The Corner
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Furthermore, we eventually showed relevant portions of the book to each of the main characters, who could then suggest—but not insist on—changes. We encouraged our subjects to correct factual mistakes, explain contradictions, or add relevant details to their stories. Journalists often refuse to share unpublished material with sources, but in a project such as this, the usual prohibition seems senseless. To write narrative with an interior point-of-view, reporters need everything they can acquire from their subjects. To their credit, the people of Fayette Street read what we wrote and then, for the most part, talked honestly about it. That interactive process made the book better, and in a very real sense, more accurate.
Still, readers may wonder whether some characters were inclined to recount events to their own advantage, exaggerating or fabricating details. The fact is that the authors were told a great many lies on a great many occasions; had we conducted our research in a limited window of time, based on limited interaction with people, this account would be seriously flawed. Instead, we continued to follow our subjects for more than four years—a long time for anyone to play false with their lives. Throughout 1993, for example, DeAndre McCullough refused to admit to the use of any drugs other than weed and liquor. By 1995, however, he was in detox, humbly displaying several track marks and admitting to having snorted heroin as early as Christmas two years earlier. Time, as they say, will tell.
One last note of disclosure: A year is a long time to watch people struggle and suffer, and many people were doing a lot of both on Fayette Street in 1993. We were reporters, yet we did not avoid the chance to encourage those who wanted to change, to give some measure of emotional support to people when they talked about getting straight or looking into detox and recovery.
In the beginning this caused us some concern. The usual policy of strict nonintervention argues that if someone asks for a lift to the methadone clinic, a reporter says no. The notion is that if the man is meant to get in a meth program, he’ll do it whether or not a reporter and his automobile happen to be at hand. Similarly, if that man is dollars light for a morning blast, then he should stay light whether or not the reporter has cash in his pocket.
That impartial stance sounds well and good until the day the reporter is confronted with another human being so sick and tired that he breaks down and cries openly for someone to drive him to a clinic. Or the day that same reporter takes a run-and-gun dope fiend out of the corner mix for a two-hour interview, only to see him become ill from withdrawal. If the fiend was on his game, he’d have blast money by now; instead, he spent the morning talking about his life to a writer. And Lord, the man needs to hold five dollars in a hurry.
As a rule, we did not intervene in the swirl of events. But there were a few instances when we ignored the rule. We came to this project as reporters, but over time we found ourselves caring more about our subjects than we ever expected. If that helped or hurt, someone more than he or she otherwise would have been helped or hurt, then it could be argued that our source material is tainted. Yet the limited support we provided had decidedly little effect. DeAndre, Fran, Gary—all began the year in the corner mix, all of them ended there. And Blue—who escaped from his own shooting gallery—did so quietly and with little encouragement from anyone. Perhaps all our journalistic concerns about nonintervention are predicated on a touch of vanity. The corner culture and addiction are powerful forces—equal to or greater than all the legal barriers and social programming arrayed against them. On Fayette Street, the odds do not change because someone pops up with a notepad and the occasional kindness.
Our best guide in these matters proved to be none other than Elliot Liebow, who, in 1962 and 1963, conducted his classic study of Washington, D.C., street-corner men in similar fashion. In his notes on methodology for Tally’s Corner, Liebow wrote: “The people I was observing knew I was observing them. Some exploited me, not as an outsider, but rather as one who, as a rule, had more resources than they did. When one of them came up with resources—money or a car, for example—he too was exploited in the same way. I usually tried to limit money or other favors to what I thought each would have gotten from another friend had he the same resources as I. I tried to meet requests as best I could without becoming conspicuous.”
At the risk of neglecting to name many of those along Fayette Street who gave us their cooperation and support, we would specifically like to thank those who opened their world to us: Fran Boyd and the Boyd family; William and Roberta McCullough and their family; DeAndre McCullough, Tyreeka Freamon, and DeRodd Hearns; Richard Carter and his family; Ella Thompson, her family, and the children of the Martin Luther King Jr. Recreation Center; George Epps, Michael Ellerbee, Dennis Davis, Terry “Eggy Daddy” Hamlin, Bryan Sampson, Tony Boice, and Veronica Boice. We remember, too, Curtis Davis, Pimp, Rita, Scalio, Bread, Shardene, and all the other lost soldiers. Especially, we hold to the memory of Gary McCullough, a man of great heart and gentle spirit. His true friendship and his interest in this book helped sustain us.
Also assisting us in our journeys along Fayette Street were a host of other generous souls: Frank Long, Marzell Myers, Myrtle Summers, and Joyce Smith of the community group and rec center; Col. Ron Daniel of the Baltimore Police Department, as well as those supervisors and officers of the Western and Southern Districts who understood the project and gave us room to work; Commissioner Lamont Flanagan of the Baltimore Detention Center; Judge H. Gary Bass of the District Court of Baltimore; John Seaman and the staff of the South Baltimore Homeless Shelter; Rose Davis at Francis M. Woods Senior High School; Kathy McGaha and Jeanne McNamara with the social work department at Bon Secours Hospital; Dr. Dan Howard of Bon Secours and the community health clinic at St. Edward’s; the Rev. Isaac T. Golder, a pastor of the Good News Bible Chapel, an affiliate of the Fulton Avenue Baptist Church; and Rebecca Corbett, a friend and mentor at the Baltimore Sun. We are also indebted to Joe Laney, Sonny Mays, and Larry “House” Canada—three sage veterans of Fayette and Monroe who shared some hard-bought wisdom with us.
And last, but certainly not least, there is the crew once known as the Crenshaw Mafia Brothers. We remember Dinky and Boo, and we offer this West Baltimore shout-out to Tae, Manny Man, Dion, Brooks, Brian, Dewayne, Dorian, Arnold, Ronald, and all the rest:
Go easy. Step light. Stay free.
In our own lives, Ed wishes to thank Anna Burns, and David owes just about everything to Kayle Tucker Simon. Without their constant love and support, the work would not be done.
At Broadway Books our thanks go to Bill Shinker for unstinting support of the project, as well as Victoria Andros, Luke Dempsey, Rebecca Holland, Maggie Richards, Trigg Robinson, Jennifer Swihart, and Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich. Thanks as well to our agent, Rafe Sagalyn, who stayed with this project even as deadlines tumbled one after the next. And we are humbled by the efforts of our line editor, Barbara Ravage; this book would have been quite close to incoherent without her careful eye.
At the center of it all is John Sterling. Not only did he craft this book with all the skill and grace of a great editor, he was there at the first spark of creation. It was John who initially suggested an account of life on a city corner, and it was John who kept us going through four years of research and writing. At the end, he finished by stepping up, taking hold of the pages, and saving yet another book from its authors.
Finally, we wish to acknowledge that the people of Fayette Street offered us a rare gift. Amid so much disorder and desperation, they nonetheless decided to make us welcome, to tell their stories, to allow us to watch as they tried to make it from one day to the next. They trusted us—not to tell a better or more flattering story than truth will allow—but to report and write with the understanding that the urban drug culture is about real people, real lives. This is a simple premise, but an important one. We have tried not to lose sight of it.
There is, after all, something almost unseemly about journalists seeking and acquiring such extraordinary access to people’s lives—acce
ss that prompts the reportorial soul to feel both professional pride and personal shame in the same instant.
The best word on this dilemma comes in the preface to a seminal American ethnography, James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Sparing himself little, Agee insisted “that these I will write of are human beings, living in this world, innocent of such twistings as these which are taking place over their heads; and that they were dwelt among, investigated, spied on, revered and loved by other quite monstrously alien human beings, in the employment of others still more alien; and that they are now being looked into by still others, who have picked up their living as casually as if it were a book …”
—David Simon and Ed Burns
Baltimore, Md.
June 1997
AFTERWORD
Much of what passes for intimacy in journalism is better described as presumption at best and outright fraud in the worst cases. Some vulnerable portion of the world allows a reporter to wander about, and then, after a week or two, or a couple months at most, the interloper gathers a handful of observed moments, the tastiest quotes, and a couple anecdotes. The scribbler then delivers a brooding, insider’s view of human lives and political systems, tales of low comedy and grand tragedy, and inevitably, the ethnographic proof for whatever insight he already had before embarking on the adventure.
Intimacy is not achieved in a week or a month, or even two. But then, real human connection is not a requirement for narrative journalism to find some measure of success. A story in which a reporter can walk into people’s lives, snatch a good tale and then walk away—this is an assignment to be relished; lives in the balance, acquired with comfortable dispassion and without the psychic cost.
Intellectually, that was how we imagined The Corner before we began the journey. We understood that as a non-fiction exercise in narrative, we would be spending a year in a world in which tragic and brutal events would occur. We knew we would be meeting people consigned to unrelenting addiction, to debilitating poverty, and in many cases, to the most unforgiving outcomes. From the first, we saw the inevitability of the thing.
But did we feel it?
How do you feel for people you have yet to meet? How do you comprehend the full tragedy of a Gary McCullough when you haven’t absorbed all that is Gary McCullough, when you haven’t yet walked beside him for a year of his life, when you have not sat in his basement room for afternoons on end, listening to dreams and fears, when you have not yet started—as a matter of slow-won friendship—to hope for another outcome? How do you know loss when you have not yet learned to love what is to be lost?
We were not naïve. Ed came to the project after a twenty-year career in the Baltimore Police Department, most of it working murders. David had been a police reporter at the city’s daily newspaper for nearly a decade and had earlier written a narrative account of day-to-day life in the city homicide unit.
Our knowledge of the corner culture was not academic. But neither was it rooted in all of the hope and love, laughter and despair that human relationships require. Ed had worked many a case off the West Baltimore corners and he had dealt with an extraordinary range of people; yet one case ran to the next and the names and faces changed with the casework. And David had reported on robberies and murders, drug busts and police scandal; but when shaped into the grist of daily news stories and weekenders, investigative series or magazine articles, few characters made themselves known for long enough to fully assert their humanity. And as for intimacy—little of it was demanded or required.
In reporting, too, there is a premium placed on dispassion. How, a journalism professor might ask, can one report with clarity on people and issues without some requisite distance? How does journalism guard against the personal emotions of the journalist? What is empirical? And what is true only of our hopes, biases and affections?
Interesting questions, if you are a journalism professor.
We went to Monroe and Fayette Streets and stayed there for a year. We encountered a great many people, some of them in the most severe distress. We met them on their own terms and, before the manuscript was complete, we walked beside them for more than three years. Some endured and triumphed, some failed, some died, and some are struggling still.
And ultimately, we came to know and understand these people as journalism often claims to know and understand people. But in retrospect, the price for this was fixed and certain: We came to care about many of our subjects. We even came to love a few and, to this day, we regard some of those who survived as close and valued friends.
If this is an affront to journalism, then journalism is, itself, something of an affront. And perhaps this is one of the reasons our American media gets poverty, addiction, and the drug war so relentlessly wrong: In dispassion, there are statistics—some juked, some accurate—and there is always the to-and-fro of political and academic argument. And that seems enough for most of us to venture opinions, often with considerable rigor. But the missing element is, of course, the ordinary and intimate humanity of those struggling.
There may be a number of reasons that America’s failed drug war is in its fifth decade, that we are the jailingest nation on the planet, that our policy of prohibition becomes ever more draconian even as it fails in cities like Baltimore or Philadelphia or St. Louis to take back drug corners or reduce the purity of narcotics. Several are the causes that have led to nearly a half-century of failure, though no political leader dares to openly acknowledge such or argue for an alternative. For a policy disaster of this scope, there is blame to go around.
But a fundamental reason, certainly, is this:
One America is only comfortable acknowledging the other as statistical, or as an amalgam of issues to be debated, or as a political argument to be joined. Few of us in the monied, functional America have the opportunity to know a Gary McCullough or a Fran Boyd or a Fat Curt. Fewer still take the risk of engaging such folk without precondition and for any length of time. And love itself? What are the chances?
Reporting and writing The Corner gave us a rare opportunity, and we accepted that opportunity with all strings attached. Yes, there would be the equivocation of writers who cared about their subjects, who hoped for better outcomes, who might write about personal failings and human flaw but would likely blanket these things in a basic empathy. On the other hand, it was possible—if the writers could convey something of their own heart—that readers might discover the human beings standing at Monroe and Fayette Streets.
Looking again, we remain comfortable with the bargain, though again, it carried hidden costs we could not measure beforehand. In December 1992, all of the above—even had we vocalized it—would have been little better than Talmudic commentary. And a few months into the project, when Fran Boyd failed to get a bed in a detox facility, well that was certainly sad enough, but then what did we expect might happen? And toward the end of the year, when Boo was shot? Jesus, poor Boo. But someone was going to get shot on those corners, weren’t they? And a year after that, when Fran slipped again, we were suddenly heartbroken, truly heartbroken, because Fran by then was, well, Fran. She mattered to us, completely. And when Gary finally got clean only to sneak off from the group home and slam a lethal dose? We didn’t write another word for months. By then, of course, nothing could ever be abstract or Talmudic again.
The extent to which we honored the standards of narrative journalism is precisely this: During 1993, the year that we chronicled in The Corner, we were careful not to interpose in any meaningful way between the people we followed and their outcomes.
We listened with a caring ear. If someone suggested they wanted to get off heroin or cocaine, we were agreeable. If someone suggested they wanted to get a nine millimeter and shoot holes in someone else, we did not affirm the wisdom in such a plan. If someone needed a lift to see a social worker, or to attend a court date, or to see about getting themselves on a wait-list for a detox bed, we happily obliged, knowing that the front seat of moving vehicle was the best po
ssible place to debrief our subjects and learn more about their lives.
Did these modest intercessions have any real effect? Perhaps, but lots of folks talked about cleaning up. Blue actually did so, quietly and without fanfare. We said nothing to him in advance of that life change, nor did we see it coming. We talked all the time about detox with Fran and she availed herself of some opportunities, but it was not until two years after The Corner narrative, when we were no longer a constant presence, that she had the strength to stay clean. And getting off heroin was a daily mantra in the life of Gary McCullough; with him, we were as encouraging as friends can be. Yet he made no effort to detox until years after the narrative and then, tragically and abruptly, he fell.
The hard-and-fast rules of journalism argue—in the manner of too many Star Trek episodes and Back to the Future sequels—that to intervene in even the smallest way can matter. Giving someone a lift down the block means they aren’t free to walk to Mount Street and achieve whatever encounter they were supposed to achieve. And yet, the forces arrayed against the people of Fayette Street were complex, unyielding and in combination, profound. It’s nice to think that two white guys wandering the neighborhood with notepads were in some way influential, but not even reportorial vanity can stretch that notion over any distance.
If we were circumspect during 1993, then in the years following— and after the narrative of The Corner was set—we began to approach many of the people we met on Fayette Street not merely as chroniclers, but as friends. And we gave not a thought to whether we were doing anything to affect anyone’s outcome beyond the scope of the book. If anything we said or did after that initial year on Fayette Street led anyone to a better place, then forgive our trespasses and consider them the just and rightful price of admission to other people’s lives.