Stuck Inside of London with the Baltimore Blues Again: Part I

By Josh Corman

Felicia "Snoop" Pearson

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1.

If you have known me for more than, say, half an hour, it’s likely that you’ve heard me vigorously extol the virtues of HBO’s The Wire. Watching the show was a strange experience for me for a number of reasons, chief among them that The Wire very well may mark the moment that television became the medium for telling long form stories. This is coming from a guy who defends the viability of the novel with rabid-wolf ferocity to anyone who’ll listen (and a fair few people who don’t particularly want to). Don’t get me wrong. I have no interest whatsoever in abandoning novels and consuming narratives solely through premium cable. But only the most sweeping, piercing novels can do what The Wire did in terms of establishing such an empathetic vision and developing complex arcs that so vigorously mine the human experience of so many seemingly disparate individuals. Think East of Eden or The Brothers Karamazov, but in contemporary Baltimore.

David Simon and Ed Burns, its co-creators, both had lived in the Charm City, The Wire’s almost-its-own-character setting, for more than thirty years, as a journalist and homicide detective, respectively. Their depictions of the violence, drug abuse, police brutality, and complex moral and ethical structures in East and West Baltimore scared the hell out me when I watched the show. Which, come to think of it, may have been the point. Perhaps The Wire functions most like one of those plays that churches occasionally put on, where they depict the misery of sinners as they depart life without accepting Christ and, painfully aware of their error, plunge into hell’s eternal fire. The biggest difference is that in the plays, people can make a choice to be saved. In Baltimore? I’m not so sure.

This may have been David Simon’s thinking when one of the show’s actors, a real-life product of the Baltimore drug game named Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, was arrested last year on charges of conspiracy to distribute heroin. This, after vanquishing her stash and quitting the game (as it is always called by those affected) a few years prior when she was discovered and cast as a mid-level enforcer in the Stanfield crew. Within hours of the arrest, Simon issued a statement:

Both our Constitution and our common law guarantee that we will be judged by our peers. But in truth, there are now two Americas, politically and economically distinct. I, for one, do not qualify as a peer to Felicia Pearson. The opportunities and experiences of her life do not correspond in any way with my own, and her America is different from my own. I am therefore ill-equipped to be her judge in this matter.

If you’ve seen The Wire, you know that this quote perfectly meshes with Simon’s Baltimore as it appears onscreen. In fact, Pearson’s arrest brought back several of the same gut-punch feelings that the show delivered often. I desperately wanted Snoop to have been wrongly arrested, for her to have finally separated herself from the game and the life that has claimed tens of thousands of mostly young, mostly black Baltimoreans. Because, see, Pearson falls into the one percent of the one percent who had (and still has, possibly) a way out of the predatory, cyclical destructiveness of poverty and drugs. Her fall would shake a (probably asinine) assumption I’ve always made about places like urban Baltimore: that if the people there could just be given a viable path out, if the allure of quick cash and status from the drug trade could be replaced with something, anything else, that those areas could be reclaimed. (Note: I am painfully aware that in using terms like cyclical, poverty, urban, viable, and reclaimed in such close proximity to each other, I’m playing into the worst part of the worst stereotype of the educated, non-urban white guy playing arm-chair quarterback to inner-city America's biggest problems. If it seems like I’m making prescriptions, I’m sorry. I aim only to portray my own woefully limited point of view.)

So, a funny thing happened. I heard about Snoop’s story and sought out Simon’s comments, pondered them, figured he knew better than I did, and went on my merry way (it speaks, I think, to my pathetic detachment from the plight of urban America—and hundreds of other places in need—that I could encounter this story and go “on my merry way,” but go I did). Then some months later, Rolling Stone ran a story about Snoop and her attempts to fully and finally extricate herself from Baltimore and all that that entails. I learned that she had been born to a crack addicted mother. I learned that she had previously spent time in prison for murder—starting when she was fifteen. Recruited by an East Baltimore drug crew, she had been on the street when a member of a rival crew (another young girl) rushed at her wielding a baseball bat. Snoop opened fire on the girl and killed her. After her time in prison, she vowed to go straight and even got a real job. She was promptly fired when her employer discovered her record, so she got another job. Once more, her crime surfaced, and she was fired. It took little time for the game to swallow Pearson once again. And until The Wire came along, nothing in her life was likely to offer any further opportunities for escape, barring some sort of myth-making, Horatio Alger-like effort of individual will (which may or may not actually even be possible), that would undoubtedly have been spun into a Lifetime movie.


2.

Oliver Twist—Charles Dickens’ second novel, published in 1837—is an unusual work of fiction. Typically, main characters are supposed to do something, rather than simply have things happen to them. Characters should dictate the action, the common wisdom goes, not serve as punching bags, tossed around by fate. Dickens, evidently, didn’t get the memo.

The book’s most famous scene (one so famous, in fact, that I would almost guarantee that you’ve absorbed it through cultural osmosis), where Oliver eats his gruel at the workhouse where he was born, and, demonstrating verve that nobody finds in the least charming, asks for a second serving, occurs on page eleven, leaving 335 more pages before we fully know the fate of the titular character. In those pages, Oliver is passed from the cruel workhouse to serve as an apprentice at the hands of a cruel coffin-maker (Dickens’ humor was bleak from the beginning, apparently), and from there into the arms of a cruel band of organized pickpockets led by a couple of especially vicious rogues who put him to work as a housebreaker. Every time it looks like little Oliver has a chance to escape these villains' clutches, he is ruthlessly jerked back into their grasp. It gets to a point where every time the kid walks outdoors, you brace for some terrible new fate to befall him (which, in Chuck's defense, isn’t quite as morally defeating and exhausting as it sounds).

Then, kind of suddenly, things get static on Oliver’s end, and a couple of other characters take center stage: Rose Maylie, a compassionate young woman who vows to aid Oliver, and Nancy, girlfriend and criminal associate of Bill Sikes (the most vicious of the two aforementioned rogues). These two women play important roles in Oliver’s development, but for long stretches, Oliver doesn’t even factor into the narrative (aside from generally being the motivating element for others’ actions—he’s kind of a Maguffin in that way), and Dickens instead focuses on the plot to finally bring the novel’s villains to justice through a Rube Goldberg-like set of machinations (his passion for coincidence knows no bounds).

Two meetings between Rose and Nancy occur in the latter half of the novel, and it is these two scenes in which Dickens makes his most lasting critical statements about London’s underclass and the crippling effects of deep poverty and learned hopelessness (which is largely, it seems to me, what the book is really "about" in the English class sense). In this passage, Nancy speaks first.

Snoop wouldn't have asked so nicely.

“I am the infamous creature you have heard of, that lives among the thieves, and that never from the first moment I can recollect my eyes and senses opening on London streets have know any better life, or kinder words than they have given to me, so help me God! Do not mind shrinking openly from me, lady. I am younger than you would think, to look at me, but I am well used to it. The poorest women fall back, as I make my way along the crowded pavement.”

“What dreadful things are these!” said Rose, involuntarily falling from her strange companion.

“Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady,” cried the girl, “that you had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness, and - and - something worse than all, as I have been from my cradle; I may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will be my deathbed.”

This exchange happens the first time Rose and Nancy meet, and in the midst of a larger conversation in which major plot points are advanced, so I’ll spare you most of the context. What you can take from this is how Nancy views herself. She isn’t fishing for compliments when she claims that people recoil from her in the streets, and she isn’t asking for a handout when she describes the miserable circumstances of her life. She’s simply offering Rose—who she sees as occupying an unreachable social plateau—an explanation of who she is, so that Rose will take the time to listen to what she has to say. A few pages later, they continue, Rose offering Nancy a chance at escape from her corrupt life.

“... do not turn a deaf ear to the entreaties of one of your own sex; the first - the first, I do believe, who ever appealed to you in the voice of pity and compassion. Do hear my words, and let me save you yet, for better things.”

“Lady,” cried Nancy, sinking on her knees, “dear, sweet, angel lady, you are the first that ever blessed me with such words as these, and if I had heard them years ago, they might have turned me from a life of sin and sorrow; but it is too late, it is too late!”

“It’s never too late,” said Rose, “for penitence and atonement.”

“It is,” cried the girl, writhing in agony of her mind...”

That agony, I think, is a very real thing, born out of the solipsistic view that often engulfs those born into extreme poverty and the sort of sinful mire that Dickens saw in the squalid hovels of 1830s London.

Or, say, that David Simon saw in millennial Baltimore. In both cases, it’s reasonable to suppose that one of the greatest contributing factors to the seemingly endless cycles of crime and despondency is that the people in those places don’t really and truly believe that another existence is even possible, let alone likely for them. In these passages, Nancy doesn’t come off as someone who is truly beyond hope, but since she sees herself that way, it doesn’t matter. Perception becomes reality, and the game claims another victim.

Part II (in which I attempt to avoid the frankly intimidating trap of sounding like I'm writing an abstract for a doctoral program application) arrives on Monday. 

By Josh Corman

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman