B-More or B-Less: Meditations on The Wire and Baltimore

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From the first season of The Wire, I had a love/hate relationship with the HBO series some critics and fans anointed “the greatest ever made.” Baltimore had been my adopted hometown since 1978, when I moved there from Harlem with my mom and younger brother. It’s a city known for crabs, sports teams, and White women who call people “hon.” Baltimore has long been the perfect setting for crime narratives, and The Wire’s creator, David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, has been behind a few of them. Simon and his producing partner, ex-cop/schoolteacher Ed Burns, crafted five seasons of The Wire, filled with brutal storylines that focused on the dog-eat-dog world of the drug “game,” as both dealers and cops reference the deadly life of dope fiends and corner boys. “The game’s the game,” Avon Barksdale said, but it’s also as serious as a heart attack. Although The Wire went deep into the worlds of the police, politics, dock workers, the school system, and journalism, all roads led to (or away from) the dealers’ crumbling row houses, dilapidated housing projects, and trash-strewn alleyways, where rats the size of cats thrived, survived, and multiplied. Years before, Black Baltimore author Jerome Dyson Wright penned the autobiographical crime novel Poor, Black and in Real Trouble (1976), which he self-published until selling the reprint rights to Iceberg Slim/Donald Goines publisher Holloway House a few years later, and to me, Wright’s title best describes many of the young men and women depicted on The Wire.

Even those who weren’t poor in material wealth were lacking something: morals, smarts, dignity, or opportunities. The difference is Wright wrote about the mean streets of the fifties and sixties, an era of swinging fists rather than blazing bullets. Back in the seventies, when I moved to a Black Baltimore neighborhood, I saw my share of fights, but I can’t recall ever seeing a gun or hearing shots at night. During that time there was still a country essence about the city, a Southern sensibility in the big town. Decades later, those same blocks went beyond mean and became downright deadly.

My old Monroe Street neighborhood transformed from the cool place I once knew, where I hung out with friends and bought cheesesteak sandwiches at a spot called KK’s, to a place overrun with decayed housing and vice. It was within that hell, a raging inferno that began blazing two decades before crack cocaine flooded the streets in the 1980s, that so many walked the roughneck path of The Wire. Watching the series from day one in the living room of my Brooklyn apartment, I studied the show from several viewpoints, including those of budding crime-fiction writer, cop show aficionado, pop culture critic, and former resident, back when the tag “Charm City” still applied

Baltimore has prided itself on having a cool slogan and/or moniker since as far back as when Mayor William Donald Schaefer was in office, throughout the 1970s and 1980s. One year another mayor called it “the city that reads.” A few years after that, there were billboards and signs encouraging their citizens to “BELIEVE.” That campaign, distinguished by wooden bus benches with the sentence “The Greatest City in America” painted in white across the back, was launched in 2002, the same year The Wire premiered. Sometimes it seemed as if the city spent more money on its various “Believe” and “The City That Reads” campaigns, presumably-intended to instill city pride, than it did on or in communities that needed help.

For me, as a lover of all things neo-noir, The Wire more than satisfied a love of criminal-minded pop culture. Though I thought it pretentious to compare the show to Charles Dickens novels, Herman Melville texts, or Greek tragedies, I admired it as much as I do the pulp novels of Chester Himes and Jim Thompson, the crime films of Sidney Lumet and Steven Soderbergh, and the albums of James Brown and N.W.A.

What drew me to The Wire more so than the “gangsta, gangsta” scenarios of dope-slinging and gun-banging was the realness it revealed, especially with the corner boys D’Angelo Barksdale, whose Uncle Avon ran the drug crew, Bodie Broadus, Poot, and Wallace. Though they were young, those boys already behaved like jaded old men. We sometimes got a peek at their vulnerability, disappointments, dreams, memories, and hopes. Unlike other drug dealers in the hood depicted on TV, they weren’t merely monsters or demons. They had layers.

Still, in my role as “former resident” who often visited my mother, brother, and friends in the Northwood section of town, I was appalled that television writer/producer David Simon, who hailed from the former “Murder City” of Washington, DC, had created yet another program in Baltimore using Black misery as its jump-off and inspiration. This one came right on the heels of The Corner, a miniseries in the same vein, also on HBO.

Though I was drawn to his shows, usually because of the cast and quality, I couldn’t help but think there’s something problematic about always showing Black folks of Baltimore at their worst. More than a backdrop, the city served as a major character that was as important to the story as Avon Barksdale, Stringer Bell, or Omar Little. Those streets, suites, waterfronts, and buildings belonged to only one town, and I resented Simon for having once again put the negative of my peoples on Front Street.

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An excerpt from Cracking The Wire During Black Lives Matter, edited by Ronda Racha Penrice and published by Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2022

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Simon’s rise in television began when his Baltimore-based true-crime book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) was turned into the NBC police procedural Homicide: Life on the Street. Produced by Baltimore native son Barry Levinson—a writer/director known for his Charm City-set movies Diner (1982), Tin Men (1987), Avalon (1990), and Liberty Heights (1999), as well as the big Hollywood films Rain Man (1988) and Bugsy (1991)—the series ran from 1993 to 1999. Though the white characters in some of Levinson’s movies were working- class and had various issues, none were desolate junkies or criminals from pre-gentrification neighborhoods Hampden or Pig Town.

A year after Homicide was canceled, David Simon wrote and produced his first HBO program, the ghetto drug miniseries (six episodes) The Corner. Adapted from another true-crime book, which Simon cowrote with Ed Burns (The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, 1997), The Corner was directed by Charles S. Dutton. More known as an actor on Broadway and in films and television, Dutton was another B-More native son. Raised in the housing project Latrobe Homes in East Baltimore, he was a troubled youth who dropped out of high school and was arrested for murder when he was sixteen. Dutton claimed it was self- defense, that the victim had attacked him with a knife. However, it was while serving a five-year sentence that he discovered the theater arts, which he has turned into an impressive and lucrative career. The brother holds two Tony Award nominations, for roles in the August Wilson plays Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (1984) and The Piano Lesson (1990), but Dutton didn’t become known to the general public until he starred in the Fox TV series Roc, depicting the life of a lower-middle-class garbage man living with his wife, jazz musician brother, and retired father in Baltimore; it ran from 1991 to 1994. Considering Dutton’s background, he could’ve created his own hood show, but instead he crafted one featuring the more traditional nuclear family.

Six years later, Dutton made his directorial debut with The Corner, a critically acclaimed production that won him a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Directing for a Miniseries or Movie. Dutton was the only member of the key creative team who grew up in similar surroundings. He even discussed his background in the opener of the first show. It was the success of The Corner that led to HBO greenlighting The Wire.

While The Wire had intriguing storylines, characters, situations, and environments, no matter how much I liked the show, I was pissed off that the Afro representation of my adopted city, where I knew many Black creative artists, social workers, and legit business owners, was once again glorifying the downside of the street.

The “Yo Boys,” as my friend Barry Michael Cooper, the journalist and screenwriter who penned New Jack City in a Baltimore library, referred to the drug dealers and stickup kids in his award-winning 1986 Spin magazine article “In Cold Blood: Baltimore Teen Murders,” seemed to be the only subject White filmmakers care about. Despite the deep roots of Black folks in Baltimore, God forbid auteurs or showrunners should ever create a movie or television show where colored folks could also wax nostalgic in the way Barry Levinson and John Waters, the celebrated writer/director behind Hairspray (1988) and Cry Baby (1990), have done in their films.

Why couldn’t there be a film about the heyday of Pennsylvania Avenue, when the Royal Theatre and the Tijuana Club were in vogue; a biopic on the Black Roller Games women signed to the Baltimore Cats in the 1960s; a documentary about Henry Green Parks, Jr., founder of the Parks Sausages Company, the first Black company traded on the New York Stock Exchange; a book about disco owner Odell Brock, Jr., whose North Avenue club Odell’s was known as the Studio 54 of Baltimore; a literary talk show featuring Paul Coates, owner of Black Classic Pre and Ta-Nehisi’s daddy; or a miniseries about Verda Freeman Welcome, the first African American Maryland state senator?

Not long after The Wire aired, people who knew that I considered Baltimore my other home, but had never been there themselves inquired, “Is Baltimore really like it is on The Wire?” That was a question I would be asked many times over the years. In the beginning I’d cop an attitude and snap, “That’s not my Baltimore. I don’t see the people that I know, the kids I went to high school with or their upwardly mobile parents. Hell, when I first moved to Baltimore in 1978, we lived in the hood and it was still nothing like The Wire.”

Another side of me was angry that yes, there were parts of the city, including my old neighborhood, that had become exactly like The Wire. The city had changed considerably since I first moved to 1903 Monroe Street, near North Avenue, in the summer of 1978. Back then I was a fifteen-year-old kid who had recently transplanted from “up top,” as some Baltimore folks refer to New York City. It was a lower-middle-class Black neighborhood of row houses, working parents, Black businesses, churches, and plenty of kids.

I had originally come from a New York community that was a multiethnic melting pot, but the Baltimore neighborhood I’d moved to was more segregated than any place I’d ever been. The whitest thing in the neighborhood was the Cloverland Farms Dairy milk processing plant a few blocks from our house. Still, Monroe Street was old-school—kids scrubbed their row house marble steps on Saturday morning, strangers greeted me kindly, and, come Sunday morning, most of our neighbors headed to church.

During my three years across town at Northwestern High School, I witnessed just one fight. Instead of standing out for violence, my classmates were featured in the Baltimore Sun for being the most fashionable students in the city. The school was filled with students of various races and socioeconomic statuses, but the Black students stood out. As part of the post-civil rights era, all the Black teens had dreams of being “something” after we graduated, and we had caring teachers who supported, helped, and guided us toward the finish line. At Northwestern, we were offered intern programs, various school organizations, drama workshops, and the school newspaper.

In 1981, when Ronald Reagan took office as America’s fortieth president, it all changed. Almost immediately, he began cutting services in the poorer neighborhoods, defunding schools, killing unions, and eliminating jobs in those communities of color that needed them most. These actions, combined with the postindustrial collapse that began in America’s factories in the 1970s, were ample indication that the forthcoming decade would be bleak, but when the darkness came, it was pitch-black.

After graduating that same year, I returned to New York for college, but a few times a year I was on Greyhound or Amtrak headed back to Baltimore. Three years later, the powerful drug crack began steadily seeping into our communities, just as it did in my Harlem neighborhood, until one day that bomb exploded, and the potent, smokable cocaine was everywhere. A social worker friend who started working for the state of Maryland in 1980 told me she remembered well how crack had invaded the city, destroying people, property, and pride. “My colleagues and I used to refer to our early years as ‘BC,’ which stood for Before Crack,” she told me. “Before heroin or anything else, it was crack that changed everything.”

It has long been believed that the crack epidemic happened because of Reagan and the CIA. While First Lady Nancy Reagan was appearing on talk shows and billboards and in PSAs in which she even sat on Mr. T’s lap while encouraging Americans to “just say no” to drugs, her husband’s posse was dope dealing in Latin America. Cocaine, once the expensive drug of rock stars and big-time players, became considerably cheaper, and the streets were flooded with the powder that would be turned into crack.

With the drugs came the guns, the gangs, the open street dealing, the violence, and mass incarceration. While most of my friends were spared, we all knew people who took a few blasts and were soon strung out for years. On the other side of that tarnished coin, many of us also knew people who became dealers, living that diamond life until either jail or death took its place. Some people eventually got out of the game, going from crack to Christ, while others eventually weaned themselves from the glass pipe teat or died trying.

Nevertheless, the devastation was already done, and as my social worker friend told me, “Generations were destroyed.” The children and grandkids of those generations were the addicts, corner boys, and kingpins who populated the streets on The Wire. After the crack days faded, the drugs changed and some streets got worse. Riding Baltimore’s public buses, I often saw people nodding out as others just dead-eye stared, showing no emotions. Recently, driving down Monroe Street at night, I noticed that my old house was now boarded up and damn near falling down as a huge rat galloped down the middle of the sidewalk.

While The Wire gave many Black actors work, including future stars Idris Elba (Stringer Bell), Michael B. Jordan (Wallace), Michael K. Williams (Omar), and Andre Royo, whose junkie character, Bubbles, was so on point it was scary, behind-the-camera Black people were not as plentiful. Simon and Burns later included other writers, welcoming crime-fiction scribes George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane, but only a handful of writers of color contributed to the sixty hours of programming, with Black directors Clark Johnson, Clement Virgo, Ernest Dickerson, Anthony Hemingway, and Seith Mann directing just over 25 percent of the episodes. (Joy Lusco Kecken, a Black woman writer unicorn among The Wire writing staff and TV in general at the time, co-directed one episode); screenwriter David Mills, an old college friend of Simon’s who also cowrote The Corner, penned “Soft Eyes,” the second episode of the A few years before, Mills and I had become cool with each other when he was a music critic at the Washington Post and editing a P-Funk fanzine called Uncut Funk.

The fourth season concentrated on four neighborhood youngsters: Dukie Weems (Jermaine Crawford), Namond Brice (Julito McCullum), Michael Lee (Tristan Wilds), and Randy Wagstaff (Maestro Harrell), who was my personal favorite. We realize from the first episode of that season, titled “Boys of Summer,” that these middle-school kids, living on the edge of gritty street life, could go either way and become fiends and dealers or escape altogether. But at least there was a sense of hope. Having once worked in a homeless shelter populated mostly by single mothers and their children, I had seen pre-adolescents much like those kids, youngsters who had to take charge of their lives as they literally walked a high wire between evil and good, the streets and school, get high and pass by.

On The Wire, none of the kids passed through the jagged edges of the B-More landscape unscathed: Dukie’s parents were dopers and drunks; Namond’s mother tried to push him into becoming a corner boy like his daddy, Wee-Bey Brice; Michael was dealing with the memory of being sexually abused; and Randy could’ve gone either way. Among themselves, as with the other “crews” on the show, they formed an unofficial family: taking care of one another, giving advice, defending one another, and following their paths as they made it from day to day. Unlike for the hard rock youths of previous seasons, the “no future” kids slinging on the streets in the first three seasons, there was still an anticipation that they would get out.

In the years since The Wire went off the air in 2008, Baltimore has gone through various changes that include certain neighborhoods being revitalized while others have simply gotten worse. As in Chicago or Detroit, the murder rate has steadily risen every year, but there has also been a surge of upwardly mobile Black folks moving here from various parts of the country: filmmakers, writers, lawyers, and musicians. So far there is still no television show about them, but, as Jesse Jackson would say, I’m going to keep hope alive.

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An excerpt from Cracking The Wire During Black Lives Matter, edited by Ronda Racha Penrice and published by Fayetteville Mafia Press, 2022

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