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.
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