Stuck Inside of London with the Baltimore Blues Again, Part II

In which the author tries (and possibly fails) not to write something best used as a sleep aid or a dry-as-dust academic treatise, and reaches an organic and frightening conclusion.

(If you haven't read it, here is part 1)

1.

There’s an episode in The Wire’s last season called “The Dickensian Aspect,” which follows part of a much larger story arc involving The Baltimore Sun and its quest for juicy stories. I always “got” the title, in the sense that I knew that “Dickensian” was shorthand for wretched urban plight. But it wasn’t until I read Oliver Twist that I saw an added layer of meaning in the phrasing of the episode’s title.

To The Sun’s editor, “Dickensian” probably means “gritty” or some other euphemistic definition that glosses over the horrors from which he’s profiting by chronicling. But really, I think it gets at the heart of what both Nancy and Felicia Pearson feel about themselves. They’ve become, as my old friend Red puts it, “institutionalized.”

And just think about the ones who don’t get the casting director knocking on their door.

How easy it is for us to look at the people who populate these bleak corners of the United States, who occupy what epidemiologists call a “cyst” because it’s contained within a host environment, but is not made up of the same material, and say that if they only made better choices, they could rise beyond their circumstances. But even if that happens, and the circumstances themselves still exist, what have we won? We love putting the onus on the individual and playing up the role that hard work and personal responsibility play in our lives. But what Dickens knew, and what Simon knows, they showed us through their art: When we use class as a convenient way to ignore a voiceless population, we create a separate world, governed by a different set of rules, where words like “choice” and “fate” and “work” and “responsibility” and “education” don’t mean the same things or work the same ways.

2.

One of the most fascinating aspects of both Simon’s and Dickens’ work is how they view the outside forces that might conceivably come to the aid of those in need, but ultimately don’t. Both The Wire and Oliver Twist are filled with individuals who are burdened by good intentions (for the sake of spoilers, I won’t mention specifics), but, despite their efforts, have little success in changing the lives of the desperate characters around them.

My interest is piqued most specifically by the way that both men view the Church’s role (or the inevitable lack thereof) in aiding these individuals. In Oliver Twist, the Church and its people are largely absent. Oliver is confined to the workhouse as an orphan, and nothing good that happens to him is initiated in any direct way by the Church. In fact, the book’s first third is filled with ironic scenes in which Oliver’s Christian decency is constantly in suspicion (he is constantly described as having a rotten soul on account of his parentage). The characters who do provide Oliver some comfort are often described in terms of their virtues, but they’re virtues that anybody could have, irrespective of their motivations. If Dickens sees a poor orphan’s best shot out of London’s horrific underbelly taking place in a Churchless bubble, it can’t speak well of his view of the Christian community’s role in aiding the poor.

The same is even more true of David Simon. The one clear religious figure in The Wire is unquestionably good-hearted, but the Church itself just kind of sits in the background, a warm, toothless grandmother who isn’t ignorant of the cancerous drug game, but is admittedly powerless to do much about it.

Simon covered Baltimore for a long, long time. He has said repeatedly that his greatest aim as The Wire’s creator was to examine the major issues at hand in American cities, particularly the sort of former industrial hubs that have been increasingly hard-hit by rampant gang violence, crushing economic blows, and governments that seem more and more worried about plastering over the cracks than making hard decisions to address the most crippling problems of their communities (Detroit and Pittsburgh would likely fit the mold). If that was his aim, and he succeeded (which by the ways that prominent sociologists embraced the show’s depictions of the inner-city, it’s reasonable to say he did), then what does that say about the Church’s crushing lack of success in serving the “Other America?”

3.

The book of the Bible I’ve read more than in any other is James’ letter to the twelve tribes. The most powerful verse in this short book is, for my money, James 1:22 - “Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says.”

The edict here is pretty clear. James 1:27 delivers another - “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

I can’t read this verse since watching The Wire without thinking about Bubbles, Randy, Dukie, Michael, Bug, Namond, Brody, D’Angelo, and all the other nameless characters who are, at one point or another, outside the game, practically begging for someone to step in and show them grace.

Please understand that, for my part, sanctimony has no place in this rambling mess of thought. I have never done anything that could be construed as what I apparently am ashamed of the Church for not doing enough of, if that makes any sense (unlikely, I admit). Charles Dickens and David Simon collided (unbidden) in my mind while I read Oliver Twist and made me think about this stuff. I’m doing a lot of the thing you’re not supposed to do when you write about serious issues (heaps of complaining and hand-wringing; no solutions), and with each word I type I get a little more down on myself. I want the Church to step in and act for me, so that I don’t have to think about Simon’s and Dickens’ implicit criticisms as criticisms of me (which of course they are, because I am the Church).

So then I end up, strangely, in a very similar situation to Snoop and Nancy. They’re scared to leave the situations that have defined their entire lives. Miserable though they may be, they know their misery and are comforted by it, in a weird way. In the end, the most challenging part of their struggle to escape their circumstance is perhaps that they are terrified about the unknowns that await them on the other side of their escape.

I’m scared too. What would it be like if I did what Simon and Dickens see so little of, and became an arm of the Church’s reach into these ravaged communities? Uncomfortable and even dangerous, perhaps. Christ didn’t mind those (or in spite of minding them, acted anyway), but I find myself wishing He’d give me a pass if it came to that.

I’m doubtful.

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

By Josh Corman

Felicia "Snoop" Pearson

Follow me on Twitter @JoshACorman

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