by Wes Moore
"When did you feel like you'd become a man?" Wes asked me, a troubled look on his face.
"I think it was when I first felt accountable to people other than myself. When I first cared that my actions mattered to people other than just me." I answered quickly and confidently, but I wasn't too sure of what I was talking about. When did I actually become a man? There was no official ceremony that brought my childhood to an end. Instead, crises or other circumstances presented me with adult-sized responsibilities and obligations that I had to meet one way or another. For some boys, this happens later--in their late teens or even twenties--allowing them to grow organically into adulthood. But for some of us, the promotion to adulthood, or at least its challenges, is so jarring, so sudden, that we enter into it unprepared and might be undone by it.
Wes, feeding off my answer, attempted to finish my thought. "Providing for others isn't easy. And the mistakes you make trying are pretty unforgiving." He paused. I waited. He rubbed his chin, softly pulling at the long strands of his goatee with his fingers. "And second chances are pretty fleeting."
"What do you mean?"
"From everything you told me, both of us did some pretty wrong stuff when we were younger. And both of us had second chances. But if the situation or the context where you make the decisions don't change, then second chances don't mean too much, huh?"
Wes and I stared at each other for a moment, surrounded by the evidence that some kids were forced to become adults prematurely. These incarcerated men, before they'd even reached a point of basic maturity, had flagrantly--and tragically--squandered the few opportunities they'd had to contribute productively to something greater than themselves.
I sat back, allowing Wes's words to sink in. Then I responded, "I guess it's hard sometimes to distinguish between second chances and last chances."
Marking Territory
1990
"Dude, I am going to ask you one more time. Where did you get the money from?"
Tony's fists were clenched and his jaw tense as he eyed his little brother up and down. His stare was serious, and his stance like that of a trained boxer preparing to pounce. Wes's body language was evasive. He refused to look his brother in the eye.
Tony had come by the house that morning to see Wes and his mother. When he strolled past Wes's room, he noticed it had changed significantly since the last time he saw it. One wall was covered with a tower of sneaker boxes--inside the boxes were a rainbow assortment of Nikes, each pair fresher than the last. The smell of barely touched leather seemed to fill the room. It was like walking into Foot Locker.
Tony found his younger brother and asked for an explanation for the leaning tower of Nikes. Wes stuttered out a story: he'd become a popular DJ in the neighborhood and was making incredible loot DJing parties. It was the story he'd used with Mary, and she'd bought it whole. Maybe because she really believed him. Maybe because she really wanted to believe him. She'd asked Wes about the shoes when they started to multiply, but after her first inquisition, she'd left the subject alone.
Tony knew better.
Tony had now spent over a decade dealing drugs and knew how much money could be made in the game. He also knew there was no way for someone as young as Wes to make that kind of money DJing. There were not enough records to spin, enough beats to play, to buy that many sneakers.
Tony grabbed Wes's shirt collar and pulled him in close. "How many times do I have to tell you to leave this stuff alone, man?" His tone was low and serious, but he barked his words out like a challenge as the two boys squared off on their front lawn, out of sight of Mary, who was inside the house.
Wes's eyebrows arched up and his voice rose, his best play at sincerity. "I told you, man, I made this money DJing!" he repeated, almost convincing himself that it was the truth.
Tony closed his eyes and asked again, pounding out every word. "Wes. Where. Did. You. Get. The. Money?"
"I made the money D----"
Before Wes could even finish his sentence, Tony cocked back his arm and punched him dead in the face. Wes tumbled backward onto the grass. His left eye immediately began to swell. Tony jumped on top of him, pinning Wes's arms to the ground with his knees. Once he'd locked Wes's arms down, Tony unloaded blows, striking his younger brother's chest, ribs, and face with wild abandon. Wes was trying hard to wriggle free, but his stronger and tougher older brother was getting the best of him.
Mary heard the commotion and ran outside. She rushed over to the boys and tried to pull Tony off Wes, screaming for an explanation. After a brief struggle, Wes wrestled free and jumped back from his incensed brother.
"What the hell is going on here!" Mary screamed.
"Wes is out here hustling! I told him to leave this alone, but he won't listen!" Tony yelled back.
"No he isn't, he is making the money DJing," Mary said.
Hearing this, Tony pulled back his anger at Wes and turned it on his mother. "Are you serious? You really believe that? Are you blind?"
Mary hesitated. Her voice was less assured when she responded. "Well, that's what he told me, and I believe him," she said. Her eyes turned to Wes. He stood about ten feet away from them, head tilted back, trying to stop the bleeding from his nose. He suddenly jerked his head down to spit out the blood pooling in his mouth. Mary knew her younger son was no innocent. In addition to the knife fight when he was younger, Wes had been arrested a few years back after being caught stealing a car. But the sight of Tony punching Wes in the face infuriated her. Maybe it was because Wes was younger than Tony and Mary knew well how violent Tony could be. Or maybe it was because she wanted so much for Tony to be wrong. She knew what her older son was into but didn't think there was anything she could do for him now. She hoped that Wes would be different.
Wes was completely taken aback by his brother's anger. Tony had tried to keep Wes in school and away from drugs for as long as Wes could remember. But Tony was still deep in the game himself. Wes didn't think Tony was a hypocrite exactly--he knew why his brother felt obliged to warn him off. But it was clear that Tony himself didn't have any better ideas or he would've made those moves himself. And the truth was, Wes now had more money in his pocket than he'd ever had before, which kept him outfitted in new clothes--including the two-hundred-dollar Cross Colours set now covered with grass stains and dirt.
Tony looked over at Wes, his clothes, his crisp green footwear, the laces gleaming white even after their tumble through the grass. They were a long way from their days of youthful innocence: catching lightning bugs in jars, playing freeze tag on the Cherry Hill streets, and going to the Ocean City beach on summer days with their mother. The days of using a shopping cart as a go-cart, pushing it to the top of a hill, and letting gravity pull them down to the bottom were over. He realized he was staring at a mirror image of himself.
"You know what, dude," he said, "I'm good." Tony was exhausted. Tired from the beating he just gave Wes. Tired from repeating himself. "If you won't listen, that's on you. You have potential to do so much more, go so much further. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink, right?"
Tony leaned over to pick up his hat--it had fallen to the ground during their fight. He spun it around and placed it backward on his head. He walked off the lawn and into the street. Mary called out to him, asked where he was going. Tony yelled back over his shoulder, "Home," and kept walking down the block. He didn't look back again.
That was the last time Tony ever tried to talk to Wes about the drug game.
Mary raced over to Wes and examined his nose. The bleeding had slowed. "I am so sorry, Wes. That's just how Tony gets sometimes," she said.
Wes looked back at her but said nothing. They walked together into the house, where Mary wet a rag and started to clean up the scrapes and bruises Tony had left on his brother's face and body. The wet rag felt good over the open cuts on Wes's face. The deeper bruise, however, Mary could do nothing about. Wes knew he was disappointing his brother, which hurt much more than the beating
he'd just taken. Wes was so confused. He loved and respected his brother. Tony was the closest thing Wes had to a role model. But the more he tried to be like his brother, the more his brother rejected him. The more he copied him, the more Tony pushed back. Wes wanted to be just like Tony. Tony wanted Wes to be nothing like him.
Tony's outburst did accomplish one thing, though. It motivated Mary to dig a little deeper into Wes's new income flow. The next day, after Wes went off to school, Mary began searching through his drawers. She hoped that he was not involved in drugs. "Please let it be DJing money. Please let it be DJing money," she prayed.
She lifted his mattress and found a few extra shoe boxes under his bed. She placed them on the mattress. They were light, so she knew they didn't hold sneakers, but something was rattling around in them. As she reached for the top of one of the boxes, she pulled her hand back. She whispered to herself, "Don't ask a question unless you are ready to hear the answer."
She reached again for the first Nike box and opened it. Inside were pills, marijuana, half an ounce of powdered cocaine, and half a dozen vials of "ready rock," or crack cocaine. She felt like she'd been punched in the stomach. She sat down on the bed, unsure of what to think. She wasn't only upset about the drugs, she was upset about the lying. She didn't even bother looking in the second box; she already knew all she needed to know. Both of her sons were drug dealers.
She sat paralyzed on the bed for fifteen minutes before springing up, suddenly decisive. She took the boxes into the bathroom, lifted their tops, and emptied the contents into the toilet. She watched every ounce, every rock, every leaf, every crystal float to the bottom of the toilet bowl, until the water was cloudy and white. She flushed it away once, and then again and again until the water in the bowl returned to its normal clarity. She put the tops back on the boxes and placed the boxes on Wes's bed.
A few hours later, Wes walked into his room and saw the two shoe boxes. His heart plummeted. These were his work boxes. He knew he was busted.
He started to think about what he would say to his mother as he slowly walked toward his bed. Maybe he would blame it on someone else. Maybe he could say he was holding them for a friend and never knew what was in them. Maybe he could say they were planted, that this was part of a larger conspiracy against him. But who would bother conspiring against him? When he reached the boxes and picked them up, he was struck by how light they were. He opened one of them and saw that it was empty. Had she thrown his drugs out? His anxiety about getting caught flipped to anger. He threw the boxes across the room. He tried to calculate how much weight he had lost, and how much money he now owed the connects who supplied him with the drugs.
"Damn!" he shouted. "Ma! Where are you? Do you know what you just did!"
"I'm in my room," Mary responded.
Wes stepped quickly to his mother's room, gaining anger with every creaky floorboard. When he walked into the room, Mary was calmly folding laundry on her bed. She didn't stop when he busted in. Wes was senseless with anger, but Mary just coolly looked at him, eyes opened in an expression of exaggerated innocence.
"Ma, do you have any idea about what you just did? Where are the drugs?"
"I flushed them down the toilet."
"That was over four thousand dollars in drugs! I have to pay someone back for that!" Wes had completely forgotten about his conspiracy argument. The only thing on his mind was trying to figure out how on earth he was going to come up with four thousand dollars--and fast.
Mary was not the least bit concerned about her son's new dilemma. "Not only did you lie to me but you were selling drugs and keeping them in my house! Putting all of us in danger because of your stupidity. I don't want to hear your sob story about how much money you owe. You will stop selling that stuff. I will be checking your room, and I don't want to ever see it in here again. Now get out of my room."
Wes was stunned. He went back to his room and desperately tried to devise a plan. He owed money but had no drugs to sell--he had to figure out how to make that money back quickly. The only way to do that was to go see his connects and hit the street again. He'd realized very early in the game that the drug market was a simple supply-and-demand equation. The demand was bottomless. Your money was determined by how hard you worked, and how feared you were. He focused. He knew the streets would get him that money back, and more. But next time, he'd be smarter about where he kept the stash and how often he moved it around.
Wes left the house and began to walk toward his girlfriend's place a few blocks over. She was older, about seventeen. Wes complained to her about his mother's abuse of his privacy. His girlfriend sympathized. Before she realized what she was doing, she'd agreed to make her home his new headquarters.
As Mary heard the door slam behind Wes, she sat back down on her bed. She pressed her fingers against her temples and began to massage them. She closed her eyes; her mind raced: Who is to blame for this? Tony, the neighborhood, the school system, Wes's friends? She put them all on trial in her mind. She was furious at Wes for what he'd done and knew that this probably would not be the end of it. Tony, who was about to become a father--making Mary a thirty-six-year-bold grandmother--had been right.
Leave the smack and the crack for the wack
Or the vial and the nine; keep a smile like that
My eyes were closed, and my hands moved along with the beat, as if I were onstage laying down the tracks on a DJ set. I was in a zone, concert mode, even if I was only in the front seat of my mother's blue Honda Civic. I recited a verse from the Chubb Rock song as it blared out of the car's speakers.
The road lost my mother's full attention momentarily as she stared down at me. She looked incredulous.
After a series of unsatisfactory report cards, my mother had begun to think that what many of my teachers were telling her was correct: I might have a learning disability. My teachers broke it down for her more than once: "Wes is a nice boy, but he has real problems retaining information." She remembered this as she listened to me reciting lyrics like I'd written them myself.
Anyway the shunless one brings forth the fun
No hatred; the summer's almost done
"How long have you known that song?"
"I don't know, not long," I mumbled out, lazily opening my eyes but never picking my head up to look at my mother. I'd first heard the song two days earlier.
"Well, your grades obviously aren't bad because you can't pick this stuff up or because you are stupid, you are just not working hard enough," my mother said, her voice rising into the epiphany. My academic failures had forced her to go through the stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She'd been stuck in depression for a long time and hadn't quite made it to acceptance, no matter how much I'd hoped she'd get there. It seemed like there was faulty wiring in the system, because now she was reverting to anger.
"You think I'm playing. Just try me," she said, the last note in a short conversation she seemed to be having with herself, and then returned her full attention to the road. As she did so, the new EPMD song came on. She must have noticed my slight head nod to the beat, because she quickly killed the radio.
Hip-hop had begun to play a special role in my life. It wasn't just music and lyrics. It was a validator. In my struggle to reconcile my two worlds, it was an essential asset. By the late 1980s, hip-hop had graduated from being the underground art of the Bronx to a rising global culture. My obsession with hip-hop kept me credible with the kids in my neighborhood. It let them know that, regardless of my school affiliation, I still understood. Hip-hop also gave the kids in my school a point of entry into my life: Public Enemy's black nationalist anthems or KRS-One's pulpy fantasies about gunning down crack dealers offered a window into a world that before hip-hop had seemed foreign to those who even dared to look through. But even more than that, I found in hip-hop the sound of my generation talking to itself, working through the fears and anxieties and inchoate dreams--of wealth or power or revolution or success--we all s
hared. It broadcast an exaggerated version of our complicated interior lives to the world, made us feel less alone in the madness of the era, less marginal. Of course, all that didn't matter to my mother. All she knew was that I could effortlessly recite hip-hop lyrics while struggling with my English class.
What she didn't know was that my problem in school was much more basic than a learning disability. The problem was that I wasn't even showing up half the time. It's tough to do well in school as an eleven-year-old when you're picking and choosing which days to go.
It was weeks before I had my schedule down pat. I realized the only time anyone really cared about my attendance was during homeroom, the first class of the day. Two days of the week, I had homeroom with my English teacher, Mrs. Downs, a young blonde who had taught only one other class in her life. I sensed her weakness and spent most of class coming up with creative ways to burnish my status as class clown. One day, she flatly told me that it didn't matter to her if I showed up because the class ran smoother when I wasn't there. From that moment, I understood Mrs. Downs and I had an unspoken agreement, a "don't ask, don't tell" pact that worked like a charm for both of us. Here's how a typical day would go: My grandmother would drop Shani and me off at school or at the train stop and we would wave goodbye, book bags in hands and smiles on faces. We would turn around and begin marching toward the school building or train stop until my grandmother's car pulled away. At that point, I'd have to decide how I would play it. Some days I would check into homeroom; other days I'd head directly back to the train and return to the neighborhood, where I'd meet up with one of the guys who had a similar arrangement. My sister, always the loyal accomplice, never snitched.
With our mother working so much, and our grandparents obviously slowing in energy, my sisters and I were supposed to look after one another. Nikki was older, so she was always the one looking after me, and it was my responsibility to look after Shani. But Nikki's hands were full with her own turbulent high school experience, which was about to come to a close. The move to the Bronx had been hard on her. Nikki never fully adjusted to the new social and academic environment; she attended three different high schools in four years. Shani, by contrast, was a prodigy. She did not go outside much, except to play basketball with me and my friends, and she seemed to have a book with her wherever she went. In fact, by the time I hit fifth grade and she was in third grade, she had overtaken me in reading scores, a distinction she carried through our entire academic lives and probably holds to this day. As much of a screwup as I was becoming, I still tried hard to look after her.