Walter Dean Myers
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Myers, Walter Dean 1937–(Stacie Johnson, Walter M.
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1937–

INTRODUCTION

PRINCIPAL WORKS

AUTHOR COMMENTARY

GENERAL COMMENTARY

TITLE COMMENTARY

FURTHER READING

(Born Walter Milton Myers; has also published as Walter M. Myers) American poet, memoirist, biographer, historian, and author of picture books, juvenile nonfiction, and young adult novels.

The following entry presents an overview of Myers's career through 2005. For further information on his life and works, see CLR, Volumes 4, 16, and 35.

INTRODUCTION

A five-time winner of the Coretta Scott King Award and a two-time winner of the Newbery Honor Book Award, Myers is one of the most prolific and versatile authors of contemporary young adult novels. Myers's fiction and nonfiction frequently utilizes realism and urban vernacular to reach underrepresented adolescent readers, making him a unique voice in children's literature. In addition to the frank dialogue of his characters, Myers's fiction recreates many of the difficult scenarios confronting modern children, including teen pregnancy, gangs, and school shootings. This combination of mature situations and language has resulted in several of Myers's works making the American Library Association/Office for Intellectual Freedom's annual list of most challenged books for young readers in the United States. Though he is best known for his young adult novels, Myers has also developed a reputation as a skilled author of histories for juvenile audiences, penning biographies of such notable figures as Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Myers was born in Martinsburg, West Virginia, on August 12, 1937, to George Ambrose and Mary Myers. While giving birth to his sister, Imogene, Myers's mother died; Walter was two years old at the time. His father struggled with the sudden responsibility of being a single parent during America's Great Depression, and subsequently, Herbert and Florence Dean—friends of Myers's parents—offered to care for Walter and two of his seven siblings. Moving their foster children to Harlem, New York, the Deans made ideal parental figures for Myers, though he was never formally adopted by the couple. Myers soon began attending an integrated school in New York City where he excelled as a student. He suffered from a speech impediment and found solace in books. Given his speech problems, one of Myers's teachers suggested that he write his own material that avoided the words he found difficult to pronounce. As a result, Myers began writing poetry and, recognizing his literary talent, his teachers placed him into college preparatory classes. Ultimately, he was accepted at Stuyvesent High School, a prestigious magnet school within the New York City public school system. Myers wrote in the magazine Voices from the Middle in 2001, "[when] I learned that my family could not afford to send me to college, I abruptly left high school. On the morning of my seventeenth birthday, I joined the Army where I discovered a far harsher world than I thought possible." While Myers's experience as a solider during the Vietnam War was difficult, it would later become the inspiration for several of his young adult novels, including Fallen Angels (1988). Myers was discharged from the Army after three years of service and began submitting poetry and short stories to various magazines. He also attended a writing class led by author Lajos Egri, who encouraged Myers to become a professional writer.

Myers's writing career advanced significantly after he entered a contest sponsored by the Council on Interracial Books for Children. Myers's entry won and, in 1969, his first book, Where Does the Day Go?, a picture book treatise on the nature of night and day between a black father and his interracial children, was released under his birth name, Walter M. Myers. For his two subsequent picture books, The Dragon Takes a Wife (1972) and The Dancers (1972), he changed his pen name to Walter Dean Myers, in honor of his adoptive parents. After attending a writer's workshop at Columbia University taught by John Oliver Killens, Myers secured a job as an acquisitions editor at Bobbs-Merrill Publishing. While working at Bobbs-Merrill, he continued to periodically publish picture books until his agent suggested that Myers's writing might be better suited for the young adult market. Passing along one of his short stories to an editor at Viking, the editor claimed to have enjoyed "the first chapter" and requested a chance to see the rest of the manuscript. The story, fleshed out into a full-length novel, became Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff (1975), which displayed all of the characteristics that would later become hallmarks of Myers's prose style—wit, street language, and strong African American leads. During this period, Myers married his second wife, Constance Brendel, with whom he had a son, Christopher. Myers would later collaborate with Christopher, who became a noted children's book illustrator, on several titles such as Monster (1999) and Blues Journey (2003). In 1977 Myers left Bobbs-Merrill and became a full-time writer. In the early 1980s, Myers went back to school and graduated with a B.A. from Empire State College.

MAJOR WORKS

Myers's familiarity with the lives of inner-city children has given him keen insight into the lives of his target readers. While his books confront the myriad difficulties presented to young urban African Americans, Myers is unique in his ability to portray his protagonists in full three-dimensional terms. And yet, while this emphasis on realism provides an innate draw for, as Myers terms them, reluctant or "uninspired" readers, the author's works have a moral subtext in which Myers attempts to offer instruction and alternative decision-making possibilities. His heroes speak with a frank genuineness, using the curses, slang, and rough terms of endearment native to the inner-city. His novels strive to connect choice and action with personal and moral responsibility in the mind of the reader, addressing broader themes of gangs, school shootings, homelessness, youth violence, drug use, and teen pregnancy in specific terms, without shying away from their often unpleasant realities. But even amidst such suffering, Myers's prose maintains a level of sophistication, filling his stories with humor and love. His characters have support systems of friends, extended family, and community who provide council and a larger sense of purpose. For example, in Hoops (1981), teenaged Lonnie Jackson is a Harlem high-school basketball star, preparing for the city-wide Tournament of Champions. His coach, Cal, is a former pro-basketball player, who lost everything after getting involved in a points-shaving scandal. After Lonnie discovers that several big-time gamblers are betting on the Tournament, Cal counsels Lonnie to avoid the mistakes he once made himself. In Motown and Didi: A Love Story (1984), the two titular teenaged protagonists are able to overcome a confrontation with the neighborhood drug dealer with one another's help, ultimately finding a measure of their dreams through the power of their love for each other.

Despite his penchant for happy endings, Myers routinely tests the characters of his young adult novels, demonstrating to juvenile readers that every action has a resulting effect. Newbery Honor selection Scorpions (1988) offers an example of the far-reaching consequences of rash decisions, set against the backdrop of the Harlem of Myers's youth. When twelve-year-old Jamal's older brother lands in jail for murder, Jamal finds himself pressured to fill the vacant role in his brother's old gang, the Scorpions. Initially resistant, Jamal finds himself enticed by the lure of the gang lifestyle, as well as by the pressing financial needs of his family. Despite their relative youth, Jamal and his best friend Tito finally decide to join the Scorpions. Unfortunately, during a scuffle, Tito is forced to defend Jamal with a gun, and the implications are devastating for Tito, both legally and emotionally. Throughout Scorpions, Myers's text loses neither its grounding nor moral grip. Jamal joins the gang ostensibly to make enough money for his brother's legal appeals, yet ironically, in the midst of his good intentions, Jamal is willing to engage in illegal activities. Above all, Myers is quick to remind Scorpions' readers that, after joining the gang, Jamal and Tito can never regain their former innocence. In the similarly-themed Monster, Myers introduces sixteen-year-old Steve Harmon, who may have been the lookout for a robbery that ends in the death of a Harlem drugstore owner. The inner workings of Steve's psyche are conveyed to readers through stark journal entries about prison life as well as through Myers's innovative presentation of the trial as a screenplay—which is how the aspiring filmmaker Steve masks the ongoing trial in his anxious yet bored mind. At times, Myers characterizes Steve as a victim in the wrong place at the wrong time, but as the story progresses, the author suggests that Steve is perhaps not as innocent as he once seemed. Myers's 2004 young adult novel Shooter expands on the legacy of Scorpions and Monster, using unconventional literary techniques—such as fictional interview transcripts—in the story of the aftermath of a high school shooting.

While a number of Myers's young adult novels are set in Harlem, several also reflect his military experience, generally narrated by characters whom reveal the African American perspective of serving in the Armed Forces. Perhaps Myers's most famous and widely read novel, Fallen Angels, tells the tale of seventeen-year-old Richie Perry, who chooses the Army over college in 1967, because his military pay will be vital to his mother and brother back in Harlem. After excelling on the Army basketball team, Richie injures his knee, which he discovers will excuse him from combat duty. However, due to a clerical error, Richie is sent to fight in the closing days of the Vietnam War. As Richie confronts racism, the morality of war, and the value of friendship under the worst possible conditions, he matures as a human being, eventually returning home after being wounded in action. Fallen Angels describes Richie's tour of duty in graphic detail, highlighting the horrific futility of war and the effect that such violence has on young soldiers, particularly in terms of psychological trauma and drug addiction. In The Beast (2003), Myers further explores the destructive power of narcotic abuse. After Anthony "Spoon" Witherspoon returns to his hometown Harlem while on vacation from a Connecticut boarding school, he discovers that his girlfriend Gabi has become addicted to heroin (nicknamed "the beast") as a means to escape the horrors of her mother's terminal cancer and impoverished surroundings. Though Myers's young adult novels remain his most popular works to date, the author has begun expanding his repertoire by authoring several works of biography and history for juvenile audiences. He has released two biographies of noted African American activist Malcolm X, Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary (1993) and Malcolm X: A Fire Burning Brightly (2000), and a biography of civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., I've Seen the Promised Land (2004). As in his fiction, Myers's nonfiction works stress the impact of cause and effect on the lives of individuals, citing historical examples of the hardships faced by Malcolm X and King due to their unwavering political convictions.

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Myers has been consistently lauded for his realistic portrayal of inner-city life throughout his young adult novels. R. D. Lane has noted that, "The work of celebrated African-American children's novelist Walter Dean Myers opposes the rising trend of incongruous representations; Myers celebrates children by weaving narratives of the black juvenile experience in ways that reverse the effects of mediated messages of the black experience in public culture." Myers has particularly drawn attention for his emphasis on the need for personal responsibility within any debate surrounding the direction of the African American community. Dennis Vellucci has hypothesized that, "What makes Myers's characters remarkable however, is the degree to which they are able to maintain a significant measure of personal and moral integrity in environments that are relentlessly inimical to such integrity." While discussing The Beast, Roger Sutton has commented that the novel's "meditative but steady narration allows Myers his larger themes of identity and community while staying attentive to the needs of the story." Despite the nearly universal positive reception of Myers's works by teachers and critics, many parent associations have taken issue with the author's graphic use of imagery and language, debating whether such realistic depictions are appropriate for young audiences. This has led some to call for the removal of several of Myers's texts, particularly Fallen Angels, from school and children's libraries. Many have labeled such attempts as blatant censorship and, as recently as 2003, Myers was ranked eighth overall on the American Library Association's list of threatened novelists, joining such other authors as Robert Cormier, Judy Blume, Toni Morrison, and Katherine Patterson, all of whom have been noted for the breadth of realism inherent to their narratives.

AWARDS

Throughout his career, Myers has won numerous awards and accolades, including the Council on Interracial Books for Children Award in 1968 for Where Does the Day Go? He received the Coretta Scott King Award for The Young Landlords (1979), Motown and Didi: A Love Story, Fallen Angels, Now Is Your Time!: The African-American Struggle for Freedom (1991), and Slam! (1996), while Somewhere in the Darkness (1992), Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary, and Harlem (1997) were named Coretta Scott King Honor Books. Scorpions and Somewhere in the Darkness both received the Newbery Honor Book Award, and Harlem was named a Caldecott Honor Book. Myers has also won the Boston Globe/Horn Book Award for Somewhere in the Darkness and Blues Journey; the 1994 ALA Young Adult Library Services Association Award; the Margaret A. Edwards Award for lifetime achievement in 1994; and the first-ever Michael L. Printz Award for "literary excellence in young adult literature" for Monster. Myers has also been awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Grant and a MacDowell Fellowship.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

Selected Works

Where Does the Day Go? [as Walter M. Myers; illustrations by Leo Carty] (picture book) 1969

The Dancers [illustrations by Anne Rockwell] (picture book) 1972

The Dragon Takes a Wife [illustrations by Ann Grifalconi] (picture book) 1972; revised edition, illustrations by Fiona French, 1995

Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff (young adult novel) 1975

Mojo and the Russians (young adult novel) 1977

It Ain't All for Nothin' (young adult novel) 1978

The Young Landlords (young adult novel) 1979

Hoops (young adult novel) 1981

The Legend of Tarik (young adult novel) 1981

Won't Know Till I Get There (young adult novel) 1982

The Nicholas Factor (young adult novel) 1983

Motown and Didi: A Love Story (young adult novel) 1984

The Outside Shot (young adult novel) 1984

Adventure in Granada (young adult novel) 1985

Ambush in the Amazon (young adult novel) 1986

Crystal (young adult novel) 1987

Sweet Illusions (young adult novel) 1987

Fallen Angels (young adult novel) 1988

Scorpions (young adult novel) 1988

Now Is Your Time!: The African-American Struggle for Freedom (juvenile nonfiction) 1991

Somewhere in the Darkness (young adult novel) 1992

Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary (young adult history) 1993

Glorious Angels: A Celebration of Children (poetry) 1995

Shadow of the Red Moon [illustrations by Christopher Myers] (young adult novel) 1995

How Mr. Monkey Saw the Whole World [illustrations by Synthia Saint James] (picture book) 1996

Slam! (young adult novel) 1996

Harlem [illustrations by Christopher Myers] (poetry) 1997

Monster [illustrations by Christopher Myers] (young adult novel) 1999

Malcolm X: A Fire Burning Brightly [illustrations by Leonard Jenkins] (young adult biography) 2000

Bad Boy: A Memoir (young adult memoir) 2001

Greatest: Muhammad Ali (young adult history) 2001

The Beast (young adult novel) 2003

Blues Journey [illustrations by Christopher Myers] (picture book) 2003

Antarctica: Journeys to the South Pole [illustrations by Christopher Myers] (young adult history) 2004

Here in Harlem: Poems in Many Voices (poetry) 2004

I've Seen the Promised Land: The Life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. [illustrations by Leonard Jenkins] (young adult biography) 2004

Shooter (young adult novel) 2004

USS Constellation: Pride of the American Navy (juvenile nonfiction) 2004

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Dennis Vellucci (essay date 1994)

SOURCE: Vellucci, Dennis. "Man to Man: Portraits of the Male Adolescent in the Novels of Walter Dean Myers." In African-American Voices in Young Adult Literature: Tradition, Transition, Transformation, edited by Karen Patricia Smith, pp. 193-223. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Vellucci examines the nature of male relationships in six works of young adult fiction by Myers, arguing that the author is "the most prominent and successful of black male writers catering to the young adult market."]

In the twenty-four years since the publication of Walter Dean Myers's first book, Where Does the Day Go?, Myers has proven himself to be as versatile a writer as he has been prolific, with some thirty-two titles to his credit. His work includes picture books; adventure stories for children and young adults; gritty, realistic young adult novels that depict the concerns of and pressures on adolescents in an urban setting; and non-fiction about the African-American experience in America, most recently Now Is Your Time: The African-American Struggle for Freedom (1991) and Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary (1993). The subjects of his young adult novels include war (Fallen Angels ), teen pregnancy (Sweet Illusions ), and gangs (Scorpions ). In her book-length study of Myers for the Twayne United States Authors series, Rudine Sims Bishop has identified Myers as "the only black male currently and consistently publishing young adult novels"1 and cites him as one of the few writers who seeks to redress "the serious lack of books about African-American children and their life experience."2

Certainly the most prominent and successful of black male writers catering to the young adult market, Myers writes most often from the perspective of young black males, a group that is frequently labeled as being "at risk," victimized by broken families and single-parent households, inadequate, inflexible, unresponsive systems of education, lack of economic opportunity, and the prejudice, both overt and subtle, that seems so deeply ingrained a part of American life, so intricately woven into its fabric. Myers has occasionally ventured into the perspective of young black women—in Crystal (1987), the eponymous heroine is a sixteen-year-old who finds herself in a modeling career—but clearly Crystal's situation is extraordinary. Myers's male protagonists, by contrast, come from ordinary though all too often daunting and potentially debilitating circumstances. Theirs is not the world of high-powered careers like Crystal's, but the world of Harlem's streets, gang fights and drug dealers, or, in the case of Richie Perry of Fallen Angels, the jungles of Vietnam. The struggles these characters face are more universal than Crystal's struggle; they are representative of their generation, their race, their culture. Psychologists and sociologists report:

The statistics show a clear disadvantage to being born black and male in America: Black males have higher rates than white males on mental disorders, unemployment, poverty, injuries, accidents … homicide and suicide, drug and alcohol abuse, imprisonment and criminality; they have poorer incomes, life expectancy, access to health care, and education.3

National statistics suggest that more than six times as many black males between the ages of fourteen and twenty-five are likely to be victims of homicide than white men the same age.4

What makes Myers's characters remarkable, however, is the degree to which they are able to maintain a significant measure of personal and moral integrity in environments that are relentlessly inimical to such integrity. In six of Myers's novels written between 1981 and 1992—Hoops (1981), The Outside Shot (1984), Motown and Didi (1984), Scorpions (1988), Fallen Angels (1988), and Somewhere in the Darkness (1992)—protagonists ranging in age from twelve to twenty-two are faced with crises that challenge their decency at every turn, that threaten to thwart their personal development and moral growth. Yet each of them manages—though sometimes just barely—to retain an innate sensitivity that sets him apart and to avoid or reject the gang membership, violent behavior, and illegal activity that sociologist Ronald L. Taylor sees as a manifestation of "the culture of disengagement" that characterizes segments of black inner city youth, a consequence of "disintegrating community institutions."5 Through his response to the obstacles that confront him, each of Myers's characters discovers truths about himself, and each approaches greater maturity. While it may be hyperbolic to say that in every case these characters transcend the limitations of their environment, neither are they defeated by them. Myers is both optimist and realist;6 his protagonists may not always triumph, but they do survive. Conflict in Myers's serious young adult novels is never easily resolved, but it at least results in the self-knowledge and self-awareness that are the foundations of strength and resiliency.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MALE BONDING

The endurance of spirit in Myers's work is often the result of a meaningful and significant relationship the protagonist has with another male character, sometimes older, sometimes younger, sometimes a peer. It is this "male bonding" that becomes the most constant and reliable source of the protagonist's strength and that elicits what is most noble in his character. Bishop has observed in Myers's earliest young adult novels, Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff (1975), Mojo and the Russians (1977), as well as in Won't Know Till I Get There (1982), the common motif of

boys trying to understand their relationships with their fathers, all of whom have achieved some measure of success after overcoming odds [and who] are determined to see that their boys are well brought up and make something of themselves.7

Fathers in Crystal and It Ain't All for Nothing (1978) are depicted sympathetically.8 But in the later novels featuring adolescent male protagonists, fathers are virtually an extinct species. (Statistically, more black children grow up in households without a father than grow up in households with a father.)9 Motown's father is dead; the fathers of Lonnie Jackson (Hoops ; The Outside Shot ) and Richie Perry (Fallen Angels ) deserted their families when their sons were young. When absent fathers do reappear, as they do briefly for Jamal Hicks in Scorpions and, more centrally to the plot, for Jimmy Little in Somewhere in the Darkness, they are distant, vaguely menacing figures who evoke not admiration or even much respect from their sons, but well-warranted resentment. If it is true that a son can see in his father a reflection of the man he is to become and discover himself in his father's image, Myers's characters must seek their identity elsewhere.

This element in Myers's work, paradoxically, both links it with and, at the same time, distinguishes it from, classic African-American novels of male adolescent initiation. Fourteen-year-old John Grimes in James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain is oppressed by his self-righteous stepfather, Gabriel, whom he regards as a hypocrite, abusive and unloving. In Richard Wright's Black Boy, the father is "always a stranger … always somehow remote and alien,"10 and the uncles who replace Richard's father once Richard's father leaves and his mother becomes too ill to care for him, are cruel to Richard, contemptuous of his ambition, and leave him feeling so isolated from his family that he must flee them, their church, and their south in order to attain a sense of identity and self-worth.

The natural father of Ralph Ellison's nameless young narrator in Invisible Man is barely mentioned, but the many father figures the narrator encounters on his odyssey, both black (Bledsoe, Lucius Brockway, Ras) and white (Mr. Norton, Brother Jack) are inevitably patronizing, duplicitous, self-serving. With every bond he forms resulting in failure and betrayal, Ellison's narrator is rendered "invisible" and driven underground into isolation and seclusion. What David L. Dudley has written of African-American men's autobiography—that "black men tend to view themselves as isolated characters striving to make their way in life"11—is no less true of the depiction of manhood in much African-American fiction. While Myers's characters, too, are denied the bonds of father-son kinship, and suffer, as a result, from a kind of rootlessness, Myers breaks with typical representations of African-American male adolescence by giving most of his characters some positive male figure in their lives from whom they can learn or gain a significant measure of self-esteem.

In an essay on Ernest Gaines, Frank W. Shelton has suggested that, perhaps as a consequence of "the paralysis inherited by the black man from slavery," male characters in African-American literature have been unable to forge any kind of meaningful bonds because they are often portrayed as "lacking commitment … a willingness to give of self to another and assume responsibility for another. Black males, even supposedly enlightened ones, seem unable to achieve full maturity."12 Myers's male characters overcome this inability and the hopelessness it portends precisely through the personal commitment, the giving of self, that they willingly undertake. Dudley maintains that intergenerational bonding is typical of literature by black women, while intergenerational conflict is typical of work by black men,13 but despite the failure of natural fathers, this is not the case in Myers's work; Myers may be seen as something of a trailblazer in his portrayal of nurturing and supportive relationships among black men. Indeed, one of the most significant kinds of male bonding that occurs in Myers's serious young adult novels is what Rudine Sims Bishop has identified as "surrogate parenting."14 In Hoops, Coach Cal Jones acts as a surrogate father for young Lonnie Jackson, exasperating Lonnie sometimes, disappointing him at other times, but ultimately giving Lonnie a sense of self-worth that his friends in the novel lack. In Motown and Didi, a mildly eccentric character known as "The Professor," by trade a bookseller with a shop on Lenox Avenue, offers Motown direction and advice, opening Motown's inner world not just through the reading material he supplies for Motown but through the ideology of racial pride that he imparts.

A second type of male bonding transpires when the fatherless adolescent becomes himself a father figure, a role model and surrogate parent to someone

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younger and from this relationship derives meaning and purpose. What keeps Richie Perry emotionally whole in Vietnam is the recurring thought of his younger brother Kenny at home. Richie knows that he is a source of pride and inspiration to Kenny, and he takes seriously the responsibilities that come with being an older brother in a home without a father. In The Outside Shot, Lonnie Jackson (the same character in Hoops, but now transported from Harlem to the Indiana campus of Montclare College) derives as much fulfillment from his work at the university hospital with an autistic boy, Eddie, as Eddie himself clearly derives. Eddie's increasing self-confidence throughout the novel reflects Lonnie's ability to adapt to his new environment.

The third type of bonding occurs when, in the absence of an older male to offer guidance or a younger male for whom he can serve as role model, the protagonist, beset by pressure and confronted by hostil-ity, seeks comfort from a contemporary whose friendship becomes his most vital support under the circumstances. In Scorpions, twelve-year-old Jamal Hicks has no one to turn to when he is urged to assume his imprisoned older brother's role in a local gang except to Tito, a faithful and concerned friend who shares Jamal's suffering and confusion and who ultimately compromises his own values for Jamal. In Fallen Angels, Richie Perry develops the kind of friendship that is a staple of war novels with Peewee Gates, a wise cracking child of the slums of Chicago whose humor and insight help to sustain Richie.

These man-to-man relationships—father-to-son, brother-to-brother, friend-to-friend—relationships that are so much at the heart of the male adolescent experience, lie at the heart of the six novels under consideration here. This is not to suggest, of course, that women do not play an equally important role in the experience of male adolescents. But in these novels, all told from a young man's perspective, women function either as girlfriend or mother. Didi introduces Motown to romance; Mary-Ann in Hoops and Sherry in The Outside Shot provide love interests for Lonnie Jackson. They are, to some degree, positive influences, but they also bring to Motown and Lonnie uncertainty and conflict; especially in the early stages of the relationship, they make the protagonist self-conscious and cause him to question his self-worth. These relationships do not always bring out the best in the protagonists; Didi, in fact, seeking revenge upon a drug dealer whom she holds responsible for her brother's death, compels Motown to uncharacteristic violence and nearly ruins his future. Mothers, particularly in Hoops and Scorpions, but to a lesser degree in Fallen Angels as well, may be self-sacrificing and well-intentioned, but they are ultimately ineffectual as they attempt to instill values or to keep their family together. Myers has written, "I have always felt that young black people must have role models with which they can identify";15 it seems natural that the men in these novels identify with men.

THE INFLUENCE OF LITERARY NATURALISM

Myers has cited Emile Zola as one of the classic novelists whose works inspired him.16 In his bleak, vivid descriptions of ghetto life, the literary naturalism that Zola pioneered in late nineteenth century France is apparent. As Zola wrote in uncompromising terms about the French underclass, making the downtrodden and impoverished his heroes, portraying their surroundings as squalid and oppressive, inevitably shaping and conditioning the individual, binding him, enclosing him, always challenging his dignity, so too does Myers, a century later, write of the individual in modern urban America. Setting is rendered graphically in Myers's novels and it serves as a vehicle of social criticism. Motown observes sardonically the pictures the city has painted on the galvanized tin that covers the missing windows of abandoned buildings in an attempt to make the buildings seem occupied and inhabitable, and he is wary of the "winos and junkies" who, he knows, "might burn up [his] bedding or leave their wastes on it in anger"17 if they do not find the few dollars he has stashed away in the vacant building where he makes his furtive residence. In Somewhere in the Darkness, fifteen-year-old Jimmy makes as much noise as he can climbing the stairs inside his tenement so as not to surprise junkies who may be hidden under the stair-well shooting up or dealing drugs. Scorpions begins with young Jamal observing an addict having no end of difficulty maintaining an upright posture by a lamppost, and he carefully avoids the video parlor that he knows doubles as a crack house. In his review of Scorpions, Robert E. Unsworth hints of the influence of literary naturalism on Myers when he comments on "the black child about to be sucked inevitably into the world of gang violence," and on "the smell of the streets where Jamal and Tito can be innocents no longer."18 The environment, sinister and threatening, cannot easily be overcome.

INSTITUTIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL RESPONSES TO THE PROBLEM OF STANDARDS

"What you need in the community," Myers once said in an interview, "are people to set standards."19 The communities portrayed in his novels are bereft of standards because the traditional institutions—family, school, police—have abdicated their responsibility. Families are broken and rarely exist intact. Police are cynical and indifferent; in Motown and Didi, their dismissal of Didi's request that they arrest her brother's drug contact and her brother as well makes Didi feel "almost dirty, ashamed of herself," and disillusioned in her expectation that "the law would protect her."20 The Professor skeptically wonders why, if child addicts can locate drug pushers, the police cannot, but the police remain apathetic. Even in Myers's earlier novels he has been critical of the police; in both Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff and in The Young Landlords (1979), the police regard black teenagers with suspicion and treat them with "unnecessary roughness."21 In these later novels, the police are not overtly antagonistic towards Myers's young charac-ters, but they are not cooperative either; they neither insure the safety of these young people, nor do they set and enforce community standards.

School officials are even worse—insensitive, manipulative, duplicitous. In Somewhere in the Darkness, the principal, on the day of a standardized reading test, invents trumped up infractions that he claims merit disciplinary action simply as a pretext to keep students he knows will do poorly out of class, while he allows Jimmy, who has been truant, back to class because he knows Jimmy will score well. Jimmy is a dreamer; when he tells the school psychologist of his fantasies filled with imaginary heroes who fight dragons and rescue those in trouble, sharing a deep and private part of himself, he is chided for being too old to be dreaming of imaginary creatures. Only Richie Perry of Fallen Angels can recall an affirming academic experience: a high school English teacher, Mrs. Liebow, encouraged his ultimately unfulfilled ambition "to go to college and write like James Baldwin,"22 and taught him a lesson that not only serves him well in Vietnam but that serves all of Myers's adolescent protagonists well—the lesson that "what separates heroes from humans [is] the not giving in."23 But never for Myers's other characters does school offer the structure and support needed especially in the inner city. In Scorpions, Myers derides all school authority. Mrs. Roberts, the school nurse, misdiagnoses Jamal's constant state of distraction and inattention as hyperactivity and attempts to drug him into submission, and the principal borders on villainous caricature, smug in his assumption that Jamal's mother cares as little about Jamal's education as Jamal himself seems to, predicting with contemptuous certainty that, sooner or later, Jamal will do something to merit expulsion.

MOTOWN AND DIDI AND HOOPS

It is not surprising that with the failure of family, law, and the educational system to promote values, characters turn to other sources for example and direction—Motown in Motown and Didi and Lonnie in Hoops to older men in their community. The Professor, Oliver Harris, frankly expresses his affection for Motown to Didi after Didi has exhorted Motown to kill a local drug dealer:

I don't want to see that boy hurt. I love him as if he was my own son. No, I love him more. I love him the way an old man loves his only son. When I am gone, all that will be left of me are the few books that I've given away and a few wild thoughts that I have planted in that young man's mind.24

Some of those "wild thoughts" include a sense of racial pride and an identification with what the Professor refers to as "the tribe." To the Professor, the young men swaggering down Harlem's streets are "not just youngbloods but warriors walking along the edges of their tribal lands, exalting their manhood."25 Yet he laments the lack of respect these young "warriors" have for themselves or for one another and attributes it to their ignorance of their shared history, their shared heritage. He grieves that young black men feel compelled to prove their manhood "fighting and killing their own," rather than "in the stock market, on the job, in politics,"26 as he claims white men do. Motown, the Professor believes, can be saved; though whenever Motown leaves his bookshop, the Professor worries that he is "failing the boy somehow,"27 he finds in Motown a receptivity to the values he advocates.

Orphaned when his parents were killed in a fire, Motown, reared in foster homes, has formed no strong or lasting attachments and has remained very much the loner. Now, at seventeen, he lives, except for his visits to the Professor, in relative solitude. Occasionally selling his blood to make nine dollars from the blood bank, Motown eschews messenger jobs as being too dangerous; unable to find the kind of job the Professor urges him to get—one from which he will learn something—Motown reads the books the Professor gives him and gets by on very little. Yet, despite the deprivations Motown suffers, he never loses his conviction that "he is made for better things."28 He first encounters Didi when she is being attacked by her brother's partners after her futile appeal to the police. An unwilling hero who knows his best chances for survival lie in minding his own business and staying out of other people's trouble, Motown nevertheless comes to Didi's defense and disperses her assailants. Later, he saves Didi's brother in two ways: first, he throws the dope Tony is about to take down an incinerator, an act that suggests he has taken the Professor's philosophy to heart and has internalized the value the Professor has sought to pass on to him—namely, that each member of the tribe is responsible for the welfare of the others. This action also saves Tony from detectives waiting to make a drug bust.

When Didi comes to the empty room Motown inhabits to thank him, Motown is shy and embarrassed. Defensive and self-conscious about his humble dwelling, he senses Didi's disapproval and wishes he had left his books out, visible so that Didi might have seen what makes him different from the other men his age in the neighborhood, men who have not had the advantage of the Professor as their mentor. Later, when his relationship with Didi blossoms, Motown solicits the Professor's approval and introduces her to him much as a young man would introduce his girl-friend to his parents. (A similar scene occurs in Hoops when Lonnie Jackson introduces Mary-Ann to his coach, Cal.) That Motown, for all his independence and self-sufficiency, craves a father is illustrated in a daydream he has, a flight of imagination unusual for the generally practical, down-to-earth Motown:

Perhaps he would be walking down … Lenox Avenue, and he'd see a tall man, black as Motown, no, blacker still, as black as the ebony statues that stood on the shelves in the back of the Professor's shop … guarding the knowledge of Africa that sprawled about them…. "I've been looking for you all these years…. I am your father and you are my son."29

The chain of association in Motown's fantasy of father with the Professor's shop with blackness with Africa implies that the Professor offers him both a personal identity and a cultural awareness, a connectedness to a people Motown might never otherwise have felt.

It is Motown's sensitivity that makes his acquiescence to Didi's request for vengeance at the end of the novel surprising and, perhaps, not entirely credible. A reluctant hero early in the novel, he is a reluctant avenger at the end. Level-headed and not by nature quick to violence, Motown first recommends to Didi that they go to the police, but Didi's earlier experience causes her to dismiss the suggestion. She challenges Motown to prove himself by killing Touchy Jenkins, and, reaching for a steak knife, threatens to do it herself. Still resistant, and against his better judgement, Motown nevertheless accedes to her persistence, and, in violation of his own character and values, purchases a weapon even as he "tries not to think about killing … or about what would happen after he had."30 Throughout the novel, Motown realizes the importance of maintaining strength. He subjects himself to a rigorous physical workout each night in his room because he believes, "You couldn't be weak in this world and let people know it."31 Yet his moral strength wavers, momentarily, but with potentially disastrous consequences; he has not yet acquired what Myers has called "the strength to turn away from disaster."32 The Professor, apprised of what has happened, convinces Didi that Motown should not "throw his life away after what is already gone,"33 and intervenes just in time to save Motown, if not from death or injury, certainly from arrest and imprisonment. Motown, who has acted as savior to Didi and to Tony, is in turn saved by the person who has functioned as father for him throughout.

An analogous relationship exists between Lonnie Jackson and Cal Jones in Hoops. Lonnie, two years younger than Motown, lacks Motown's maturity and his innate nobility of character. Lonnie is the kind of teenager who takes advantage of a liquor store hold-up to squirrel away a case of Johnny Walker that he hopes to sell at five dollars a bottle. His volatile temper erupts when Cal shows up in the locker room after Lonnie concludes Cal has swindled team members of the money they gave him for team uniforms. Lonnie pulls a .32 pistol from his locker, and though Myers handles the scene comically—Lonnie winds up giving himself a superficial wound that, when washed out with whiskey, "hurt as much as the shot did"34—it establishes Lonnie as impetuous and irresponsible. Lonnie lacks Motown's self-awareness; when he loses a basketball game, he rationalizes that had he "been playing the sucker seriously," Lonnie "would have wiped him off the court."35 In contrast to Motown's respect for Didi, Lonnie, at least in the early part of the novel, is contemptuous of women. He sleeps with Mary-Ann but flees from her declarations of love, and he boasts that he "can't see getting next to a broad but one way."36 Unlike Motown, Lonnie has no daydream of his real father ever re-appearing, but he recalls vividly the night his father left, and it is obvious that much of Lonnie's attitude—his distrust, his temper, the emotional distance he puts between himself and others—is rooted in this painful recollection:

It was me laying on my bed in my room, listening to my mother and father in the kitchen. She was begging and crying, and I was laying there, holding my breath, waiting for his answer. When he said he couldn't, when he had left and the door was closed and the only sound was Mama's crying in the kitchen, I started hitting the wall with my fist. I hit it and hit it until I couldn't feel the pain anymore.37

As an adolescent, Lonnie is still metaphorically "hitting the wall," striking out as his only means of survival.

Lonnie's skill on the basketball court and his relationship with his coach, a relationship that progresses from suspicion and resentment, to pity and respect, to affection and gratitude, help Lonnie mature until he eventually accepts an athletic scholarship and goes on to play for Montclare College, a story that Myers continues in the sequel to Hoops, The Outside Shot. Cal hones Lonnie's athletic talent but, more important, he re-sensitizes Lonnie. By confiding in Lonnie and sharing his own tragic experience, Cal enables Lonnie to "feel the pain" of another person's suffering. Cal, Lonnie discovers, had once played professional basketball but was banished from the NBA for his complicity in a gambling scheme after he had shaved points from a game. Cal's life is a series of regrets. Denied his career and insufficiently skilled to establish himself in another profession, he is briefly supported by his wife. Finally able to find a job, he works for less than a week when he returns home one day to find fire engines at his apartment building. His infant son, Jeffrey, whom Cal had left in the care of a baby sitter, perishes in the blaze, and soon, his wife leaves him. Cal has descended to the level of neighborhood "character" who drinks too much wine and who is known for his eccentricity.

In noting the father-son relationship between Cal and Lonnie, Rudine Sims Bishop has observed that "Lonnie represents a second chance for [Cal]."38 Lonnie is the means by which Cal, himself estranged from his father, can re-enter the world of basketball, relive vicariously his former glory, regain his self-respect, and atone for the mistakes of his past. Lonnie is both a younger version of Cal and an older version of Jeffrey, the adolescent son Jeffrey did not live to become, the child Cal needs to replace. And Lonnie needs a substitute for his father. It is no wonder, then, that he and Cal are well-suited. Above all else, Cal's goal is to keep Lonnie honest so that Lonnie does not fall into the same traps that ruined Cal's life and career. He warns Lonnie against the false hopes fed to young athletes by college recruiters and teaches Lonnie to be wary of supporters who seem too altruistic. Initially resentful of Cal for being "always on [his] case,"39 Lonnie comes to appreciate the transformation that Cal affects in him, and his self-esteem grows; he begins to "feel good" that his game "is a little deeper than a lot of other guys' games."40 When Lonnie invites Mary-Ann to meet Cal, she is at first disdainful and calls Cal a wino. Lonnie feigns indifference and protests that Cal isn't his father, but Mary-Ann can see how sensitive Lonnie has become about Cal, and her apology does little to assuage the offense Lonnie takes on Cal's behalf. Later, Lonnie defends Cal against the suggestion made by O'Donnel, the arrogant, self-important promoter of the tournament in which Lonnie's team is to play, that, because of his tarnished reputation, Cal step down as coach. Lonnie's compassion for Cal becomes his acknowledgement of the role Cal has played in his adolescence.

In her Booklist review of Hoops, Stephanie Zvirin commented that the story "evolves a sharply etched picture of Harlem, where sex and violence emerge naturally as part of the setting."41 During the course of the novel, welfare recipients routinely have their checks stolen from their mailboxes, teenage girls are brutalized by their boyfriends, Cal is blackmailed, bullied, and beaten. One character, against her will, is injected with heroine until she almost dies of an overdose; another is stabbed to death. Again, the environment is hostile, grim, fraught with peril, but Lonnie's athletic gift is his means of escape. In an interview, Myers once said, "It's an absolute lie that a child can get out of the ghetto through sports,"42 yet this is precisely what happens to Lonnie Jackson. Myers ends this novel making clear the metaphor of Lonnie's basketball game for Lonnie's life; his protagonist knows that he "can't win all the time," but that if he can "keep [his] game together … at least [he'll] have a chance."43 This insight, this confidence, and the opportunity Lonnie has to make a new life for himself far from the ghetto, are all parts of Cal's legacy to him.

SCORPIONS

Motown and Lonnie are blessed to have the Professor and Cal, respectively, helping them to define their place in the world. Twelve-year-old Jamal Hicks of Scorpions has no such figure. The role models he might have had—his father, Jevon, and his seventeen-year-old brother, Randy—have each, in a different way, failed him. Jamal is bitter that Randy has caused his mother so much grief and has remained so completely unrepentant about it. He recalls Randy's insouciance as a jury finds Randy guilty of killing the owner of a delicatessen in a robbery, and thinks to himself, "You weren't supposed to be looking cool when you made your mother cry."44 He expresses the hope that Randy never get out of jail and is sure that, were Randy to be released, it would not be long before he courted trouble again. When his mother learns how Jamal feels, she cries again and evokes in her son so much guilt that he feels coerced to find a part-time job to earn money for Randy's appeal. Jamal knows he has little in common with his brother; where Randy is brash and defiant, Jamal is sensitive and reserved. Before going to jail, Randy advises Jamal about being "man of the house," and he urges Jamal to "take care of business" in the gang.45 But Jamal is reluctant to undertake the gang leadership that Randy's friends, especially Mack, try to impose upon him—it is simply not in his nature—though he is tempted by the promise of money for Randy's appeal, a prospect that he regards with ambivalence, but one that his mother prays for. His father, Jevon, links Jamal's responsibility for financing an appeal to Jamal's becoming a man and leaves Jamal little choice but to betray his own best instincts.

Manhood appears to Jamal to be an unreachable goal because he is always made to feel "small inside and weak."46 A furniture salesman who berates his mother, a patronizing school principal who has already written Jamal off as a lost cause, teachers who humiliate him for mistakes he makes in class or for homework he has not done, classmates whom Jamal perceives as tougher than he and who taunt him and mock him—all these trigger Jamal's impression of himself as powerless and helpless. His father, an infrequent visitor, also makes him feel this way by half-joking, half-threatening, "You don't want me to have to take my belt off and straighten you out." Jamal's eyes "sting with tears" not just at his father's arrogance and his lack of respect for Jamal, but also because his father is rarely present "to talk to him or help him or anything."47 And he feels small and weak when he learns that Randy has been stabbed in a prison fight.

Jamal, like Motown, knows it is important for him to be strong—it is a lesson he learns from his mother—but, also like Motown, he has not yet acquired "the strength to turn away from disaster." When he tries on his brother's Scorpions jacket, he finds it "a little too big for him, but not by much."48 For Jamal to grow into his brother's jacket, to follow the bad example Randy has set for him, would represent a tragic diminution of his character, but in the absence of the kind of father figure Motown and Lonnie have, Jamal's moral decline seems inevitable.

It begins when Mack gives him a gun. To Jamal, the gun has a life of its own; he fears it will discharge of its own volition, and he considers throwing the thing away as his best friend Tito advises him, but he cannot. The gun, he believes, confers upon him the strength and the maturity that he lacks and that he knows are essential for his survival. The gun will compel people to respect him. This aspect of Scorpions seems indebted to Richard Wright's classic story of adolescent initiation, "Almos' a Man," in which seventeen-year-old Dave Glover acquires a gun to prove his manhood and accidentally kills a mule belonging to a local landowner. His desperate attempts to cover up his crime provide amusement for the townspeople, but immeasurable embarrassment and humiliation for Dave. Sentenced to work for the land-owner to remunerate him for the dead animal, and faced with his parents' wrath at home, Dave flees his small town, but takes the gun, which he tells his parents he has thrown away, with him. Dave learns nothing from his misadventure; he leaves still clinging to the gun as an emblem of his manhood despite the considerable havoc it has wrought and the chagrin it has brought him.

For Jamal, in Harlem, the stakes are higher than a dead mule. Again disregarding Tito's advice, Jamal brings the gun to school where he intends to intimidate Dwayne, the class bully who has regularly taunted Jamal and who has challenged him to a fight. An essentially harmless schoolboy dispute thus escalates into a potentially fatal confrontation; even Jamal, as he rationalizes that, "It wasn't right, Dwayne laughing at people,"49 seems aware that his solution to the conflict is disproportionate to Dwayne's offense.

Dwayne is frightened by the gun; at first he doubts it is real, but once he cowers as Jamal had hoped, Jamal takes advantage, kicking the trembling Dwayne "once, twice, harder, harder."50 But this violation of his own character does nothing to ameliorate Jamal's sense of himself as small and weak. Now he worries that Dwayne will notify authorities and that he himself will be dispatched to a youth home. Too frightened to keep the gun, but too insecure to throw it away, Jamal prevails upon Tito to hide it for him.

Without any older male to trust or confide in, Jamal comes to rely on Tito whose good and sensible counsel he has hitherto ignored. It is Jamal's friendship with Tito, a physically weak boy who suffers from asthma, but a morally strong boy who has willingly embraced the values of the religious grandmother who has raised him, that offers Jamal the possibility of redemption. Tito envisions himself as a savior; he contemplates being a fireman so that he can "save people,"51 and he attempts to keep Jamal from the lure of the Scorpions. When Jamal remains unmoved, Tito suggests that perhaps, together, they can "get [the Scorpions] to do some good things, too."52 Ultimately, Tito saves Jamal's life, but at great personal sacrifice: Tito fires Jamal's gun, killing a gang member as he is about to stab Jamal.

All Tito can do is cry. To Jamal's grateful, "You saved my life," Tito can only respond, "I didn't want to shoot nobody."53 Tito suggests that perhaps, the next day, he can visit Jamal and they "can read comic books or something,"54 but he knows that, for him, the trappings of childhood have lost their relevance and that his innocence has been spent. Chastened, Jamal realizes that Tito "had been wounded in a place [Jamal] couldn't see,"55 but there is nothing he can sacrifice to save Tito from his psychic and spiritual wound as Tito has saved him from probable death upon the point of a knife. Tito becomes a recluse and soon leaves with his grieving and distraught grandmother for Puerto Rico, his friendship with Jamal a bittersweet memory.

The bond that exists between Tito and Jamal is a genuine one; his friendship with Tito is the most meaningful and nurturing relationship Jamal has. Without Tito, Jamal might have been sucked into the world of the Scorpions with less hesitation and fewer misgivings; without Tito, Jamal would have become another statistic, another victim of gang violence. But perhaps because Tito is Jamal's peer, his contemporary, only a child himself, he cannot have upon Jamal, despite his good intentions, his gentleness, and a wisdom that belies his youth, quite the redemptive effect that the Professor has upon Motown or Cal Jones has upon Lonnie. Scorpions, like Motown and Didi, ends in gunfire that saves the protagonist and destroys the villain; in both cases, the agent of the villain's death is in no danger of being prosecuted. Yet, the resolution of Scorpions is hardly a happy one; the moral ambiguity of taking a life to save a life, of resorting to violence even in the service of a just cause, of conforming to the hostility of the environment rather than challenging it or attempting to transcend it, is rendered in all of its complexity.

SOMEWHERE IN THE DARKNESS

Rudine Sims Bishop has suggested that Scorpions reflects an increasing darkness in Myers's vision.56Somewhere in the Darkness, Myers's most recent serious young adult novel represents, in some ways, a darker vision still. Here, the young protagonist, Jimmy Little, does have a father present, a father who suddenly appears on Jimmy's doorstep after nine years in prison to take Jimmy away from Mama Jean, the woman who has raised him and who has been to Jimmy "all that he needed, companion and friend, mother and father,"57 so that he might travel around the country with Jimmy in an attempt to prove to his son his innocence of the murder for which he was convicted. Escaped from the prison hospital and dying of a kidney ailment, Crab Little hopes to convince a son who does not know him that while he may have been a thief, he has never been a killer.

Jimmy, like Motown and Lonnie and Jamal, has a distinct and innate sensitivity; he also seems to have been less corrupted or damaged by the neighborhood in which he has grown up than do any of the aforementioned characters. He routinely defends Mr. Johnson, the block's resident inebriate, from the taunts and projectiles of schoolboys younger than he. He is devoted to Mama Jean who has cared for Jimmy since his mother died many years before, and though he is an indifferent student who has trouble getting himself to school every morning, he often finds himself motivated by his knowledge of how hurt and disappointed Mama Jean would be if he did not go.

When asked about his father by a school psychologist, Jimmy lies that his father works as a mechanic on city buses; in general, his father does not occupy his thoughts and he has only a vague understanding of the robbery attempt that led to his father's murder conviction. Uncomfortable and uncertain at Crab's sudden arrival, Jimmy is taciturn; he denies having ever wondered about his father, but now his curiosity is aroused. He imagines standing beside Crab in front of a mirror, not just to verify this stranger's identity, but to see himself reflected in the man who calls himself his father. Jimmy is surprised to find himself wondering how much Crab thought about him in prison, and before long, his initial fear and distrust of Crab turn into a need for Crab's approval. He offers Crab the fifty dollars Mama Jean had given him in case of emergency, and he nurses Crab when Crab's illness attacks, finding the times that Crab is weakest the easiest times to be with him. Eventually, he tries, without much success, to assuage Crab's anger and disappointment when Rydell Dupuis, the man that Crab tracks to Memphis hoping that Rydell will tell the truth about the robbery and "make things right"58 between Crab and Jimmy, not only refuses to acknowledge Crab's innocence, but notifies the police, who soon catch up with Crab.

In Cleveland, Jimmy meets Frank, the son of an old friend of Crab's, whose ambition is to enter the Golden Gloves. As Crab and Jimmy watch Frank workout in a local gym, Jimmy feels weak, inadequate, and he wonders if Crab wants him to be more like Frank. Jimmy takes some comfort learning that Frank is a year older than he is, but he is daunted by Frank's swagger and confidence, by the way Frank has of "looking at [Jimmy], sizing him up,"59 by the bravado Frank puts into the workout, "grunting as he threw punches,"60 all, apparently, to extract awe and fear from Jimmy. Later, Frank verbally intimidates Jimmy, who responds simply by looking into Frank's eyes, not backing down, but not accepting the challenge either, and the moment passes. Jimmy does not tell Crab about the incident until much later; sensing that Crab associates manhood with toughness, he is afraid it will make him seem weak to Crab, unable to defend himself. When Jimmy does eventually relate his encounter with Frank to Crab, Crab offers to teach Jimmy to fight—"You got to want to hurt somebody before they hurt you," Crab cautions—and Jimmy agrees, "figuring that was what Crab wanted to hear."61 But Jimmy has no enthusiasm for the proposition; he is simply trying to fulfill Crab's expectations of what a son should be. In an article examining male adolescence in young adult literature, Allan A. Cuseo and Barbara Williams Kerns have written, "All too often the pubescent male receives conflicting messages—be sensitive/be macho—and feels as if he is floundering in a sea of confusion."62 This characterizes precisely Jimmy Little's dilemma in Somewhere in the Darkness : the message to be macho comes from Crab and the milieu into which Crab introduces Jimmy; the urge to be sensitive comes from what is best and deepest within himself.

Crab's motive in forcing Jimmy on this journey with him is dubious. Ostensibly, he wants to repair a severed relationship; he does not want "a kid that hated [him] because [he] killed somebody."63 And he hopes that Jimmy's respect will bring him self-respect. But Crab has a score to settle with Dupuis, and he suspects that the police who might be after him will be less suspicious of a man traveling with a boy who is obviously his son than they would be of a man traveling alone. Further, Jimmy's presence gives the ailing Crab the strength to confront Dupuis, his former partner in crime. A conjure man that Crab consults for his back pain marvels at Crab's strength and wonders at its source. Clearly, Crab derives strength from having his son with him.

During the course of their journey, Jimmy begins to feel affection for Crab, albeit tempered and qualified. Early in the book, Jimmy says to Crab, "I don't love you";64 later, he says, "I don't hate you,"65 hinting at some progress, however limited, in their relationship. But ultimately, the values that Jimmy has apparently gained from Mama Jean lead him to reject Crab, regardless of how genuine Crab's need for Jimmy's respect might be. Jimmy is appalled when Crab rents a car with a stolen credit card, for example. Crab's world is crime, and it seems more natural for him to break the law than to obey it. His philosophy—"It don't matter how I get what I need"66—is one that Jimmy cannot accept, and he frankly questions his father. Not having killed someone, Jimmy explains, does not make Crab innocent if Crab still attempted robbery. Crab's fond recollection of his own father encouraging Crab to drink to prove his manhood shows Jimmy just how shallow Crab's concepts of fatherhood and manhood are. Jimmy searches for someone he loves in Crab, but all he can see is Crab's "darkness,"67 and when Crab touches his shoulder, Jimmy jerks it away. Jimmy recoils from Crab both physically and emotionally; their odyssey finally results in the "terrible" shared knowledge that "Crab did not indeed know how to be a father."68 Crab is the embodiment of the stereotype that sociologist Ronald L. Taylor believes has come to represent the public image of the black male: the symbolically emasculated man, who, has failed to reach "full emotional maturity," and, consequently, "tends to be a poor … father."69

Unlike many of Myers's other protagonists, Jimmy functions well enough without a role model; he feels safer on the Harlem streets that are familiar to him and that he has learned to negotiate than he feels on the road with Crab. His father's unannounced appearance and virtual abduction of Jimmy bring conflict, but they also result in Jimmy's greater maturity and self-assurance. The novel ends with a long, poignant passage wherein Jimmy imagines someday having a son of his own:

It seemed so far off, like something that could never happen but somehow would…. He would tell him all the secrets he knew, looking right into his eyes and telling him nothing but the truth so that every time they were together they would know about each other. There would be a connection, he thought, something that would be there even when they weren't together. He would know just how he was like his son, and how they were different, and where their souls touched, and where they didn't. He knew that if he ever had a son he would have to do it … all the time, because sooner or later, there wouldn't be enough days left to fit the meaning in.70

Perhaps Jimmy's difficult and unhappy experience with Crab, then, has a beneficial effect on him after all. If Jimmy is representative, the next generation of fathers will not be fated to repeat the mistakes of past generations, and the cycle of broken families, of distant or anonymous fathers, of sons left too young to their own resources might be broken. Jimmy has learned the importance of the father-son bond through its absence in his own life; his reflections at the end of the book promise that, sensitive and responsible, he will one day be for someone an exemplary guide.

FALLEN ANGELS

Many of Myers's adolescent heroes—Motown, Jamal, Jimmy Little—share a similar sensibility; they seek to reconcile gentleness with strength and try, with varying degrees of success, to endure without compromising their humanity. Put any of these characters in Vietnam and the result will be a hero very much like Richie Perry, the narrator of Myers's most adult "young adult" novel, Fallen Angels. Richie joins the army at seventeen; his story is told retrospectively as he is leaving Vietnam some years later, having been wounded twice, an adolescent no longer. At home, Richie had felt "the loneliness … of not belonging to the life that teemed around [him]."71 A good student, but weary of not having even clothes enough for high school, Richie decides not to go on to City College, but to enlist instead. At first, Richie is unafraid. Rumors of imminent peace, persistent but ultimately false, lull Richie into the belief that a truce will soon be signed. Army life for Richie consists of little more than "standing around waiting for something to happen."72 Richie has no strong political conviction, no impassioned belief in the rightness of America's involvement in Vietnam. He describes himself as "not gung-ho or anything, but ready to do [his] part."73 Asked by a television news crew why he is fighting, Richie, like his comrades, speaks in the language of patriotic cliché—"I said that we either defended our country abroad or that we would be forced to fight in the streets of America"—that he has likely given little serious thought to, but that he is pleased to observe, "everybody seemed to like."74

Soon, of course, the experience of combat touches Richie and leads him to an honest, if disturbing appraisal of himself. Richie is confused at his response to the death of the first soldier in his unit to fall, Jenkins. "I didn't know what to feel," he reflects; as much as he regrets and grieves Jenkins's death, Richie admits to "a small voice inside" relieved that it was a friend and not himself who had been killed.75 He is more affected by the death of Lieutenant Carroll, whom Richie praises in a letter to Carroll's wife as "a gentle man."76 In battle, Richie is sickened by "the sight of all the bodies lying around, the smell of blood and puke and urine";77 he remains haunted by vivid images of slaughter. Above all, he is frightened. As he awaits the choppers that will lift him high above the battle, he "trembles in fear" and "runs in near panic."78 Richie had thought of himself as "a middle of the road kind of guy, not too brave, but not too scared either,"79 but war teaches him that his knowledge of himself is incomplete. As skirmish erupts after skirmish, the war becomes for Richie "hours of boredom, seconds of terror."80

Richie also does not think of himself as a killer; he is, he believes, an emissary on a mission of peace. "We, the Americans were the good guys," Richie says. "Otherwise, it didn't make the kind of sense I wanted it to make."81 It is natural that Richie's first kill forces him to re-evaluate himself. Gazing at photographs on the wall of what he thinks is an empty hut after a Viet Cong attack, Richie turns to see the muzzle of a gun pointed at his chest. But his would-be assailant cannot get the gun to work. Momentarily paralyzed, immobile, Richie finally stirs himself to empty the clip of an M-16 into his enemy's face. Myers's description, meant to convey Jimmy's horror, is especially graphic:

There was no face. Just an angry mass of red flesh where the face had been. Part of an eyeball dangled from one side of the head. At the top there were masses of different colored flesh. The white parts were the worst. There was a tooth, a bit of skull.82

By the time of Richie's second kill, he has become a different person. Richie recognizes in the face of a teenager he is about to kill his own fear, his own weariness, but he pulls the trigger anyway and then simply sits on the ground to rest without remorse. There is little description, little emotional investment in the act; Richie has learned to distance himself. The title of the book is a reference to innocent young men who fall in battle, but Richie is a "fallen angel," too—battle has begun to numb him spiritually, emotionally, and it is as much of an effort for him to maintain his humanity in his environment as it is for Motown and Jamal in theirs. Two relationships help Richie to endure; one with his younger brother Kenny who is rarely far from Richie's thoughts, and the other with the soldier who becomes his best friend in Vietnam, Peewee Gates.

Richie is the kind of older brother Jamal Hicks might have wished Randy to be—solicitous, thoughtful, someone to look up to. "It was good having Kenny need me," Richie admits. "I had been a sort of father to him … and I know he missed me."83 Richie wants to impress Kenny with his contribution to the war effort; he wants to inspire in Kenny some of the toughness that he knows Kenny will need growing up in Harlem but that he worries Kenny lacks. Yet when Richie, who in his unit has earned a reputation and even attracted the favorable attention of his superiors as an eloquent writer of letters, tries to write Kenny of the "good job" Richie had done killing, the words won't come.84 Instead, he writes to Kenny of the rumors of peace, he sends Kenny souvenirs, including the medal he is awarded after being wounded, and he carries with him the last thing Kenny says to him as Kenny drifts off to sleep the night before Richie leaves—"When you get to Vietnam, I hope you guys win."85 It is clear that Richie is a positive influence in Kenny's life, but it is equally true that Kenny gives much to Richie in return, "something to hold on to," as Richie says.86 Kenny gives Richie the blessing of knowing that Richie is needed, admired and loved. With a father who has left and a mother who, it is insinuated, has had problems with alcohol, Richie and Kenny are mutually dependent, even when one of them is on the other side of the world.

Other soldiers in Richie's unit who come from more traditional backgrounds and who have fathers to write home to, find, like Jimmy Little, that their father more often creates conflict than provides support. Jenkins is bullied by his father, a former colonel whose "game plan"87 for his son was for Jenkins to join the infantry and then go on to officers' training school. Jenkins is the first casualty. Lobel, a movie fanatic who copes with the horror of war by pretending he is an actor in a film, joined the army so that his father "would stop thinking [Lobel] was a faggot";88 now, his father has grown sympathetic to the anti-war movement and criticizes his son's involvement in the military. Even Carroll, whose relationship with his father is close, tells his men twice how proud his father is of Carroll's being an officer "like [Carroll] didn't know what to make of it."89 Not even for Myers's minor characters is the father/son relationship a constructive one. Kenny thus seems all the more fortunate in his relationship with Richie.

Richie's friendship with Peewee Gates also sustains him in Vietnam. Peewee is a colorful figure who often functions as the agent of comic relief, but it is also Peewee whose hand Richie holds on their way back home. At first glance, Peewee appears superficial—his three ambitions in life are to drink wine from a corked bottle, to make love to a foreign woman, and to smoke a cigar—but it is he who makes the connection between the violence of Vietnam and the dangers of urban America most apparent, and thus he serves as spokesman for Myers's social criticism. Peewee sees the military as the great equalizer. He facetiously claims to like the army because he has the same uniform, the same equipment, the same food and accommodations as the other soldiers have; for the first time in his life, no one has more or less than he does. He half-humorously suggests that "them suckers from the projects"90 would be ruthless and efficient killers in Vietnam. When Monaco, a fellow soldier, expresses a variation on the "war is hell" cliché, Peewee retorts that the dangers of Vietnam are not dissimilar to those in Chicago. Richie, too, acknowledges a link between Vietnam and Harlem. At the sight of a dead soldier, he recalls an incident on Manhattan Avenue in which a gang member about the soldier's age lay dead, and in soldiers who are excited by the anticipation of battle, Richie recognizes "a kid on 119th Street"91 with similar bloodlust.

Flying home, Richie finds that his mind keeps returning to Vietnam as he attempts to assess the effect of his experience. Whatever the physical injuries he has suffered, whatever the psychological scars yet to be healed, whatever the unpleasant truths he has confronted about his own character, Richie comes out of Vietnam with a sense of belonging. The loneliness he had known as an adolescent in Harlem, the perception of not being connected to the life outside him, is replaced by the camaraderie forged by men at war. He understands that Peewee, along with the other men in his squad, has taught him—more than anything in his experience before Vietnam with the exception of Kenny ever had—about love. "I had never been in love before," Richie muses as he thinks about his comrades-in-arms. "I hoped this was what it was like."92 It is brotherhood that has sustained him. His final prayer is for "God to care for them, to keep them whole,"93 as they have kept him whole through conditions that might otherwise have broken him.

RISK, SUCCESS, AND THE MAKING OF A HERO

The tree lined, tranquil campus of Montclare College in Indiana obviously does not hold for Lonnie Jackson the hazards that Vietnam holds for Richie Perry, but it does offer a different kind of risk, and it is as foreign a place, as far removed from Harlem to Lonnie as Southeast Asia is to Richie. "Montclare is not the world I knew," Lonnie confides, "and I felt it wasn't the world I belonged to either. But I knew it was a world that had something in it that I wanted."94 For many of Lonnie's friends back home, college was a dream that they never really expected to realize. Through basketball, Lonnie does and opportunity, an escape from the milieu he has known all his life, and personal fulfillment. On a basketball court, Lonnie can "feel full of power," as if "some crazy kind of magic was happening to [him]."95 Ironically, Lonnie jeopardizes his athletic and academic career by nearly falling into the same trap that snared his mentor from Hoops, Cal Jones. A local gambler known as "Fat Man" takes a liking to Lonnie because he sees in Lonnie a naive youth who might easily be manipulated. Lonnie is instinctively suspicious of Fat Man; yet, his association with him subjects Lonnie to suspension from the game and investigation by college athletic officials. Eventually, Lonnie is vindicated and, his innocence affirmed, he is restored to his place on the team. Through his ordeal, Lonnie finds empathy and support from his roommate, Colin, the son of an Indiana farmer, whose poverty surprises Lonnie because Colin is white and because Lonnie had always associated the ownership of property with financial security. "Back in Harlem, we used to see this as the perfect kind of life,"96 Lonnie says on a visit to Colin's farm. Poverty and basketball create such a bond between these two that the issue of race never emerges.

The relationship that gives Lonnie the taste of being a hero, though, and the one that, in some ways, is analogous to Richie's with Kenny, is the one he forms with young Eddie Brignole, an autistic child with whom Lonnie, somewhat improbably, makes almost instant contact where trained therapists have failed, and whose mother, considered overbearing and overprotective by hospital staff, is easily won over by Lonnie despite some initial grumbling. Eddie responds to Lonnie's relaxed, self-deprecating manner; he becomes responsive and completely at ease with Lonnie, who offers to continue working with Eddie even after Eddie's father pulls Eddie out of the hospital program for which Lonnie works. Like many of Myers's other characters, Eddie, a child of divorced parents, is easily intimidated by his father's visits. Carl Brignole, a one time football player for Tulane, is a thoughtless, but not a malicious bully. Lonnie describes him as "the kind of guy who shook your hand like the harder they squeezed, the more of a man it made them."97 His domineering personality has sent his only child retreating into a shell, withdrawing into a private world. Lonnie coaxes Eddie out, and, in the process of becoming a role model to a boy desperately in need of one, learns of gifts he has beyond athletics. Lonnie, who has a surrogate father in Hoops, becomes a surrogate father—or, perhaps more accurately, big brother—in The Outside Shot. Like Richie Perry, he is sustained in a world that is unfamiliar to him by the admiration of a boy and by the empathy of a contemporary.

FEMALE INFLUENCES ON MALE CHARACTERS

Lonnie also develops a relationship in The Outside Shot with Sherry, a serious, independent, self-assured young woman at Montclare on a track scholarship. But women rarely occupy central roles in the novels Myers has written from male points of view—even Motown and Didi has been regarded by critics to be "more Motown's story than Didi's"98—because they are not central to the experience of these characters, another deprivation that is a function of the environment. (Jimmy Little of Somewhere in the Darkness doesn't think very much about girls, though he is fifteen, and Richie Perry, who reveals so much of his life before Vietnam in Fallen Angels, never even suggests any kind of previous involvement in a romantic relationship.) Lonnie tries to understand why he is so uncertain around Sherry, why so many of their early encounters end in misunderstanding, and he concludes, "I wasn't used to dealing with girls outside a man-woman thing. I didn't know how to just hang out and rap or do casual things."99 His girlfriend in Hoops observes that Lonnie resists emotional intimacy; even as he lies in bed with Mary-Ann, Lonnie cannot bring himself to tell her that he loves her because he is unsure of his capacity for love. What his relationships with Cal in Hoops and with Eddie in The Outside Shot show Lonnie is that he is, indeed, capable of forming an emotional attachment, just as Motown learns first from the Professor and then from Didi, and as Richie Perry learns through Kenny and Peewee.

Like many adolescent males, Myers's characters are especially uncommunicative with their mothers. When Lonnie calls his mother from campus, he cannot tell her that he misses her or that he misses home because "that kind of thing was still hard for [him] to say,"100 and because he does not want to worry her. The mother is to be protected; she is to be spared anxiety. This is the basis of Jamal's anger at his brother Randy in Scorpions. This is why Jimmy does not call Mama Jean while he is on the road with Crab, even though he thinks of her often and would like to contact her. This is why Richie Perry destroys the letter he writes to his mother after Jenkins's death; he is afraid it will upset her. And Richie's mother is equally uncommunicative; she writes to Peewee to say that she loves Richie, but she cannot express that love to Richie himself.

CONCLUSION

It seems, then, that Myers's male adolescent protagonists learn to be most fully themselves through their associations with other men. These are the relationships that disclose to them the strengths and weaknesses of their character, that nurture their emotional growth and development, that teach them of responsibility—in short, that transform these boys into men. Lonnie Jackson of Hoops and Motown of Motown and Didi find surrogate fathers to offer them advice, protection, and the wisdom of their experience, but even in as strained a father-son relationship as that between Jimmy Little and Crab in Somewhere in the Darkness, Jimmy discovers much that is honorable about himself. His odyssey transforms him; Crab's negative example and his dependence upon Jimmy confer upon his son a maturity, a depth of understanding and responsibility, that the did not have before his journey began. Lonnie in The Outside Shot and Richie Perry in Fallen Angels, both sons of fathers who have deserted their families and both emigres from the ghetto that has been their only home, discover that their adjustment to new, and in very different ways, challenging surroundings is eased by peer relationships that are especially reassuring as they face hostile circumstances, and by the responsibility they accept to younger boys who look to them as role models and sources of inspiration. Jamal Hicks of Scorpions seeks solace and support in a peer relationship as well, and though he places too great a burden on Tito for the friendship to endure, his experience teaches him about loyalty and sacrifice and disabuses him of the false notion that respect can be earned and manhood proven with a gun.

In a recent interview, Henry Louis Gates, Jr. said, "Learning to be black in this society … happens through the tutelage of one's parents and relatives, through the examples of one's friends, and, particularly in adolescence, through the written examples provided by people of color…."101 While there is much in Myers's serious young adult novels to appeal to all male adolescents regardless of race—male bonding is an essential part of the male adolescent experience—it is clear that Myers's work has particular appeal and can serve a distinct purpose for young black males, city bred, streetwise, challenged by poverty, racism, and sometimes circumstance to hold fast to values and maintain a sense of self worth. In Myers's characters they see their own concerns explored and struggles resolved, and recognize the value of the kinds of relationships Myers portrays as the means by which they might grow strong and survive.

Notes

1. Rudine Sims Bishop, Presenting Walter Dean Myers, Twayne's United States Authors Series (Boston, MA: G. K. Hall and Co., 1990), 24.

2. Ibid., 16.

3. "Rescuing the Black Male," The Futurist 26 (September-October 1992): 50.

4. Carrell Peterson Horton and Jessie Carney Smith, eds., Statistical Record of Black America (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1990), 653.

5. Ronald L. Taylor, "Black Youth in America: The Endangered Generation," Youth and Society 22 (September 1990): 8.

6. Bishop, 45.

7. Ibid., 34.

8. Ibid., 50.

9. Horton and Smith, 263.

10. Richard Wright, Black Boy (New York: Perennial Library, 1989), 42.

11. David L. Dudley, My Father's Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men's Autobiography (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 5.

12. Frank W. Shelton, "In My Father's House: Ernest Gaines after Jane Pittman," Southern Review 17 (April 1981): 344.

13. Dudley, 5.

14. Bishop, 49.

15. Adele Sarkissian, ed., "Walter Dean Myers," in Something about the Author, vol. 2 (Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1986), 147.

16. Ibid., 148.

17. Walter Dean Myers, Motown and Didi (New York: Viking, 1984; Dell, 1987), 4.

18. Robert E. Unsworth, review of Scorpions, by Walter Dean Myers, in School Library Journal 35 (September 1988): 35.

19. Walter Dean Myers, interview by Amanda Smith, in Publishers Weekly 239 (20 July 1992): 217.

20. Myers, Motown and Didi, 33.

21. Bishop, 29.

22. Walter Dean Myers, Fallen Angels (New York: Scholastic, 1988), 15.

23. Ibid., 36.

24. Walter Dean Myers, Motown and Didi, 142.

25. Ibid., 5.

26. Ibid., 122.

27. Ibid., 55.

28. Ibid., 36.

29. Ibid., 84.

30. Ibid., 162.

31. Ibid., 31.

32. Sarkissian, 155.

33. Myers, Motown and Didi, 167.

34. Walter Dean Myers, Hoops (New York: Delacorte, 1981; Dell, 1983), 34.

35. Ibid., 20.

36. Ibid., 55.

37. Ibid., 158.

38. Bishop, 58.

39. Myers, Hoops, 28.

40. Ibid., 43.

41. Stephanie Zvirin, review of Hoops, by Walter Dean Myers, in Booklist 78 (15 September 1981): 98.

42. Walter Dean Myers, interview by Stephanie Zvirin, in Booklist 86 (15 February 1990): 1153.

43. Myers, Hoops, 183.

44. Walter Dean Myers, Scorpions (New York: Harper, 1988; Harper Keypoint, 1990), 39.

45. Ibid., 38.

46. Ibid., 22.

47. Ibid., 93.

48. Ibid., 74.

49. Ibid., 101.

50. Ibid., 107.

51. Ibid., 86.

52. Ibid., 78.

53. Ibid., 196.

54. Ibid., 201.

55. Ibid., 209.

56. Bishop, 46.

57. Walter Dean Myers, Somewhere in the Darkness (New York: Scholastic, 1992), 74.

58. Ibid., 152.

59. Ibid., 64.

60. Ibid., 67.

61. Ibid., 90.

62. Allan A. Cuseo and Barbara Williams Kerns, "Growing up Male," VOYA 7 (October 1984): 155.

63. Myers, Somewhere in the Darkness, 98.

64. Ibid., 52.

65. Ibid., 98.

66. Ibid., 99.

67. Ibid., 154.

68. Ibid., 156.

69. Ronald L. Taylor, "Socialization to the Black Male Role," The Black Male in America: Perspectives on His Status in Contemporary Society, ed. Doris Y. Wilkinson and Ronald L. Taylor (Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1977), 1.

70. Myers, Somewhere in the Darkness, 167.

71. Myers, Fallen Angels, 35.

72. Ibid., 28.

73. Ibid., 20.

74. Ibid., 77.

75. Ibid., 46.

76. Ibid., 132.

77. Ibid., 177.

78. Ibid., 167.

79. Ibid., 50.

80. Ibid., 132.

81. Ibid., 112.

82. Ibid., 181.

83. Ibid., 117.

84. Ibid., 190.

85. Ibid., 14.

86. Ibid., 187.

87. Ibid., 28.

88. Ibid., 117.

89. Ibid., 60.

90. Ibid., 24.

91. Ibid., 198.

92. Ibid., 301.

93. Ibid., 309.

94. Walter Dean Myers, The Outside Shot (New York: Delacorte, 1984; Dell, 1987), 136.

95. Ibid.

96. Ibid., 105.

97. Ibid., 127.

98. Gale Jackson, review of Motown and Didi, by Walter Dean Myers, in School Library Journal 31 (March 1985): 180.

99. Myers, The Outside Shot, 52.

100. Ibid., 77.

101. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., interview by Jerry W. Ward, Jr., in New Literary History 22 (Autumn 1991): 929.

References

Bishop, Rudine Sims. Presenting Walter Dean Myers. Twayne's United States Authors Series. Boston, MA: G. K. Hall and Co., 1990.

Cuseo, Allan A. and Barbara Williams Kerns. "Growing up Male." VOYA 7 (October 1984): 155-6.

Dudley, David L. My Father's Shadow: Intergenerational Conflict in African American Men's Autobiography. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. Interview by Jerry W. Ward, Jr. In New Literary History 22 (Autumn 1991): 927-35.

Horton, Carrell Peterson and Jessie Carney Smith, eds. Statistical Record of Black America. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1990.

Jackson, Gale. Review of Motown and Didi, by Walter Dean Myers. In School Library Journal 31 (March 1985): 180.

Myers, Walter Dean. Crystal. New York: Viking, 1987.

――――――. Fallen Angels. New York: Scholastic, 1988.

――――――. Fast Sam, Cool Clyde, and Stuff. New York: Viking, 1975; Penguin, 1988.

――――――. Hoops. New York: Delacorte, 1981; Dell, 1983.

――――――. It Ain't All for Nothin'. New York: Viking, 1978; Avon, 1985.

――――――. Malcolm X: By Any Means Necessary. New York: Scholastic, 1993.

――――――. Mojo and the Russians. New York: Viking, 1977; Avon, 1979.

――――――. Motown and Didi. New York: Viking, 1984; Dell, 1987.

――――――. Now Is Your Time: The African-American Struggle for Freedom. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.

――――――. The Outside Shot. New York: Delacorte, 1984; Dell, 1987.

――――――. Scorpions. New York: Harper, 1988; Harper Keypoint, 1990.

――――――. Somewhere in the Darkness. New York: Scholastic, 1992.

――――――. Sweet Illusions. New York: Teachers and Writers Collaborative, 1986.

――――――. Where Does the Day Go? (illustrated by Leo Carty). New York: Parents Magazine Press, 1969.

――――――. Won't Know Till I Get There. New York: Viking, 1982; Penguin, 1988.

――――――. The Young Landlords. New York: Viking, 1979.

――――――. Interview by Stephanie Zvirin. In Booklist 86 (15 February 1990): 1153.

――――――. Interview by Amanda Smith. In Publishers Weekly 239 (20 July 1992): 217.

"Rescuing the Black Male." The Futurist 26 (September-October 1992): 50-51.

Sarkissian, Adele, ed. "Walter Dean Myers." In Something about the Author, vol. 2. Detroit, MI: Gale Research Co., 1986, 143-155.

Shelton, Frank W. "In My Father's House: Ernest Gaines after Jane Pittman." Southern Review 17 (April 1981): 340-5.

Taylor, Ronald L. "Black Youth in America: the Endangered Generation." Youth and Society 22 (September 1990): 4-11.

――――――. "Socialization to the Black Male Role." The Black Male in America: Perspectives on His Status in Contemporary Society. Edited by Doris Y. Wilkinson and Ronald L. Taylor. Chicago, IL: Nelson-Hall, 1977.

Unsworth, Robert E. Review of Scorpions, by Walter Dean Myers. In School Library Journal 35 (September 1988): 35.

Wright, Richard. Black Boy. New York: Perennial Library, 1989.

Zvirin, Stephanie. Review of Hoops, by Walter Dean Myers. In Booklist 78 (15 September 1981): 98.

FALLEN ANGELS (1988)

Rudine Sims Bishop (essay date 1990)

SOURCE: Bishop, Rudine Sims. "Of Battles and Brotherhood: Myers the War Novelist." In Presenting Walter Dean Myers, pp. 82-92. Boston, Mass.: G. K. Hall, 1990.

[In the following essay, Bishop offers a critical reading of Fallen Angels, Myers's young adult novel about the Vietnam War experience, praising the novel's use of realism and natural-sounding dialogue, while ultimately calling the text "a powerful evocation of the Vietnam War and an indictment of war in general."]

Lord let us feel pity for Private Jenkins, and sorrow for ourselves, and all the angel warriors that fall. Let us fear death, but let it not live within us. Protect us, O Lord, and be merciful unto us. Amen.

This is the prayer that gives Fallen Angels its title, offered on the death of one of the angel warriors—boys sent off to fight wars before they are old enough to vote. A disproportionate percentage of those angel warriors were underprivileged young men who could not escape the draft or who thought the military would offer them educational opportunities and a source of income. Many were from the Harlems of this country, and in Fallen Angels Myers presents a fictional portrayal of one such young man and his experience of the Vietnam War.

The book is dedicated to Myers's brother Tommy, one of the several Martinsburg siblings who made their way to New York. Although Myers did not develop close relationships with them, the younger boys admired Walter, who had escaped the hardships of Martinsburg and lived what must have appeared to be an exciting life in Harlem. Tommy, a sensitive young man who wanted to be an artist, elected first to follow his older brother's footsteps and join the army. He became one of the fallen angels, struck down before his twenty-first birthday. Myers was deeply moved by his death and terribly saddened at the thought of the wasted life—a gift thrown away.

Even though the book honors Tommy, Myers tapped his own experiences to create the character of Richard Perry. Like Myers, he attended Stuyvesant High School and wanted to go to college and become a writer. They both joined the army at seventeen, were stationed at Fort Devens, and played basketball for the army. In his speeches and in his autobiographical writings, Myers often acknowledges a debt to his high school English teacher, Bonnie Liebow, for the individualized reading list she gave him. In a tribute to his teacher, Myers names Perry's English teacher Mrs. Liebow and the fictional Mrs. Liebow makes a comment about heroism that states one of the themes of the book. Perry tells her about a feeling he sometimes has: "I would feel a pressure to give in, to let a rebound go over my head, to take the outside shot when I knew I had to take the ball inside…. I told Mrs. Liebow, my English teacher, and she had said that it was what separated heroes from humans, the not giving in, and I hadn't understood that."

But Perry is not, after all, Myers; Fallen Angels is not autobiography. Myers did not fight in Vietnam, and Fallen Angels is a testament to his craft as a creator of realistic fiction. The book is a graphic and sometimes horrifying depiction of the waste, the futility, and the anguish of war. It is also, as Mel Watkins points out in the New York Times Book Review, "as much about Perry's coming of age as it is about the Vietnam War."1

Fallen Angels shares with The Nicholas Factor and The Legend of Tarik the structure of the romantic adventure story. Richard Perry, too, takes a circular journey. The book begins with Perry on his way to Vietnam and closes with him on his way home. There the similarity to a romance ends. What he does share with Gerald and Tarik is a loss of innocence, the passage to manhood, and the realization that, in the real world, issues of right and wrong, good and evil, are not easily decided.

Fallen Angels opens with Richard Perry on his way to Vietnam in 1967. He chooses to join the army rather than enroll in City College because he thinks his military pay will help his mother and younger brother. He plays basketball for an army team, injures his knee, and is supposed to be excused from combat duty. But through an army snafu, he is sent to Vietnam. Much of his time there is spent waiting, bored, hoping that rumors of imminent peace are true. Other time is spent on patrol, on "pacification missions," in combat. People who share those kinds of experiences develop a bond, and camaraderie grows among the members of Perry's squad. The book ends with Perry on his way back to "the World" some months later, wounded but essentially whole, presumably with a clearer understanding of Mrs. Liebow's definition of heroism.

THE CRAFT OF FALLEN ANGELS

Reviewers recognized Fallen Angels as an extraordinary book. School Library Journal, in a starred review, called it "a riveting account of the Vietnam War" and "a compelling, graphic, necessarily gruesome, and wholly plausible novel. It neither condemns nor glorifies the war but certainly causes readers to think about events."2Horn Book also gave it a starred review, in which Ethel Heins found that "Except for occasional outbursts, the narration is remarkably direct and understated; and the dialogue, with morbid humor sometimes adding comic relief, is steeped in natural vulgarity, without which verisimilitude would be unthinkable…. With its intensity and vividness in depicting a young soldier amid the chaos and the carnage of war, the novel recalls Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage."3

In this book Myers brings together all those elements of his craft that make his best writing commendable. His characters are complex and memorable. The dialogue, both in Black vernacular and standard informal English, sounds genuine and is a major means by which he defines his characters. He uses imagery and figurative language to paint vivid word pictures of the setting, the action, and the characters. There is both linguistic and situational humor. His first-person narrator keeps the reader close to the action, and he skillfully draws the reader into sharing the emotions of his characters. The descriptions of the fighting are dramatic.

Richard Perry is drawn as an ordinary young man from Harlem—bright, fatherless, without enough money to ensure a smooth passage even through City College. He tells us that in high school he had so few suitable clothes that he had to wash them every night and dry them each morning on the oven door. Clothes for college seemed like an impossibility. Besides his mother, who drinks too much, he leaves at home a younger brother, Kenny, for whom he feels responsible. For Perry, as for many poor young men, the army seems to offer a reasonable alternative to the streets or to the college education that was out of his reach—some training, a temporary job, a salary for his family.

Mrs. Liebow points out that Perry is "too young to be just an observer in life." Readers need Perry to be an observer, however, since through him we come to know the other soldiers and to experience all the action. Partly because he is an observer, he has developed a sensitivity, an ability to tune in to the feelings of those around him. He understands when it is appropriate to reach out to his cohorts and when to keep quiet and leave them with their thoughts. He knows intuitively how to compose a letter to the family of a fallen comrade that is touching and eloquent in its simplicity.

Perry is more than an observer, however. Although he is no "gung-ho" soldier, he is prepared to do his part once he has been assigned to a squad. Given the opportunity to opt out of patrols because of his knee, he elects to participate with the others. That decision sets the stage for him to experience the full horror of the war. He learns to live with "the fear that calls each of our names." He sees people dying all around him and even confronts his own death when a Vietcong guerilla tries to shoot him in the head, failing only because his gun malfunctions. Perry shoots the attacker's face away and is shaken both by his close call with death and by his killing another human being not by shooting at some bushes but at close range.

If this is a coming-of-age story, then as Mel Watkins points out, "Perry's experience in Vietnam—his baptism in the violence, confusion and moral havoc—is the crucible that tests and determines his passage to manhood."4 Having arrived in Vietnam an innocent, he leaves understanding that war changes humans, that it sometimes even destroys their humanity. He also knows that he has survived because, like Mrs. Liebow's heroes, he hasn't given in.

The character who becomes Perry's best buddy, and who provides most of the much needed humor in Fallen Angels is Peewee Gates, high school dropout from Chicago. Peewee is almost always talking—teasing, challenging, spouting opinions and his philosophy of life. The first line of the book is his:

"Somebody must have told them suckers I was coming."

"Told who?" I [Perry] asked.

"The Congs, man. Who you think I'm talking 'bout?"

"Why you think somebody told them you were coming?

"Cause I don't see none of 'em around here. They don't want their butts kicked."

No matter that the troops are in Anchorage, Alaska, on a refueling stop. Peewee is on his way, and he is bad!

Peewee is another young man from a poor inner-city neighborhood. He has joined the army, he says, because when he accompanied a friend to the recruiting office, the friend, who had a criminal record, was rejected because the army does not take rowdies. He figured that if the army were serious about killing people, they would most certainly look first for "them suckers from the projects, 'cause that's all they like to do, anyway." He now thinks he's been tricked. The army is deadly serious.

Peewee takes on all comers, regardless of size or position. His armor against fear and danger is to take the offensive, to openly invite them into his territory. When a white soldier, much larger than he, calls him "boy," Peewee kicks him in the groin and threatens him with a switchblade. When Johnson, a large