Free Bad Boy by Walter Dean Myers Page B

away from the school, that was to have a major effect on me. An Irish kid named Eddie was having a party. He asked Eric to come and told Eric that he could bring anyone he wanted. Eric askedme in front of Eddie if I wanted to come to the party. I said yes. Later Eddie told Eric that I couldn’t come because I wasn’t white.
    Eric was mad and told me that I should beat the crap out of Eddie. I wanted to do just that, but I was more hurt than I was mad.

SONNETS FROM THE PORTUGUESE
    T he seventh and eighth grades, which our Special Progress class did in one year, were remarkable only in that I had no major fights and for the depression of my father. I ended the year glad to be released from the hot classrooms but with few prospects for the summer. I had fewer friends than ever, having lost anything of common interest with the boys on my block who were my age. Boys slightly older were moving on to girls and dating and fitting in with the mores and restrictions of being in their mid teens, which meant, among other things, avoiding associations with younger boys. I was twelve and going into the ninth grade of what would today be called a “gifted” program, while many of the other kids my age were just going into the seventh. The only sport I was playing now was basketball,often with guys four or five years older than I was.
    Basketball was very satisfying. It gave me a chance to compete, which I loved, and it was highly respected in the community. A good basketball player would be known throughout Harlem. Beyond the idea of winning, which was important to me, I liked the physical aspects of playing ball. Going up for a rebound and snatching it off the backboard over an opponent was a thrill. To even get into one of the tough summer tournaments, with players coming from as far away as Philadelphia, was sheer delight.
    My sister Imogene had come to Harlem to live with George Myers. She was bright, beautiful, and feisty, but, like Mickey, she was not allowed out of the house that much. I wanted her to see me play ball in the worst way, but she could never get to the better games that I managed to play in. I did show her some of my poetry, which she liked. I thought Jean, as we called her, was a lot like me and began wondering more often what my biological family was like.
    Mr. Lasher had convinced me that I was bright, and by the time I approached the ninth grade, education had become very important to me. There was far less pretense in the New York City school system than there is today. High schools were divided into four general categories: vocational, commercial, general, andacademic. Only 25 percent of all male students attended academic high schools and were expected to go on to college. The rest, even if they did graduate from high school, were expected to take their place in the workforce immediately. The dropout rate was quite high, but it didn’t seem to matter all that much. Most jobs could be handled by anyone with a willingness to work and some reading ability. But I knew that a poor education would probably land me in a “Negro” job, that lower level of employment in which so many of the neighborhood men seemed to be hopelessly stuck.
    By this time there were two very distinct voices going on in my head, and I moved easily between them. One had to do with sports, street life, and establishing myself as a male. It was a fairly rough voice, the kind of in-your-face tone that said I wouldn’t stand for too much nonsense either on the basketball courts or in the streets. The other voice, the one I hid from my street friends and teammates, was increasingly dealing with the vocabulary of literature. Harlem had a rich literary heritage of which I knew nothing. The so-called Harlem Renaissance, which produced writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen, had ended during the Depression of the thirties, and none of these writerswere taught in city schools.