by Wes Moore
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 Whi
te 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.
Wes was playing defense, guarding one of the kids from the neighborhood who was playing wide receiver. The boy ran his pattern with Wes closely guarding him, pushing him slightly to throw him off-balance. Wes didn't believe in taking it easy. If he was going to play, he was going to play to win. That was his style. The boy told Wes to stop pushing him. Wes pushed the boy harder.
Wes was bigger and stronger than the other boy, a fact pointedly reinforced every time their bodies collided. The boy finally had enough and, after the final play of a drive, stood toe-to-toe with Wes, bumping his chest against the bigger boy. His nose brushed up against Wes's chin.
"Didn't I tell you stop touching me?" the boy yelled in Wes's face.
"Make me, bitch!"
The boy pushed Wes in the chest, creating a short distance between the two, then cocked his right arm and punched Wes square in his face. Wes stepped back and threw his hands up, not just to protect himself from another blow but to make sure his face wasn't damaged. Wes had never been punched before, not like that. And he never expected this little dude to swing on him. The boy stared at Wes, seemingly as shocked as he was.
Woody stepped in front of Wes and urged him not to retaliate. The boy who punched Wes was still trying to maintain his strut but seemed to realize that he might have made a mistake by punching the bigger guy. Wes was stunned. Then he tasted the unmistakable bitterness of blood on his tongue. He stuck his lip out slightly and felt the skin splitting open. Blood flowed, staining his white Northwood jersey.
The sight and taste of his own blood set Wes off. He clenched his fists and forced his way past Woody. Everyone waited for the next punch to be thrown. Instead, Wes broke into a sprint, running right past the kid. His focus was elsewhere. He left the kid standing there confused, hands still up, preparing for a fight. Wes was running home.
The commotion caused a stir, and neighbors began to look out their windows to see what was going on. Many of them were already frustrated with the boys playing football in the street--lost in their game, the players would curse, run through flower gardens, and scatter their quarter-water bottles across the sidewalks. It was not unusual for the owner of a beautifully decorated and well-kept yard to wake up in the morning and see an empty bag of Lay's potato chips or Cheez Doodles drifting through. Woody and White Boy looked up at the neighbors' windows and saw unhappy eyes staring back at them.
Woody ran after Wes to see what was going on, while White Boy ran back to his house to avoid getting in trouble. Woody cut through the back door of Wes's house. As he entered, he looked into the kitchen to see Wes slamming a drawer closed. With his left hand, Wes held a wet paper towel to his lip, trying to stop the steady flow of blood. The lip had begun to swell, and his anger grew along with it. This was a pride issue for Wes. He had just allowed himself to be punched dead in the face, in front of his friends, by a smaller guy. He could have walked away. He could have fought back on the spot and settled it. But when Wes had looked into the other boy's eyes, he knew that he had to send a message.
Tony flashed through Wes's mind. Tony wanted the best for Wes, but he still felt that part of his mission as a big brother was to toughen him up for the battles Tony knew Wes would have to fight as he got older. Some days, Tony would have Wes and Woody meet him at the Murphy Homes, where he would assemble a group of Murphy Homes boys. The boys would circle up like they were getting ready to watch a gladiator fight. Tony would order Wes and Woody into the center of the ring. Then he would call out the names of a few of the Murphy Homes boys. At Tony's command, Wes, Woody, and the boys from the projects would start wrestling and punching one another, first tentatively but then with increasing viciousness until Tony jumped into the circle and grabbed the backs of their collars, separating them like pit bulls in a dogfight. If he ever slackened, Tony would pull an exhausted Wes to the side, get within inches of his face, and say, "Rule number one: If someone disrespects you, you send a message so fierce that they won't have the chance to do it again." It was Murphy Homes law and Wes took it to heart.
As Woody got closer, his attention was diverted from Wes's left hand to his right, where he held a long-bladed knife. Woody carefully approached Wes and said, "Don't do it, man. Dude is not worth this," but Wes moved toward the back door, which led to the alley that connected the homes on each block. The alleys were narrow, barely wide enough for a car to pass through.
Woody sensed where Wes was headed and ran to block the back door. Woody held on to Wes's arms and tried to talk sense to him, but Wes's rage blocked out every word his friend said. Wes tried to wriggle free, to no avail. He knew he couldn't overpower Woody, so he told him that he needed to change the paper towel stanching his wound. The moist towel that Wes held to his lip was almost solid red and beginning to drip blood on the living room carpet. As he walked back to the kitchen, Wes kept an eye on Woody.
Woody turned his head away to see if the boys outside had moved from the front yard to the back alley. To no surprise, they had. What did surprise Woody was that they weren't alone.
One of the neighbors must have called the police, because two cruisers had pulled up, flashing their red and blue lights. They blocked off the alley. The boys who were running from the front of the house to the back alley stopped, following orders from the police car that pulled up behind them. Woody began to think it was a good thing that he and Wes had come inside.
The slamming front door brought Woody's attention back to the kitchen. Wes was gone. Before Woody could tell Wes that the police were out back, Wes was on the other side of the front door, knife in hand, hurrying to settle the score with the boy who had busted his lip.
Wes was now in a full sprint, clearing the five steps of his front porch in one leap and then running around to the alley, figuring that's where the boys were. His pace slowed as he turned the corner. Right in front of him was the boy who'd split his lip. The anger he'd felt minutes before rushed back. He gritted his teeth and clenched his fists. His eyes started to stream with tears of anger, confusion, and fear. He began to scream. His vision tunneled till the only thing he saw was the boy who'd punched him. Nothing else was on Wes's mind or in his sights, not even the policeman who had just stepped out of his cruiser.
The policeman left his car just in time to see the other kids clearing out of the alley and sprinting away. Wes was still preparing to take this fight to the next level. He took a few quick steps toward the boy who'd punched him, holding the knife to his side. The police officer yelled at Wes: "Put down the knife." Wes didn't hear him. Wes continued to move toward the boy. His grip on the knife handle tightened. His forearms flexed.
Send a message.
After repeating the order one more time, and watching Wes ignore him again, one of the officers stepped forward. He lifted all eighty pounds of Wes off the ground, slamming him facefirst on the trunk of the police cruiser. Wes's chest collapsed against the trunk of the car, sending pain throughout his entire body. His hand loosened. The knife fell to the asphalt. The officer pinned Wes's body to the car with a forearm hard against the back of Wes's neck while he used his other hand to pull the handcuffs from the right side of his belt holster. Wes was incapacitated, the side of his head pressed
against the cruiser, but he still had the boy who'd punched him in his sights. Wes wondered how it was that he was the one being arrested. He tried to plead his case to the police officer as he closed the second cuff on Wes's eight-year-old wrists.
Woody went through the back door. He saw Wes lying on the back of the police car in handcuffs. "Why y'all got my man in handcuffs? What did he do?"
Woody's screams were largely ignored by the two police officers. They were busy placing Wes in the back of one of the cruisers and told the other boys to go home. They ignored Woody until he shouted out, "If y'all don't let him go, I'm gonna have to kill somebody!"
Moments later, Woody was in handcuffs too.
Woody was taken to his house in one of the police cars while Wes was brought down to district booking. Wes sat there, pondering his next step. He didn't want his mother to know he'd been arrested. She would probably ground him at least. It was summer, and that was the last thing he wanted. He used his one phone call to call his brother in Murphy Homes. Tony agreed to ask his father to pick Wes up. Three hours later, Wes was released under the care of Tony's father, and he was back at his house before his mother got home from her job.
It was years before Wes's mom found out her son had been arrested that day. By the time she did, she had bigger things to worry about.
The extreme heat in my poorly ventilated room woke me in the middle of the night. I was dying of thirst. I crept slowly out of my room, careful not to wake Shani. Each stair let off an irritating squeak. As I reached the bottom of the alcove, I saw my mother half lying down, half sitting up on the couch, staring at me with wide eyes. It was obvious she had been sleeping just a few moments prior, but the sound of the stairs woke her. She asked what I needed, and after I explained that I just wanted some water, she insisted on getting it for me. I didn't need her help, but I didn't say anything as she rose from the couch to get a glass from the kitchen.