Discovering Wes Moore

Worried about the violence in the Bronx’s lackluster public schools, Joy sends her kids to Riverdale Country School, a private school. To pay for it, she works tirelessly in a series of odd jobs.

At Riverdale, Wes quickly befriends Justin, who lives near him and is the only other Black boy in his grade. Justin’s father Eddie, a former Black Panther, inspires Wes and Justin with lectures about the burden and the pride of being a Black man.

One day, Wes and Justin go to hang out with Ozzie and their crew. Wes’s friend Paris gives him a hard time about going to a rich White school, unlike everyone else in the neighborhood. Wes tries to act cool and exaggerates a story about his recent suspension for beating a classmate, wanting to make himself sound tough. Justin’s facial expressions show Wes how obvious his posturing is, prompting the group to mock Wes even more.

A frazzled old man approaches the boys and stammers a request for change. Ozzie callously dismisses him, and then the boys talk about the man’s likely crack addiction and the pervasive influence of crack in their community. Drugs have been prevalent in the Bronx for a long time, but crack is more accessible and far more addictive than anything that preceded it, derailing people’s lives and causing a surge in gun violence. The neighborhood’s murder rate jumps more than 60 percent in the 1980s.

Wes and Justin take the subway home, a harrowing journey at nighttime. Justin asks about Wes’s poor grades, but Wes gets defensive, saying that the school doesn’t understand his struggles, like his long commute and that he comes from a single-parent household . In reality, though, Wes knows that Justin’s situation is just as tough as his own, and Justin still gets straight As. Wes flippantly mentions how his mother had threatened him with being sent to military school, a threat he doesn’t take seriously.

Wes reflects on how Paris confronted him earlier about going to Riverdale, and he realizes that he feels out of place there, too. He and Justin feel like they are straddling two different worlds between school and home—it’s as though they speak different languages depending on where they are. Wes and Justin feel like chameleons, struggling to fit in wherever they are.

Wes is consistently embarrassed about not being wealthy like the rest of his classmates and tries to hide the fact by never having friends over to where he lives. One day, he takes his uncle Howard’s advice and tries to use sports to overcome the class and race barrier between himself and his schoolmates. He invites a group of his classmates to a baseball game in his neighborhood. Soon, however, Deshawn’s persistent mocking of Randy, a Riverdale student, starts a series of fights, and the game is called off as a failure.