Literary Crusader Writes Stories About Real Kids

Walter Dean Myers is an accidental pioneer.

Twenty years ago, when he began writing fiction for young readers, he was just hoping it would provide a better living than delivering messages. But the children’s literature of the late ‘60s was so monochromatic that Myers became a one-man movement, simply by writing about the world as he knew it, a world that included Harlem, Bedford-Stuyvesant and the Lower East Side.

His first book, the illustrated story of a trip to the park, was criticized in the industry because it had no white characters. His second, the tale of a lovelorn dragon, provoked letters urging Myers to desist under pain of death. Correspondents were particularly incensed by a black fairy named Mabel Mae who said such things as, “Face it baby, that knight is a bad dude.”

“There had never been a black fairy before,” Myers says by way of still bewildered explanation. “Especially a black fairy that sort of had jive talk.”

In the 20 years since Mabel Mae broke the color line, her creator has become an institution in the low-profile world of children’s fiction. His books are consistently named to the American Library Association’s list of the Best Books for Young Adults. But it is his subjects as much as his skill that sets Myers apart. He is the only successful novelist in America who has devoted his career to writing for and about inner-city kids.

“I get to see these kids the way most writers don’t,” says Myers. “I can go to kids’ homes. I see their parents. I have the knowledge of what’s going on. So I have an obligation to all the kids who are voiceless.”

Myers lives with his wife, Connie, and their 15-year-old son, Chris, in a modest row house on the main drag in this gritty town at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel. A school stands across the street. There is a playground around the corner where he and Chris shoot hoops with neighborhood kids.

“What happens is that I see these kids at 11, I see them at 12 and then two years later I see them in trouble, and I wonder about that,” he says.

Myers is a calm, somewhat distracted man whose unpretentious manner undercuts an intense concern about inner-city problems ranging from teen pregnancy to drug abuse. Although at 50 his days as a playground rat are well behind him, he keeps in touch with children by teaching creative writing twice each month at a nearby public school.

“The kids there are 12 and 13, and they write about their problems,” he says. “Say here’s a kid that’s coming in, and instead of writing a story about a teddy bear or their favorite Christmas, they are writing about a friend who is OD’ing on crack. Or there was one story about a girl who came home and her mother was on crack. She said she wanted to try crack, too.”

These students might well be Myers’ characters. In 1975, with “Fast Sam, Cool Clyde and Stuff,” he began writing his spare, realistic novels about growing up in the ghetto. The children he wrote about were seldom particularly athletic or particularly smart. They lost fistfights, struggled in school and felt alternately tempted and threatened by the world exploding around them.

Like Myers himself, many were foster children. They were living on the edge of indigence in neighborhoods plagued by poverty, violence and drug abuse. Yet Myers managed to evoke their sadness without robbing them of their dignity.

“He tackles difficult topics, but he does it in a way that is not without hope,” says Maria Salvadore, coordinator of children’s services for the District of Columbia public library. “Younger people gain a sense of control through self-exploration in most of his work.”

“I just think he’s tops,” says Peggy Coughlin, reference specialist in children’s literature at the Library of Congress. “It’s the way he constructs the stories. There are very fine characters, a realistic setting and you have a strong plot, and it all works together.”

Myers has been much in demand as a speaker lately, and his books are reaching an increasingly wider audience. He won two important honors last year. But his new popularity may owe as much to the recent vogue of concern for “children at risk” as it does to his talent. These children have been Myers’ subject--and his audience--for years, and there are few better sources on the problems they face and the hopes they nourish.

In “The Young Landlords,” for instance, Myers looks at what happens when a group of grade school friends buy an old apartment building for a dollar. The story, aimed at preteen readers, is a blend of social commentary and whodunit, spiced with almost slapstick comedy. It won the Coretta Scott King Award in 1979.

“Motown and Didi: A Love Story” won the same award five years later, but it is an entirely different sort of book. More violent and more philosophical, it tells the story of a stoic young man living in an abandoned apartment whose life is convulsed when he helps a proud, brainy girl whose brother is on heroin.

In “Scorpions,” a 12-year-old trying to raise money to appeal his brother’s robbery conviction is talked into taking over a drug gang. Desperate for protection, he acquires the gun that will change his life. By creating a world in which there are no good choices, Myers shows how easy it is for good kids to go wrong. The novel was named a Newbery Honor Book, which, in children’s literature, is akin to being short-listed for the National Book Award.

What unites the best of Myers’ work is a handful of strong characters who are not subordinated to his issue-oriented plots.

“I spend a lot of time working on characters,” he says. “I start off with a resume. Actually it is an application form. You know, like a job application form that I have just extended a little bit. And I fill that out and sort of force myself to think about the characters. Then, if I am lucky, I will find a picture of my character. In a magazine. And I will go through hundreds of pictures to find pictures of my characters and find pictures of his house.”

When he’s finished, his wife transforms the clippings into a big collage that spans one wall in the upstairs room where he does his writing. The characters that these methods help produce are the keys, he says, to inducing reluctant readers to tackle a book they might think is too bleak.

“I talk to kids in schools and they would say, ‘Well, I don’t want to read anything about black life,’ ” he says. “And yet these were little black kids. So I am saying, ‘Well, why?’

“And then I realized that the reason was that so many of the books that were being published . . . were just so negative. And then I thought, ‘Well how can you avoid that and still write a realistic book?’

“And then I figured that you can avoid it by humanizing the kid. Giving the kids the same kinds of problems that everybody else has. And just saying it is OK to have this problem. Making the kid so human and real that the kid who is reading can identify with him.”

But the characters who make Myers’ books so believable also make them controversial. Many parents object to their street-savvy language and to the depiction of a world they would rather their children not see.

“These are people who really believe that society is going off the steep end,” Myers says. “And I sympathize with them. I think they are misguided in what they are doing, but to some extent, they are at least trying to make a move.”

Myers came up against the censors most recently when he was asked to contribute a short story to an anthology of young adult fiction. The publishers specified that the girls in his story must be middle class and that they mustn’t eat junk food or use bad language.

“These were obviously things that were on the censors’ list,” Myers says. “So I did this thing about two middle-class black girls and their parents (who) owned a pet shop. The parents went to the next town. The two girls ran the pet shop, and they were placing the animals by their astrological signs.”

The story, called “The Aries Ape,” was rejected because astrology was also on the censors’ list. “Devil worship,” Myers says, shaking his head.

On the wall above the couch in Myers’s darkened living room hangs the collage Connie Myers made for her husband’s best-known book, “Fallen Angels.” Published in 1988, it recently was released in paperback--so recently that one of the big cardboard “dumps” that bookstores use to display popular books still stands in the doorway.

“First time I ever had a dump,” Myers says.

“That’s why it’s up in the living room,” his wife adds with a tolerant smile.

“Fallen Angels,” which also won the King award, is the first of Myers’s books to be marketed for adults as well as teens. A young soldier’s memoir of Vietnam, it has been compared to Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” and Tim O’Brien’s “Going After Cacciato.”

The novel’s dedication is: “To my brother, Thomas Wayne ‘Sonny’ Myers, whose dream of adding beauty to this world through his humanity and his art ended in Vietnam on May 7, 1968.”

Therein lies the reason it was so difficult and so important for Myers to write it.

“I joined the Army (in 1953) when I was 17 because I was in deep trouble and had a possibility of getting my little butt in jail or something like that,” he says. “But that made me a hero. I went through the Army . . . I scored very, very well on my tests, and my Army career went accordingly.

“My brother went in after me. And by the time he got in, the war was raging. And he got in just before the Tet Offensive. And he got into Vietnam at the height of it. And he was killed two days after he got there.”

Myers slides a bit more deeply into the couch, and for the first time in an hour or so takes his eyes off the person to whom he is speaking.

“And I really felt to a large extent that my going in and coming out--and having this uniform, which was the best clothing I’d ever had at the time--affected him,” he continues. “I really felt to a large extent that it was my fault that he went in. At least partially my fault, anyway.”

With “Fallen Angels,” as with the novels that came before it, Myers was motivated by what he perceived as a responsibility.

“I had an obligation,” he says. “Since I had lost a brother there, I needed to write something to justify not only his experience, but the youth experience.”

Justifying the youth experience, in Vietnam or on the streets of Harlem or Jersey City, is still Myers’s primary concern. It is a responsibility he feels all the more strongly because he knows that to some extent he is shouldering it alone.

“Very few men think about writing stories for young people,” he says. “And very few black men are writing at all. You tend to go where the publisher says, ‘Here’s a market, come here.’ So if the market is Judith Krantz, and here’s a black guy who wants to write about his environment. . . what can he do?”

Myers is finishing a black history textbook and a novel about a difficult father-and-son relationship. Maybe, he says, when those projects are behind him, he will take on an issue still relatively untouched in young adult fiction: crack.

“I haven’t done anything really on a kid turning into a crack addict,” he says. “But I could. I could do that, but that has to be something very, very special, and it has to have the right editor.”

He has already begun research that might one day be useful. “I did prison interviews, talked to kids in youth houses. It’s up to somebody to write their stories. If not me, then who?”