in his pocket, suggesting that he had a knife. I wasn’t afraid of his knife for two reasons; the first was that my brother Mickey was standing behind him holding a baseball bat, and the second was that I was kind of stupid.
    Mickey and I had become friends. My adoptive parents gave me better circumstances than he had, at least to my way of thinking. Our biggest problem was that where he was laid-back, almost passive, I was very aggressive. Small disagreements for Mickey were reasons to move on to another subject; to me they were reasons to fight. He was also more constricted than I was. Mickey, for some reason, had to stay in our Harlem neighborhood. I would travel down to the Riverside Park boat basin, at 79th Street, on my bike, or up to the International House on Riverside Drive.
    What impressed me most as an observer was the entrance to the A train on 125th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. There were constant streams of people goingdown those stairs in the mornings and coming up them in the evenings. They were going downtown to jobs I knew about—jobs as laborers, cleaning people, messengers. I knew there were exceptions. The Amsterdam News and Ebony always printed pictures of blacks who worked in downtown offices or who had achieved some small recognition. But next to the accomplishments of whites, the stories about blacks in the Amsterdam News were almost silly. The white newspapers would have a story about some white senator making a speech, or some white businessman opening a branch office somewhere, and the black paper would have a story about a man who was given a certificate for having a job as elevator operator for twenty years. White singers performed at Carnegie Hall. If a black singer appeared at Carnegie Hall, it wouldn’t be in an opera but in a recital, which would include Negro spirituals.
    The idea that race played a large part in the life process was becoming clear to me. I knew that blacks did not