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other clothes off and got under the covers. When Dad came into the room, I pretended to be asleep, and he left.
    An hour or so later Mama came home, and she looked at me and asked me if I wanted some ice cream that she had bought me. I said no, and she felt my forehead and noticed that it was damp.
    â€œYou feeling all right, boy?” Dad asked when he came into the living room.
    Yes was my answer, and he asked me why I was curled up. He pulled back the cover and saw the blood oozing from my bandaged stomach. He picked me up and rushed me to the emergency ward.
    The incision had opened, either when I was riding the bike or when I was getting it back upstairs.
    â€œWhat happened?” a doctor asked.
    â€œI fell,” I said.
    â€œThere might be some internal bleeding” was the diagnosis, and I spent another night in the hospital.
    Home again, and Mama quit her job to take care of me.
    I didn’t attend any more classes that year. In early June my sister Gerry took me to school, but after a hurried conference between Mrs. Parker and Mrs. Flynn, I was promoted to the fifth grade and moved to a new school.

BAD BOY
    T he summer of 1947 was one of eager anticipation for black people across the country. Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby, two black players from the all-black Negro Leagues, had finally been accepted into major-league baseball. Joe Louis was heavyweight champion of the world, and “Sugar” Ray Robinson was the welterweight champion. The president, Harry S. Truman, was negotiating with black leaders to integrate the armed forces. The New York Amsterdam News , our local weekly Negro newspaper, suggested that the United States was now going to treat Negroes as equals for the first time.
    Most of my life revolved around school and church. The schools I went to were integrated, and the church always had whites involved in some capacity. Likemany black youngsters raised in northern cities, I was not aware of a race “problem” other than what I heard from older black people and an occasional news story. In sports, the area in which I was most interested, there seemed to be a good representation of blacks. Sugar Ray Robinson would drive slowly through the neighborhood in his brightly colored Cadillac and yell at us if we didn’t get out of the street fast enough. We knew if we yelled back, he would jump out of his Caddy and box with two or three of us at once. Occasionally I would see Joe Louis walking slowly, almost majestically, along 125th Street.
    Outside school and church there were the endless street games on 122nd Street. The block was safe to play on under the watchful eye of housewives who sat in the windows in the summer, catching whatever breeze there was in those days before air-conditioning. Women would sit in the windows, their arms folded before them resting on pillows used exclusively for street watching. Nothing would go on that they would miss.
    A number of unexpected people entered my life that summer. The first was George Myers, my biological father, who had left West Virginia and settled in an apartment with his new wife and family in Harlem, a short distance from me. I knew that I had been adopted, although there had never been official proceedings tomake the adoption legal. In the black community, as well as the white, extended families were common. Sometimes names were changed and sometimes, as in my case, they weren’t. In school I was known as Walter Milton Myers. The neighbors, knowing my parents were the Deans, often referred to me as Walter Dean. I preferred Walter Myers for the most logical reason: If you wrote out the initials WM and turned them upside down, they were still WM.
    I knew that George Myers existed and that he lived somewhere other than in New York. I don’t remember ever having a feeling that I was his son, or that he was my father, but I was curious to see him and the other children who were to be my newly discovered brothers and