Discovering Wes Moore

Nonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | YA | Published in 2012

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Introduction

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-11

Epilogue

Key Figures

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 1 Summary: “For Keeps”

At three years old, Wes Moore is chasing his nine-year-old sister Nikki in the living room. Nikki is fast, and he’s never been able to catch her before. Shocked by catching up to her, he punches her in play as his mother enters the room. Their mother, Joy, screams at him to go to his room. Wes sits in the bedroom he shares with his baby sister, Shani, afraid of the bedroom door opening. He hears his parents talking among each other below, and Wes’s father Westley tells Joy not to yell at Wes because he’s three and won’t understand what she’s talking about.

Their voices fade into the background as Wes looks out the window. There is a photograph of him and Nikki on the dresser. Wes explains he is named after his father, and Nikki is named after their mother. Wes spends all his time with Nikki. He doesn’t understand why he is in trouble or what boundary was broken while playing since he and Nikki have such a close relationship. He reflects, “Years would pass before I understood how that blow connected to my mom’s past” (7). Joy had been in an abusive relationship with Nikki’s biological father, Bill.

Wes reflects on his mother’s past. Joy came to the US from Jamaica when she was three. Wes’s grandparents Mas Fred and Miss Ros sold the Jamaican farm that had been in their family for generations and settled in the Bronx. His grandfather wanted to study theology, and years later Joy entered American University in Washington, D.C. in 1968. It was a time of Vietnam protests, marches for civil rights and desegregation, and the Martin Luther King, Jr. assassination.

Joy joined the organization of African and African American Students at her university and met the treasurer, a junior named Bill. Within two months they were engaged, and they married two years later. Bill experimented with drugs, but his use became regular until he lost control and abused alcohol and drugs daily. Joy refused to allow drugs in her home and threatened Bill with a knife before leaving him with Nikki a month later.

Wes hears his father calmly stepping up the stairs. He knows a beating wouldn’t happen in that moment, as his father’s demeanor was calm and defensive. Wes has two memories of his father: He was his protector, and Wes had watched him die. His father was the only son of his parents, and he dreamed of being a TV reporter because of his interest in political justice. Westley traveled across the country as a reporter, and when he was back at home he hosted his own public affairs radio show. He hired a writing assistant, who turned out to be Joy, and they fell in love.

“My father was intensely attracted to this short woman with a broad smile, who mixed a steel backbone with Caribbean charm. And in Joy’s eyes, Westley was the opposite of Bill—calm, reassuring, hardworking, and sober. Westley and Nikki adored each other” (12). Wes’s parents married in Washington, D.C in a small ceremony two years before he was born. Shani, the youngest, was born in 1980.

After Westley signed off his radio news broadcast, he came home and ate his favorite meal while Wes and his sisters were still asleep. He had been ill for 12 hours, so the next morning he goes to the hospital while Joy takes Nikki to school and Wes and Shani to the babysitter’s house. Joy rushes to the hospital and is shocked by her husband slouched over the bed. The doctors didn’t find anything wrong. They said he had a bad sore throat and that he should rest and then sent him home.

At dinnertime, Joy is holding Shani while Nikki is cooking dinner with her. Wes is a few months from his fourth birthday. His father comes down the stairs and collapses while trembling uncontrollably. Joy tells Nikki to call 911. Nikki and Wes go outside to signal the ambulance to their house. Joy packs the kids in the car and follows the ambulance to the hospital. His father dies from acute epiglottitis.

The hospital treated him for a sore throat, giving him pain medicine that stopped him from feeling his throat close up. Wes describes how his father had entered the hospital with an unshaved face and an address in a poor neighborhood. There are systemic and racial inequalities in how his father was treated at the hospital. Nikki lost Bill, her biological father, along with Wes that day, as Bill only had been in her life to compete with Westley. Now that Westley was gone, Bill was gone too.

At his father’s funeral, Wes sees the pained faces of the journalist community and his family. His uncle leads him to the casket, and his father looks peaceful. He hears people saying his father has passed on, but he doesn’t understand where. As his uncle tugs at his hand to keep moving, he wishes his father would come with them too.

Chapter 2 Summary: “Courtside in the Bronx”

Joy sleeps on the couch for two years after Wes’s father dies. The neighborhood in Baltimore where they live is becoming more dangerous. Joy says she sleeps there to protect her children, but Wes and his sisters believe she’s avoiding the bedroom she shared with their father. Joy unfairly blames herself for his death. Joy’s friends and siblings have noticed she hasn’t been coping with the death well. Unable to stay in the home where Westley and she had lived and created a family together, Joy calls her parents in the Bronx for help.

Joy’s mother is ecstatic they’re moving in with them. Joy packs up the car with the kids and drives from Maryland to New York. The Bronx is different than when Joy left. Wes’s Jamaican grandparents greet them, excited to have them there. Wes overhears his mother and grandmother whispering about the crime and drug use in the neighborhood. Wes’s grandparents are strict about chores and being home before the sun goes down. He learns that the drug use is especially bad in the abandoned sections of the Bronx and that crack has overtaken parts of the city.

Wes goes to the basketball court and watches a game of three on three. A young man is injured, and they look to Wes to fill his spot. There are from all walks of life, with different backgrounds and clothes and careers, but they are all the same on the basketball court. Wes has fun playing with the young men, but when the streetlights illuminate he knows he has to leave. He asks when they will play again, and a boy named Deshawn tells him the same time tomorrow.

Chapter 3 Summary: “The Chameleon”

Joy tells Wes that he won’t be going to public school in the Bronx. The public schools there are crumbling, and Joy works multiple jobs all day to pay for the tuition of Riverdale Country School. Joy comes home late from work but always kisses her children goodnight. Wes smells her perfume when she gets home and tucks them in each night, and then he turns over and goes back to sleep.

Wes is the only Black boy in his section at Riverdale Country school. There is another Black boy in section two named Justin, and Wes quickly befriends him. Justin’s mom, Carol, is close with Joy, and Justin’s dad, Eddie, lives in Harlem, and Wes looks up to him. He recalls listening “carefully when Eddie spoke. ‘We are black males, and as black males there are certain things we have to deal with that others don’t,’ he told [them] once” (31). Eddie tells the boys to stay strong and proud.

Two years later, Wes and Justin enter the fifth grade. Justin is nearly five feet six inches and stands high above Wes. They take the train home from Manhattan after spending the afternoon window shopping. Justin tells Wes they’ll be able to sit down in the crowded train after the next stop. The white people get off at the last wealthy stop in Manhattan just like Justin predicted, and the boys finally get a seat.

They get off at Gun Hill Road, and the familiar scents of Jamaican, Puerto Rican, and Chinese food in the Bronx surround them. Wes and Justin go to Ozzie’s house, and Paris is there too. The boys ask Wes and Justin about the shoe stores in Manhattan and how school is at Riverdale. Wes tries to avoid the topic of Riverdale, but Paris won’t let it go. Wes tells them he was suspended recently and then exaggerates the story. He was actually play-wrestling with another student, and the student fell and cut himself. He instead tells the boys that this guy got in his face and was disrespecting him. They don’t believe him, and the boys laugh until a man stumbles toward them. Ozzie tells the man to get out of there when he asks for change.

Wes reflects on the people like the stumbling man in the Bronx. Crack was introduced to the streets there in the 1980s, and turf wars and gunshots were still just as bad. The sun begins to set, and Wes and Justin know they have to get home. They take the subway back home, and there is a lingering fear. They keep to themselves and don’t look at anyone. Justin asks Wes if he’s studied for the English test and when Wes says no, Justin warns him that he will be put on probation if he doesn’t start to do better.

Wes makes excuses for why he’s doing poorly in school. He says it’s a long bus ride, that his mother is overworked, and his father is dead. He quickly stops himself: “I trailed off when I felt Justin’s withering glare. Justin had it as hard as I did, worse in some ways, but he still got the best grades in the class” (37). They don’t speak until Wes breaks the silence. He tells Justin that his mom is threatening him with military school if he doesn’t get his grades up. They laugh at the idea. Wes thinks about Paris asking about their school and how awkward he feels going to Riverdale. He doesn’t fit in there, but he feels guilty that his mother is sacrificing so much to send him there.

Wes feels caught between two worlds. He is one person at Riverdale, and another in the Bronx afterschool. Wes hosts a baseball game with 10 friends from school and some of the guys from his neighborhood, and Deshawn and Randy get into a fight. The game is called, and everyone goes back to their neighborhoods. Wes is still caught in the middle between these two very different worlds.

Chapters 1-3 Analysis

Wes’s memory when he is three places the reader inside his household to understand his family dynamic, and this provides the foundation for the rest of the story. Joy and Westley are characterized through descriptions of their pasts. Joy has a traumatic past, but she is a strong woman and mother, and she knows what it means to sacrifice everything for her children. Westley, although only in Wes’s life for a short time, has a profound effect on him as he grows up.

Later, in the final chapters of the book, Wes explains that his father’s death ultimately shaped him into the man he is now during a conversation with the other Wes Moore. He writes, “It took me years to realize that in many ways he did shape me. I became a man, despite his absence. In fact, his absence made me grow up fast” (145). The other Wes Moore will make the case that his father chose to abandon him while Wes the narrator’s father did not choose to leave his family; his life was cut short by a preventable illness. Even though they both grew up without fathers, the choice, or lack of choice, in the father’s absences affect the characters of both men and their decisions in life.

Wes witnesses how the absence of his father is affecting his mother. When they arrive in the Bronx, Wes notices that this isn’t the same Bronx that Joy described growing up in. Wes is influenced by the boys and men on the basketball court and by men like Justin’s father, Eddie, who tells the boys to be proud of who they are. The theme of identity as a young Black man emerges here as well as the theme of being caught between two worlds.

Wes struggles to find direction in a constantly changing time in his life. He wants to be a strong man in the house, to help his grandparents, sisters, and mother, but he also wants time to figure out who he is. When he’s at school, he feels disconnected from the kids in his neighborhood who go to public school. When he’s with the kids in his neighborhood, he is made fun of for going to an expensive school across town. He struggles with the guilt of knowing how hard his mother must work to pay for his school while he’s disinterested in even being there. Having a strong, Black male like Eddie in his life provides him with advice and an idea of what kind of life he should lead despite all challenges.

Wes becoming friends with Justin is important because Justin provides an understanding perspective as another student at Riverdale Country School. When Wes tries to make excuses for why his grades are failing, he realizes he has no grounds to say that to Justin since Justin has it just as bad and still does well in school. Justin warns him that he’s not going to last at school much longer if he doesn’t turn things around. It’s important for Wes to hear this from one of his peers as opposed to his mother or grandparents.

Wes’s grandparents have rigid rules, but Wes follows them and respects his grandparents. This example of structure and how positive it is for Wes shows that he is capable of following rules and guidelines when he understands the purpose of them and what could happen if he doesn’t follow them. He understands that his curfew has to do with safety, and he understands his household chores are because his aging grandparents need assistance. At this point in the story, he is still unaware of why failing out of school would be a blow to his family and his future opportunities, and his mother is overwhelmed by working several jobs all day.