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Chapter 9
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Discovering Wes Moore, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Choice vs. Chance
Mentorship and Support
Community, Identity, and Belonging
Coming of Age
Summary
Analysis
After college, Wes goes to England on a Rhodes Scholarship. As excited as he is, he can’t stop thinking about the other Wes Moore. The other Wes is serving a life sentence for killing Bruce Prothero, an off-duty police officer working as a security guard at a jewelry store, during a robbery. Wes writes the other Wes a letter, asking him about his life. He can’t stop thinking about how easily their places could have been switched in life. The other Wes responds, beginning a long correspondence in which he divulges his life story.
Wes’s life continues its upward trajectory as he earns a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and seems poised for a great career. Yet the chance coincidence of his sharing a name with a convicted murderer from his area casts a haunting shadow over his success, forcing him to continually question how and why he and this man with whom he has so much in common could have gone on to live such starkly different lives.
Themes
In his letter, the other Wes describes his upbringing. Wes and his older brother Tony’s father is an alcoholic, and their mother Mary eventually him to raise the kids on her own. Mary got pregnant with Tony at age 15, but she nevertheless stays committed to academics and works hard, getting a Pell Grant to study at Johns Hopkins. Yet when the government slashes the budget for these grants, she is forced to drop out. She continues working hard and saving up, repeatedly moving to less and less dangerous environments for young Wes (while Tony lives with his father).
The other Wes’s childhood shows certain striking similarities to Wes’s own: in addition to growing up in the same area at the same time, both Wes Moores were raised by single mothers who went to college. In the case of the other Wes, however, the bad luck of having her scholarship funding cut forced Mary to withdraw through no fault of her own. Nevertheless, her withdrawal from college goes on to have a profound impact on her ability to support her sons.
Themes
Tony gets sucked into drug dealing at a very young age and becomes an intimidating figure. He tries to make the other Wes tough like him, but he also tries to dissuade Wes from following in his footsteps, encouraging him to focus on school. Wes has mediocre grades but cares more about football. One day, a man propositions Wes to help out with a drug deal, and he agrees, quickly getting sucked into the dealing world and making lots of money. He lies to Mary that he paid for the expensive sneakers he’s been buying with money from DJing.
Much like the author, the other Wes finds himself growing up in an unforgiving environment of drugs and crime, where children get inducted into gang activity at a very young age (like Shea was). Also like the author, the other Wes resorts to lying to his mother to conceal his delinquent activities, straining their relationship.
Themes
Tony finds out about the other Wes’s activity and tells on him to their mom. Dismayed, Mary flushes Wes’ stash down the toilet, which sends Wes into a panic over the money lost. He resolves to keep dealing to make it back.
Though not yet a teenager, the other Wes already finds himself getting sucked into the financially rewarding but dangerous world of drug dealing.
Themes
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At age 15, the other Wes impregnates his girlfriend, Alicia. She has the baby, but Wes doesn’t understand what being a father would mean, and he doesn’t intend to be around for his kid. He keeps dealing drugs. In a spat over another girl, Wes gets enraged and shoots his opponent in the shoulder. He’s sent to juvenile detention for six months for attempted murder. Upon release, he continues dealing drugs, becoming highly organized and efficient.
While the other Wes does wrong by his girlfriend and child here, it’s also true that having a child is an enormous and overwhelming amount of responsibility for a 15-year-old to take on. It’s a bad, tragic situation for all involved. Meanwhile, the other Wes’s enraged reaction recalls the author’s angry confrontation with Lateshia and her brother.
Themes
By age 21, the other Wes has grown tired of the frequent arrests and stress of the drug-dealing life. He now has two children with Alicia and two with another woman, Cheryl. His friend convinces Wes to join him at the Job Corps, a campus environment where they spend the next seven months being trained in honest marketable skills. During this time, Wes begins to shine academically and gets his GED with ease. This is a great time in his life, during which he becomes looked on as a leader by the other students.
It finally looks like things are turning around for the other Wes. This unexpected reversal in his life echoes the author’s own change of environment and outlook when he’s sent to military school. Both Wes Moores find themselves exhibiting talents they didn’t know they had in these settings and demonstrating natural leadership skills.
Themes
When the other Wes finishes the Job Corps and returns home, however, the pressures of life in the neighborhood are still the same. Faced with fewer job prospects than he would have liked, and overwhelmed with financial responsibilities for his children, Wes turns to drug dealing again.
Tragically, the time at the job corps turns out to have been little more than a break from the harsh realities of life in the other Wes’s neighborhood. This calls to mind when the author Wes Moore speculated about how he might have behaved if he had returned home from military school. Once more, the book shows how easily, given their similar backgrounds, the author’s life might have changed if one small detail had been different.
Themes
One day while watching the news, Mary is stunned to see that two wanted suspects in a jewelry store robbery that led to a fatal shooting of the security guard are the other Wes and Tony. They’re tracked down at their uncle’s house in Philadelphia 12 days later and arrested. Tony takes a plea deal to avoid a possible death penalty. Wes, meanwhile, maintains his innocence and goes to trial. His story, however, is full of holes, and he’s convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The author Wes reflects on how this other Wes Moore could never have seen a crime of this magnitude in his future: he had been committing low-level crimes for a long time as a means of staying alive in the short term, but suddenly, his “future was sealed.”
In his crime-ridden environment, the other Wes took things one day at a time for as long as he could remember; this short-term thinking was all that made sense to him when the future wasn’t in any way guaranteed. Yet short-term perspective becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when it winds up involving him in a heinous crime that “seals his future” for good and removes any power of choice he may have had to determine his life in the long term.
Themes
