This is the story of two boys living in Baltimore with similar histories and an identical name: Wes Moore. One of us is free and has experienced things that he never even to dream about as a kid. The other will spend every day until his death behind bars for an armed robbery that left a police officer and father of five dead.
This is the opening line of the book’s Introduction. A brief interlude follows before Chapter One officially commences, but technically these are the first words of the book and they effectively explain the title and efficiently sums up the narrative that is to follow.
Having an advocate on the inside, someone who had gotten to know me and understood my story on a personal level, had obviously helped. It made me think deeply about the way privilege and preference work in the world, and how many kids who didn’t have “luck” like mine in this instance would find themselves forever outside the ring of power and prestige.
The author describes the day he received an acceptance letter from Johns Hopkins University. Since his SAT scores were considerably lower than just the average for students accepted by the prestigious institution, he has felt like applying was just really more just an exercise in going through the motions than anything else which makes the surprise even greater when the acceptance letter arrives. As the 2019 revelations of widespread fraud in the admissions process made clear to the public at large, however, some things are more important to have than high scores and Moore had access to that in the form of Paul White, the “advocate” responsible for his “luck.”
We were all enclosed by the same fence, bumping into one another, fighting, celebrating. Showing one another our best and worst, revealing ourselves––even our cruelty and crimes––as if that fence had created a circle of trust. A brotherhood.
The description is here of the basketball court in the Bronx which the author describes as neutral ground bringing together all aspects of the surrounding community: hot high school prospects and the washed-up versions who use to be them, drug dealers gambling on the outcome of a pick-up game, skinny kids who’d just come from church without even changing out of their dress clothes and pumped-up convicts fresh out of jail. The basketball court becomes a metaphor for one of the book’s most persistent themes: the difference between winding up like Wes Moore and not the other Wes Moore does like just within, but is dependent upon a brotherhood of others who may either be stepping stones to better things or obstructions and hurdles holding you back.
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.
One name and two men. One city, but two worlds. The men who share one name both grew up in Baltimore, but they may as well as grown up different sides of the country or even different planets. Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University is a symbol of hope and possibility for not just the author, but the mother of the other Wes Moore. She, too, was accepted into the university, but unlike the author was forced by economic circumstances to drop out. The symbolic opposite of the promise of hope represented by the university is Baltimore’s Murphy Homes Project. It is in this black hole where hope and promise goes to get murdered that the other Wes Moore gets sucked into the dark brotherhood of drug dealing and murder.
