Partlow, in the company of Snoop, pistol-whips the man to the point of being unrecognizable; an emotional execution following candid dialogue about what a man – some men anyway – has to do in prison if he wants sex. “Man gotta bust his nut, know what I’m sayin’?” says Michael’s stepfather.
“I do,” says Partlow and then administers a beating unlike anything we’ve seen from him before.
At home, Michael tells his agitated mother she best stop waiting around for her man to get back from the store because “he ain’t coming back.”
FELICIA “SNOOP” PEARSON
Baby girl never really knew her daddy and what she remembers of her mama she’d sooner forget: a crack fiend who didn’t care enough about the baby she was carrying to give up the dope. Baby girl came into the world addicted, cross-eyed, and barely big enough to thrive. But she lived and she thrived because Felicia “Snoop” Pearson is a survivor.
There’s little else to explain her journey. Crack baby. Foster child. Baby-faced gangsta. Teenaged murderer. Prison inmate. Drug dealer. Actor.
As the androgynous, nail gun assassin on The Wire, Pearson not only looked the part with her cap of braided hair, oversized T-shirts and baggy shorts, she lived it.
“My world was ruled by street smarts. If you have them, you survive; if you don’t you die. That was an exciting idea.”1
Pearson learned early on that no good would come from a mother who’d sell the Sunday dress off her daughter’s back to cop another high. She saw the beautiful lady of her dreams for what she really was and would never be. As a child, she was smart enough to know that the elderly couple who had taken her into their East Baltimore home, Cora and Levi Pearson, were all the parents she would need.
Mama and Pop loved and cared for her and young FeFe loved them back.
From the time she was an infant, Pearson was raised by the couple with all sorts of family coming and going and staying. Their two-story, brick row house in the 2400 block of East Oliver Street was home for Pearson.
“She never gave my mother any trouble,’’ says James Jackson, 68, of York, PA, one of Cora and Levi Pearson’s four children.
On the streets of East Baltimore, Felicia was different, a girl who looked and acted like a boy and was proud of it. Book-smart and street-wise, she was enticed by the world beyond the front door of the Oliver Street row house.
Pearson’s devotion to the foster parents who eventually adopted her wasn’t enough to keep her in school or out of harm’s way.
“Being outside Mama’s house was always more interesting than being inside … The streets were screaming at me – that’s for sure. But the streets were screaming at everyone. Some kids ignored those screams. I didn’t.
“I had to see what the screaming was all about.” 2
The drug trade was lively at the corner of Oliver and Montford, a few feet from the Pearsons’ front stoop. A boy could earn good money working as a lookout or guarding the stash of the local drug dealer. He could earn big money if he led a corner crew.
And FeFe was more boy than girl, despite her brown doe eyes and angelic face. She dressed like a boy ’cause that’s who she was. She knew then she preferred girls to boys for sex, experimented at a tender age, and wasn’t ashamed of it.
A drug dealer who fondly nicknamed her Snoop – after comic-strip character Charlie Brown’s pet beagle – befriended her and tried to keep her out of trouble and in school. He was as close to her as any uncle, but she wouldn’t listen.
By the time she was ten, she had a 9mm gun stashed under her mama’s back porch. At 13, she had left behind an all-girl crew to run with the boys, doing a nigga’s business. Pistol-whip a bitch for stealing drugs. Trade shots with some Westside boys who don’t belong here. Pop a few niggas in a mall parking lot.
No way to live. Only way to survive.
“Seemed like death rode down Oliver Street more often than the ice cream truck. Death was a regular. Even as a baby girl, death – up close and real as rain – was a part of my life.”3
April 27, 1995, three weeks before her 15th birthday, Pearson was out in the neighborhood walking when she saw a street fight brewing. She couldn’t ignore it, walked right into the middle of it, and when a baseball bat came swinging at her head, she ducked and then tried to stop it the only way she thought she could.
She pulled a gun and fired. The girl with the bat hit the ground. Death was at Snoop’s door. She was 14 and a killer.
It took two years for the case to wend its way through the courts as she sat in Baltimore City Jail. After pleading guilty to second-degree murder and a gun charge, she received a 25-year sentence, all but eight years suspended, and a 20-year sentence with 12 years suspended, both to run concurrently.
Pearson arrived at the Maryland Correctional Institution for Women in December 1996. She was 16 years old.
“So you get in the Cut and you find your place. My place was to fly under the radar. I didn’t want to be no star in Grandma’s house. I’d rather not be noticed.”4
Besides earning her General Equivalency Diploma and lying low, Snoop fell in love with a prison guard and found grace while locked up. The love affair didn’t last, but word of the death of her mentor, a drug dealer she called “Uncle,” overwhelmed her with rage and grief and – miraculously – cracked open her heart to the power of redemption.
“I believed in the grace business. I knew I was blessed. And knowing that gave me patience. Gave me fortitude. Gave me the wherewithal to grind it out, hour after hour, day after day.”5
That knowledge sustained her through the rest of her prison stay. Pearson was released July 7, 2000, determined to begin anew and do right. She got a $15-an-hour job making car bumpers, but when her employer discovered she had been in prison, she was fired.
Pearson then worked for a book store. That too didn’t last once they learned of her past. But the streets were ready to take her back, and back she went, returning to the drug trade’s easy money, no questions asked.
And that was her life until a man she didn’t know or recognize noticed her in a club on Guilford Avenue in downtown Baltimore. The man had a nasty scar on his face.
“He was looking at me so I told my cousin, Man this guy right here looking at me. He say, Who? I say this guy right here. He say, Man’s Omar. I say, You know him? Yeah, he play on The Wire … Finally he came over and he say, I have a question for you, Is you a girl or a boy?”6
The conversation with actor Michael Kenneth Williams led to an introduction to producer-writer Ed Burns who recognized her potential and authentic voice.
Pearson wasn’t sure what would come of it, but when Burns and Simon cast her as the icy hit woman for drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield, she slipped into the role as though she was born to it. Packing the Lexus of nail guns, the character Snoop was a hip-hop executioner for our times.
Baby girl in a different game now and working it as hard. Signing with an agent, studying with an acting coach, lending her insights when a scene or script didn’t feel right and working hard to do right. Pearson was determined to make good on this chance.
“At first she was just being herself. By the end of the show, she was hitting every mark,” says Simon.
Added Burns: “She knows she had a big break. And she’s one of the few people that I’ve met in my journey that took advantage of the break. She is giving it a hell of a shot. I think she has a lot more to offer to the camera.”
Since The Wire ended, Pearson has pushed ahead with her new life. She bought a house on a street of neat bungalows and tidy lawns, miles away from the old neighborhood. She has landed parts in two movies, and like other actors identified with a particular role, struggled to keep from being typecast.
Pearson penned an autobiography, Grace After Midnight, with writer David Ritz and it’s a gritty, provocative portrait of her life on the streets. She’s also recorded two songs, hoping to make her mark as a rap singer.
“I keep encouraging her not to step back, to ke
ep going forward,’’ says Mr. Jackson, her adoptive big brother. “I do worry about her. She is the only sister I got. I hate to see her not do good.
“I think everybody in life deserve a break and seeing as she is getting hers I want her to keep on doing good.”
But can playing an iconic character on an acclaimed HBO series for a couple of seasons completely change the trajectory of a life?
Last year, Pearson found herself back in court, in handcuffs and leg irons, a witness to a murder whom prosecutors claimed wasn’t cooperating, a scene not unlike one the writers for The Wire might have scripted.
But Pearson’s lawyer insisted that his client had not been an unwilling participant. And when the judge who issued the warrant for her arrest realized Pearson hadn’t received notice of the court dates in the murder case, he apologized to her, noting that her past troubles “were a world away.”
While promoting her book at the Enoch Pratt Free Library last year, Pearson talked about her past with a self-awareness of the responsibility she now bears.
“I just thank God every night that I’m here. You know just to tell my story. This is my chance. I could probably change a couple peoples’ lives in this room. There are lot of trials and tribulations that I went through. Just hold your head up. Don’t let nothing steer you wrong. Just keep positive people around you … People ask me all the time now that they read the book, if you could change one thing in your life what would you change. I said I go back to that day when I was running toward [a fight] and I shot and killed somebody.”7
In Felicia Pearson’s old neighborhood, vacant, boarded-up houses seem to outnumber those where families live. Shirley’s Honey Hole bar is busy even at midday.
Trash is strewn in alleys and behind rundown houses. Pearson still comes round by East Oliver Street where Alicia Ford and Quantay Johnson are quick to distinguish the girl they grew up with from the terrifying character she played on television.
“She funny. She aggravating at the same time. She’s a giver, a friendly soul,’’ says Johnson, 33, a Pearson relative. “She real strong as a person … strong enough to grow up in a family she didn’t know. But everybody loved her. My grandmother is real proud of her.”
Says the 26-year-old Ford: “No matter what she does, she always going to be Felicia Pearson to us. We look at her no different. She’s blood.”
“We don’t even call her Snoop,” adds Johnson. “We call her FeFe.”
Ann LoLordo
episode forty-eight
“A NEW DAY”
“You play in dirt, you get dirty.”
– MCNULTY
Directed by Brad Anderson
Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by Ed Burns
Randy is petrified upon learning the fate of Little Kevin, last seen headed for a row of vacant houses near the playground. Tired of being run off by Officer Walker, the cop who broke Donut’s fingers, the boys think of ways to get back at him. Michael says that he’s “got this one.”
Carcetti gets a visit from the powerful minister Reid Franklin, who comes complaining about Herc’s stop-and-search of a fellow man of the cloth.
Franklin wants a civilian review board of police behavior to ensure that complaints will be taken seriously. Carcetti is eating his first true bowl of damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t shit. If he fires Herc, the department rebels. If he doesn’t, the African-American political base is enraged.
At school, Prez soldiers on, teaching practical math, and Randy, now saddled with the snitch rep is shunned trying to sell his candy to kids who used to greet him happily.
Following Slim Charles in a commandeered taxi-cab, Omar and Renaldo trail him to Prop Joe’s eastside appliance store, upon which Omar remarks: “… on this caper, the more we learn, the less we know.”
In a talk with the homicide unit, Pearlman and Daniels – head of the courthouse Violent Crimes Unit and the police department’s Criminal Investigation Division, respectively – claim that a new day has dawned.
Asking for suggestions about how to make things better, they are told everything from “better witness protection” to “more Scotch.”
When Carcetti right-hand Norm Wilson tells Rawls that the mayor wants all police districts to steer away from wide-net arrests and concentrate on quality-of-life problems and big-picture investigations, Rawls asks straight up why Burrell hasn’t been fired.
Apprised of the problem with Herc and the ruffled minister, Rawls says to dump the problem on Daniels’s desk. When Daniels doesn’t see much to the incident in terms of true misconduct, Rawls tells him that City Hall is looking for him to “do the right thing.”
Putting the payback of Officer Walker into action, Dukie keys the cop’s private car and, when chased, leads the man into an alley. There, a masked Michael points a gun at the off-duty, somewhat inebriated officer, saying: “You the police like to fuck with a nigga?” and fires a warning shot.
But then he sees a ring on Walker’s finger, the ill-fated Old Face Andre ring that has made its way from pillar to post: from Andre to Marlo to Omar to Walker.
Michael tells Walker to hand it over and when he does, Namond tosses a bucket of yellow paint on the cop. When Walker claims in the station house that the attack on him was a gang declaration of war – “us against them” – McNulty cannot conceal his contempt, saying: “Yellow paint a declaration of war?”
A group of thugs step up to Randy outside of school and accuse him of talking to the police. Randy denies it and they turn on Michael, wanting to know what he’s doing hanging with a snitch.
Michael responds with a punch and by the time Prez can break it up, Randy is on the ground, bloody and stunned. Michael and Dukie stand by as Prez helps Randy, who swears he only told the cops common knowledge: that Lex was killed on a playground and he heard about it from Little Kevin. Michael says the best policy is not to talk to cops no matter what and Prez agrees.
Talk of Michael standing up for a snitch, however, soon makes it back to Marlo.
Carcetti is determined to find a five percent pay raise for the police department while Rawls distributes the new mayor’s order calling for quality police work over statistics. At the end of the meeting, Daniels asks permission to reorganize the Major Crimes Unit, the detail that did such good work over the years only to be stymied by political agendas. Rawls says okay.
Taking this good news to Lester Freamon, Daniels tells the savvy detective to pick the squad of his dreams, that it’s “morning in Baltimore, Lester. Wake up and smell the coffee.”
The Slim Charles trail leads Omar and Renaldo to a seminar room at the Holiday Inn with a “New Day Co-op” sign and a table around which sit Prop Joe, Fat Face Rick and others. When Marlo joins them, Omar’s blood begins to sing.
“If it’s what I think it is,” he says, “our little clutch of chickens might be putting all their eggs up in one basket.”
As Freamon packs up his desk in homicide to again begin working more complicated cases, Carver comes in looking for Bunk, wanting to know what happened with the promise to look after Randy Wagstaff, the kid from the Lex murder.
Bunk doesn’t know what he’s talking about and Carver, embarrassed, says Herc was supposed to bring the boy to Bunk for safekeeping.
Working the good cop/bad cop routine on Herc, Bunk and Freamon interrogate their colleague about the fate of Randy. Bunk takes the ogre role, storming out to leave Freamon to play the understanding shrink.
Herc lays it out for Lester, including info about the nail gun he found on Partlow and Snoop. Though the workingman’s tool meant nothing to Herc, Lester makes note of it.
At the Western District roll call, Carcetti announces the five percent raise he’s managed to put together, along with the new order of abandoning quotas in favor of quality police work.
“If the old dogs can’t handle the job, I’ll find new ones who can,” he vows.
With reluctance, Carcetti meets with Burrell, who concedes that while the big pict
ure of policing is not what he does best, the slap on the wrist that Daniels gave Herc for jacking up a black minister will not sit well in the community. His solution: look for dirt in the six years that Herc worked narcotics, a beat in which “there are no virgins.”
Carcetti fully understands now that while Burrell may not be much of a cop, he’s a hell of a politician. He will later realize that he promised the cops a meager pay raise without knowing that he inherited a $54 million school system deficit from the Royce Administration.
“How the fuck,” he asks, “do we deal with that?”
Reconciled and reunited with Sherrod (no match for the streets as a solo act) Bubbles is doing a bang-up business with his mobile “Bubbles Depot.”
Finding a toppled aluminum utility pole – easily worth a cool hundred as scrap – makes for good feelings all around. Until the Fiend shows up: same old story, same old song and beatdown.
Omar and Renaldo raid Prop Joe’s appliance store, holding heavy weapons on Joe and his lieutenants, Cheese and Slim Charles. Prop Joe promises to lead Omar to Marlo’s package. If you don’t, says Omar, I’ll tell the boy you set him up for the poker heist.
When Bunk and Freamon complain to Prez that Randy’s “math teacher” won’t let him talk to cops, Prez backs it up: “I’m siding with my kids.”
Lester understands but Bunk presses for something, anything. Prez gives up the address of the playground where Randy told Lex to meet a girl. “That’s all he did,” Prez insists.
When Dukie is one of five eighth graders told they will be promoted to high school, he is crestfallen: he will be leaving his friends behind, a smaller fish in a more dangerous pond.
Colvin and Professor Parenti also get bad news from Marcia Donnelly: “They pulled the pin on your program.”
Bunny and the academic plead for the class to the school superintendent, arguing that attendance has been near-perfect, there were no suspensions for behavior problems and regular classes have improved with the troublemakers removed.
The Wire Page 30
