The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

Chapter 2 begins in 1984 and focuses on the other Wes Moore’s living situation in Murphy Homes. These projects “were among the most dangerous projects in all of Baltimore” (26). It was here where Wes’s older brother Tony spent most of his time, and it was here where Tony began selling drugs before he was 10 years old. According to Moore, at age 14 Tony had “passed the point of no return” (27). He was trying to expand his territory into East Baltimore, but this stirred up trouble. Mary tried moving her family around several times to secure housing in a neighborhood that was more promising.

Wes loved football and was a natural on the field. Although he was passing his classes, football soon became his only focus. At the time that they lived in Northwood, Wes had two close friends: Woody and “White Boy” (Paul). Moore describes how Wes first got into trouble with the law at a neighborhood football game gone wrong. A fellow football player was being especially pushy with him, and Wes wasn’t backing down. It turned into a scuffle that split Wes’s front lip. Wes ran home and grabbed a knife, his brother’s words running in his head: “if someone disrespects you, you send a message so fierce that they won’t have the chance to do it again” (33). This was “Murphy Homes’ Law” (33).

Woody tried to detain Wes in his house as best as he could as the police moved through the neighborhood. However, Wes escaped and returned to the field to make the other player pay. The police called for him to drop his weapon, but Wes refused. The policeman then stepped forward, “lifted all eighty pounds of Wes off the ground, slamming him face first on the trunk of the police cruiser” (34). After being detained for a while at the police station, he called Tony to come pick him up. He was released under the care of Tony’s father and was back home before his mother even returned from work.

The story shifts to the author’s childhood, after his father’s death. Moore went downstairs to fetch a glass of water in the middle of the night. His mother had made the downstairs couch her new bedroom, and Moore reflects on how terrible she looked and how “people around us didn’t think she was coping well with her husband’s death” (37). Three weeks later, his mother decided to move the family to the Bronx in New York City. Her childhood memories of the Bronx were of a warm and safe community. When they arrived, she was shocked to see how much the borough had changed. In the words of President Jimmy Carter, it looked like “a war zone” (38).

As Moore recounts his grandparents’ explanation of the Bronx’s decline, readers are given a history of Reverend Doctor James Thomas, Moore’s grandfather. He always wanted to become a minister like his father before him, but he had to finish school. In 1948 Moore’s grandfather left Jamaica to attend college in Pennsylvania. His Jamaican wardrobe was ill-suited for the approaching winter, and a man Moore’s grandfather encountered on campus helped him secure appropriate clothing. That man was Kwame Nkrumah, who would become the first president of Ghana. The two became close friends, with Kwame Nkrumah mentoring Moore’s grandfather and encouraging him to enter politics. Moore’s grandfather was determined to be a minister, however, and in 1952 he became the first black minister in the Dutch Reformed Church.

Moore had to adjust to the strict rules set by his grandparents to keep them safe. The Bronx wasn’t the same neighborhood where his mother grew up; he characterizes it as being in its “postapocalyptic phase” (43). Despite the constant threat of violence and drugs, but Moore found solace in the neighborhood basketball court. He explains that “the basketball court [was] a strange patch of neutral ground, a meeting place for every element of a neighborhood’s cohort of young men” (45). It was “as if that fence had created a circle of trust. A brotherhood” (45).