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Chapter Three: Foreign Ground (1987)
Summary: Section 1 (Moore)
Moore walks the streets of New York with Justin, the only other Black kid at Riverdale, the private school they attend. Joy works three jobs to pay Moore’s tuition. She enrolled Moore in the private school in an effort to keep him away from the growing dangers in the Bronx streets. Moore and Justin stop to talk to a couple of neighborhood boys, and Moore, trying to act cool, exaggerates the details of his recent suspension for fighting. The boys immediately recognize Moore’s lie and make fun of him, until an addict interrupts them asking for money. Moore feels like an outsider in both worlds: He’s too poor to fit in with the other Riverdale students, and yet attending Riverdale sets him apart from the other boys in his neighborhood.
Moore’s uncle Howard suggests Moore try to bring his two worlds together, so Moore sets up a baseball game between his Riverdale and neighborhood friends. The game ends in fifteen minutes after several fights break out between the two groups. Feeling isolated, Moore sees his grades begin to slip, and Joy threatens to send him to military school.
Summary: Section 2 (Wes)
Wes, now twelve and living in Dundee Village on the edge of Baltimore county, feels envious of Tony’s lifestyle. Tony, now eighteen and recently hospitalized for a gunshot wound, is a full-time drug dealer and can afford expensive, stylish clothing. Wes’s struggles in school have made him repeat a grade and Mary worries that he’s following in Tony’s footsteps. One Saturday, Wes sees a boy wearing a cool headset, and he approaches the boy and asks where he can get one. The boy explains that Wes can get paid to wear a headset and watch out for police. While Wes knows that if he agrees, he’d be working for drug dealers, he rationalizes that he wouldn’t be actually selling drugs.
A few months earlier, Wes had found some marijuana in Mary’s closet. He and Woody had skipped school, met some older boys, smoked and drank, and then gone for Chinese food, where Wes felt sick. When Wes got home to lay down, Mary and her boyfriend noticed his condition. Both felt that Wes’s hangover would be enough to keep him away from drinking, but in fact the experience only helped Wes realize the allure of drugs and how much money he could make selling them.
Analysis: Chapter Three
As teens, both Moore and Wes struggle with their circumstances and get into varying degrees of trouble, and their mothers’ disparate reactions have consequences as the boys grow up. Although Moore makes friends in the Bronx, he often feels out of place. He is one of only a few Black students at his private school, Riverdale, and his neighborhood friends tease him about attending. Moore puts a lot of energy into appearing rich enough for his school and tough enough for his neighborhood. His long, complicated commute to school is symbolic of the lengths Moore must go to live his double life, so it’s no surprise that his grades begin to fall. Similarly, when Wes moves to Dundee Village, he's taken away from everything he knows, including his brother. Wes’s mom warns him about the danger of drugs, but she also uses drugs herself, making her warning easy to ignore. Mixed messages and the allure of steady income make drug dealing almost inevitable for Wes, yet his mom naively hopes a hangover will stop him from using again. On the other end of the discipline spectrum is Joy: she threatens to send Moore to military school over a minor transgression.
Moore spends a significant amount of time discussing the impact of the drug trade on people in struggling communities in order to offer an explanation for, but not a defense of, Wes’s choices. He uses a variety of metaphors to describe the distribution, sale, and consumption of drugs, such as comparing it to war when he calls Tony a “foot soldier.” Moore agrees with Schmoke, the mayor of Baltimore, who called drugs a “public health problem rather than a criminal justice problem.” Moore describes how crack changed the nature of addiction and the business of selling drugs, and gangs began recruiting even more young people in poor neighborhoods. Moore’s explanation of the lure of the drug trade provides a deeper understanding of how and why Wes started dealing drugs despite all the warnings and the risks. Moore also notes that the increase of sophisticated weapons available on the street paired with the crack epidemic made it a particularly dangerous time for young people of color in poor communities. Aside from offering insight into Wes, Moore’s detailed explanation reveals how places like the Bronx and Baltimore radically changed during this era.
