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Summary
Themes
and Colors
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
Three-year-old Wes and his older sister Nikki are chasing each other around. Catching her at last, Wes punches Nikki, but his mother, Joy, catches him in the act and roars at him to go to his room, saying that he should never hit a woman. Wes’s father, Westley, a calm and peaceful man, comes to his defense, saying that the young boy didn’t mean anything serious and doesn’t even know about domestic abuse. Wes indeed feels confused about what he did wrong.
As both Wes and Westley’s reactions indicate, Joy’s anger seems disproportionate to what the three-year-old Wes could have intended. This suggests that Joy perhaps has some personal history experiencing violence against women, which makes her particularly sensitive to the subject.
Active
Themes
Wes now relates his mother’s story of coming to the U.S. from Jamaica at three years old and settling in the Bronx. Joy studiously observed her classmates and learned American slang and behavior. She went to college in 1968, a year when race riots rocked the country, which awakened her to political injustice. She married her classmate Bill and gave birth to Nikki. Bill, however, soon became a drug addict and a violent abuser. During one harrowing incident, Joy drew a kitchen knife in self-defense, and she left him for good a month later.
Joy’s backstory explains why she was so quick to get enraged over three-year-old Wes’s punching of Nikki. Her story also broadens the horizon of the narrative to situate it within the social and political contexts of 20th-century America, touching on the deep-seated racial tensions of the era and on the experience of Black people and immigrants during that time.
Active
Themes
Wes returns to the day he hit Nikki. Westley comes into Wes’s room and calmly tells him not to hit women, but he reassures Wes that Joy isn’t mad. In the present, Wes reflects that this is one of only two memories he has of his father, the other being the day he died.
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Themes
Wes now relates his father’s backstory. Westley had gone to college and become a broadcast journalist. He met Joy and had two children with her, Wes and his younger sister Shani. One day in 1982, when Wes was three years old, Westley seemed quite sick and out of sorts. He drove himself to the hospital the next morning, but the doctors told him he just had a sore throat and needed rest. Back at home that night, Westley collapsed, terrifying Wes and his family, and he died on the way to the hospital. It turned out that Wes had a rare but treatable infection that blocked his airways, but the hospital staff had been suspicious of him as a Black man and didn’t take his concerns seriously, telling him to deal with it himself.
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Nikki was particularly crushed by Westley’s death, as she had grown close to him and was old enough to understand what was going on. Meanwhile, Bill, who had cleaned up his act and made an effort to compete with Westley for Nikki’s affection, stopped trying after Westley died, thus leaving Nikki feeling “as if she had lost two fathers that day.” The community mourned Westley’s death, but Wes was too young to really understand what had happened.
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Themes
