The Corner (90 page)

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—access 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

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 possible 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.

The years since have produced some inevitable endings, but many surprises as well—not the least of which is that our connection with some of those depicted in
The Corner
has endured and deepened. Indeed, we have learned to treasure these friendships beyond the book itself.

Fifteen years after
The Corner
’s narrative concluded, Denise Francine Boyd is still drug-free. More than that, she has become the rock of the Boyd family, raising not only her two sons, but going further to adopt her sister’s three children and provide a stable home to them as well.

She lives in Baltimore County and the children attend county schools, but Fran travels routinely to the West Baltimore neighborhoods that cost her so much. For years, she has been doing outreach work with addicts for a treatment program funded by Bon Secours Hospital.

She and her brother Scoogie are the family survivors. Her sisters Bunchie and Sherry, and her brother Stevie, all struggled with addictions well after Fran cleaned up and changed the arc of her life. Bunchie, however, finally got clean only to succumb to lung cancer in 1996. Stevie passed in 2004 and Sherry followed him last year.

Readers who have seen the HBO miniseries based on this book may recall a scene in which the actress Khandi Alexander, playing the role of Fran, breaks down emotionally upon learning that an expected treatment bed is not available—an accurate depiction of that painful moment in Fran’s long fight for sobriety. In the supporting role of the receptionist at the rehab facility, bearing witness to Khandi’s moment, was the real Fran Boyd. By the time the miniseries went into production in 1999, Fran had been clean for more than four years.

Perhaps the best Cinderella moment was at the Emmy Awards, when Fran walked the red carpet with director Charles Dutton and the other producers. A Los Angeles television reporter, acknowledging Fran’s evening dress, asked for the name of the designer.

“Mondawmin,” said Fran, naming the shopping mall in West Baltimore.

To which the reporter nodded, falsely knowing.

It has been marvelous to watch, this heroine’s journey, and Fran has taught us things about human grace and resolve that we could only pretend to know before she came into our lives. The hardened wraith who glared at us from the front steps of 1625 Fayette Street can no longer be easily conjured; another woman has emerged and her strength and confidence carries a family’s weight.

In addition to her own sons, and to her nieces and nephews, Fran proved to be a parent to Tyreeka Freamon, embracing the mother of DeAndre’s son as her own, helping to raise DeAnte, and pushing Reeka to stay in school and to continue on through college.

While working full time as an administrative assistant at the University of Maryland Hospital in downtown Baltimore, Tyreeka continued her education first at Coppin State University and later at Strayer College, taking six or nine credits a semester and eventually receiving her bachelor’s degree in business administration. She has been promoted twice at the hospital and is now enrolled in a master’s program in the Strayer business school.

The hardest moment of that academic career: Quite possibly the first day of an undergraduate sociology class when Tyreeka was appalled to discover that
The Corner
was the assigned text for the class. She was quickly recognized.

“Oh my god,” she remembered, laughing only in retrospect. “I wanted to die.”

Her relationship with DeAndre was barren, if not belligerent, for more than a decade as DeAndre continued to struggle. Moving to her own apartment, first in the Walbrook Section of Baltimore, and ultimately— when it became clear that DeAnte would benefit from county schools—to another apartment near Fran’s home, Tyreeka stayed close with Fran. As an accepted member of the Boyd family, Tyreeka and DeAndre passed each other at family events and they shared some of DeAnte’s childhood, but in other ways, DeAndre—taking his cue from the corner world—kept his emotional distance. Wounded by this—some shard of Reeka’s loyalty to DeAndre was always evident—she pursued other relationships for a time.

Fran’s life was not without further trials, of course.

She compensated for her brother and sisters as best she could, but Stevie’s slow decline landed hard on his son, Little Stevie, who went to the corners without even the brief hesitations that DeAndre had
managed. And though Scoogie tried to supplant his younger brother as a father figure to Turtle, it mattered little; at this writing, Little Stevie Boyd is no longer little, nor is his outcome. He is serving a lengthy sentence, caught up in a major federal narcotics investigation.