57 pages • 1 hour read
Ron Hall, Lynn Vincent, Denver MooreSame Kind Of Different As Me
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
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Friendship
At its core, this is a book about friendship, as demonstrated by the relationship between Denver Moore and Ron Hall. The concept of friendship is examined through several different questions: What is friendship? Is it possible for people who live in drastically-different worlds to be friends? What responsibilities are entailed when two people are friends?
Early in the book, despite society’s systemic racism, Moore and Hall are both presented as people who have the capacity to relate to others who aredifferent from them. As a child, Moore befriends the white nephew of the plantation owner his family works for. As time goes by, and after he’s attacked by the three white youths on horseback, he gradually becomes more alienated and distant from society. He has friends of a sort while homeless, but this is based more on the necessity of having a partner to eke out a living with on the streets in the city.
For his part, Hall is respectful of the black farmhands his grandfather employs and they become friends over the years, and eventually he goes to a roadhouse with them to drink his first beer and listen to raucous blues music. As he achieves more success, though, Hall socializes with people who are only like himself: white, urban, and financially secure. Thanks primarily to his wife Deborah, as a couple they have several sets of close friends who share their evangelical beliefs, but in many ways, Hall socializes with people without necessarily moving beyond superficial interactions.
Hall tells Moore he wants to be his friend mainly because his wife Deborah told him to. He finally considers in-depth what it means to be friends when Moore says to him, “If you is fishin for a friend you just gon’ catch and release, then I ain’t got no desire to be your friend […] But if you is lookin for a real friend, then I’ll be one. Forever” (107).
For Moore, being friends is not something to be taken lightly and means more than just two people who have coffee together at Starbucks. It means someone whose life you are going to be a part of and to be someone who looks out for and is responsible for another person. A key thing about Moore is he embodies the “real” friendship he demands from Hall. As Deborah becomes more and more sick, he puts her and her family at the forefront of his concerns, praying for her and doing whatever he can to help them out. And Moore offers Hall the wisdom he’s learned from a life on the streets as well as his deeply-personal Christian faith.
Hall often wonders if he can be as good a friend to Moore as he should be. Even after Moore becomes a de facto member of the Hall family, Hall wonders if he’ll ever see Moore again when Denver drives away in his brand-new truck to deliver his daughter’s belongings to Colorado. Then again, when Moore returns—albeit a few days behind schedule—Hall goes on to trust him with even greater responsibility.
By the end of the book, the depth and breadth of Moore and Hall’s friendship—willed into being by Deborah Hall—is what drives them to begin writing the book in the first place. On the face of it, their friendship is improbable, based on their wildly different backgrounds. But, as the two men demonstrate, friendship is not based on where you’re from or where you are; it’s built on mutual respect, as well as the commitment to be there for each other.
Racism
A major portion of the book deals with racism. There’s the Deep South’s overt racism, with its Jim Crow laws and Emmett Till’s brutal murder for allegedly whistling at a white woman. In addition, there’s the hegemonic racism that prevents Denver Moore from learning to read or write, having a chance to get ahead as a sharecropper, or even being integrated enough into the world to know about WWII or the Civil Rights Movement.
By spending summers on his grandfather’s farm in Texas, Ron Hall lives in a racist society firsthand,without being able to recognize it. With a modern perspective, it’s easy to see what was going on; however, at the time, there was no outside frame of reference Hall had access to that would allow him to see the world in any other way than he already did.
Moore has several strikes against him because of the society in which he lives: he can’t read or write, he’s a convicted felon, and he’s temperamentally unstable. The biggest thing working against him, though, is the color of his skin: “I know what it’s like to get beat down for bein born with different-colored skin. And I know what it’s like to walk around with my eyes down low to keep it from happening again” (48). This simmering, ever-increasing anger for the world he finds himself in is what makes Moore so dangerous by the time he meets the Halls.
For his part, Hall doesn’t really understand how Moore’supbringing in the Deep South affected him until the two men go to Red River Parish, Louisiana, at the end of the book. Hall sees the conditions in which his friend grew up: crumbling shacks in the woods with mountains of beer cans outside, snarling dogs, cars on cinderblocks, and a pervading sense of despair. Hall is horrified and is confronted with the reality of the opportunities afforded him,compared tothe lack of opportunities for Moore.
Byits conclusion, the book presents its own method for battling racism at a one-on-one level. That is, the Civil Rights Movement made its impact through working at the macro level: the Voting Rights Act, affirmative action, and school desegregation. And, yes, this dramatically transformed American society. There is still change to be accomplishedat the micro level,however, in the way individual people interact with each other. Moore and Hall’s story demonstrates racial divides can still be conquered by two minds and two hearts at a time.
Personal Transformation
Both Denver Moore and Ron Hall are dramatically-different people at the end of the book than they were at the beginning. Therefore, an important element is the way the idea of personal transformation is examined. Part of this has to do with changing from living a life measured in materialistic terms to living a fully-realized spiritual life. Another part has to do with how long it can take to undergo meaningful change in life.
For much of his life, Moore defines himself by what he doesn’t have: a home, a car, a job, or a family. He becomes increasingly angry because he is forced to live in a world where he is not equipped with the skills to thrive. Even after he becomes friends with the Halls and is considered a family member, however, it’s not shiny new belongings that give his life meaning and value. Instead, he comes into a fuller realization and understanding of his spiritual life and being. It’s his belief in the Christian faith that allows him to be happy with his life as it is. He says the only thing people need to know about him before delivering a sermon is “just tell em I’m a nobody that’s tryin to tell everbody ‘bout Somebody that can save anybody” (231).
On the other hand, Hall is happy to define himself by his material possessions and creature comforts. At one point, he is boarding a private jet to make yet another high-dollar art deal and says, “It would have been perfect if I could have had […] my whole 1963 Haltom High graduating class, lined up parade-style so they could all see how I’d risen above my lower-middle-class upbringing” (6). Hall’s had a sense of inferiority his entire life, which he spends years trying to compensate for by making more money, having bigger houses, and driving more expensive cars. This turns out to be a fool’s errand, as all it does is estrange him from his wife and almost end their marriage.
Sometimes change can be quick and dramatic, such as the conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus. Most of the time, though, while the desire to change or recognizing the need for it can arrive in a moment of epiphany, change itself is something that happens by accretion over time. Hall begins to realize his life is consumed by materialism when Moore asks him about his keyring: “I know it ain’t none of my business, but does you own somethin that each one of them keys fits? […] Are you sure you own them, or does they own you?” (112-13). Although Hall understands the concept Moore is communicating, it takes several more years and his wife’s death to internalize this knowledge, as opposed to just having an intellectual understanding of it.
In the end, the book provides an in-depth examination of how people’s perceptions of the world maybe transformed. And, as opposed to a Paul-like “Once I could see, but now I am blind” moment,which makes change seem dramatic and quick, and even easy, the long timeline of both Moore and Hall’s lives in moving away from materialistic appraisals of themselves to ones more spiritually-based, demonstrates this was neither quick nor easy for them.
