the Other Wes Moore (2010) (9 page)

The sun continued its rapid descent. We tried to keep a bop in our step, tried to keep it cool, but by now we were pretty explicitly speedwalking. Breathing a little heavily, we did our best to keep up appearances. We laughed about our day, talked about school.

Riverdale. The pristine campus and well-dressed kids had stunned me on my first visit--the Bronx was not the homogenous ghetto I thought it was. I felt a crazy-making crosscurrent of emotions whenever I stepped onto campus. Every time I looked around at the buildings and the trees and the view of the river, I was reminded of the sacrifices my mother was making to keep me there. And every time I looked at my fellow students, I was reminded of how little I fit in.

I tried to hide the fact that my family was so much poorer than everyone else's at school. Every week I sat down to create a schedule for my clothes. I had three "good" shirts and three "good" pairs of pants. I would rotate their order, mixing and matching so that each day I had on a fresh combination. Later I even borrowed Nikki's clothes to show some further variation, thinking that nobody would notice the zippers at the bottoms of the jeans or the way the hips hugged a little tight. I would just nonchalantly say that I was trying to "bring the seventies back." This claim was usually met with polite smiles when I was in the room, but I can only imagine the hysterical laughter and conversations about my cross-dressing when I wasn't around.

When the kids would talk about the new videogame system that was out or how their family was going to Greece or Spain or France during summer vacation, I would sit silent, hoping they wouldn't ask me where my family planned on "summering." At times I would try to join in, chiming in about the "vacation home" my family had in Brooklyn, not realizing how ridiculous I sounded. The "vacation home" I was speaking about was the parsonage my grandparents had moved into when my grandfather came out of retirement to lead a congregation. Not until I got older did I learn that Flatbush Avenue inspired a lower level of awe than the French Riviera. Whenever I hung out with Riverdale kids, I made sure we went to their homes, not mine. I didn't want to have to explain. But, in the sixth grade, I broke my own rule.

My uncle Howard was my mother's younger brother. He had recently made a decision with his medical school that becoming a doctor was not in the cards for him, and he moved to the Bronx, where he worked as a pharmaceutical salesman. He came up with the idea to invite some kids from the neighborhood to play a game of baseball with the kids from my school in a park near our house. I think he sensed my frustration at living in mutually exclusive worlds and thought a game of baseball would bring together my neighborhood friends and my wealthier Riverdale classmates and broaden the horizons of both. His intentions were good. I jumped at the idea. I invited ten friends from school to come and play against my friends from the neighborhood.

In the first inning, my neighborhood friend Deshawn, who was playing first base, started trash-talking Randy, a lanky Riverdale kid with a mop haircut, after Randy hit a single. Innocent stuff--until Deshawn finally said one thing too many and Randy, the pride of super-affluent Scarsdale, playfully tipped the front bill of Deshawn's hat, knocking it off his head. It was as if he were a king and someone had knocked his crown into the dirt. Before we were even fifteen minutes into the game, a brawl had broken out. Three fights and four innings later, I conceded that the experiment wasn't working out. The game was called. Everyone retreated to their separate corners, to their separate worlds. Everyone except me, still caught in the middle.

I was becoming too "rich" for the kids from the neighborhood and too "poor" for the kids at school. I had forgotten how to act naturally, thinking way too much in each situation and getting tangled in the contradictions between my two worlds. My confidence took a hit. Unlike Justin, whose maturity helped him handle this transition much better than I did, I began to let my grades slip. Disappointed with Ds, pleasantly satisfied with Cs, and celebratory about a B, I allowed my standards at school to become pathetic. In third grade I was reading at a second-grade reading level. Later in life I learned that the way many governors projected the numbers of beds they'd need for prison facilities was by examining the reading scores of third graders. Elected officials deduced that a strong percentage of kids reading below their grade level by third grade would be needing a secure place to stay when they got older. Considering my performance in the classroom thus far, I was well on my way to needing state-sponsored accommodations.

When we finally got to the train station, Justin asked me a question.

"Did you study yet for the English test for Wednesday?"

"Nope," I replied.

"You know they are going to put you on probation if you don't start doing better, man."

I knew, but I broke it down for Justin: the problem wasn't what I knew or didn't know, the problem was that they didn't understand my situation. My long trip to and from school every day, my missing father, my overworked mother, the changing routes I took every day from the train just so no one with bad intentions could case my routine. I continued throwing excuses at Justin but started to wither under the heat of his glare. Justin had it worse than I did but was still one of the best-performing kids in the class. My litany of excuses trailed off.

After a moment I broke the awkward silence by telling him my mother had begun to threaten me with military school if I didn't get my grades and discipline together.

"For real?" he asked and laughed.

My mother had even gotten her hands on a brochure that she'd haul out as a visual aid to her threats. But I knew there was no way my mother would allow her only son to be shipped off to military school. Regardless of the grades. Regardless of the suspensions. It was too remote, too permanent. Maybe she'd shift me to a school closer to home, maybe a public or Catholic school, but not a military school.

My mother couldn't send me away. She needed a man in the house to look after Shani and Nikki, not to mention her, right? She had to be bluffing. Plus, in Caribbean households, boys were often indulged like little princes. Minor infractions were tolerated and "he's just being a boy" was an all-purpose excuse for anything short of a felony. And what was military school anyway? A bunch of countrified folks yelling and screaming, waving flags and chewing tobacco, forcing confused kids to crawl through mud, preparing them to get killed in a war? My mother wouldn't even let me have toy guns in the house. It was absurd.

"We'll see what happens," Justin said with a smirk.

"Yeah, we'll see," I replied.

The cloudless evening sky had gone dark. Justin ran up the metal staircase to the train entrance. The streetlights blinking on were a silent siren. Time was up. Justin laced up his sneakers and boarded the train, preparing for his run home.

Wes walked through his new neighborhood, the fourth he could remember living in so far in his short life. He'd called this place home for only the last four months. Despite its being only ten miles from his old home, the thick old-growth trees that lined streets with names like Biscayne Bay, March Point Park, and Whispering Woods were evidence of how far removed he was from the Baltimore City row houses he'd been accustomed to. They now lived in Baltimore County, which sits on the northern, eastern, and western borders of Baltimore City, a horseshoe that fits around its more well-known neighbor. Baltimore City residents increasingly bled into it, exchanging the city for the county's spacious neighborhoods, quality schools, and higher per capita income. Mary Moore was part of that flight.

Dundee Village, where Wes's new home was located, was a collection of connected, whitewashed homes. The houses were modest but well cared for--flowerpots were filled with geraniums or black-eyed Susans, and floral wreaths hung from each wooden door.

He hadn't lived there long, but the closeness of the homes allowed Wes to get to know the neighbors and their idiosyncrasies well. He stared thirty yards across the road and saw Mrs. Evers, a middle-aged black woman, standing in front of her house talking with Joyce, an older white woman from Brooklyn, Maryland, who worked at the Royal Farms up the street. Aside from the carbon-copy houses, there was nothing uniform about this working-class neighborhood; it was filled with people of all shapes, colors, and backgrounds. The only thing most of them had in common was that they came from somewhere else, and for most of them, Dundee was a better place to be.

Back in Baltimore, a new young mayor had just taken over. He ran on a platform of improving the school system, fighting illiteracy, and trying to find innovative solutions to the metastasizing drug trade that was poisoning life in major areas of the city. Mayor Kurt Schmoke was himself a proud product of Baltimore City who went from the city's public schools to Yale University, Oxford, Harvard Law School, and then, improbably, back to his beloved and deeply troubled city. He served as Baltimore's state's attorney for four years and at age thirty-eight was elected the first African-American mayor of Baltimore City, which at the time was over 60 percent black.

A few months into his administration, Mayor Schmoke was lambasted for saying, "I started to think, maybe we ought to consider this drug problem a public health problem rather than a criminal justice problem." Most people heard this as a cry for drug legalization in Baltimore. But Schmoke was desperate. He knew that unless someone figured out some way of controlling it, the drug trade--and the epidemics of violent crime and untreated addiction it left in its wake--would stifle any hope for progress in the city.

Change couldn't come fast enough for Mary. Tony was now full-time in the streets, splitting his time between his father's and girlfriend's apartments in the Murphy Homes Projects. He was a veteran of the drug game at eighteen. He'd graduated from foot soldier and now had other people working for him. School was a distant memory; Tony hadn't seen the inside of a classroom on a regular basis since eighth grade.

Two incidents were decisive in Mary's decision to move. First, Tony got shot in the chest during a botched drug deal. It was the first of three times that he would feel the searing heat of a bullet enter his body. Second, Wes failed the sixth grade at "Chicken Pen" and had to repeat it. Baltimore City had a 70 percent dropout rate at the time. Tony had already joined that statistic; Mary wanted to keep Wes away from the same fate. And now here Wes was, walking around Dundee Village, hoping these bucolically named "avenues" and "circles" would lead him to a better place than the city streets had.

Wes finally turned from his neighbors. He was wearing his unlaced, beat-up Adidas, a T-shirt, and an orange Orioles hat with the bill facing the back. He'd pleaded with his mom earlier in the week for an upgrade to his wardrobe. Tony, he complained, was wearing all the newest clothes and was now sporting a thick gold rope chain on top of it. His mother came back at him hard. "And you see Tony just ended up in the hospital, right? Be thankful for what you got!"

It meant nothing to Wes. All he knew was that, when he got back to the city and walked its streets, breathing in the noise and bustle and craziness he was used to, he did it in secondhand gear.

Back in the county, he walked away from Dundee Village, trying to kill time on a lazy Saturday afternoon. A few blocks from his house he noticed something he had never seen before: a kid, maybe a couple years older than Wes, standing on a street corner. The boy was wearing a headset right out of the Janet Jackson "Control" video. A gold ring with a small diamond cut into the middle of its crown caught the light every time the boy moved his hand. The ring was not exactly flashy, but the shine coming off it told a short story: the kid had some money. The whole tableau--the ring, the headset--was the coolest thing Wes had ever seen. The boy's tall and muscularly broad frame made him look older than he probably was and he had a few people around him, all of them laughing and joking. But it was obvious, both by the size difference and by his cool gadgetry, that this kid was the leader of the pack. Wes wanted to know more and, never shy, he approached the boys.

"Hey, where can I get one of those headsets--"

"Who are you?" one of the boys snapped back, cocking his head and narrowing his eyes.

Wes knew to choose his next words carefully. "I just moved here. From the City. I live over on Bledsoe." He kept his tone level, non-confrontational, but not scared. Never scared.

The tall kid looked him over carefully before he responded. "You want one of these, it's pretty easy. All you have to do is wear one, and every time you see jakes roll by, you just push this button and say something. When your shift is over, you come by, and I'll give you your money," he said.

Money? Wes just wanted to get his hands on one of the headsets. There was money involved too?

After hearing more details, Wes was sold. It seemed like a sweet setup. Simply wear a headset, hang out with new friends, notify people when you see police coming, and get paid at the end of the day. He knew what game this was, the same game that had consumed Tony and put a bullet or two in him. The same game Tony continually urged Wes to stay out of.