Theme: Redemption and Salvation
"She watched every ounce, every rock, every leaf, every crystal float to the bottom of the toilet bowl, until the water was cloudy and white. She flushed it away once, and then again and again until the water in the bowl returned to its normal clarity." (page 73)
On the surface level, Wes's mother is flushing the drugs she has found under his bed down the toilet so that he is unable to sell them any more. However, the imagery in the passage reveals a deeper meaning of attempted salvation. Moore describes how the water in the toilet bowl with the drugs in it is clouded, representing Wes's clouded future-- much like the classical fortune teller's looking glass, foggy with trouble and anticipated disarray-- and reputation as a boy who is involved in the drug trade. While he was once normal, "pure" clear water, he is now distorted and marred by the drugs he sells, which both affect the way he acts (keeping secrets from a mother he once trusted) and the people he hangs out with (which in turn can impact his future). Mrs. Moore's flushing of the toilet represents her attempt to save Wes from this troubled future. As she flushes once, and then again, her goal is not just to dispel the drugs from the water but to make it as though they were never there-- in other words, to return completely to the placid, perfect image of pure water. This represents her hopes for Wes: in flushing away his main source of drug income, she hopes to dissuade him from future dealing, so that he can become once again the "good boy," the ideal son she always hoped she could have. Her attempted salvation, as seen through her actions in the passage, exemplifies the chapter's theme of redemption-- though in Wes's case it is largely unwanted.
"He knew the streets would get him that money back, and more. But next time, he'd be smarter about where he kept the stash and how often he moved it around... His girlfriend sympathized. Before she realized what she was doing, she'd agreed to make her home his new headquarters." (page 74)
Here the idea of redemption as a temporary action, which will be excavated further in the author Wes's section, is explored for the first time. Despite Mary Moore's attempted salvation by flushing Wes's drug cache down the toilet, he simply finds different means of feeding his dealing business. If his mother represents fate and the redemptive high power, here Wes uses the tactic of "outsmarting fate"-- he realizes that what he is doing isn't working and so switches his outside appearances while in reality staying largely the same. His girlfriend adds an interesting second layer to the idea of fate and redemption. While Mary, as his mother, still exercises parental control over him-- and is thus seen as the principal director of fate and redemption-- the girlfriend offers a countering view to his actions and a secondary source of salvation. Although Mary disapproves of Wes's drug dealing, his girlfriend seems to almost endorse it, going as far as letting him use her house for his burgeoning trade. Thus, without completely overpowering Mary's purity-seeking salvation, she provides a different sort of redemption: the validation of his ideas and actions over Mary's.
"It was a validator. In my struggle to reconcile my two worlds, it was an essential asset... I found in hip-hop the sound of my generation talking to itself, working through the fears and anxieties and inchoate dreams-- of wealth or power or revolution or success-- we all shared. It broadcast an exaggerated version of our complicated interior lives to the world, made us feel less alone in the madness of the era, less marginal." (page 76)
Here not a person, but rather an aspect of culture is seen as the redeemer: hip-hop music. To Wes, hip-hop is a form of salvation. He sees it as a way to reconcile his place in society, to feel as though he is less alone. In other words, hip-hop redeems a struggle to survive as an African-American kid in a relatively low-income neighborhood in the Bronx by making it important. Through hip-hop, Wes learns that there are other people who feel the same way and have experienced many of the same things as he has, and in turn he is able to use the songs he hears to project these feelings and experiences back onto the world. He finds redemption in hip-hop because he can hear his own story in it and because he can use it to show people who don't usually understand what exactly his story means, especially the other students at his prestigious private high school.
"I became aware of how I had put myself in this unimaginably dire situation-- this man now had control of my body; even my own hands had become useless to me. More than that, he had control of my destiny-- or at least my immediate fate. And I couldn't deny that it was my own stupid fault." (page 83)
An interesting feature of redemption is that it is relatively uncommon for a person to be able to redeem themselves-- redemption. or salvation, is something that comes from above, from a higher power that one has little control over. In this passage, the higher power takes the form of a policeman, who holds in his hands the ability to give Wes salvation (by letting him go home free) or damnation (by taking him and his friend to jail). Wes seems to be fully cognizant of this fact, as he shows by speaking about the cop's control over his destiny. He recognizes that even the fate of his body depends on the decision that the policeman makes.
"The cops gave us a gift that day, and I swore I would never get caught in a situation like that again. A week later, Kid Kupid was on the loose again, adding my tag to another graffiti-filled Bronx wall." (page 84)
The higher power of the policeman does end up granting Wes and his friend salvation-- they are not arrested or taken to jail. However, at the end of the chapter a larger trend in the theme of redemption becomes evident; just because a person is "saved' doesn't mean that they will be grateful for it, or even fully accept it. Indeed, despite the fact that Wes recognizes the fact that he has been redeemed-- and even ruminates on how he will never again commit the same acts that forced him to take the position of helplessness in the hands of fate-- just a few days later he has returned to his old tricks. Salvation here is not permanent. In fact, it seems to be more of a distraction than a real act-- the spectacle of redemption that masks the continuation of that which must be redeemed. This passage raises serious questions about the very nature of redemption itself: is it possible to be saved by a higher power, or is that something that a person can only do for him or herself? The example of the policeman seems to lean towards the latter-- after all, though the policeman's role is to redeem, he functions in direct antagonism to the full redemption of society. When society is truly saved, the policeman no longer has a job; thus, he functions best as a temporary savior-cum-redeemer, who lifts poor young troublemakers from the troubles of the streets only to deposit them right back where they started.
"She watched every ounce, every rock, every leaf, every crystal float to the bottom of the toilet bowl, until the water was cloudy and white. She flushed it away once, and then again and again until the water in the bowl returned to its normal clarity." (page 73)
On the surface level, Wes's mother is flushing the drugs she has found under his bed down the toilet so that he is unable to sell them any more. However, the imagery in the passage reveals a deeper meaning of attempted salvation. Moore describes how the water in the toilet bowl with the drugs in it is clouded, representing Wes's clouded future-- much like the classical fortune teller's looking glass, foggy with trouble and anticipated disarray-- and reputation as a boy who is involved in the drug trade. While he was once normal, "pure" clear water, he is now distorted and marred by the drugs he sells, which both affect the way he acts (keeping secrets from a mother he once trusted) and the people he hangs out with (which in turn can impact his future). Mrs. Moore's flushing of the toilet represents her attempt to save Wes from this troubled future. As she flushes once, and then again, her goal is not just to dispel the drugs from the water but to make it as though they were never there-- in other words, to return completely to the placid, perfect image of pure water. This represents her hopes for Wes: in flushing away his main source of drug income, she hopes to dissuade him from future dealing, so that he can become once again the "good boy," the ideal son she always hoped she could have. Her attempted salvation, as seen through her actions in the passage, exemplifies the chapter's theme of redemption-- though in Wes's case it is largely unwanted.
"He knew the streets would get him that money back, and more. But next time, he'd be smarter about where he kept the stash and how often he moved it around... His girlfriend sympathized. Before she realized what she was doing, she'd agreed to make her home his new headquarters." (page 74)
Here the idea of redemption as a temporary action, which will be excavated further in the author Wes's section, is explored for the first time. Despite Mary Moore's attempted salvation by flushing Wes's drug cache down the toilet, he simply finds different means of feeding his dealing business. If his mother represents fate and the redemptive high power, here Wes uses the tactic of "outsmarting fate"-- he realizes that what he is doing isn't working and so switches his outside appearances while in reality staying largely the same. His girlfriend adds an interesting second layer to the idea of fate and redemption. While Mary, as his mother, still exercises parental control over him-- and is thus seen as the principal director of fate and redemption-- the girlfriend offers a countering view to his actions and a secondary source of salvation. Although Mary disapproves of Wes's drug dealing, his girlfriend seems to almost endorse it, going as far as letting him use her house for his burgeoning trade. Thus, without completely overpowering Mary's purity-seeking salvation, she provides a different sort of redemption: the validation of his ideas and actions over Mary's.
"It was a validator. In my struggle to reconcile my two worlds, it was an essential asset... I found in hip-hop the sound of my generation talking to itself, working through the fears and anxieties and inchoate dreams-- of wealth or power or revolution or success-- we all shared. It broadcast an exaggerated version of our complicated interior lives to the world, made us feel less alone in the madness of the era, less marginal." (page 76)
Here not a person, but rather an aspect of culture is seen as the redeemer: hip-hop music. To Wes, hip-hop is a form of salvation. He sees it as a way to reconcile his place in society, to feel as though he is less alone. In other words, hip-hop redeems a struggle to survive as an African-American kid in a relatively low-income neighborhood in the Bronx by making it important. Through hip-hop, Wes learns that there are other people who feel the same way and have experienced many of the same things as he has, and in turn he is able to use the songs he hears to project these feelings and experiences back onto the world. He finds redemption in hip-hop because he can hear his own story in it and because he can use it to show people who don't usually understand what exactly his story means, especially the other students at his prestigious private high school.
"I became aware of how I had put myself in this unimaginably dire situation-- this man now had control of my body; even my own hands had become useless to me. More than that, he had control of my destiny-- or at least my immediate fate. And I couldn't deny that it was my own stupid fault." (page 83)
An interesting feature of redemption is that it is relatively uncommon for a person to be able to redeem themselves-- redemption. or salvation, is something that comes from above, from a higher power that one has little control over. In this passage, the higher power takes the form of a policeman, who holds in his hands the ability to give Wes salvation (by letting him go home free) or damnation (by taking him and his friend to jail). Wes seems to be fully cognizant of this fact, as he shows by speaking about the cop's control over his destiny. He recognizes that even the fate of his body depends on the decision that the policeman makes.
"The cops gave us a gift that day, and I swore I would never get caught in a situation like that again. A week later, Kid Kupid was on the loose again, adding my tag to another graffiti-filled Bronx wall." (page 84)
The higher power of the policeman does end up granting Wes and his friend salvation-- they are not arrested or taken to jail. However, at the end of the chapter a larger trend in the theme of redemption becomes evident; just because a person is "saved' doesn't mean that they will be grateful for it, or even fully accept it. Indeed, despite the fact that Wes recognizes the fact that he has been redeemed-- and even ruminates on how he will never again commit the same acts that forced him to take the position of helplessness in the hands of fate-- just a few days later he has returned to his old tricks. Salvation here is not permanent. In fact, it seems to be more of a distraction than a real act-- the spectacle of redemption that masks the continuation of that which must be redeemed. This passage raises serious questions about the very nature of redemption itself: is it possible to be saved by a higher power, or is that something that a person can only do for him or herself? The example of the policeman seems to lean towards the latter-- after all, though the policeman's role is to redeem, he functions in direct antagonism to the full redemption of society. When society is truly saved, the policeman no longer has a job; thus, he functions best as a temporary savior-cum-redeemer, who lifts poor young troublemakers from the troubles of the streets only to deposit them right back where they started.
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