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Entertainment
Moore: Author or Prisoner?
Men Who Share a Name Take Different Paths in Life
Chronicle News Services
JESSUP, Md.--On a glorious spring afternoon, sunshine glitters off the bales of silver barbed wire at Maryland’s vast Jessup Correctional Institution prison complex.
Wes Moore, a buff 31-year-old with male-model looks, sits at a picnic table across the road, watching as armed guards monitor inmates who shuffle on and off prison vans.
“You can’t predict where you’re going to end up in life,” he said quietly.
Had just a few things gone differently when he was 12 years-old, he might be in prison, along with another guy named Wes Moore.
Instead, he’s outside the steel bars, talking about his new book.
“The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates” tells the story of two Black men with the same name.
Both were born in Maryland. Both grew up with single mothers in fatherless homes.
By the time they were 11 years-old, both had been handcuffed by cops.
One became a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Johns Hopkins, a Rhodes Scholar, a White House Fellow under Condoleezza Rice and an Afghanistan combat veteran who spoke at the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
The other Wes Moore, 34, is in the Jessup Correctional maximum security unit, where he is serving a life sentence without parole.
He was sentenced for his part in a botched robbery in 2000, in which his halfbrother, Tony Moore, shot to death an off-duty Baltimore police officer who was the father of five.
The author emphasizes that the point of his book is not to depict a “good” Wes Moore and a “bad” Wes Moore.
He said he wanted to illustrate not the differences between their lives, but the similarities, particularly what it’s like to grow up without a father in the house--an experience he shares with an estimated one out of three children, according to 2009 U.S. Bureau of the Census data.
Mr. Moore’s hope is that his story will encourage Americans to step in at crucial moments to help other troubled 12 year-olds.
“It’s not a race issue,” he said. “It’s a national issue which threatens the future of the United States.
“We’re spending billions on prisons. Mathematically, it’s unsustainable.”
The origin of “The Other Wes Moore” goes back to Dec. 2000, when the Baltimore Sun ran an article about Mr. Moore being the first Black Rhodes Scholar from Hopkins University.
His mother, Joy Moore, mentioned that Wes Moore had the same name as another young Baltimore man who was in the headlines, wanted for murder.
“The disparity was so jarring,” said Mr. Moore, who kept thinking about his namesake, whom he did not know.
After returning from his Rhodes Scholarship in England, he wrote a letter to Jessup Correctional and received one in return.
Letters turned into visits, and Mr. Moore began recording the conversations he had with the convict and his family and friends.
The story was straight out of HBO’s “The Wire.”
At 14, the Baltimore resident was dealing drugs; at 16, he was a father; and before he turned 18, he was charged with attempted murder of a neighborhood man and was sent to a juvenile detention center.
At one point, he was pulling in $4,000 a day selling crack. His role model: his drug-dealing gangster big brother, Tony Moore.
As the two Wes Moores talked, the connection between them became clear: the pain of growing up fatherless.
“My mother could teach me to be a good person, but she couldn’t teach me to be a good man,” said the author, who credits family members and teachers with intervening in his life at pivotal points.
The author was only 3 years-old in 1982 when his father, 34, a radio and television journalist named Wes Moore, died from a rare but treatable virus.
“So many times,” he said, “like when I won the Rhodes Scholarship, I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to call up my mom, then say, Pass the phone to Dad,’ but it was God’s decision.”
The other Wes Moore experienced something more damaging.
He has seen his father, who lived in Baltimore, only three times in his life.
The last time he saw his son, Bernard Moore looked up from a drunken stupor and asked, “Who are you?”
Bernard Moore’s whereabouts today?
Unknown.
In the book, the incarcerated Wes Moore tells his namesake: “Listen, your father wasn’t there because he couldn’t be. My father wasn’t there because he chose not to be.”
Roland Warren, president of the non-profit National Fatherhood Initiative, calls absent dads the nation’s biggest social crisis.
“Fatherless kids have a hole in their soul in the shape of their father, and it leaves a wound that is not easily healed,” he said.
Throughout Mr. Moore’s book, children are growing up without fathers.
The incarcerated Wes Moore has four children with two women.
(His mother is raising three of them.)
When he was 33, he became a grandfather.
After reading the book, the convicted Wes Moore told the author that “It made him realize how little he’s done with his life.”
Oprah Winfrey featured the book on her show the other week, and the prison turned down her interview request because Wes Moore is a convicted murderer and the slain police officer’s family objected.
The imprisoned Mr. Moore’s mother, Mary Moore, 55, said she visits her son in prison every week.
She was interviewed on “Oprah” and said “the reaction has been pretty positive.”
“Other women could see it and benefit from my story,” the mother of the imprisoned man said.
She said her son “likes the book, but he was under the impression it was going to be a pamphlet handed out by social services agencies, not a book.
He has mixed emotions.”
“He didn’t think it was going to be for profit,” the mother commented.
(A portion of the book’s proceeds will go to service organizations, including the U.S. Dream Academy, which helps children of incarcerated parents.)
