Chapter 2: In Search of Home

The second chapter of The Other Wes Moore, entitled In Search of Home, examines the themes of Crime and the Importance of Education. The chapter opens with the Other Wes's brother encouraging him to focus on school and not make the same mistakes that he had; however, then Other Wes skips school to play football with his new neighborhood friends. Other Wes then gets into a fight with one of the boys and when the fight escalates and weapons get involved, Other Wes and his friend Woody get arrested. We then learn that Author Wes is moving with his family to a new neighborhood which turns out to be filled with drugs and crime. Both Weses are victims of their environments.

The first theme examined is the importance of education. Other Wes's brother, Tony, had become involved with drug dealing at his father's projects, but at the same time wishes that his brother go down a better path than he had: "Tony felt his brother’s life could be saved, even if he felt his own had already, at age fourteen, passed the point of no return.” (Page 27). Tony is uneducated academically, but is also uneducated about the opportunities available. He is only 14, yet he sees no way out of the hole he has dug for himself and consequently, digs that hole deeper in the form of drug dealing and gang membership. This does not stop him from advocating for his brother to make different decisions, telling his brother in reference to school, "‘Yo, you need to take this shit seriously, man. Acting stupid ain’t cool!”(Page 27). Author Wes chooses to include both Other Wes's and Tony's experiences in order to express how important education is. These brothers understand why they should be going to school, but the application of these idealistic morals is sometimes hard to execute under their environmental circumstances. Tony shows that it's much easier to preach what is right than to do it yourself and that just because you know what you should be doing doesn't always mean you do it.

The other theme that is shown is the prevalence of crime. While skipping school, Other Wes gets into a fight with one of the boys he plays football with, and decides to get his knife out in order to defend his honor. Honor was everything in these neighborhoods: "Nothing else was on Wes' mind or in his sights, not even the policeman who had just stepped out of his cruiser…Send a message.” (Page 34). Other Wes was only eight years old and he was already headed down the pipeline to prison. He was so angry because of the neighborhood in which he grew up; he had been exposed to violence as the only way to deal with his anger and therefore chose to show the kid who punched him who was "boss." The fact that at only eight years old Other Wes had no sense of fear of cops or jail, or that he was willing to risk it all just to get back at this boy, shows that he was already headed down a dark road. Other Wes's mother was not much help because with the lack of a father figure, she was forced to work all the time, and seemed to miss many of the problems going on at the time: “It was years before Wes’s mom found out her son had been arrested that day. By the time she did she had bigger things to worry about.” (Page 35). Had Other Wes's mother had the resources and ability to step in at this early sign of problematic behavior, then perhaps his whole life could have  been turned around. Author Wes was also forced to endure an environment infested with crime. After the death of his father, his mother became too depressed to support the family effectively, and so they moved in with Author Wes's grandparents. The neighborhood was much different than they thought it would be; they had expected to move into a safer place, but over the years following the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination riots, the neighborhood had become a cesspool of drugs and violence: "I heard my grandparents talk about how drugs and violence had slowly crept in. Fear and Apathy had become the new norm in what had once been a close-knit community.” (Page 40). 

Overall, this chapter expresses how crime can be a product of either the support and resources one has (or does not) as well as the environment in which one grows up in. It also shows how key education is to growing up and understanding what other opportunities are available outside of the "gangsta" life.

Chapter 1: Is Daddy Coming With Us?

The main theme addressed in this chapter is that of absent fathers. The author, Wes Moore, uses the similarities and differences in the absence of his father, and the other Wes Moore's father, to illustrate a point of how a lack of a father figure affects people differently. On page 15, the author writes, "While I knew something bad had happened, I still wasn't sure what it meant...I heard that my father had 'passed on' but had no idea where he'd gone." Wes was so young when his father died that the whole thing was just very confusing to him. His father had been so important to him and such a big part of his life that it was impossible for him to grasp the severity of what had just occurred. Once Wes did understand what happened, he began to realize the injustices of it. He begins to get angry with the hospitals treatment of his father, and believes the hospital didn't treat him as well as other patients because of his disheveled appearance and unfamiliar name; "The hospital looked at him askance, insulted him with ridiculous questions, and basically told him to fend for himself. Now, my mother had to plan his funeral." (page 14). The loss of his father forced Wes to grow up much sooner than he should have, and made him question the fairness and safety of the world he lived in. However, the other Wes's experience with a lack of a father was much different. Wes's father had left his mother before Wes had even been born. As it says on page 23, "Mary was left with two alcoholic, abusive men who shared the DNA of her two children but no husband or dad for her boys." Wes had to grow up never knowing the love of a father, but also never really having to lose one. At the start of part one of the book, there is an excerpt from one of the Wes's meetings in the jail in which Wes says, "Your father wasn't there because he couldn't be, my father wasn't there because he chose not to be. We're going to mourn their absence in different ways." Both of these men were forced to go through life without a father, but the causes of their absence were very different and cause very different responses in the men. Wes Moore explores the impacts of their absences throughout the novel, and how the differences in the causes of their absences is important.

Another theme that is addressed in this chapter is that of the importance of education. When the other Wes Moore's mother finds out about the loss of the Pells grant, which was helping her pay for college, she is devastated. She is forced to leave the college and turn her temporary job at the Bayview Medical Center as a secretary into a permanent position, since her goal for better work was crushed due to her lack of education. Since she was a little girl, her mother always told her that she had to go to school so she could make something out of her life. Now, that option became impossible. On page 18 it says, "She told herself she was down but not out...but she couldn't deny it: without schooling she was worried." The author chooses to include this story to show just how crucial education is. If Mary had been able to graduate college, she would have found a much better and more satisfying job, and Wes's life may have been completely altered. Instead, his mother feels hopeless and is unable to achieve her goals, which disheartens Wes as well.