The Master Plan Summary and Analysis

Summary: Part 1: The Cave

“Division Avenue” takes the narrative back in time to 1948. Chris Wilson’s grandparents moved to a duplex in Northeast Washington, D.C., where they raised five children. One of those children was Wilson’s mother, Mona. The family was “working poor, but proud.” Later, when Wilson was in first grade and the neighborhood had become rougher due to housing projects, his grandparents still kept their home tidy. During the day, Wilson recalls, the neighborhood was relatively safe, but at night there was trouble, mostly heroin related. Wilson was not a great student, though he was smart. He was up at night, anxious about the sounds of violence coming from outside, and this made it hard to focus on school. Within a few years, the crack crisis had begun to transform the neighborhood. Wilson stayed up late, reading. One of his favorite works was Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” in which people who are chained together can only see the shadows of reality, not reality itself, and so they think the shadows are reality. When one man escapes and sees reality, he realizes the shadows were a lie. Even at 8 years old, Wilson knew the story was about him. The neighborhood was the cave. He was the one who believed in the reality outside of the cave. 

In “My Mona Lisa Mom,” Wilson explains that he lived with his grandparents on Division Avenue during the school week but with his mom on weekends. The neighborhood she lived in was much nicer. She was a paramedic working 12-hour shifts, which is why Wilson and his sister went each week to their grandparents’. Wilson adored his mom, Mona. She was careful with money and lived well, and she was expressive and affectionate with her son. He felt loved by her. And he learned to make a small profit from selling candy at school from her. Yet while he was selling candy at school, other kids were selling crack. But then something happened that changed everything. Mona “fell in love with the wrong man.”

In “The Cop,” Wilson describes the man his mom fell for, a police officer. Things were good at first, and Wilson and his sister got to live with his mom full-time. Wilson started a lawn-mowing business and went on his first date, and his mom was there for him. But then “the cop,” as Wilson continues to call him, hit his mom. And it turned out that it wasn’t the first time. When Wilson confronted her, she told him he didn’t understand. She began drinking. The cop cheated on her and brought drugs and guns home, but she didn’t leave him. Things deteriorated. Wilson’s grades went down, and he began pulling out his own hair from the anxiety. Wilson found out his mom was doing crack, and one time he threatened to hurt the cop. One time he stole the cop’s bulletproof vest and took it to school, thinking the cop would get in trouble for losing equipment, but Wilson ended up getting expelled from school. His teachers gave him the schoolwork for the rest of the year, though, so he kept studying. His cousin Eric took him out to clubs at night sometimes and then gave him his first gun.

When Wilson was 14, the cop beat his mom badly. Wilson drove her to the police station, but the police didn’t want to help her—they took a statement and then sent her to the hospital. Wilson took her home and then, in the morning, caught the bus to school.

“Broken” continues to describe the aftermath of his mom’s beating. She came home bandaged and wearing dark glasses. Her eye socket had been shattered. She couldn’t work, so she was placed on disability—and she never returned to work. She got addicted to her pain medication, and she kept drinking. She was broken. And Wilson was broken, too, but differently. He was broken by anger at the cop, the cops at the station who’d been so disrespectful, and at all cops. The cop was arrested but got a light sentence. Yet Mona still didn’t cut her abuser off. And Wilson blamed himself for not standing up to the cop and saving his mom. He felt he’d been weak, and so he determined to change that. He began carrying a gun. One time, in an argument with some older boys, he pulled his gun and shot it, shattering a window. He was arrested. Then, he found out his cousin Eric was dead. Both he and his mom went downhill after that. He began to feel a kind of distance between himself and everyone else. One time, he passed out from alcohol poisoning at school. When the school counselor asked him why he was trying to kill himself, he denied he was. He was “just trying to survive,” he explains.

In “Gladiator School,” Wilson describes his life in “Boys’ Village,” a residential treatment facility for traumatized youth. He was depressed, having hallucinations of his dead cousin, and self-harming. They put him in solitary and medicated him. But he only got worse. He was transferred to the Hickey School, a school for juvenile offenders, where the guards were physically abusive. A family friend brought his mom to visit, but she was clearly strung out, and Wilson told the friend not to bring her back. Wilson started working out, put on muscle, and started thinking he might join the military after he got out of juvenile detention. Then, he was released unexpectedly. Mona had cleaned herself up enough to petition the court for his release. She had plans to buy a house and get Wilson into a better school. But when he got home, he found out his brother Derrick had other plans. Derrick gave him a gun and told him they were going to retaliate for Eric’s death.

“The House Becomes the Cave” begins, “There was no house, of course.” Wilson explains how his mom stayed in bed a lot of the time and continued to drink and take pain pills. Meanwhile, his sister Leslie took care of the household and their little brother Korey. He and Derrick didn’t retaliate for Eric’s death, and the cop was now stalking and harassing their mom. There were always a lot of people hanging around, and Wilson tried to keep things from going from bad to worse. One day, the cop tried to sneak into the house and ended up crashing through the ceiling right into the middle of the living room. Wilson began stockpiling weapons and was eventually arrested for illegal gun possession. The court sent him to live with his father, but he violated the court order and went back to his mom’s. Wilson began doing PCP to escape all the pain of his life, and it made him paranoid. He lost friends to gun violence and prison and developed PTSD. His grandfather tried to help, but he got sick with cancer. Wilson wasn’t worried about his grandfather dying, though, because he thought he’d be joining him soon. Death seemed inevitable and close.

Then, Wilson had a son, Darico. He got custody and got off PCP. He got a job. But it didn’t work out. “I wanted a different life,” he says, looking back, “but I didn’t want to do the work.” His sister Leslie had a plan, joined the ROTC, and was going places, but Wilson was robbing cars and firing guns for kicks. His mom started to tell him he was a mistake and should never have been born. He quit his job and started robbing places for money to pay the bills and for his mom’s alcohol. Then he got arrested for malicious gunfire. His mom bailed him out, but when he got home, a crooked cop named Rodney was there with his mom. They got in a fight, and Rodney left badly beaten. A few days later, some drug dealers kidnapped Wilson and beat him. But when he told his mom what happened, she laughed at him, asking how he managed to get kidnapped when he had a gun.

In “Six Shots,” Wilson describes the event that would derail his life. They didn’t have enough money to celebrate Darico’s first birthday, they’d just received an eviction notice, and he was still shaken from the kidnapping. At 11:00 p.m., he decided to go for a walk. Two men began following him. At a gas station, they began threatening him and his family. He pulled out his gun and fired six shots. The men ran away, but one of them died.

Analysis: Part 1: The Cave

This section takes its name from Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave,” which Chris sees as an allegory of his own life. He sees that the neighborhood his grandparents live in is like the cave in the allegory—just a shadow of reality, but one people believe is reality, so they never try to leave it or believe in something greater than what their limited experience leads them to believe. He also sees from an early age that he is the one man in the story who believed there was a reality outside of the cave.

Later, though, his house becomes the cave. The shrinking of the cave reflects the increasingly limited life Wilson has as his mother’s abuse by her boyfriend, her subsequent drinking and drug addiction, and Wilson’s own fear and resentment cause his life to focus on survival only, without room for thoughts and dreams beyond getting through the day. The shrinking cave presents a tangible, vivid image of how Wilson’s life is pressured and squeezed on all sides so that his life becomes ever smaller and more restricted. He’s trapped by his mom’s abusive boyfriend, then by the damage done to her, his grief and anger, his first experience being locked up, his grandfather’s death, his own drug use, and being beaten by drug dealers. By the time he kills a man, it doesn’t seem likely he will ever get out of the cave. This is important narratively, though, because it sets the stage for what is, later, quite a comeback story. While Wilson’s story is real, it has many narrative elements we can recognize from fiction, such as a protagonist who hits rock bottom before they begin an upward trajectory.