Discovering Wes Moore

As Wes enters his junior year at Valley Forge, he meets with Miss Pollack, his college advisor. She asks him if he knows of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He thinks about how his mother and sisters moved back to Baltimore five years earlier and that he still considers it home despite his time living in the Bronx. Wes tells Miss Pollack he is familiar, but he doesn’t want to study medicine. She tells him there is more to offer at Johns Hopkins than medicine and that Wes should meet with Paul White, the assistant director of admissions. Wes meets him a week later.

Paul White is a Black man with a warm personality and full of energy, and he tells Wes that he would fit in great at Johns Hopkins. Wes is concerned about his SAT scores and feels it’s a stretch but applies to the university anyway. He is accepted with scholarship money. When Wes reads the letter of acceptance over the phone to his mother, Joy screams with excitement. This is a turning point for Wes and his mother, as their “relationship wasn’t just mother-to-son, it was now also friend-to-friend” (95). Wes has shown maturity and growth over the course of his time at Valley Forge, with the help of several teachers and advisors.

It’s nearly two years since Wes has returned to Baltimore, and he is meeting with the mayor. The mayor greets him using the title of general and poking fun at the fact that Wes is a brand-new second lieutenant in the US army reserve, which is nowhere near the level of general. This is Wes’s second internship with the mayor, but he still feels intimidated by him. Mayor Kurt Schmoke has been in his position for 12 years and realizes that the problems of urban America are far bigger than he is: “Those who brag about Baltimore often ignore the poorer, grittier areas. Yet these were the areas Mayor Schmoke gave his attention” (96). Wes looks up to the mayor for his efforts in building up Baltimore.

The mayor’s office is impressive with a wall of awards and photographs. Mayor Schmoke asks Wes the dreaded question of what he’s doing when he finishes school, but Wes isn’t sure. He spouts out law school because he thinks it sounds respectable. The mayor asks if he has heard of the Rhodes scholarship and takes him around his office. He talks about his life and points at photographs and explains that with the scholarship he was able to travel the world and stay in other countries. Mayor Schmoke explains that it takes independence to be an outsider, “Not just as a black person in the middle of white people, but as an American in the middle of Europeans” (98). Wes plans to go to South Africa with a group of 14 American students to the University of Cape Town. Wes has been outside America before, to Jamaica, visiting his family growing up and to Cuba on a class trip with Johns Hopkins students.

Before Wes leaves the mayor’s office, Wes is asked to look up Cecil Rhodes to learn about him and to apply for the scholarship. Cecil Rhodes was not a good man and is remembered as greedy and racist. Wes thinks about Colin Powell’s message and how a brutal and painful past is important, as it shapes Black Americans. He knows the past doesn’t have to be repeated. Wes is upset by how privilege and preference works in the world and especially in America. He believes that everyone else has to rely on hard work, but there is also a large amount of chance. Wes thinks about his parents during the civil rights movement and how everyone needs a group of people around, a support network who will believe in each other and ensure that everyone makes it. Without that, there is hopelessness and life can feel pointless.

Wes travels below the equator to South Africa, where there are opposite seasons. He got on his plane in winter clothes and stepped off in sunglasses and shorts. A tall, thin, white man with a strange accent asks for Wes. His name is Zed, the study-abroad program director; “[t]he letter ‘Z’ is pronounced ‘Zed’ in most of the English-speaking world outside of the States” (104). Zed smiles at Wes and leads the 15 students to a van. They are all tired and jetlagged. Wes’s grandfather had worked in Africa as a missionary and told Wes that Africa wasn’t just a giant safari. Wes is surprised by the landscape, including Table Mountain, the beautiful beachside roads, and the impressive skyscrapers.

Wes and the other students studied South Africa’s apartheid, the former system of hierarchy based on race that was enforced by the government:

So-called nonwhites were legally segregated into certain areas. They were forced to live in townships, small towns that had been created for one reason: to isolate black Africans in poverty-stricken areas away from the whites. When police came through the townships, it was to harass the residents, not to protect them. Segregation was enforced strictly and violently under apartheid (104).

Wes understands that South Africa is more dangerous than America, but he draws similarities between the two countries. He thinks about the Bronx and Baltimore housing projects and how even though apartheid was overturned after the country’s first democratic elections in 1994, the country is still segregated by economic class. There are large economic and wealth gaps in Cape Town similar to the cities in which Wes grew up. Nelson Mandela became president after three decades of imprisonment, though the country still deals with issues from the past.

All of Wes’s belonging are in a 40-pound bag. For six months, this simple white home on Mschumpela Street in a poverty level neighborhood would be his home. Langa is a Xhosa township, and a short woman wearing a West African style skirt opens the front door to greet Wes. He puts his hand out to shake hers, and she embraces him instead. She tells Wes to call her Mama. Mama’s son, who is a few years younger than Wes, is Zinzi, and her daughter Viwe is eight years old. Wes immediately feels welcomed.

During Wes’s first week in Cape Town, he spends time after school with Zinzi and his friend Simo. He hadn’t spent time with Mama yet, but she asks him to join her for tea in the kitchen one afternoon. Wes is eager to hear what living through apartheid was like, and they talk for three hours. Mama tells him there is a different color dynamic in South Africa. Wes would be considered colored, not Black. She explains this is a societal structure created during the apartheid era to pit Black people against each other and further segregate Black and white people. She explains that “coloreds” received more privileges than “Blacks.” They discuss music and how artists told the world about what was happening there during the apartheid era. Ubuntu is Xhosa for humanity and compassion. Heroes like Nelson Mandela had "ubuntu,” says Mama, and her husband was a freedom fighter. Wes asks her how she is able to forgive and move on, and she says, “Mr. Mandela asked us to.” Wes is confused, expecting that she would say she was still planning revenge. Wes reflects on his middle name, Watende, which means “revenge will not be sought.”

A few weeks before Wes goes back to America, he walks with Zinzi and Simo from the bus station or, kumbi, and back to the house. South African music, kwaito, blares from cars, children play with soccer balls in the dirt road, and women carry bags and baskets on their heads and in their arms, speaking loudly amongst each other. Wes feels settled into the Langa streets. He always explores the neighborhood after class, talking to girls from the university campus, or eating one of the best steaks he’s ever had at the restaurant Mama Africa.

Wes soaks in the experience of his last days there before he will head back to Johns Hopkins and graduate in a few months. Simo asks what he’s supposed to do when Wes and Zinzi leave. Zinzi, as a Xhosa boy, will leave to spend four weeks in the bush to join a group of elders with dozens of others. It is important culturally that the Xhosa boys are circumcised. While healing, they spend their remaining weeks learning about the history of the Xhosa tribe, the land, and their battles. They would learn how to be a good father and husband. The boys and elders are joined during meditation, prayer, meals, and healing. When they return home, they’ll be heroes, and a large feast will be cooked in their honor. The boys, now seen as men, will wear all white for a month to symbolize that they have returned differently.

Wes is impressed by how unafraid Zinzi is before his journey to the bush. Wes reflects on how manhood in America is not guided or celebrated through a formal ritual. Instead, he writes, “it feels like we enter adulthood almost by accident” (111-12). Here, Zinzi’s fearlessness is a great model for Wes, and Wes’s openness to the Xhosa tribe culture helps him understand himself and the importance of identity and purpose for young men. Later that night, Wes sees a young man walking, dressed in all white clothes. Wes is struck by how he moves with the dignity of a man twice his age. The man has a confidence and stride that Zinzi, Simo, and Wes do not have yet. The two young men nod and smile at one another.

Wes tells his mother about his time in South Africa on the phone. He tells her about Mama, how much they would like one another, but Wes notices that Joy sounds strange. She is upset because the authorities in Baltimore are looking to arrest a man with the name Wes Moore for killing a police officer. She’s grateful he is in South Africa, as she can’t imagine the trouble and misunderstanding that could’ve happened had he been home during the officer’s murder.