payment page
Chapter Two: In Search of Home (1984)
Summary: Section 1 (Wes)
Two years later, Tony, now fourteen, wakes an eight-year-old Wes with a phone call, checking on him and giving him advice. Tony has been dealing drugs since he was ten, and as a result, he’s become cold and has a fierce reputation in spite of his young age. Wes now lives in Northwood, a middle-class neighborhood removed from the violence and poverty he has grown used to. He is obsessed with football and he struggles in school.
Later, Wes meets up with his friends Woody and White Boy. The three head to the park, where they meet another group of boys and begin playing football. The game quickly heats up, and Wes becomes aggressive with another boy. Though smaller than Wes, the boy hits him. Wes sprints home and grabs a knife, thinking about Tony’s advice to not let anyone disrespect him. Back at the park, Woody pleads with Wes to stop, but Wes won’t listen. Meanwhile, the police arrive on the scene. Ignoring Woody’s warning, Wes goes after the boy. A police officer grabs Wes, slams him on his car, and cuffs him. Wes later calls Tony’s dad to get him out of jail. Mary doesn’t learn about this event for several years.
Summary: Section 2 (Moore)
Fearful of the growing violence in their neighborhood and struggling to cope with Westley’s death, Joy asks her parents—James and Winell—if she and her children can move in with them. James and Winell, now retired, bought a home in the Bronx when the neighborhood was safe. However, as Joy recounts her wonderful childhood in the Bronx while driving to her parents’ home, she quickly sees how much the area has declined. James and Winell married young and immigrated from Jamaica to the United States, where James worked hard to become the first Black minister at a Bronx church.
Moore’s family settles into their new home, but James and Winell establish strict rules to keep the children away from the drugs and violence that have pervaded the neighborhood. Moore explores his new neighborhood and finds himself at the local park playing basketball. Moore notices both the differences and similarities between the kids from the Bronx and kids from Baltimore, but he finds camaraderie on the basketball court, noting that it is a place where everyone comes together, the A students, the drug users and dealers, the young and old.
Analysis: Chapter Two
Both Moore and Wes move during their childhoods because their mothers want to create better lives for them, but they have markedly different experiences. Wes’s family moves to Northwoods, an affluent suburb where Wes’s mother works long hours, while Joy moves from Baltimore to the Bronx so that her parents can help raise her children. Moore’s grandparents enforce strict rules and hardly let Moore out of their sight, whereas Wes spends hours alone each day, and Wes’s older brother Tony struggles to provide guidance for him. Both boys want to feel like they belong and to earn the respect of their peers, but they go about it differently. Wes demands respect by pulling a weapon on another boy, and a lack of guidance and support leaves him vulnerable to making other bad decisions. Moore earns respect by asking to join a basketball game in his neighborhood. The young men on the court aren’t perfect, but the court is a space where Moore can compete and connect. Moore implies that where a child grows up is important, but the connections that they’re able to form have an even greater impact on their future.
Moore also posits that the design of Black neighborhoods is often substandard and sets their occupants up for failure. Moore describes how, under a “separate but equal” plan, Baltimore built two neighborhoods for soldiers returning from World War II: Cherry Hill for Black soldiers and Upland Apartments for white soldiers. While the Uplands became a middle-class community, Cherry Hill became a neighborhood characterized by “poverty, drugs, and despair.” Moore points out that this is largely a result of the design of the neighborhood, which was not built to be sustainable, as it had no main streets to support businesses. The small houses were shoddily constructed using weak materials. By the time Wes moved to Cherry Hill, children could no longer use the dilapidated playgrounds, and more than half of the population lived below the poverty line. Clearly, the separate neighborhoods were not, in fact, equal. The racism inherent in the design and construction of these neighborhoods contributes to the generational poverty of the people who live there.
Through Tony, Moore defines the concept of an ice grille, a cold, intimidating stare that young men sometimes adopt to project confidence. Moore explains how the trauma of growing up in rough neighborhoods often results in young boys using the ice grille as self-protection. The ice grille communicates unflinching, uncompromising strength, a quality that Wes’s brother Tony needs to project in order to survive as a teenage drug dealer, but Moore points out that the ice grille is not what it appears to be. Tony’s ice grille makes Wes view him as a “certified gangsta,” but Tony’s attempts to save Wes from drug dealing reveal that Tony is really just a scared kid unsure of how to protect himself or his brother. Tony tries to help Wes by hiding Wes’s arrest from their mother, but his misguided choices hurt Wes. Wes, like many young boys, isn’t mature enough to see that the ice grille is a lie. Moore demonstrates how young men often get stuck in a cycle of chasing a façade of success instead of the real thing.
