Snoop From the Wire Dressed as a Woman

The story of Felicia "Snoop" Pearson's life so far turns upon a single moment - a chance encounter that proved so significant, and might so easily never have occurred, it feels like a plot contrivance. In early 2004, she was 23, a mid-level operative in the Baltimore drugs trade who had been released from jail four years earlier after serving time for second-degree murder. One Sunday night, she was drinking at a nightclub, minding her own business, when she noticed someone watching her. "He was looking at me like he was crazy," she recalls. "He look like a thug, and I'm, like, 'Man, what you keep lookin' at me for?'"

Pearson had never seen The Wire, the TV drama that examines the life of Baltimore - from its crack dens to its failing school system, its struggling police force to its corridors of power - with a moral ferocity and a novelistic complexity that has won it near-universal critical adulation. (Its creator, David Simon, cites Balzac among his influences, which would be toweringly arrogant, except that the show largely lives up to the boast.) So she had no way of knowing that the man watching her was the actor Michael Kenneth Williams, who plays Omar, a freelance gangster who makes his living robbing drug dealers. "I remember just staring at her, staring at her, because I couldn't tell if she was a young lady or a little boy," says Williams, who was in Baltimore to shoot The Wire's third season. "I went over, and we started talking. And when I realised she was a young woman... I just felt compelled to have her meet our producers. I thought maybe they could use her as a PA or something. I just wanted to be part of her having an option that wasn't going back to prison."

Pearson (she pronounces it "person") was sceptical. But growing up in the ghetto, she'd long learned to stay attuned to opportunity, however faint its murmur. So the next morning she found the cluster of trailers housing the cast and crew, and almost immediately found herself ushered in for a screen test. Two further tests and a couple of weeks later, she had a part - as "Snoop Pearson", a character with the same name, same defiantly ambling gait and the same distinctive, smoky voice with its undulating, often hard-to-follow Baltimore accent. The Wire's Snoop Pearson is a cold-blooded assassin, a soldier in the Baltimore drugs empire of Marlo Stanfield (played by Jamie Hector), who unflinchingly dispatches those who fall foul of her boss before boarding up their bodies in the city's abandoned buildings.

The real-life Pearson, meanwhile, felt as though she'd stepped through a looking-glass. Like Hector, she first appeared in the show's third season. But until well into its run, in real life she was still dealing in hard drugs - she'd tried to stop, she says but had lost two legitimate jobs because of her prison record - so she had a foot in two worlds, and the experience was disorienting. "Real is pretend, and pretend is real," she writes of that period in her memoir, Grace After Midnight, co-authored with David Ritz. "I wake up in the morning, get dressed, leave my work on the block to walk into a world about make-believe work on the block."

Pearson doesn't dress up her eventual decision to quit dealing in the language of moral repudiation: it was just that her old job became impractical: "If I keep hitting the block, I'll fuck up this acting business. The only way to leave my fucked-up reality is to throw myself into the pretend version of my fucked-up reality." But she's also keen to emphasise that her own life wasn't quite like The Wire's version. "We never put nobody in abandoned buildings or nothing like that. I sold drugs, yes, when I was younger. But, you know, I never, like, killed a lot of people, like Snoop on The Wire had. Nah. That's not me at all."

In the fourth season her role expanded significantly, a transition heralded by one of the show's most memorable scenes, in which Pearson - full of nonchalant, unshowy menace - buys a nail gun from a hardware store clerk who clearly has no idea that she doesn't intend to use it for conventional DIY purposes. Soon after, Stephen King, an authority on such matters, described her character as "perhaps the most terrifying female villain ever to appear in a television series".

Four years later, when we meet on a bright New York afternoon, Pearson still seems to be feeling her way in her new environment, treading with care, bestowing honorifics ("Mr David Simon", "Mr Michael K Williams") and using hyper-respectful "sir"s and "ma'am"s with me and the stylist. She is dressed in baggy jeans and an outsized T-shirt, her hair immaculately braided. You're unprepared for her beauty - she and her fellow assassin in The Wire, Chris Partlow, played by Gbenga Akinnagbe, may be two of the best-looking hoodlums ever to terrorise a neighbourhood with their merciless capacity for murder, but good looks aren't what you're focusing on while they're doing it. Also present is Jamie Hector, aka Marlo, a professionally trained actor who is something of a chaperone to Pearson; I could meet her, her manager explained, only if he was free to meet, too. Utterly unlike his chillingly understated on-screen performance, he is a generous, amicable presence, seemingly happier to talk about Pearson than himself.

"Snoop is Baltimore," says Hector, who was raised by Haitian parents in Brooklyn and trained at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute. "In New York and Baltimore, we have a saying: real recognise real. First time I met Felicia, I just looked at her, and I was like, 'Yo!'" - he chuckles appreciatively, implying that he saw her potential right away. "But I didn't have to say much." Together, they have launched a youth drama organisation, Moving Mountains, which works with young people in New York and Baltimore to devise and perform new plays. It is a matter of amusement for Hector that the Baltimore branch, which Pearson runs, is about to perform its first play, while the New York participants are still in the planning stages: the street kid's no-nonsense approach versus that of the classically trained actor.

Too often they find themselves on the receiving end of admiration from children who seem to envy their characters - "I want to be you, Marlo!" people say to Hector in the street - and the theatre group provides an opportunity to channel that enthusiasm into something more productive. "Sometimes, they get confused about the acting and real life, you know?" Pearson says. "No, [I say], that's acting. I tell 'em all the time. That's acting, man, acting."

For Pearson, these are uncertain times: The Wire's fifth and final season has ended in the US (it comes to the UK this summer), and it is impossible to avoid the question of what she does next, now that the character she played, modelled so closely on herself, is no more. "I miss it, I miss it," she says. "But you gotta work on something else, you know? That door close, another door open." She says it casually, but hearing it you're reminded of a passage in her memoirs about filming the scene in the hardware store: "I was nervous. The thing about me, though - the thing I learned from the streets - is not to show it. Keep my cool. Make it seem like I got my shit together. That's what Snoop the Character is all about. And that's what Snoop the Actor has to be about, too."

Hector is full of admiration for his co-star. "The reason Felicia's such a great actress," he says, "and the reason why I love her work so much, is because it's coming from authenticity. And a lot of great actors... most of them had hard times. I mean, the good ones, you know? They're pullin' it from something, even if it's subconsciously. I'm thinking of Brando."

It's by no means clear, though, that it will be easy for Pearson to find a good supply of other parts. "I believe, if she puts her heart into it, that she can play other types of roles," David Simon says. "But she suffers from the same problem as any African-American actor: there are fewer roles than there is talent, and they're marginalised by the types of stories that the film industry tends to finance. It wasn't easy for Felicia to walk on that set and be taken seriously, and it won't be easy the next time." He warns against the notion that Pearson just played herself in The Wire, as if that meant she has no real, marketable skill. "Casting regular people from Baltimore where we could was one of our things on The Wire - we liked doing it. But many people, when they know the camera's on them and they're expected to present - they actually become quite false. In a way, I suppose she's just being herself. But that simple phrase, 'just be yourself'? That's actually epic."

When Pearson was born, prematurely, in 1980, she weighed only three pounds; she was so small that she had to be fed with an eyedropper. Her parents, now dead, were both addicts, and she was born cross-eyed, she says, because of the drugs that had been coursing through her mother's body. As a baby, she was placed in a foster home in a neighbourhood she describes as the toughest in East Baltimore. Her corner - the corner where she first tasted the excitement of the drugs business - was East Oliver Street and North Montford, an intersection that is still a bleak landscape of boarded-up buildings and ramshackle stores.

It was a world of random violence, where everyday household chores might suddenly be punctuated by gunshots. Pearson recalls one particularly gruesome day from her childhood: "I was standing there washing the dishes, and my [cousin] Willie, he comes in the house, use the bathroom, and somebody knocks on the door [asking for Willie]... I tell him he's using the bathroom."

She picks up the story in her memoir: "Meanwhile, I hear my cousin slipping out the back door... I go back to washing a plate. Then Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! I drop the plate. Someone's shooting. Someone's shot. Someone's screaming: 'Your cousin's down!'"

"I mean, trouble just always find you," she tells me. "You could try to stay away from it, but it'll find you, man, it'll find you."

Yet, for all the horror, the way she tells her story, there's an unmistakable sense that her life need not necessarily have veered in the direction that it did: her foster-parents were an attentive couple, who worried when she didn't come home on time and helped her become a high achiever in her first years at school. "I could have gone either way," she says. But they were already in their 60s when they adopted her, and their devout Christianity left her cold. She could not have discussed with them, for example, her dawning realisation that she was attracted to other girls.

Besides, the streets were calling: not especially with the lure of money, or escapism through using drugs herself - she did that, but not much - but with a shimmering promise of excitement. "Mama... was right," she writes. "I was being turned the wrong way. I saw it, but I wasn't about to stop it. Something like a fever had come over me. But it wasn't no 24-hour fever. The fever felt permanent. The fever provided chills and thrills. Even when Mama was talking good sense to me, I felt the fever. The fever had more power over me than Mama's warnings."

By the time she reached what she describes today as "the worst day of my life", she was 14, and no longer just working corners but running errands for senior dealers, charging $100 a time to pistol-whip people to whom they wanted to deliver a warning. She was good at it. "See, that's the problem, Snoop," she was warned by Arnold Lonly, a dealer who acted as a father figure and tried to discourage her from getting more involved in the trade. "You do good at something you got no business doing."

The way Pearson tells the story, she was walking through her neighbourhood - "stalking", her foster-father called it, "like you don't want no one to fuck with you" - when she saw a fight break out. "Didn't know the people," she wrote later. "Didn't know why they was fighting. Didn't know nothing except fights always drew me. Something about the energy of a fight. The excitement. The danger. I wanted to get close and see what was happening. So I crossed the street. I fuckin' crossed the street."

According to an account in the Washington Post several years later, Okia Toomer, known as Kia, who was 15, had left her house to go to a nearby shop. But Pearson says Toomer attacked her with a baseball bat made of lead, "with murder in her eyes... if she caught me, I'd be dead". Pearson tried to get away, she insists, but the crowd was too thick. At some point in the struggle she fired the gun she was carrying. Toomer died on arrival at hospital.

In Pearson's mind, the killing was a clear-cut case of self-defence. True, she'd been carrying a loaded weapon, but "I used to always. That was the streets. Every time you turn around, somebody getting killed... Sorry to say, you know, but I'd rather take somebody else's life than mine, you know. Back in the day." She was tried as an adult and sentenced to eight years in the Correctional Institute for Women in Jessup, Maryland.

Pearson's account of her time in prison is notable for its matter-of-factness. She seems to have given little thought, at the time, to the killing she had committed, a lack of feeling matched only by her lack of pity for herself. "I didn't have 20 years, and I didn't have 15 years, you know? I had [five] with no parole. So if I do them five, straight out - they can't hold me. So, you know, I was coming home. I wasn't worried about it." Her "Uncle" Lonly visited her regularly in jail, urging her to behave well, to study hard and to get her GED, the high-school equivalency exam. He was her link to the outside world. Then, a few days after one of his visits, news reached her that he was dead, shot in a drug deal that went bad. She remembers ripping the payphone from the wall. "[I] threw it on the cement floor. Then I threw myself on the floor and started screaming."

The news of Lonly's death seems to have changed Pearson profoundly: she describes a quasi-religious experience in her cell late one night that provides the title for her memoir, Grace After Midnight - a mystical sense of Lonly's presence. She vowed to change the direction of her life, studied for her GED and was released almost as soon as the terms of her sentence allowed. But overnight transformations only happen in Hollywood - not on The Wire, and not in real life, either - and Pearson's case was no different. She lost two jobs, in a car wash and on an assembly line, after her employers discovered her record. By the time she met Michael K Williams that night in the bar, she was again making good money from drugs.

Her move from that world to the world of television was not, she says, as easy as it might look in hindsight: "That's hard work right there, man," she says, more than once. But the swiftness of the transition was not lost on others, notably the family of Okia Toomer, who in a 2007 Washington Post article sounded distressed by the experience of having seen their daughter's killer playing a killer on TV. Sylvia Williams, Toomer's grandmother, recalled receiving a phone call from one of her daughters, crying. "She said, 'That girl that killed Kia is on The Wire,'" Williams said. "She's still acting violent." ("A lot of people get breaks and it changes them," conceded Ronald Williams, Sylvia's son. "But I don't know if [playing an assassin] just makes her worse. She's still living the hell that she was back in the day when she killed Kia.")

Now, though, that old environment is completely behind her, Pearson insists: she's too busy, and doing too well financially, to miss the corners for a moment. She'll talk to old friends when she returns to her former neighbourhood - "That's just respect" - but she lives in a larger home now, outside the city, with her girlfriend and their dog; there are plans to be carried out. "I gotta strive and make everything my way, you know? I want them big houses, and all that." She has taken acting lessons, and has appeared on the quasi-reality series The Hills, set in Beverly Hills. "I'm here for the long run, you know. I mean, the gangster part got me in, [so now it's] 'All right, what else can you do?' I've already been on The Hills. I'm not stopping."

She is working with a voice coach to expand her range, so she's not limited to an accent so distinctive that blind people have stopped her in the street. "I came out of a book-signing, and it was a blind person, standing on the corner, with somebody they walk wit, and I was talking, and he was, like, 'That's Snoop!' And I was, like, 'Yes sir. How you doin'?' And he was, like, 'I could tell your voice from anywhere, man, oh, I love you, give me a hug.' It felt good, you know? That feels good." When she dealt drugs, she writes in her memoir, no one came up and said, "I love your work."

Hector, for his part, has already shot several episodes of the NBC series Heroes, and is currently working on a film in which he plays Frederick Douglass, the 19th-century American slave who became a leading abolitionist. On the other hand, nobody would argue that Pearson's future in acting is assured. But it has already given her plenty. The Wire, she says, taught her how to feel: "Ain't saying I'm the best actor out here - I know I'm not - but I also know that acting, by showing me how to feel, also showed me I hadn't been feeling at all. You can't sell dope all day and still feel. You can't kill niggas and still feel. You just can't."

When you don't know what's coming next - and Pearson never did in her old life, and still doesn't now - the trick is to be grateful for what you've got. She writes: "I wake up in the morning, yawn, stretch, get up, and look out the window. If the sun is shining, fine. If it ain't, that's fine, too. I'm saying a little two-word prayer. 'Thank you.' That's the whole prayer."

bertiesquam1976.blogspot.com

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/may/24/the.wire.season.five

Bertie Squam1976

Snoop From the Wire Dressed as a Woman

Three key characters from the Wire

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