The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates

“Young boys are more likely to believe in themselves if they know that there’s someone, somewhere, who shares that belief.”

Mentorship emerges as a key theme in Chapter 2, as Moore recounts how Kwame Nkrumah befriended and mentored his grandfather. Mentors can make all the difference in a child’s life, teaching them confidence and self-esteem and helping them discover new opportunities. Mentors are particularly important for young black boys like Wes, whose only mentor was his drug-dealing older brother and who fell into the cycle of drugs and violence. The author would argue that the influence of a positive role model may have altered the course of Wes’s life.

“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? I guess it’s hard sometimes to distinguish between second chances and last chances.” 

This book strives to answer why one Wes Moore ended up a with a successful career while the other wound up serving a life sentence. Although Moore ends the book with no satisfactory answer for why their lives played out so differently, he does identify choice and mindset as two factors that contributed to his success. As this quote demonstrates, Wes places more weight on circumstances. In his view it doesn’t matter what decisions you make if you remain trapped in the same oppressive paradigm.

“I didn’t have the energy for romantic rebellion—the possibility of losing control of my life was like a depthless black chasm that had suddenly opened up in front of me. All I wanted to do was turn around, go home, and never find myself at this precipice again for such a stupid reason.” 

As a kid, Moore felt caught between a desire for his mother’s support and a craving for freedom and independence. This tension manifested as rebellion: Moore began tagging public buildings with spray paint. After this got him arrested at age 11, such “independence” began to seem like an endless abyss that could swallow him whole. This could have been a turning point that scared Moore straight, but he was too young, inexperienced, and isolated to recognize it.

“Boredom in teenage boys is a powerful motivation to create chaos.” 

Chapter 5 explores how responsibility can provide much-needed structure to a young person’s life. At this point both boys lacked structure and a system of accountability, without which young people are likely to make poor choices. In Moore’s case, he struck and injured his sister; in Wes’s case, the chaos manifested as a pregnancy and a shooting incident that landed him in jail.

“My grandparents knew I was at a crucial juncture in my life. These forks in the road can happen so fast for young boys; within months or even weeks, their journeys can take a decisive and possibly irrevocable turn. With no intervention—or the wrong intervention—they can be lost forever. My mother made the decision to intervene—and decided that overdoing it was better than doing nothing at all. She felt my environment needed to change and my options needed to expand. Drastically. My grandparents agreed…My grandparents took the money they had in the home in the Bronx, decades of savings and mortgage payments, and gave it to my mother so that she could pay for my first year of military school.” 

In describing how his mother and grandparents provided him with an opportunity for a better life, Moore honors that their efforts required substantial sacrifice on his behalf. This passage also acknowledges that mentoring and supporting disadvantaged children is no easy feat, especially not when you have limited resources yourself.

“The notion that life is transient, that it can come and go quickly, unexpectedly, had been with me since I had seen my own father die. In the Bronx, the ideas of life’s impermanence underlined everything for kids my age—it drove some of us to a paralyzing apathy, stopped us from even thinking too far into the future…Life’s impermanence, I realized, is what makes every single day so precious. It’s what shapes our time here. It’s what makes it so important that not a single moment be wasted.” 

One of the book’s key themes is mindset versus fate and how our perspectives can shape our lives. Moore acknowledges that some people lose faith and hope when confronted with so much loss. However, he opts for a mindset that finds meaning in impermanence: Life is fleeting, and that’s precisely why it’s so precious.

“Wes had spent much of his adolescence incarcerated, and he knew that occasional bids in the pen were part of the game. But he’d never figured this. Maybe it was because he’d never thought long term about his life at all. Early losses condition you to believe that short-term plans are always smarter. Now Wes’s mind wandered to the long term for the first time. Finally, he could see his future.” 

This passage highlights a cruel irony of Wes’s life. When he was trapped in the street life but still physically free, he could never consider the long-term picture of his life. Loss, poverty, and desperation kept his attention fixed on the present moment. It was only after receiving a life sentence, when he no longer had control over his life, that he had the time and opportunity to consider his future.

“We make decisions based on what we see in that limited world and follow the only models available. The more important thing that happened to me was not being physically transported—the moves from Baltimore to the Bronx to Valley Forge didn’t change my way of thinking. What changed was that I found myself surrounded by people—starting with my mom, grandparents, uncles, and aunts, and leading to a string of wonderful role models and mentors—who kept pushing me to see more than what was directly in front of me, to see the boundless possibilities of the wider world and the unexplored possibilities with myself.” 

Moore calls attention to how choice, location, mindset, and circumstance all influence our lives. However, he argues that mentorship had more of an impact on him than anything else. This emphasizes the importance of human connection and compassion. When a person lives in a limited world with limited opportunities, the right guidance can make all the difference, helping them find new paths toward a better future.