Girl on wire
Why this?
I also read this at my kitchen table. I suppose I was home for some reason. I'm not sure. I remember looking at it and thinking, "Christ, how do you get out of poverty?"
By the way, this article isn't online anywhere for some reason. I had to dig it out of the Stanford archives...worth it, I think. It's about Felicia Pearson, an actress on The Wire who got pulled straight from the Baltimore streets. From a 2007 profile in the Washington Post:
"She knows that she's been given a one-in-a-million chance. It's not a chance that she plans to blow." In 2012, she was arrested for dealing drugs. Is it her fault? Well, it's worth reading on....
Magazine Context:
Rolling Stone is a music magazine that runs two or three features every issue. They are usually written for average folks and can be a bit sensationalist. But - as in this case - they can really knock your socks off. Sonya, the editor of my high school paper, loved their writing and could, like the Rolling Stone articles, really capture the nitty-gritty feeling that they just nail in this magazine.
I also read this at my kitchen table. I suppose I was home for some reason. I'm not sure. I remember looking at it and thinking, "Christ, how do you get out of poverty?"
By the way, this article isn't online anywhere for some reason. I had to dig it out of the Stanford archives...worth it, I think. It's about Felicia Pearson, an actress on The Wire who got pulled straight from the Baltimore streets. From a 2007 profile in the Washington Post:
"She knows that she's been given a one-in-a-million chance. It's not a chance that she plans to blow." In 2012, she was arrested for dealing drugs. Is it her fault? Well, it's worth reading on....
Magazine Context:
Rolling Stone is a music magazine that runs two or three features every issue. They are usually written for average folks and can be a bit sensationalist. But - as in this case - they can really knock your socks off. Sonya, the editor of my high school paper, loved their writing and could, like the Rolling Stone articles, really capture the nitty-gritty feeling that they just nail in this magazine.
Ben Wallace-Wells
Rolling Stone, 2012
WHEN FELICIA PEARSON GOT FAMOUS, her first and her best instinct was to flee. She was 24 at the time but looked younger - scrawny and short, butch and just baby-faced enough that she was regularly mistaken for a boy. Her accent was close to impenetrable, she was funny and swaggering and mistrustful, and she struck everyone she met as a perfect emblem of inner-city East Baltimore, a world she had barely ever left - a convicted murderer and eighth-grade dropout whose only sustained employment had been selling drugs. But the great lucky accident of Pearson's life is that The Wire, then a little-watched HBO crime drama, happened to be filming in town. One of the actors spotted her in a downtown nightclub and brought her to meet the show's creator, David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun police reporter. He wrote a part for Pearson, giving her character the actress' own nickname, Snoop, to make things easier on her. The character was a brutal enforcer for a drug dealer, and Pearson, who had never considered the possibility that she might act, played it with such reptilian matter of-factness that Stephen King called her "perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series."
The first thing Pearson did once it became clear there was a little bit of money in acting was to get rid of her heroin stash, a unilateral resignation from the drug game. "I just gave everything away," she says. "Free stuff - who gonna complain about that?" The second thing she did, more or less, was to buy a house, for $275,000, in a working-class suburb of Baltimore. What was beguiling about the place was its ordinariness, the almost conscious anti-glamour of it: a worn, three-bedroom house with grasses in the yard that did not quite cohere into a lawn. For someone who had progressed from convict to celebrity in just four years, the place seemed aspirational, a suggestion of new possibilities.
But this was 2007, possibly the worst moment in American history to buy a house, particularly if you were a brandnew actor with few leads on other roles. Pearson soon lost the house to foreclosure, and moved into a condo in downtown Baltimore, not all that far from where she grew up. Then, one day last March, local cops and federal drug agents raided her apartment, wielding a warrant for her arrest for conspiracy to distribute heroin. "Just kicked in the danged door," Pearson says. It was part of a broad sweep of dealers who operated from the LaTrobe Homes in East Baltimore, under the shadowing monolith of Johns Hopkins Hospital. The feds, it emerged, had a wiretap of Pearson on the phone with one of the drug ring's central figures, a friend of hers named Shawn Johnson, asking him to pay back her "30." Her lawyers said she had loaned Johnson 30 bucks. The prosecutors said a confidential informant would testify that Pearson was speaking in code, and that she was part of a complex conspiracy to distribute heroin.
One of the arguments The Wire advanced is that some areas of the inner city - among them the section of East Baltimore where Pearson grew up - represent a kind of evolutionary break from the rest of the country, a place where the deprivation is so deep that it challenges our conception of what America is. There are social scientists who chart the rules and adaptations of this culture, who know its boundaries so well they can draw them on a map. One social epidemiologist who has studied East Baltimore calls this separate world the Cyst, because it can seem so perfectly walled off from the rest of society. What Simon was trying to do, in fiction, was to suggest that in these neighborhoods, you aren't really free to choose whether you become a criminal or not, that here crime is the only viable choice. Now, one of the show's stars was suggesting the same thing, in real life.
The day Pearson was arrested, when the details of her case were still murky and she was sitting in jail, held without bail, Simon released a statement to the press. "Both our Constitution and our common law guarantee that we will be judged by our peers," he wrote. "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."
This is a profoundly radical statement. That every person is equally capable of obeying the law or violating it, that we all have the ability to understand one another well enough to judge one another, to decide when a stranger has violated the rules of society - this is the basis of the jury system, our criminal code and our social compact. In the case of Felicia Pearson, Simon was saying, you could see that all falling apart. You could see, in America's most abandoned and violent neighborhoods, places shaped by the War on Drugs, that the principle of free will in criminal justice might be just a delusion.
PEARSON WAS BORN IN 1980 in one of the most troubled parts of East Baltimore, an almost entirely black neighborhood called Broadway East. Her early life was imbued with near total deprivation: She was born cross-eyed because of her mother's addiction to crack, fed with an eyedropper by her foster grandmother, stripped and locked naked in a closet at the age of five so her mother could sell her clothes for drugs. Because Pearson was so bluntly a tomboy - and, from the age of 12, openly a lesbian - she was an object of curiosity on the streets, at first a mascot for the drug gangs and then an active member. By the time she was 14, the streets were so much a surrogate parent that she called the drug dealer she worked for Uncle and the kingpin he worked for Father. It was Uncle who rechristened her Snoop: Like the cartoon dog, she struck him as sweet but sad.
"What interested me was danger," Pearson writes in her autobiography, Grace After Midnight. "Going to the edge. And then over the edge. I can't tell you why, but at a time when other 13-year-olds were buying frilly dresses and training bras, I was buying guns."
There are those who avoid the drug game on Oliver and Montford, the bleak intersection where Pearson grew up, but in retrospect, she says, the trajectory of a "wild" kid like her was close to inevitable. At first she ran simple errands, but soon she was part of a small crew dispatched to collect debts - dispensing pistol-whippings, terrorizing would-be competitors. She got a nine-millimeter gun, and one day, when a rival crew from the West Side opened fire out of the back of a U-Haul, she crouched behind a garbage can and returned fire. She was learning violence by increments. "Something like a fever had come over me," she later recalled. "The fever felt permanent."
One day, when she was 15, some members of her crew got into a fight and she ran across the street to join them. Suddenly, a 15-year-old girl named Okia Toomer came at her wielding a baseball bat. "There was only one way to stop her," Pearson recalled. She shot and killed the girl. Pearson was still such a child that while she was holed up in one of Uncle's safe houses, hoping the police would lose interest in the case, she watched reruns of The Cosby Show, dreamily inserting herself into the Huxtable family, with its doctor father and lawyer mother.
Pearson pleaded guilty to murder and spent five years in prison. To ease the boredom, she busied herself manufacturing dildos for the other prisoners. "Ace bandages are the building block to a good sturdy dildo," she says in her memoir; she faked sprained ankles to get the dressings from the prison nurse. "Small, medium, large and extra large. Made them as reallife as possible." When Pearson got out in 2000, determined to go straight, she cycled through three menial jobs: in a bumper factory, a warehouse and a carwash. She liked the rhythm of the work, but was fired from each job once her supervisors discovered her criminal record. Before long she was dealing drugs again.
If Pearson believes that she was trapped by the circumstances of her birth - that her path was locked in from the start - she doesn't show it. "Snoop is one of only three or four people I've ever met who grew up in that kind of environment who has this ability to look at herself from the outside," says Ed Burns, a former Baltimore cop who served as Simon's co-writer on the show. "She can say, 'Well, I fucked that up,' and laugh at herself, and move on."
The first time Pearson saw herself on The Wire, she was impressed. "I said to myself, You go, bitch.' That's what I said." Her self-aware swagger played well onscreen. At one point in the fourth season, the character Snoop is sitting handcuffed on a curb, having just been arrested for gun possession, and she sneers resentfully up at the cop who busted her: "You thinking you all that."
"I know I'm all that," the cop replies. "I'm thinking about pussy."
At which point the scene, as scripted, is supposed to end. But there is a sudden flash of humor in Pearson's eyes, the sense that the way she sees the world is different enough that what she says as fact will play as funny. She looks up at the cop and adds an ad-lib: "Me too," she says, all deadpan. Simon left that one in.
One day last November, Pearson went back to Oliver and Montford, wearing a cocked Orioles cap and a sharp-looking leather jacket - her clothes, like herself, part of an identity in transition: half still in Baltimore, half out. Pearson is called Fe-Fe in her neighborhood, and her arrival is an event; the small cluster of people accompanying her - cousins, an uncle, her attorney - begins to swell. The neighborhood's blocks are bisected by small alleys that cut between decrepit row houses: Too narrow for cars, they are often used as escape routes for dealers running from the cops. "We used to have house parties," Pearson recalls. "It would be a hundred people in this little room." When she remembers the neighborhood fondly, it is for its intimacy, its coherence - the 50 bucks you might give someone whose gas was about to be cut off, the hundred bucks you might put in toward rent. "Everybody stick together," she says.
There are cops nearby, as usual, and they are giving the kids hanging out on the corners a hard enough time that Pearson's lawyer calls a friend of hers, a city detective, to try to get the patrolmen to lay off. There are reminders everywhere of how tenuous escape can be; Pearson recalls a basketball star she grew up with, a neighborhood hero, who was recently jailed on burglary charges. "Once you get a step further than Oliver and Montford, you gotta keep going," Pearson says. "Because it'll mess your whole life up. People keep thinking, ? got to come back and show love to the hood.' Man, forget that. Send 'em a postcard with some money. That's what they be worried about."
BALTIMORE, AS "THE WIRE" hoped to show, can seem to be governed by a hidden city, an unofficial structure of power and relationships over which the official one is laid - a necessary condition in a place where the homicide rate in neighborhoods like Pearson's is 32 times the national average. The neighborhoods here are tiny - a few blocks by a few blocks - and they stay intact across generations, so power is often informal, wielded in one neighborhood by a pastor's son, in another by a retired gangster who runs a towtruck company. A year ago, in a Northwest Baltimore neighborhood called Park Heights, two young members of a Jewish community patrol were charged with beating a black kid who had crossed an invisible neighborhood dividing line, and for a few tense days safety in the city depended in part on the efforts of a former gangster named Ted Sutton, who was sent as an emissary between the two communities. It may not be an accident that former defense lawyers, like the city's most powerful politician, the legendary congressman Elijah Cummings, ascend to elected office: They comprehend how power works in both the official city and the secret one.
In working-class Baltimore, the tininess of the neighborhoods means you can make aleft-hand turn - from Harford Road, say, onto Tivoly Avenue - and suddenly one city evaporates and the Cyst materializes. Seven out of every 10 houses boarded up, marked with a red X; plastic bags lashed to telephone poles, in lieu of public trash bins; a windless and swampy feeling that seems to stick to you. Social scientists have traced the boundaries of the Cyst, and marked its characteristics: Forty percent of the adult population addicted to drugs, 70 percent of adult males permanently outside of the labor force, 90 percent of the households headed by single parents. The Cyst is all black, but once in a while you will see a white addict, and he is invariably more strung out and crazy than anyone else for a square mile. This part of Baltimore is stuck so far in the past that it has preserved a set of strange anachronisms: Syphilis still persists here, and the drug of choice remains injected heroin. You will sometimes see a group of kids counting money on a street corner, or handing off drug packets to passing motorists as a cop car idles half a block away, but there is mostly just a pervasive listlessness. "These pockets of urban cysts are places where American values disappeared, and a fundamental ecological shift happened," says Thomas Glass, a social epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins. "Here, violence makes sense - violence is strategic."
When Baltimore was still deeply segregated, in the Fifties and Sixties, the neighborhood where Felicia Pearson grew up was called Up the Hill. It was where you bought a row house when you moved out of the projects - there were black-run law firms, doctors' offices, shops. But by the mid-Seventies, desegregation opened up the suburbs, and the black elite soon moved out. Housing projects started to fill up with unmarried women and their children, the sprawling Bethlehem Steel plant went into decline, and by the 1980s what was left here was a generational vacuum - few jobs and few educated adults.
I get much of this history from P.M. Smith, a 65-year-old minister. Smith has a big, prosperous church in the suburbs, and his sermons are broadcast on local television, yet with a brief exception as a student and a lawyer in Texas and Michigan, he has chosen to live in East Baltimore his entire life, out of some combination of duty, martyrdom and attachment. There have been costs: One of his three children died of a drug overdose, and for years, when he walked his grandson to school, he would often see teenage dealers openly lobbing handfuls of heroin samples - "testers" - into clutching, eager crowds, seeking to build business. "Grown men, trying to grab drugs that boys their own son's age had thrown," Smith says. If you are a preacher, this is one of the most dispiriting elements of East Baltimore, the forced infantilization, and you notice it everywhere.
Smith's war is a block-by-block battle to keep the edges of this neighborhood from falling into the Cyst. On his block of Luzerne Avenue, Smith got the city to change the traffic pattern, making a twoway street run one-way, to deter drug buyers from outside the neighborhood from driving through. He also staged weekly prayer vigils on his corner, to try to reclaim it from the dealers who sold drugs there. He won, more or less, but it took years, and it was only one block. "If you can control the corners," he says, "you can control the block."
If you observe this neighborhood from a distance - like Burns, Simon, Glass - it presents a bleak face: It looks like a cyst, a separate, second America. But those who live here, like Smith, are more apt to see possibility. 'Young girl who grew up there became a CPA," Smith says, pointing out a row house backgrounding a clutch of sedate drunks. A minute later, at another decrepit row house: "Boy became a teacher. Sister a lawyer. Dad's a janitor, but he put them through." If you know the neighborhood, you know the victories, too: steady jobs held, children who graduate. You can see these as exceptions, aberrations in the statistical wave, or as a standard that everyone here might reach, an extension of the American Dream. "Some of these row houses can be really nice!" Smith observes.
I ask him about Simon's rhetoric - there are two Americas, and those of us on one side of the line have no capacity to judge what happens on the other. "I don't have that kind of sympathy," Smith says. "Young people make choices."
EARLIER THIS YEAR, WHEN Pearson was locked up after her bust, she seemed "like a caged animal," says her friend Norris Davis, who visited her in jail. Prisoners watch a lot of television, and Pearson's face was on the news constantly; every couple of hours, someone would cry out, "Yo, Snoop! You on TV!" and everyone would crowd around to see a video of her arrest replayed on the screen - footage that was quickly becoming her public image. When she made bail, its terms imposed an even more tangible burden: Pearson was required to wear an electronic monitoring box on her ankle, and to pay up to $400 a week for its upkeep. Her lawyer thought it might be two years before she would go to trial. She was broke, and she was looking at a $40,000 anklebracelet bill.
Former gangbangers say the nightmare that persists, years after they've gone straight, is that the police will happen upon some forgotten crime, something that just sneaks under the statute of limitations, and suddenly there will be a goon squad at the door. Four years ago, Pearson refused to testify against a friend of hers, Steven Lashley, whom she had been with when he stabbed three men, killing one, during a fight outside a fried-chicken joint in a part of Baltimore called the Block, a stretch of strip clubs right next to police headquarters. Ever since that incident, Pearson says, she's felt as though she has a target on her back. Friends say she doesn't know whom to trust. "Snoop doesn't know how to recognize the enemy," Davis tells me.
This is the heart of one critique of the War on Drugs: that what is being criminalized is often little more than association. There is a concept in social science called Dunbar's number: Most people, scholars have found, have a natural social circle of around 150 people. If you grow up on Oliver and Montford, many of them will inevitably be drug dealers. "Even if she was not involved in drugs," Simon tells me, "the chance of her never being on the phone with anyone who was involved in drugs in East Baltimore is nonexistent. It's a factory town. It's like telling someone in Birmingham, 'Don't get on the phone and have a conversation that is at all ambiguous with anyone who works in the steel industry.' They're all drug dealers. She doesn't know anybody else."
Pearson's own perspective is more muddled. "It ain't the neighborhood," she tells me. "It ain't like, 'Oh, you better get out here and sell drugs' - nah, it's a choice." She mentions cousins of hers, good kids, who made it out of the same neighborhood and are doing all right. And yet she recognizes that the imperative of escape imposed by the ghetto makes it impossible, on some level, to adopt a one-size-fitsall morality. "People like David Simon - or even me, now, if I go back to Oliver and Montford - I feel as though I can't judge this person because they're selling drugs," she says. "Everybody got to find their own way out." Pearson spends a lot of time in our conversations insisting that she's a grown-up ("I ain't 12 anymore"), as though she's petitioning for divorce from her former self. From her perspective, choices do exist at Oliver and Montford - but you can spend your life trapped in your worstever choice.
"A lot of this comes back to what I call the Matrix problem," says Glass, the epidemiologist. 'Your subject grew up in one Matrix. She takes the blue pill. She jacks out of the world of the Cyst and gets in front of the camera and makes money and enters the dominant world. But many people who leave one Matrix and enter another find it difficult to change their cognitive programming. And they long to get back to the Matrix."
At her sentencing in August, Pearson pleaded guilty to taking part in a drug conspiracy. She got three years of probation. Following her court appearance, she insisted to the press that she is innocent, that she pleaded guilty only to get out of the monitoring payments, to resume her career and get on with her life. Just about all of the other actors from The Wire had departed Baltimore, and it had occurred to her that she would be targeted as long as she stayed. "I'm the only one left, as far as starwise," she said. "Everyone else left." Pearson was beginning to plot her escape.
"She's trying to cross the increasingly impermeable membrane between the two Americas without disowning either," Simon says. "And it's a very hard thing. A very hard thing."
ONE DAY WHILE SIMON WAS preparing to film the final season of The Wire, he got a draft of Snoop's death scene from George Pelecanos, a crime novelist who was working as a writer on the show. The outlines of the scene had been sketched out in advance: Snoop and a young boy named Michael, a character whom she has mentored and taught to kill, are driving together to a job. The drug lord who employs them believes that Michael has betrayed him, and has ordered Snoop to kill him. Michael, realizing all of this, pulls a gun on Snoop first, and kills her. Pelecanos had worked into this a writer's touch. Just before Michael pulls the trigger, Snoop pauses and gives herself a look in the rearview mirror, smoothing out her braids with her hand. "How my hair look?" she asks Michael. Simon, reading this, thought it was "one of the most amazing lines of dialogue I've ever seen written." He called Pelecanos. "I said, 'What does this line mean to you? I gotta know.' And there was this long pause and George said, 'I don't know, but don't you dare cut it.'"
Pearson was disappointed; she wanted her character to go down in a blaze of glory. "When I read the script, I was like, 'Huh? Snoop getting shot - nah.' Because they don't have a battle scene or nothing." Simon made sure to be on set the night they were filming. Pearson was still an amateur actress - a few months earlier, she'd been showing up on set without knowing her lines, figuring she could ad-lib her way through it - and he wasn't sure what kind of reading she'd give. What Pearson did was to soften the line, to downplay the melodrama. In doing so, she heightened her character's sense of regret, and emphasized her acceptance of her own fate. The Wire's philosophy, in which the systems of society dehumanize its inhabitants, means that a character's death is often when their dignity is most apparent; it is the kind of universe, says Robert Chew, who played the wise kingpin Proposition Joe on the show, in which you can aspire to make "an excellent exit." What Pearson made evident, in her reading, was that her character had always assumed that this moment was coming, that the circuit of her tragedy would close. "It was an incredible reveal of humanity and regret and sadness on the part of someone who has not allowed themselves to feel these things for a very long time," Simon says. On set that night, he pulled Pearson aside and told her sbe had become an actress.
Pearson does not have a theory of acting, but she has a sense of some of its requirements, a feel for what it is to be an actor in practice. When she gets a script she reads the whole thing, twice, so she understands the arc of the story. Then she begins to read her lines, to memorize them. If there are two people in a scene, she will read her own lines out loud, in her room, and say the other character's lines in her head, to preserve the timing. She will sometimes have a particular image in mind when she rehearses - a scene from a music video, or a gesture of someone she knows. Pearson rarely has a complicated account of her character's motivations, but she understands intuitively that the most important question an actor can ask is what her character wants - "money," she tells me when I ask her about the motivations of one character; "for her father to love her," describes another; to be loyal to her crew, because "that's all she had," is a third.
On another level, of course, the most important question an actor can ask is who will pay her, and how much, and to do exactly what. At first, she almost left The Wire after she saw how little she was paid as an extra. "When I see my first paycheck, I was like, 'Fifty dollars! That's crazy! I can make more than this!'" The show's veteran actors encouraged her to stick it out - but they also warned her there were likely to be limited roles available depicting a scrawny gangbanging black lesbian. It might be good, she thought, to be more versatile, to show a different side of herself, so she might come to be seen not just as a gangster but as something more.
Once, early on, Pearson got a call from the producers of the Showtime series The L Word to come audition for a part, a woman who has just gotten out of the military and who has a crush on one of the show's regular characters. This was while The Wire was still filming, and Pearson went over to the apartment of Robert Chew, who served as an acting coach for the less experienced members of the cast. "At first she was just reading the lines as Snoop," Chew says. "It was the same angle. So we stopped and I said, 'Snoop, what about other girls you know? Maybe you could just think about one of them?' And she goes, 'Oh, OK, Mr. Robert, I got it, I got it!'" Her reading improved. "She is a very good mimic," he says. But she didn't get the part.
Given how confining the Snoop character seemed, Pearson sought an alternate image. She auditioned for the role of LiI' Kim in the Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious, and felt ridiculous doing it. "I wasn't Kim at all," she says. She tried out for a part playing someone's grandmother, though she didn't get that either. I ask her why she is so insistent on breaking out of a particular type when that type is likely where she would find work. "I want to show people that I'm not just a killer," Pearson says. Someone who can play a lawyer convincingly, after all, might not merely be thought of as a killer. Acting, for Pearson, does not just require transformation. It promises a kind of transformation, too.
"When I was working with her," says David Ritz, who co-authored her memoir, "there was a great deal of confusion" - about who she was, and whether the street persona she'd spent her life adopting still fit. "There was this whole question of authenticity," Ritz says. "I think part of what she is looking for is clarification."
Simon, sounding a little anguished, says that every time a role comes up that fits Pearson's demographic, he tries to work her in, but the problem is always her accent. The Baltimore accent does a special violence to the English language. It hugs its vowels like an anaconda. "Character" sounds like "curructur" when it emerges from Pearson's throat. "Dog" is "dugg," and "period" comes out as "purryud." The authenticity in her voice was an asset on The Wire: The notion that there are intelligent people in East Baltimore who talk so differently from the rest of the country helped to deepen the sense that this is a separate world, tucked away in the inner city. For an actress seeking other roles, it is a problem. Pearson has been taking lessons to try to improve, working in particular on pronouncing every single syllable. "I'm trying," she tells me. "That's all I can do."
We are sitting, at the time, on the set of a movie called Diamond Ruff, an independent feature in Hartford, Connecticut, on the last day she's filming. Pearson is once again playing a gangster, and the movie's producer, an amiable local animator named Joe Young, tells me that she had been so convincing in a scene in which she had to hold up a convenience store that she had alarmed passers-by. The shoot has the collégial, chaotic feel of amateur theatricals, and I watch as the crew puts Pearson through her death scene; she has no lines but emerges from a van, firing at a line of police cars, and winds up splattered on the pavement. Gamely, in take after take, she throws herself at the van and then onto the ground, thrashing about, trying to convey the impact of the bullets. But it's a long way from The Wire.
Pearson has a huge, inviting laugh, and you can hear it from halfway across the set; she's playing the mascot again. She feels more relaxed here than in Baltimore, less cautious, more at ease. We begin to talk about her plans for her career. "What if this is all that there is?" I ask. "What if you're able to make a living as an actress, you're in a lot more independent movies like this one, but by the end you're not a star, and The Wire is the biggest thing you ever do?"
Pearson doesn't like that. "I mean, I'm going to make it bigger than that," she says, and shifts tensely. Then she changes the subject.
The only note of self-pity in Pearson's memoir comes at its very beginning, when she describes the neglect she suffered as an infant from her addict mother. "A little itty baby small enough to fit into the palm of the doctor's hand," Pearson writes of herself. "A baby born to die." When you are conscious of the drama of your own trajectory, when you know that you have come from, as Pearson says, "the worst of the worst," you expect your story to conclude with equal drama. They don't make movies about crack babies who grow up to become actors who appear, now and then, in music videos or on single episodes of cop shows. They make movies about crack babies who grow up to become stars.
IN HARTFORD, I ASK PEARSON IF she ever thinks about Okia Toomer, the girl she killed when she was 14. "Even if I sit here right now, it will pop into my head," she says. "I just say a prayer for both of us." When she talks about the murder, her language always seems to lapse into an equivalence, emphasizing the similarities between herself and Toomer, rather than the fundamental difference: that one had killed the other. "It wasn't her fault, it wasn't my fault," she says. "We just both were there at the wrong time." It's as if the murder had been an unfortunate accident of circumstance, rather than an act of will.
What strikes Simon as perhaps the gravest inequity of the War on Drugs is that, particularly in federal cases, juries who have no familiarity with the choices that people in places like Oliver and Montford have to make are deputized to judge them. "The absurdity of the idea that I am fit to make a judgment on what an economic crime is occurred to me at some point in the past few years," he says, "and I came to the conclusion that I could not convict anyone of a drug crime that did not involve violence." But violence, to Simon, is different. "If you're talking about an act of murder or an act of violence," he says, "I don't believe there's any cross-cultural barrier." He wants a relativism when it comes to drug crimes, and an absolutism when it comes to violence.
Simon's moral intuition feels right in theory, but in practice - in, for instance, the case of Felicia Pearson - the distinction between different types of crimes seems harder to make. Every crime reflects, in part, a choice: to pistol-whip a recalcitrant thug, to go along while your friend shoots a deadbeat, to kill a girl who is in a fight with another member of your crew. But with each step deeper into the drug trade, researchers have found, you become more likely to commit a violent crime, even in disputes that have nothing to do with the drug trade - a beef over a girlfriend, say, or an argument with your stepfather. If Pearson only partly chose to become a drug dealer - if she was partially coerced by her circumstances - and if being a drug dealer embeds you in a violent, dangerous culture, then was she really exercising an absolute choice when she turned to violence?
Soon after I meet with Pearson for the first time, I begin to wonder if it might be possible to resolve this question with data - to create a kind of criminal probability index, a single number that would quantify how much more likely someone like Pearson is to commit a crime than the average American, based simply on where and when she grew up. Some scholars think it simply isn't possible. But others - including Debra Furr-Holden, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with expertise in drug and alcohol dependence - think it might be. Furr-Holden tells me that a group at Hopkins had launched a massive study of first graders in Baltimore in 1985, right around the time Pearson started school, interviewing them again and again throughout the years to see who dropped out, who became addicted to drugs and - crucially - who committed crimes.
A graduate student of Furr-Holden's named Adam Milam breaks down the data, applying a neighborhood disadvantage index to identify all of the students from areas in Baltimore as grim as Broadway East - a sample of children whose backgrounds were very similar to Pearson's. A few weeks later he sends me an email: Among these students, Milam says, half have been arrested for a crime by the time they turned 18. He mentions that he also found something else in the depths of the study: a surprisingly strong correlation between each increment of disadvantage and your likelihood to commit a crime. If you were just 10 percent worse off than a cousin who lived in a different part of the city, you were 60 percent more likely to commit a crime. "Even I was surprised by that," Milam tells me. "We look at a lot of indicators, and we don't often find connections that strong."
I send this data to Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University of Albany, who has agreed to compare Baltimore students to those in a similar study he worked on of grade-schoolers nationwide. It turns out that there is a real divergence between the Cyst and the rest of the nation: If you grow up in inner-city Baltimore, the data indicates, you are three times more likely to commit a crime than the average American. The statistics, in other words, look very much like Pearson's description of her own life. She was exercising a choice, when she was a teenager, to enter the drug game. But it was a choice, like many made within the confines of the Cyst, whose consequences quickly closed around her, and that soon became very hard to escape.
Neighborhoods as severely deprived as Broadway East can only be found in certain American cities. There are no neighborhoods that approach this degree of isolation in New York, Los Angeles or Boston, but similar cystic environments exist in Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago. Robert Sampson, a Harvard sociologist who directs the Social Sciences Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, has just completed a landmark 15-year study in Chicago that suggests that neighborhoods like Broadway East do, in fact, exert powerful pressures on residents - but those pressures have limits. "I wouldn't go down Simon's road," Sampson tells me when I mention the writer's suggestion that we can't judge crimes committed in the Cyst. "One has to be careful about causality - it's not a deterministic process." In the worst parts of Chicago, he observes, people cling even more ferociously to the idea of personal responsibility than do better-off Americans like Simon. The view that prevails is a cognitive dissonance not unlike P.M. Smith's. You watch your son die after succumbing to a life that he would not have even seen if he had lived somewhere else. And yet you continue to insist that he made a choice.
AT ONE POINT, I ASK PEARSON whether The Wire had gotten the Baltimore streets right, more or less, whether its account rang true. "Nah, that's not what it's like," she says. The show had dramatized things, added sensation and flair, portrayed Snoop's crew hiding the bodies of two dozen murder victims in abandoned row houses. "Ain't nobody putting nobody in no vacant houses," Pearson scoffs. In real life, she says, murder is tragic, but it is also clinical, dispassionate, designed for financial gain. "It's always about the money," she says. "It's not because someone looked at you wrong. It's always about that evil dollar."
If you look through the Baltimore homicide reports, you see many purely economic murders - but you also see many stupid ones, petty, peacocking disputes that ought to end with a joke but end with someone dead. Yet this perspective on violence - that it is impersonal, compelled by circumstance - has a useful quality for someone who, like Pearson, once committed a murder. It permits you to square the person you believe yourself to be with a heinous act; it offers you the chance to move on.
There is a certain, hesitant science to redemption. Scholars study how people who have committed crimes for many years finally stop, and never return again. One landmark study found that criminals stop when they hit turning points in their lives: when they get married, have a child, find and hold a job. More recent work has shown that going straight requires a subtle change in how you narrate your own life - 1 will be the agent of my own fate, not a victim of it. Practitioners of redemption believe that such shifts depend as much on timing as on individual character. Ted Sutton, the ex-gang member in East Baltimore who is now devoted to guiding the city's youth away from crime, says the likelihood that one of his interventions will succeed depends primarily on how broken-down a gangbanger is when he calls for help. "When they are broken, I get messages begging me for guidance," Sutton says. "You got to get him at that moment - not a week later, but when he's ready. But if he goes through that moment and nothing changes for him, it makes it that much harder." Which is only to say that redemption, like the rest of the criminal arc, is fragile and conditional.
Four years ago, Ed Burns began to urge Pearson to move to Los Angeles. She often says that it is her plan, but she is still in Baltimore. At first she stayed because of her grandmother, whom she had always provided for. In the interim she has made modest escapes, first to the suburbs, then to the condo downtown. But she is now convinced that the only solution is a more radical departure, a more complete shunning of one world in favor of the other.
"I'm getting away, man," Pearson tells me. "I'm cutting everybody off, man, everybody, even down to some of my aunts and uncles. Because I'm from here, people keep judging me from my background. That's why I feel as though I'm trapped if I stay here - because they're going to keep messing with me. I could walk across the street and they would say I'm jaywalking. Everybody gonna try to lock me up. That's why I gotta go."
And yet the move out of Baltimore remains just beyond her conception. After she pleaded guilty to the heroin charge, she told a reporter for The Baltimore Sun that she was leaving for Los Angeles in a week, and they made that the headline: NOW A FREE WOMAN, FELICIA 'SNOOP' PEARSON HEADS TO L.A. TO PURSUE HER dream. But only a few days later, when I interview her for the first time, she is already amending that ambition; she will move to California after her probation ends, she tells me, in three more years.
This is the imagery of desire not just for inner-city America, but for most every American: squinting into the sun as you deplane at LAX, the chlorinated swimming-pool water sloshing up between your toes, the languid, day-drunk feeling of fame. I ask Pearson where she thinks her career will be in five years, inviting her to make the California fantasy her own. "Five years, man, I don't know," she says, suddenly a little bashful. "I don't know that." She thinks about it some, tries to get her head around it, says she would like to make five more movies in that time. "But I just live for today. Because I was always brought up, tomorrow's never promised." Perhaps, for Pearson, the fantasy will eventually come nearer, the details more tangible, the move more urgent. Or perhaps that semipermeable membrane between East Baltimore and the rest of America will remain too thick, and LA. will always be too far away.
Rolling Stone, 2012
WHEN FELICIA PEARSON GOT FAMOUS, her first and her best instinct was to flee. She was 24 at the time but looked younger - scrawny and short, butch and just baby-faced enough that she was regularly mistaken for a boy. Her accent was close to impenetrable, she was funny and swaggering and mistrustful, and she struck everyone she met as a perfect emblem of inner-city East Baltimore, a world she had barely ever left - a convicted murderer and eighth-grade dropout whose only sustained employment had been selling drugs. But the great lucky accident of Pearson's life is that The Wire, then a little-watched HBO crime drama, happened to be filming in town. One of the actors spotted her in a downtown nightclub and brought her to meet the show's creator, David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun police reporter. He wrote a part for Pearson, giving her character the actress' own nickname, Snoop, to make things easier on her. The character was a brutal enforcer for a drug dealer, and Pearson, who had never considered the possibility that she might act, played it with such reptilian matter of-factness that Stephen King called her "perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series."
The first thing Pearson did once it became clear there was a little bit of money in acting was to get rid of her heroin stash, a unilateral resignation from the drug game. "I just gave everything away," she says. "Free stuff - who gonna complain about that?" The second thing she did, more or less, was to buy a house, for $275,000, in a working-class suburb of Baltimore. What was beguiling about the place was its ordinariness, the almost conscious anti-glamour of it: a worn, three-bedroom house with grasses in the yard that did not quite cohere into a lawn. For someone who had progressed from convict to celebrity in just four years, the place seemed aspirational, a suggestion of new possibilities.
But this was 2007, possibly the worst moment in American history to buy a house, particularly if you were a brandnew actor with few leads on other roles. Pearson soon lost the house to foreclosure, and moved into a condo in downtown Baltimore, not all that far from where she grew up. Then, one day last March, local cops and federal drug agents raided her apartment, wielding a warrant for her arrest for conspiracy to distribute heroin. "Just kicked in the danged door," Pearson says. It was part of a broad sweep of dealers who operated from the LaTrobe Homes in East Baltimore, under the shadowing monolith of Johns Hopkins Hospital. The feds, it emerged, had a wiretap of Pearson on the phone with one of the drug ring's central figures, a friend of hers named Shawn Johnson, asking him to pay back her "30." Her lawyers said she had loaned Johnson 30 bucks. The prosecutors said a confidential informant would testify that Pearson was speaking in code, and that she was part of a complex conspiracy to distribute heroin.
One of the arguments The Wire advanced is that some areas of the inner city - among them the section of East Baltimore where Pearson grew up - represent a kind of evolutionary break from the rest of the country, a place where the deprivation is so deep that it challenges our conception of what America is. There are social scientists who chart the rules and adaptations of this culture, who know its boundaries so well they can draw them on a map. One social epidemiologist who has studied East Baltimore calls this separate world the Cyst, because it can seem so perfectly walled off from the rest of society. What Simon was trying to do, in fiction, was to suggest that in these neighborhoods, you aren't really free to choose whether you become a criminal or not, that here crime is the only viable choice. Now, one of the show's stars was suggesting the same thing, in real life.
The day Pearson was arrested, when the details of her case were still murky and she was sitting in jail, held without bail, Simon released a statement to the press. "Both our Constitution and our common law guarantee that we will be judged by our peers," he wrote. "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."
This is a profoundly radical statement. That every person is equally capable of obeying the law or violating it, that we all have the ability to understand one another well enough to judge one another, to decide when a stranger has violated the rules of society - this is the basis of the jury system, our criminal code and our social compact. In the case of Felicia Pearson, Simon was saying, you could see that all falling apart. You could see, in America's most abandoned and violent neighborhoods, places shaped by the War on Drugs, that the principle of free will in criminal justice might be just a delusion.
PEARSON WAS BORN IN 1980 in one of the most troubled parts of East Baltimore, an almost entirely black neighborhood called Broadway East. Her early life was imbued with near total deprivation: She was born cross-eyed because of her mother's addiction to crack, fed with an eyedropper by her foster grandmother, stripped and locked naked in a closet at the age of five so her mother could sell her clothes for drugs. Because Pearson was so bluntly a tomboy - and, from the age of 12, openly a lesbian - she was an object of curiosity on the streets, at first a mascot for the drug gangs and then an active member. By the time she was 14, the streets were so much a surrogate parent that she called the drug dealer she worked for Uncle and the kingpin he worked for Father. It was Uncle who rechristened her Snoop: Like the cartoon dog, she struck him as sweet but sad.
"What interested me was danger," Pearson writes in her autobiography, Grace After Midnight. "Going to the edge. And then over the edge. I can't tell you why, but at a time when other 13-year-olds were buying frilly dresses and training bras, I was buying guns."
There are those who avoid the drug game on Oliver and Montford, the bleak intersection where Pearson grew up, but in retrospect, she says, the trajectory of a "wild" kid like her was close to inevitable. At first she ran simple errands, but soon she was part of a small crew dispatched to collect debts - dispensing pistol-whippings, terrorizing would-be competitors. She got a nine-millimeter gun, and one day, when a rival crew from the West Side opened fire out of the back of a U-Haul, she crouched behind a garbage can and returned fire. She was learning violence by increments. "Something like a fever had come over me," she later recalled. "The fever felt permanent."
One day, when she was 15, some members of her crew got into a fight and she ran across the street to join them. Suddenly, a 15-year-old girl named Okia Toomer came at her wielding a baseball bat. "There was only one way to stop her," Pearson recalled. She shot and killed the girl. Pearson was still such a child that while she was holed up in one of Uncle's safe houses, hoping the police would lose interest in the case, she watched reruns of The Cosby Show, dreamily inserting herself into the Huxtable family, with its doctor father and lawyer mother.
Pearson pleaded guilty to murder and spent five years in prison. To ease the boredom, she busied herself manufacturing dildos for the other prisoners. "Ace bandages are the building block to a good sturdy dildo," she says in her memoir; she faked sprained ankles to get the dressings from the prison nurse. "Small, medium, large and extra large. Made them as reallife as possible." When Pearson got out in 2000, determined to go straight, she cycled through three menial jobs: in a bumper factory, a warehouse and a carwash. She liked the rhythm of the work, but was fired from each job once her supervisors discovered her criminal record. Before long she was dealing drugs again.
If Pearson believes that she was trapped by the circumstances of her birth - that her path was locked in from the start - she doesn't show it. "Snoop is one of only three or four people I've ever met who grew up in that kind of environment who has this ability to look at herself from the outside," says Ed Burns, a former Baltimore cop who served as Simon's co-writer on the show. "She can say, 'Well, I fucked that up,' and laugh at herself, and move on."
The first time Pearson saw herself on The Wire, she was impressed. "I said to myself, You go, bitch.' That's what I said." Her self-aware swagger played well onscreen. At one point in the fourth season, the character Snoop is sitting handcuffed on a curb, having just been arrested for gun possession, and she sneers resentfully up at the cop who busted her: "You thinking you all that."
"I know I'm all that," the cop replies. "I'm thinking about pussy."
At which point the scene, as scripted, is supposed to end. But there is a sudden flash of humor in Pearson's eyes, the sense that the way she sees the world is different enough that what she says as fact will play as funny. She looks up at the cop and adds an ad-lib: "Me too," she says, all deadpan. Simon left that one in.
One day last November, Pearson went back to Oliver and Montford, wearing a cocked Orioles cap and a sharp-looking leather jacket - her clothes, like herself, part of an identity in transition: half still in Baltimore, half out. Pearson is called Fe-Fe in her neighborhood, and her arrival is an event; the small cluster of people accompanying her - cousins, an uncle, her attorney - begins to swell. The neighborhood's blocks are bisected by small alleys that cut between decrepit row houses: Too narrow for cars, they are often used as escape routes for dealers running from the cops. "We used to have house parties," Pearson recalls. "It would be a hundred people in this little room." When she remembers the neighborhood fondly, it is for its intimacy, its coherence - the 50 bucks you might give someone whose gas was about to be cut off, the hundred bucks you might put in toward rent. "Everybody stick together," she says.
There are cops nearby, as usual, and they are giving the kids hanging out on the corners a hard enough time that Pearson's lawyer calls a friend of hers, a city detective, to try to get the patrolmen to lay off. There are reminders everywhere of how tenuous escape can be; Pearson recalls a basketball star she grew up with, a neighborhood hero, who was recently jailed on burglary charges. "Once you get a step further than Oliver and Montford, you gotta keep going," Pearson says. "Because it'll mess your whole life up. People keep thinking, ? got to come back and show love to the hood.' Man, forget that. Send 'em a postcard with some money. That's what they be worried about."
BALTIMORE, AS "THE WIRE" hoped to show, can seem to be governed by a hidden city, an unofficial structure of power and relationships over which the official one is laid - a necessary condition in a place where the homicide rate in neighborhoods like Pearson's is 32 times the national average. The neighborhoods here are tiny - a few blocks by a few blocks - and they stay intact across generations, so power is often informal, wielded in one neighborhood by a pastor's son, in another by a retired gangster who runs a towtruck company. A year ago, in a Northwest Baltimore neighborhood called Park Heights, two young members of a Jewish community patrol were charged with beating a black kid who had crossed an invisible neighborhood dividing line, and for a few tense days safety in the city depended in part on the efforts of a former gangster named Ted Sutton, who was sent as an emissary between the two communities. It may not be an accident that former defense lawyers, like the city's most powerful politician, the legendary congressman Elijah Cummings, ascend to elected office: They comprehend how power works in both the official city and the secret one.
In working-class Baltimore, the tininess of the neighborhoods means you can make aleft-hand turn - from Harford Road, say, onto Tivoly Avenue - and suddenly one city evaporates and the Cyst materializes. Seven out of every 10 houses boarded up, marked with a red X; plastic bags lashed to telephone poles, in lieu of public trash bins; a windless and swampy feeling that seems to stick to you. Social scientists have traced the boundaries of the Cyst, and marked its characteristics: Forty percent of the adult population addicted to drugs, 70 percent of adult males permanently outside of the labor force, 90 percent of the households headed by single parents. The Cyst is all black, but once in a while you will see a white addict, and he is invariably more strung out and crazy than anyone else for a square mile. This part of Baltimore is stuck so far in the past that it has preserved a set of strange anachronisms: Syphilis still persists here, and the drug of choice remains injected heroin. You will sometimes see a group of kids counting money on a street corner, or handing off drug packets to passing motorists as a cop car idles half a block away, but there is mostly just a pervasive listlessness. "These pockets of urban cysts are places where American values disappeared, and a fundamental ecological shift happened," says Thomas Glass, a social epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins. "Here, violence makes sense - violence is strategic."
When Baltimore was still deeply segregated, in the Fifties and Sixties, the neighborhood where Felicia Pearson grew up was called Up the Hill. It was where you bought a row house when you moved out of the projects - there were black-run law firms, doctors' offices, shops. But by the mid-Seventies, desegregation opened up the suburbs, and the black elite soon moved out. Housing projects started to fill up with unmarried women and their children, the sprawling Bethlehem Steel plant went into decline, and by the 1980s what was left here was a generational vacuum - few jobs and few educated adults.
I get much of this history from P.M. Smith, a 65-year-old minister. Smith has a big, prosperous church in the suburbs, and his sermons are broadcast on local television, yet with a brief exception as a student and a lawyer in Texas and Michigan, he has chosen to live in East Baltimore his entire life, out of some combination of duty, martyrdom and attachment. There have been costs: One of his three children died of a drug overdose, and for years, when he walked his grandson to school, he would often see teenage dealers openly lobbing handfuls of heroin samples - "testers" - into clutching, eager crowds, seeking to build business. "Grown men, trying to grab drugs that boys their own son's age had thrown," Smith says. If you are a preacher, this is one of the most dispiriting elements of East Baltimore, the forced infantilization, and you notice it everywhere.
Smith's war is a block-by-block battle to keep the edges of this neighborhood from falling into the Cyst. On his block of Luzerne Avenue, Smith got the city to change the traffic pattern, making a twoway street run one-way, to deter drug buyers from outside the neighborhood from driving through. He also staged weekly prayer vigils on his corner, to try to reclaim it from the dealers who sold drugs there. He won, more or less, but it took years, and it was only one block. "If you can control the corners," he says, "you can control the block."
If you observe this neighborhood from a distance - like Burns, Simon, Glass - it presents a bleak face: It looks like a cyst, a separate, second America. But those who live here, like Smith, are more apt to see possibility. 'Young girl who grew up there became a CPA," Smith says, pointing out a row house backgrounding a clutch of sedate drunks. A minute later, at another decrepit row house: "Boy became a teacher. Sister a lawyer. Dad's a janitor, but he put them through." If you know the neighborhood, you know the victories, too: steady jobs held, children who graduate. You can see these as exceptions, aberrations in the statistical wave, or as a standard that everyone here might reach, an extension of the American Dream. "Some of these row houses can be really nice!" Smith observes.
I ask him about Simon's rhetoric - there are two Americas, and those of us on one side of the line have no capacity to judge what happens on the other. "I don't have that kind of sympathy," Smith says. "Young people make choices."
EARLIER THIS YEAR, WHEN Pearson was locked up after her bust, she seemed "like a caged animal," says her friend Norris Davis, who visited her in jail. Prisoners watch a lot of television, and Pearson's face was on the news constantly; every couple of hours, someone would cry out, "Yo, Snoop! You on TV!" and everyone would crowd around to see a video of her arrest replayed on the screen - footage that was quickly becoming her public image. When she made bail, its terms imposed an even more tangible burden: Pearson was required to wear an electronic monitoring box on her ankle, and to pay up to $400 a week for its upkeep. Her lawyer thought it might be two years before she would go to trial. She was broke, and she was looking at a $40,000 anklebracelet bill.
Former gangbangers say the nightmare that persists, years after they've gone straight, is that the police will happen upon some forgotten crime, something that just sneaks under the statute of limitations, and suddenly there will be a goon squad at the door. Four years ago, Pearson refused to testify against a friend of hers, Steven Lashley, whom she had been with when he stabbed three men, killing one, during a fight outside a fried-chicken joint in a part of Baltimore called the Block, a stretch of strip clubs right next to police headquarters. Ever since that incident, Pearson says, she's felt as though she has a target on her back. Friends say she doesn't know whom to trust. "Snoop doesn't know how to recognize the enemy," Davis tells me.
This is the heart of one critique of the War on Drugs: that what is being criminalized is often little more than association. There is a concept in social science called Dunbar's number: Most people, scholars have found, have a natural social circle of around 150 people. If you grow up on Oliver and Montford, many of them will inevitably be drug dealers. "Even if she was not involved in drugs," Simon tells me, "the chance of her never being on the phone with anyone who was involved in drugs in East Baltimore is nonexistent. It's a factory town. It's like telling someone in Birmingham, 'Don't get on the phone and have a conversation that is at all ambiguous with anyone who works in the steel industry.' They're all drug dealers. She doesn't know anybody else."
Pearson's own perspective is more muddled. "It ain't the neighborhood," she tells me. "It ain't like, 'Oh, you better get out here and sell drugs' - nah, it's a choice." She mentions cousins of hers, good kids, who made it out of the same neighborhood and are doing all right. And yet she recognizes that the imperative of escape imposed by the ghetto makes it impossible, on some level, to adopt a one-size-fitsall morality. "People like David Simon - or even me, now, if I go back to Oliver and Montford - I feel as though I can't judge this person because they're selling drugs," she says. "Everybody got to find their own way out." Pearson spends a lot of time in our conversations insisting that she's a grown-up ("I ain't 12 anymore"), as though she's petitioning for divorce from her former self. From her perspective, choices do exist at Oliver and Montford - but you can spend your life trapped in your worstever choice.
"A lot of this comes back to what I call the Matrix problem," says Glass, the epidemiologist. 'Your subject grew up in one Matrix. She takes the blue pill. She jacks out of the world of the Cyst and gets in front of the camera and makes money and enters the dominant world. But many people who leave one Matrix and enter another find it difficult to change their cognitive programming. And they long to get back to the Matrix."
At her sentencing in August, Pearson pleaded guilty to taking part in a drug conspiracy. She got three years of probation. Following her court appearance, she insisted to the press that she is innocent, that she pleaded guilty only to get out of the monitoring payments, to resume her career and get on with her life. Just about all of the other actors from The Wire had departed Baltimore, and it had occurred to her that she would be targeted as long as she stayed. "I'm the only one left, as far as starwise," she said. "Everyone else left." Pearson was beginning to plot her escape.
"She's trying to cross the increasingly impermeable membrane between the two Americas without disowning either," Simon says. "And it's a very hard thing. A very hard thing."
ONE DAY WHILE SIMON WAS preparing to film the final season of The Wire, he got a draft of Snoop's death scene from George Pelecanos, a crime novelist who was working as a writer on the show. The outlines of the scene had been sketched out in advance: Snoop and a young boy named Michael, a character whom she has mentored and taught to kill, are driving together to a job. The drug lord who employs them believes that Michael has betrayed him, and has ordered Snoop to kill him. Michael, realizing all of this, pulls a gun on Snoop first, and kills her. Pelecanos had worked into this a writer's touch. Just before Michael pulls the trigger, Snoop pauses and gives herself a look in the rearview mirror, smoothing out her braids with her hand. "How my hair look?" she asks Michael. Simon, reading this, thought it was "one of the most amazing lines of dialogue I've ever seen written." He called Pelecanos. "I said, 'What does this line mean to you? I gotta know.' And there was this long pause and George said, 'I don't know, but don't you dare cut it.'"
Pearson was disappointed; she wanted her character to go down in a blaze of glory. "When I read the script, I was like, 'Huh? Snoop getting shot - nah.' Because they don't have a battle scene or nothing." Simon made sure to be on set the night they were filming. Pearson was still an amateur actress - a few months earlier, she'd been showing up on set without knowing her lines, figuring she could ad-lib her way through it - and he wasn't sure what kind of reading she'd give. What Pearson did was to soften the line, to downplay the melodrama. In doing so, she heightened her character's sense of regret, and emphasized her acceptance of her own fate. The Wire's philosophy, in which the systems of society dehumanize its inhabitants, means that a character's death is often when their dignity is most apparent; it is the kind of universe, says Robert Chew, who played the wise kingpin Proposition Joe on the show, in which you can aspire to make "an excellent exit." What Pearson made evident, in her reading, was that her character had always assumed that this moment was coming, that the circuit of her tragedy would close. "It was an incredible reveal of humanity and regret and sadness on the part of someone who has not allowed themselves to feel these things for a very long time," Simon says. On set that night, he pulled Pearson aside and told her sbe had become an actress.
Pearson does not have a theory of acting, but she has a sense of some of its requirements, a feel for what it is to be an actor in practice. When she gets a script she reads the whole thing, twice, so she understands the arc of the story. Then she begins to read her lines, to memorize them. If there are two people in a scene, she will read her own lines out loud, in her room, and say the other character's lines in her head, to preserve the timing. She will sometimes have a particular image in mind when she rehearses - a scene from a music video, or a gesture of someone she knows. Pearson rarely has a complicated account of her character's motivations, but she understands intuitively that the most important question an actor can ask is what her character wants - "money," she tells me when I ask her about the motivations of one character; "for her father to love her," describes another; to be loyal to her crew, because "that's all she had," is a third.
On another level, of course, the most important question an actor can ask is who will pay her, and how much, and to do exactly what. At first, she almost left The Wire after she saw how little she was paid as an extra. "When I see my first paycheck, I was like, 'Fifty dollars! That's crazy! I can make more than this!'" The show's veteran actors encouraged her to stick it out - but they also warned her there were likely to be limited roles available depicting a scrawny gangbanging black lesbian. It might be good, she thought, to be more versatile, to show a different side of herself, so she might come to be seen not just as a gangster but as something more.
Once, early on, Pearson got a call from the producers of the Showtime series The L Word to come audition for a part, a woman who has just gotten out of the military and who has a crush on one of the show's regular characters. This was while The Wire was still filming, and Pearson went over to the apartment of Robert Chew, who served as an acting coach for the less experienced members of the cast. "At first she was just reading the lines as Snoop," Chew says. "It was the same angle. So we stopped and I said, 'Snoop, what about other girls you know? Maybe you could just think about one of them?' And she goes, 'Oh, OK, Mr. Robert, I got it, I got it!'" Her reading improved. "She is a very good mimic," he says. But she didn't get the part.
Given how confining the Snoop character seemed, Pearson sought an alternate image. She auditioned for the role of LiI' Kim in the Biggie Smalls biopic Notorious, and felt ridiculous doing it. "I wasn't Kim at all," she says. She tried out for a part playing someone's grandmother, though she didn't get that either. I ask her why she is so insistent on breaking out of a particular type when that type is likely where she would find work. "I want to show people that I'm not just a killer," Pearson says. Someone who can play a lawyer convincingly, after all, might not merely be thought of as a killer. Acting, for Pearson, does not just require transformation. It promises a kind of transformation, too.
"When I was working with her," says David Ritz, who co-authored her memoir, "there was a great deal of confusion" - about who she was, and whether the street persona she'd spent her life adopting still fit. "There was this whole question of authenticity," Ritz says. "I think part of what she is looking for is clarification."
Simon, sounding a little anguished, says that every time a role comes up that fits Pearson's demographic, he tries to work her in, but the problem is always her accent. The Baltimore accent does a special violence to the English language. It hugs its vowels like an anaconda. "Character" sounds like "curructur" when it emerges from Pearson's throat. "Dog" is "dugg," and "period" comes out as "purryud." The authenticity in her voice was an asset on The Wire: The notion that there are intelligent people in East Baltimore who talk so differently from the rest of the country helped to deepen the sense that this is a separate world, tucked away in the inner city. For an actress seeking other roles, it is a problem. Pearson has been taking lessons to try to improve, working in particular on pronouncing every single syllable. "I'm trying," she tells me. "That's all I can do."
We are sitting, at the time, on the set of a movie called Diamond Ruff, an independent feature in Hartford, Connecticut, on the last day she's filming. Pearson is once again playing a gangster, and the movie's producer, an amiable local animator named Joe Young, tells me that she had been so convincing in a scene in which she had to hold up a convenience store that she had alarmed passers-by. The shoot has the collégial, chaotic feel of amateur theatricals, and I watch as the crew puts Pearson through her death scene; she has no lines but emerges from a van, firing at a line of police cars, and winds up splattered on the pavement. Gamely, in take after take, she throws herself at the van and then onto the ground, thrashing about, trying to convey the impact of the bullets. But it's a long way from The Wire.
Pearson has a huge, inviting laugh, and you can hear it from halfway across the set; she's playing the mascot again. She feels more relaxed here than in Baltimore, less cautious, more at ease. We begin to talk about her plans for her career. "What if this is all that there is?" I ask. "What if you're able to make a living as an actress, you're in a lot more independent movies like this one, but by the end you're not a star, and The Wire is the biggest thing you ever do?"
Pearson doesn't like that. "I mean, I'm going to make it bigger than that," she says, and shifts tensely. Then she changes the subject.
The only note of self-pity in Pearson's memoir comes at its very beginning, when she describes the neglect she suffered as an infant from her addict mother. "A little itty baby small enough to fit into the palm of the doctor's hand," Pearson writes of herself. "A baby born to die." When you are conscious of the drama of your own trajectory, when you know that you have come from, as Pearson says, "the worst of the worst," you expect your story to conclude with equal drama. They don't make movies about crack babies who grow up to become actors who appear, now and then, in music videos or on single episodes of cop shows. They make movies about crack babies who grow up to become stars.
IN HARTFORD, I ASK PEARSON IF she ever thinks about Okia Toomer, the girl she killed when she was 14. "Even if I sit here right now, it will pop into my head," she says. "I just say a prayer for both of us." When she talks about the murder, her language always seems to lapse into an equivalence, emphasizing the similarities between herself and Toomer, rather than the fundamental difference: that one had killed the other. "It wasn't her fault, it wasn't my fault," she says. "We just both were there at the wrong time." It's as if the murder had been an unfortunate accident of circumstance, rather than an act of will.
What strikes Simon as perhaps the gravest inequity of the War on Drugs is that, particularly in federal cases, juries who have no familiarity with the choices that people in places like Oliver and Montford have to make are deputized to judge them. "The absurdity of the idea that I am fit to make a judgment on what an economic crime is occurred to me at some point in the past few years," he says, "and I came to the conclusion that I could not convict anyone of a drug crime that did not involve violence." But violence, to Simon, is different. "If you're talking about an act of murder or an act of violence," he says, "I don't believe there's any cross-cultural barrier." He wants a relativism when it comes to drug crimes, and an absolutism when it comes to violence.
Simon's moral intuition feels right in theory, but in practice - in, for instance, the case of Felicia Pearson - the distinction between different types of crimes seems harder to make. Every crime reflects, in part, a choice: to pistol-whip a recalcitrant thug, to go along while your friend shoots a deadbeat, to kill a girl who is in a fight with another member of your crew. But with each step deeper into the drug trade, researchers have found, you become more likely to commit a violent crime, even in disputes that have nothing to do with the drug trade - a beef over a girlfriend, say, or an argument with your stepfather. If Pearson only partly chose to become a drug dealer - if she was partially coerced by her circumstances - and if being a drug dealer embeds you in a violent, dangerous culture, then was she really exercising an absolute choice when she turned to violence?
Soon after I meet with Pearson for the first time, I begin to wonder if it might be possible to resolve this question with data - to create a kind of criminal probability index, a single number that would quantify how much more likely someone like Pearson is to commit a crime than the average American, based simply on where and when she grew up. Some scholars think it simply isn't possible. But others - including Debra Furr-Holden, an epidemiologist at Johns Hopkins with expertise in drug and alcohol dependence - think it might be. Furr-Holden tells me that a group at Hopkins had launched a massive study of first graders in Baltimore in 1985, right around the time Pearson started school, interviewing them again and again throughout the years to see who dropped out, who became addicted to drugs and - crucially - who committed crimes.
A graduate student of Furr-Holden's named Adam Milam breaks down the data, applying a neighborhood disadvantage index to identify all of the students from areas in Baltimore as grim as Broadway East - a sample of children whose backgrounds were very similar to Pearson's. A few weeks later he sends me an email: Among these students, Milam says, half have been arrested for a crime by the time they turned 18. He mentions that he also found something else in the depths of the study: a surprisingly strong correlation between each increment of disadvantage and your likelihood to commit a crime. If you were just 10 percent worse off than a cousin who lived in a different part of the city, you were 60 percent more likely to commit a crime. "Even I was surprised by that," Milam tells me. "We look at a lot of indicators, and we don't often find connections that strong."
I send this data to Shawn Bushway, a criminologist at the University of Albany, who has agreed to compare Baltimore students to those in a similar study he worked on of grade-schoolers nationwide. It turns out that there is a real divergence between the Cyst and the rest of the nation: If you grow up in inner-city Baltimore, the data indicates, you are three times more likely to commit a crime than the average American. The statistics, in other words, look very much like Pearson's description of her own life. She was exercising a choice, when she was a teenager, to enter the drug game. But it was a choice, like many made within the confines of the Cyst, whose consequences quickly closed around her, and that soon became very hard to escape.
Neighborhoods as severely deprived as Broadway East can only be found in certain American cities. There are no neighborhoods that approach this degree of isolation in New York, Los Angeles or Boston, but similar cystic environments exist in Detroit, Cleveland and Chicago. Robert Sampson, a Harvard sociologist who directs the Social Sciences Program at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, has just completed a landmark 15-year study in Chicago that suggests that neighborhoods like Broadway East do, in fact, exert powerful pressures on residents - but those pressures have limits. "I wouldn't go down Simon's road," Sampson tells me when I mention the writer's suggestion that we can't judge crimes committed in the Cyst. "One has to be careful about causality - it's not a deterministic process." In the worst parts of Chicago, he observes, people cling even more ferociously to the idea of personal responsibility than do better-off Americans like Simon. The view that prevails is a cognitive dissonance not unlike P.M. Smith's. You watch your son die after succumbing to a life that he would not have even seen if he had lived somewhere else. And yet you continue to insist that he made a choice.
AT ONE POINT, I ASK PEARSON whether The Wire had gotten the Baltimore streets right, more or less, whether its account rang true. "Nah, that's not what it's like," she says. The show had dramatized things, added sensation and flair, portrayed Snoop's crew hiding the bodies of two dozen murder victims in abandoned row houses. "Ain't nobody putting nobody in no vacant houses," Pearson scoffs. In real life, she says, murder is tragic, but it is also clinical, dispassionate, designed for financial gain. "It's always about the money," she says. "It's not because someone looked at you wrong. It's always about that evil dollar."
If you look through the Baltimore homicide reports, you see many purely economic murders - but you also see many stupid ones, petty, peacocking disputes that ought to end with a joke but end with someone dead. Yet this perspective on violence - that it is impersonal, compelled by circumstance - has a useful quality for someone who, like Pearson, once committed a murder. It permits you to square the person you believe yourself to be with a heinous act; it offers you the chance to move on.
There is a certain, hesitant science to redemption. Scholars study how people who have committed crimes for many years finally stop, and never return again. One landmark study found that criminals stop when they hit turning points in their lives: when they get married, have a child, find and hold a job. More recent work has shown that going straight requires a subtle change in how you narrate your own life - 1 will be the agent of my own fate, not a victim of it. Practitioners of redemption believe that such shifts depend as much on timing as on individual character. Ted Sutton, the ex-gang member in East Baltimore who is now devoted to guiding the city's youth away from crime, says the likelihood that one of his interventions will succeed depends primarily on how broken-down a gangbanger is when he calls for help. "When they are broken, I get messages begging me for guidance," Sutton says. "You got to get him at that moment - not a week later, but when he's ready. But if he goes through that moment and nothing changes for him, it makes it that much harder." Which is only to say that redemption, like the rest of the criminal arc, is fragile and conditional.
Four years ago, Ed Burns began to urge Pearson to move to Los Angeles. She often says that it is her plan, but she is still in Baltimore. At first she stayed because of her grandmother, whom she had always provided for. In the interim she has made modest escapes, first to the suburbs, then to the condo downtown. But she is now convinced that the only solution is a more radical departure, a more complete shunning of one world in favor of the other.
"I'm getting away, man," Pearson tells me. "I'm cutting everybody off, man, everybody, even down to some of my aunts and uncles. Because I'm from here, people keep judging me from my background. That's why I feel as though I'm trapped if I stay here - because they're going to keep messing with me. I could walk across the street and they would say I'm jaywalking. Everybody gonna try to lock me up. That's why I gotta go."
And yet the move out of Baltimore remains just beyond her conception. After she pleaded guilty to the heroin charge, she told a reporter for The Baltimore Sun that she was leaving for Los Angeles in a week, and they made that the headline: NOW A FREE WOMAN, FELICIA 'SNOOP' PEARSON HEADS TO L.A. TO PURSUE HER dream. But only a few days later, when I interview her for the first time, she is already amending that ambition; she will move to California after her probation ends, she tells me, in three more years.
This is the imagery of desire not just for inner-city America, but for most every American: squinting into the sun as you deplane at LAX, the chlorinated swimming-pool water sloshing up between your toes, the languid, day-drunk feeling of fame. I ask Pearson where she thinks her career will be in five years, inviting her to make the California fantasy her own. "Five years, man, I don't know," she says, suddenly a little bashful. "I don't know that." She thinks about it some, tries to get her head around it, says she would like to make five more movies in that time. "But I just live for today. Because I was always brought up, tomorrow's never promised." Perhaps, for Pearson, the fantasy will eventually come nearer, the details more tangible, the move more urgent. Or perhaps that semipermeable membrane between East Baltimore and the rest of America will remain too thick, and LA. will always be too far away.