the Other Wes Moore (2010) (5 page)

"Mary, what the hell is going on?" her sister asked.

"It's Bernard's crazy ass out there. I ain't going out to talk to him. He's drunk and crazy."

Bernard continued to bang and scream. He stood on the other side of the door in faded jeans and a plain white T-shirt, his beard scruffy and his eyes bloodshot. He was slurring out demands to see his son. Mary simply sat on her bed, peeking through the blinds at the father of her younger child. All the noise woke Tony up, but when he arrived at Mary's bedroom door asking what was going on, she snapped her fingers and hushed him, telling him to go back to bed. Wes, not even a year old yet, slept on peacefully. Bernard kept up his racket for another twenty minutes, while Mary just peered out at him, disgusted. Finally, admitting defeat, he stumbled back home. That was the last time he tried to see his son.

Wes waited downstairs for his mother to take him to his grandmother's house. It was already late, almost six in the evening, so he wondered how long he would have to stay there. Mamie, Wes's grandmother, liked Mary, but she loved her grandson. Wes always felt true love when he went to her house. Despite the fact that her son had nothing to do with Wes, Mamie didn't want Wes punished for the circumstances through which he was brought into the world.

Wes sat in the front seat of the car for the short drive to Mamie's. Mary ran down the rules of the house, as she did every time Wes visited. No running indoors, no talking back, don't eat too much. Wes nodded at each commandment.

Minutes later, they arrived at McMechen Street. Wes ran up the three white marble stairs that led to the front door. He got on his toes and reached up to push the doorbell. Mamie's scintillating eyes met Wes's as she opened the door and her arms for a big hug. Wes loved the house. It was large, three stories, which gave him plenty of things to get into and out of. He sprinted inside the house and made a beeline for the kitchen. The smell of fried chicken cooking and the excitement of playing with the pet rabbit under the sink increased his pace.

He was running through the living room when he saw someone he had never seen before. A man sat on the couch leaning precariously to the side, his right elbow supporting his body and his head nearly flat against his shoulder. The strong smell of whiskey wafted from his clothes and his pores. Wes and the man returned each other's quizzical looks.

Mary entered the room and stopped in her tracks. She would have recognized that "hangover lean" anywhere. The man looked through his partially opened eyes and saw Mary.

A wide smile appeared on his face. "Hey, Mary. Damn, you look good," he loudly announced.

"Hey," she responded, her voice as emotionless as she could make it.

Wes looked at his mother, hoping she would explain who this man was. He moved closer to his mother's hip. Not only did he feel safer there than in the middle of the room but also because the smell coming off the man was beginning to bother him. The man on the couch looked up at Mary and asked, "Who's this?" Mary smirked and rolled her eyes. She could not believe his audacity.

Wes didn't understand why, but he felt a tension in the room. Mary looked down at her son and uttered the words she had never said before and never thought she would have to say.

"Wes, meet your father."

In Search of Home
1984

The phone was up to its eighth ring. It was nine in the morning, and Wes hadn't seen nine in the morning since his summer break started. He climbed out of bed slowly, irritable, his eyes still half-masted when he picked up the phone in his family's narrow hallway.

"Hello?"

"Where's Mom at?" Tony asked.

"Probably at work already. Try her there." Their mom was usually out of the house by 8:30 and didn't come back until well into the evening. Wes, now eight years old, was free from any adult supervision till then. His brother, six years older, was the closest thing Wes had to a caretaker during the daylight hours and was fiercely protective of the little brother who idolized him. But lately even Tony hadn't been around much. Tony was spending most of his time in the Murphy Homes Projects, where his father lived.

The Murphy Homes were built in 1962 and named after George Murphy, a legend in Baltimore for his work as a groundbreaking educator, but just as often they went by a self-explanatory nickname, Murder Homes. The seventeen-story monoliths were among the most dangerous projects in all of Baltimore. The walls and floors were coated with filth and graffiti. Flickering fluorescent tubes (the ones that weren't completely broken) dimly lit the cinder-block hallways. The constantly broken-down elevators forced residents to climb claustrophobic, urine-scented stairways. And the drug game was everywhere, with a gun handle protruding from the top of every tenth teenager's waistline. People who lived in Murphy Homes felt like prisoners, kept in check by roving bands of gun-strapped kids and a nightmare army of drug fiends. This was where Tony chose to spend his days.

The conversation between brothers quickly turned to school. Tony knew Wes had just finished elementary school and asked him what he was doing to get ready for the start of middle school at Chinquapin, pronounced "Chicken Pen" by all of its students. Chinquapin Middle was 99 percent black. Close to 70 percent of the kids were on the school lunch program.

Wes mumbled the verbal equivalent of a shrug. Tony was enraged. "Yo, you need to take this shit seriously, man. Acting stupid ain't cool!"

Wes sighed into the phone. He had heard it before. He loved his brother but had learned to ignore his occasional "do as I say, not as I do" tirades. Tony, by contrast, was desperately trying to give his little brother information he thought he needed, the kind of information that Tony never got. 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.

To Wes, Tony was a "certified gangsta." Tony had started dealing drugs in those shadowy hallways of Murphy Homes before he was ten. By the time he was fourteen, Tony had built a fierce reputation in the neighborhood. Despite his skinny frame and baby face, his eyes were lifeless and hooded, without a hint of spark or optimism.

Tony's dead-eyed ruthlessness inspired fear. He spent much of his time in West Baltimore but had decided to try to open up a drug sales operation in East Baltimore as well. Baltimore is a territorial and tribal city. Once the boys in East Baltimore heard that a West Baltimore guy was attempting to take over their corners, tempers flared. Tony ended up in a shoot-out with a few of the corner boys. Ten minutes later, it was Tony's corner. But no matter how tough he was, or how many corners he controlled, what Tony really wanted was to go back in time, to before he'd gotten himself so deep in the game, and do it all over. He wanted to be like Wes.

There's a term in the hood for a face like Tony's, that cold, frozen stare. The
ice grille
. It's a great phrase. A look of blank hostility that masks two intense feelings--the fire evoked by
grille
(which is also slang for
face)
, and the cold of the ice. But the tough facade is just a way to hide a deeper pain or depression that kids don't know how to deal with. A bottomless chasm of insecurity and self-doubt that gnaws at them. Young boys are more likely to believe in themselves if they know that there's someone, somewhere, who shares that belief. To carry the burden of belief alone is too much for most young shoulders. Tony had been overwhelmed by that load years ago. Now he wanted to help Wes manage his. Like a soldier after years of combat, Tony hated the war and wanted Wes to do whatever he could to avoid it. He was willing to risk seeming like a hypocrite.

When Tony finished his rant, Wes hung up the phone and went back to bed. As soon as he was comfortably under the covers, the phone rang again.

"Yo, you coming out today?" a gruff voice barked out.

"It's too early, man!" Wes replied. "Wait, okay, okay, give me ten minutes."

Wes was talking to his new friend, Woody, one of the first people he'd met when Mary moved the family to this neighborhood a year earlier. It was their third move since Tony was born. The first was from Pennsylvania Avenue to Cherry Hill to get away from Wes's father. The move from Cherry Hill to Northwood was to get away from Cherry Hill.

Wes spent his earliest years in the Cherry Hill Apartments, a planned construction built after World War II to provide housing to returning black veterans. A neighboring development, the Uplands Apartments, was the white counterpart, built at the same time under the city's "separate but equal" policies. The Uplands became home to a thriving middle class, while the over 1,700 units in Cherry Hill became a breeding ground for poverty, drugs, and despair. There was never a question that Cherry Hill wasn't built as a sustainable community for its families. Isolated and desolate, it had no main streets. Small, poorly constructed, faux-brick homes lined the streets like dormitories. There were three swing sets in the middle of the complex that sat vacant at all times because all of the children had been taught to stay clear of them. The rest of the courtyard remained busy with drug activity. If you're not from Cherry Hill, you don't go to Cherry Hill. Over half of the eight thousand residents lived below the poverty line.

Mary shuddered every time she left the house and was plotting her escape from Cherry Hill almost as soon as she got there. When she moved from public housing to a three-bedroom home in a suburban area in the Northwood section of town, she was trying to create more distance between her and the city's imploding center. Compared with the chaos of Cherry Hill, Northwood was a paradise of neat houses with fastidiously maintained lawns. Black professionals constituted the bulk of the residents, many of them graduates of the universities that sat on its borders, Loyola College and Morgan State University. Mary felt safe and hopeful here.

Wes searched around his room for his football jersey. He played defensive end for the Northwood Rams, one of the best rec football teams in the nation. Wes loved football, and his athletic frame made him a natural. Even if he was just going out to play in the streets with Woody and some other friends, he wore that jersey like a badge of honor. The crimson "Northwood" that blazed across his white jersey gave him a sense of pride, a sense of belonging. He found the jersey in the corner of his room. Grass still stained the white mesh from his last game.

As football became more important in Wes's life, his performance in school declined. His test scores were high enough to make it to the next grade, but not high enough to make a legitimate argument that he'd learned anything. He was skating by, and since this was his third elementary school, he was able to do so with fairly little notice. Wes didn't act up in class, which kept him under the radar; his teachers spent 90 percent of their time dealing with the 5 percent of kids who did. Wes's teachers gave his mother reports that said he was unmotivated, but Wes just claimed boredom. He always felt he was smarter than the other kids in class and that the work just didn't hold his interest.

Wes laced up his white Nikes, beelined to his mother's room, and started to look through her drawers and closets for change, his daily ritual after she left for work. His mother would notice missing bills, but he could steal coins with no worries. In the corner of her closet, there was a large green-tinted glass jar of loose change shaped like a teakettle. He permanently borrowed about a dollar, enough to grab a few quarter waters--the colored sugar water sold in small plastic bottles at the corner store.

He ran out the front door to meet Woody, who was sitting on the curb lightly tossing a football in the air.

"It's about time, man!" Woody yelled. Woody lived one street over, on Cold Spring Lane. When Wes moved to Northwood, Woody immediately noticed his size and speed and tried to recruit him for the Rams. They'd since become friends.

Woody came from a working-class, two-parent household. Woody's father was a former sergeant in the Army. During the peak of the Vietnam War, he volunteered for the Army in logistics as an alternative to being drafted and sent to the front lines like many of his friends. Wes loved his war stories, savoring every detail. But most of all Wes enjoyed the simple fact that Woody's father was there.

Before he met Woody, Wes had never really seen a father around. Single-parent households were the norm in his world. At best, kids would have a setup like his brother Tony's, whereby they would get to see their fathers regularly and even stay with them a lot. But a family where the father lived with the mother, happily? This was new to Wes, and he liked it. Sometimes he'd ask Woody to hang out, and Woody would reply, "Can't, I'm with Pops today," and Wes would feel a surge of conflicting feelings. He was genuinely happy for Woody, but he was also deeply envious.

Wes and Woody tossed the football back and forth, waiting for other kids to show up to play. The houses on the street were large by Baltimore standards, two stories with small front yards. Wes's home was among the few on the block without flowers or colorful decoration in the front. It was also one of the few rentals on a block full of homeowners.

Wes and Woody were soon joined by their friend White Boy. White Boy's real name was Paul, but everyone called him White Boy because his father was Lebanese-American and his mother was white. In West Baltimore, white people were a rare sight, so White Boy took the brunt of constant teasing. Despite clowning him about it, they loved him. Wes would always say, "The only thing white about him is his skin. Everything else is black. He's a real black dude." White Boy would just shrug and say, "It's not my fault. I was born this way."

These had been Wes's boys since he'd moved out to Northwood, and they would remain his boys for life. The boys approached another group of kids toward the dead end on Wes's block and asked them if they wanted to play. Particularly during the summertime, the streets were full of kids, and this group looked like a good match for a game of street football. Wes, always up for a challenge, relished the opportunity to beat up on a new group of neighborhood kids.