"It just tears me up to see young people wasting their lives like that," Mom said. "You can read about it in the papers tomorrow." "That's because they weren't eighteen yet," Pop said. "They didn't even give their names," Mom said. In Lebanon, negotiators have reached a tentative agreement. Tragically, this is yet another example of the growing number of children left behind on the cold streets of New York. The country's educational mantra these days is "No Child Left Behind." The result: a badly frightened and wounded clerk in the store, a sixteen-year-old in police custody, and a seventeen-year-old fatally wounded. The two youths shot at the policeman, who returned fire. As they made their way from the store and down the busy street they encountered an off-duty policeman, who immediately sensed what was going on. The image on the screen switched to a picture of the police stretching yellow tape across the sidewalk in front of a discount store.Īt one thirty this afternoon, two boys, boys who should have been in school, attempted to stick up this store on 126th Street and Lenox Avenue. Today, two high school boys were involved in a vicious robbery and shoot-out in New York's Harlem community. What's happening with the youth of America? Well, if you're talking about the young people in our inner cities, the picture is far from pretty. There was a commercial on the television.Ī moment later a woman's face filled the screen. "They're talking about that stick up on 126th Street." Pops came out of the bathroom in his undershirt and started to say something, but Mom held her hand up. She and Mom were already sitting on the couch across from the television. "Yo, Drew, here's the story!" Jocelyn called me from the living room. I wasn't going to tell some teacher that my mom is an alcoholic - I wasn't going to do that," says Myers. "The first time I dropped out of school, the counselors asked me what was wrong. He says that if he were to write Bad Boy again, he would write more about what he calls "the burden I carried with me every single day." One aspect of his life that Myers omitted from his memoir was his mother's alcoholism. When he wrote his own memoir, Bad Boy, Myers says he wanted to show "a duality of characters more clearly than Wright had." "James Baldwin and Wright had this clash," Myers says, adding that Baldwin said "that when he read Black Boy he was both pleased with it, because it mirrored some of the things that happened to him, and he was upset with it, because he felt that Wright had glamorized in a negative way some of his earlier upbringing."īaldwin's charge that Wright had glamorized the negative aspects of his story stayed with Myers. Some African-Americans struggled with it: It's a powerful book that details racism, extreme poverty and brutal violence. Myers also discovered Richard Wright, whose memoir, Black Boy, told of a troubled childhood in Natchez, Miss. "He didn't look to me like a writer because he wasn't white," remembers Myers, now 70 years old. Then one day in the 1950s, he met Langston Hughes in Harlem. The only problem was that all the authors Myers read in school were white and British. But he was also bookish, and he knew he wanted to be a writer. He got into his share of fights and run-ins with the law. He was tall, with a speech impediment that elicited teasing. Growing up, Myers lived with his adopted family in Harlem, not far from this Bronx detention center. Myers' books tell stories that many in the audience are all too familiar with - stories about being insecure for lack of a dad, being scared to walk in your neighborhood, being viewed as a criminal monster. Though the audience members walk in wearing prison jumpsuits and sit slumped in their chairs, don't be fooled by the attitude: These kids have read some of Myers' dozens of books and are here because they want to meet the author. Myers amassed a collection of aviation photographs while preparing to write The Brown Condor, the story of a pilot in the Italian-Ethiopian conflict of 1935.Īuthor Walter Dean Myers meets some of his young fans in a classroom at a juvenile detention center in the South Bronx.
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