The Wind in the Reeds

by Wendell Pierce

  “He is privileged to witness this because he needs most to know who he is,” August wrote. “It is telling him, ‘this is who you are. You are these bones. You are the sons and daughters of these people. They are walking around here now, and they look like you because you are these very same people. This is who you are.’”

  The City of Bones myth August created for his plays (it appears again in Gem of the Ocean, from 2003) is based in part on an 1803 report of a cargo of Igbo tribesmen (sometimes called Ibo) who, arriving in Georgia, had a premonition that they were about to enter slavery. It is impossible to be certain which parts of the tale are factual and which parts have been added over the years as the story took root in the African American folk consciousness, but it appears that the slaves revolted and drowned the crew, causing the ship to run aground in Dunbar Creek, south of Savannah. The slaves then leapt off the deck of the slave ship in chains, supposedly expecting to walk back to Africa. In truth, they chose to commit mass suicide rather than submit to forced servitude.

  That moment was our Masada. Their death by drowning was a kind of baptism through which new life—a spirit of resistance—was born for African Americans who unite themselves to its power. Similarly, the City of Bones is not a graveyard but a source of spiritual renewal. It represents the collective memory of African Americans. Bynum tells Herald that he suffers because he has “lost his song.” Herald does not find his song—that is, his purpose in life—until he connects in a deep and life-changing way to ancestral history and makes it his own.

  Like Albert Murray’s own aesthetic, August Wilson’s art encompasses what W. E. B. Du Bois, in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, called the “double consciousness” of the American Negro:

  One ever feels his two-ness, an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

  The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

  The moral grandeur, spiritual greatness, and artistic fecundity of the African American tradition emerge from the creative tension of his double consciousness. It is both the thorn in our side and the wind beneath our wings. Through inhabiting the roles of Boy Willie and Herald Loomis, I communed with the spirits of my ancestors and gained wisdom that would carry me far down the road on my personal pilgrimage toward finding my own song.

  MY PROFESSIONAL MILESTONES didn’t always come wrapped in such noble mantles. There was the time I acted a fool and humiliated myself in public and spent the night in jail for my troubles—and it led to the role of a lifetime.

  In 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks, my agent passed to me the pilot script for an upcoming HBO series called The Wire. It was the creation of David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun police reporter who had made his professional reputation with his nonfiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which became a crime drama on NBC in the 1990s. With The Wire, Simon wanted to do something more ambitious. It wasn’t going to be simply an exceptional Baltimore cop show; Simon had already done that for NBC. He was going to attempt to create a visual novel, in which the storytelling arc would be much longer than a standard television drama, and the plotting would be far more complex. Simon felt that audiences were smart enough to stick with it for the payoff.

  David—we would become close friends—hit his mark. The show ended its five-season run in 2008 as one of the most critically acclaimed dramas in television history. As the journalist Jacob Weisberg said after three seasons, The Wire “is surely the best show ever broadcast in America. . . . No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.”

  All that was in the future. I could sense something big coming when I first laid eyes on that pilot script. It was like nothing I had ever read. The character for which I was auditioning, Bunk Moreland, a brilliant homicide detective known for his hard drinking, caustic wit, and natty taste in clothes, struck me as startlingly genuine. In fact, the realism of the entire program blew me away. The Wire was really an investigation of human nature. That was the key to my approach to acting. Plus, as in August Wilson’s plays, The Wire would go deep into the heart of an African American character rarely if ever seen in drama: a black cop.

  I was born to play Bunk, I thought. This is one role I cannot miss.

  Days before my Wire audition, I got into a New York taxi in Midtown, headed to a screening at a hotel in SoHo. The cabdriver didn’t want to take the route I asked him to follow. Instead, he went right through Times Square during rush hour. Traffic was at a standstill, and I was running out of time.

  “Listen, I’ll just get another cab,” I said, then opened my door to exit.

  “You’re going to pay me for this,” he said, and jumped out.

  “Hell, no,” I shot back. “I told you not to come this way, but you wouldn’t listen.”

  We stood there in the middle of a Times Square traffic jam, arguing. Next thing I know, the cabbie takes a swing at me.

  I couldn’t believe this guy! I was furious. My glasses were askew. I put my glasses in my breast pocket and pulled an old schoolboy trick.

  “Motherfucker, look,” I said, and pointed to the ground. When he looked down, I clocked him.

  There we were, two grown men, too old to be doing this shit, fighting like two schoolboys, with a rush-hour audience of thousands watching.

  The cabbie swung at me again. “Look, motherfucker,” I said a second time. Incredibly, he looked. I cold-cocked him.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I saw what was obviously an undercover police van crawling through traffic. An officer sitting in the van had a clipboard and was hiding his face, trying to pretend not to see these two clowns fighting in the street. You could tell they were on a major manhunt of some kind—I found out later they were looking for suspects in a notorious multiple murder over the Carnegie Deli—and they didn’t have time to waste on a stupid fistfight. But when the van stopped right in front of us brawlers, they had to act.

  The cops jumped out, cuffed both of us, and grabbed a witness to get his story before questioning the cabbie and me. I heard the witness tell them that I had started the fight. When he turned to leave, I said, “Oh, so you’re just going to walk away now?” And I took one step toward him. At that point, the cops jumped me and arrested me as the perpetrator.

  I learned a valuable lesson that day: When cops don’t know who started a fight, they wait for a sign of some sort to plausibly blame the incident on one of the parties. Without knowing what I was doing, I gave them what they needed.

  Now I was in deep. “What happens now?” I asked one of the officers. “I’ve never been arrested before.”

  “We’ll process you, you’ll go home, and we’ll be in touch,” he said, in a business-as-usual tone.

  Then the officer saw my driver’s license. “Wait, we can’t let you go,” he said. “You live in California.”

  So I spent the night in a Manhattan lockup.

  A couple of days later, I showed up for my Wire audition still mad as hell. Before the reading, I boiled over with anger telling the people in the audition about my arrest. Here I was in a major audition, and all I could think about and talk about was what had happen
ed to me in Times Square. After the reading, I had a callback to read with Dominic West, who was to play Bunk’s partner Jimmy McNulty, and then another call to say I had the job.

  “You know what got you the role?” David Simon told me later. “That story. You were Bunk. You took us through every possible thing we could write about a character. We knew you were probably our Bunk before you read a single line.”

  That taught me something important about the human element in storytelling. It goes all the way back to the invention of language, to prehistoric people sitting around a fire, telling about hunting, running in the fields, and painting tableaux of their world on the cave walls.

  Telling stories is at the core of human nature. It’s how we connect with each other. That’s what happened with me that day with David Simon. I was simply telling a tale of what had happened to me in my run-in with the police, but the way I did it revealed my humanity. It showed David that I had within me all the elements he would be able to use to create Bunk Moreland’s character.

  This is what the art of acting—and indeed all true art—is about: to recognize the truly human, to authenticate it, to express it, and to document it in a way that makes it accessible to other human beings. What every artist will tell you is that we’re all searching for the truth about humanity, to help ourselves and each other become more authentically human.

  After taking the Bunk Moreland role, I went to Baltimore and began doing ride-alongs with police officers of the city’s western division. David knew the people of Baltimore and the culture of police officers intimately. I wanted to get to know them too, especially because I had had two bad experiences with the police—one of them in Baltimore—that made me anxious about cops.

  In 1986, fresh out of Juilliard, I was on the road tour of Queenie Pie and stopped in Baltimore to see a friend who was in a play at Center Stage. After we parted, I took a cab back to the downtown train station. When I tried to pay the cabbie, he attempted to cheat me. We got into an argument on the sidewalk. It ended with him putting his cab into reverse and running over one of my bags on the curb.

  “Call the police!” I yelled. When an officer showed up, he talked to the cabbie and then spoke privately with me on the sidewalk. Both the officer and the cabbie were white.

  “What do you want to do?” the cop said to me.

  “I want to press charges,” I said. “That guy tried to run me over with his cab, and he ran over one of my bags.”

  “What do you want to do?” the cop repeated.

  We went back and forth like this, over and over. Finally he gets right in my face, puts his hand on his holstered pistol, and screams, “What do you want to do?!”

  I got it.

  “I guess I’m going to get my bags and get on the train and go to New York,” I muttered.

  “Yeah,” he smirked, “that’s what I thought you were going to do.”

  The second incident happened in 1999, when I was in south Louisiana for Uncle L.H.’s funeral. I picked up my cousin Kim and her two small children at the airport in New Orleans and was driving them to the church for the funeral mass. A Louisiana state trooper put his lights on behind us. I pulled over.

  It was 100 degrees that day, so I kept the windows up and the air conditioner on, waiting for the trooper to come to the window. I immediately put my wallet on the dashboard; if a cop pulls me over for a traffic violation, I do that so he won’t think that I’m reaching for a gun. There I sat, waiting for the trooper to approach the window. The radio was on, and I couldn’t hear a thing outside the car.

  I checked my rearview mirror to see what was taking him so long. There he was behind the car, his face scarlet, spittle flying from his mouth, gun slightly drawn.

  “Goddamnit, get out of the car!” he screamed.

  I lowered the driver’s-side window, put my hand out, and opened the door from the outside. I wasn’t about to give him any reason to shoot. I began walking toward him.

  “Back up!” he yelled. “I’m going to blow your fucking head off!”

  I stopped in my tracks.

  “Why didn’t you get out of the car?”

  “I didn’t hear you, officer. Why didn’t you use your PA?”

  “Don’t tell me how to do my job! Where you going?”

  I told him and handed him my driver’s license.

  “Oh, you’re from California. You’re a flight risk. I can’t just write you a ticket.”

  He arrested me and said he was going to take me downtown to pay the ticket. He said my cousin Kim would have to drive my car behind him to the police station.

  “If I’m under arrest, that’s fine,” I said to him. “But you see those two little kids in the back of the car? They’re never going to see a police station in their life, and it’s not going to start today.”

  The trooper walked to the car to speak with Kim outside of my earshot. In that moment, for the first time in my life, I understood what it meant to be in a blind rage. I was engulfed by wrath, but could not let it slip. My rage was so intense I could not pick out his badge number. All I recalled was that he was young, white, and had red hair.

  Somehow, we got out of the situation, but my tears at L.H.’s funeral were from anger, not grief. If I had jumped out of the car and done something rash, my family would have had another funeral to deal with. The trooper, whose name I never learned, was on the verge of firing his gun.

  I would not impugn all police officers because of the conduct of a few. In fact, the bad cops I’ve dealt with heightened my respect for the men and women of the badge who don’t dishonor it by abusing their power. Still, I came to The Wire with some emotional baggage that was not easy to drop.

  What a relief, then, to be welcomed so warmly by the Baltimore police officers who invited me to go with them on their rounds to see how it all works. The first detail that struck me was to see the effect the police car had on the people of the streets we cruised. Even though the police and I were in an unmarked car and the detectives weren’t in uniform, everybody knew they were cops, and everybody was watching them.

  People talk about how the presence of police can be a deterrent. I saw it firsthand. When we were spotted, there was an immediate effect. Everyone in the neighborhood is aware of your presence. When I watched police interview witnesses and suspects on the street, I saw people’s behavior change. The power of the police to affect behavior in others was palpable.

  I also saw how dealing day in and day out with criminality, the worst part of human nature, took its toll on police officers. They developed harsh black humor to cope with the bleakness of the world they had to live in. You saw that on The Wire, and believe me, it was not exaggerated for dramatic effect. Cops are always messing with each other. It’s the boys’ locker room times a thousand. Observing this helped me develop Bunk.

  And there was this: As part of the coping mechanism for the cops I saw of the western division, every Thursday when they got off duty, they’d get a bottle of Bushmills and kill it. Every single Thursday. They drank a lot. Bunk’s alcoholism in the series is based on real-life observations of the personal lives of police detectives. The Wire is set in West Baltimore, the historic heart of the city’s African American culture but now overrun by drugs, crime, blight, and chronic poverty. The cops who work in the western division have a hard life there, and they don’t always soften the psychic pummeling their work deals them in the best ways.

  On one of the ride-alongs, I followed the two male detectives I was paired with to meet with a family. They introduced me as Detective Pierce. Back at the station, I went into the interrogation room, still in character, so to speak. I listened as the real detectives questioned a burglary suspect. At one point, the interrogator turned to me and said, “Detective, do you have any questions?”

  Oh, God. What do I say?

  I asked something very simple. “So, you are saying you were t
here that day. That you knew the man, but you didn’t do it. But if you were there, then you saw it. Describe the man who did it.”

  The suspect didn’t know what to say. Busted! After it was over, the real detective said to me, “Hey, man, that was a good question.” That felt great.

  One of the officers I shadowed, a veteran of decades on the force whom I will call Jimmy, told me back then that it’s so difficult to become a homicide detective that those who do take pride in wearing fine suits. “You a homicide detective, man, you got to let them know it,” said Jimmy, who favored a dapper hat and beautiful overcoats.

  I built that style into Bunk. One of my classic lines from The Wire is: “The Bunk is strictly a suit-and-tie-wearing motherfucker.” That really came from the pride these homicide detectives had in themselves and their appearance.

  Jimmy also taught me the power of interrogation. He was so good at it that by the end of The Wire’s five-year run, I thought that if I could become a homicide detective, I would. The experiences that the detectives I observed had, and that I sometimes had with them, dazzled me as a student of human behavior.

  “Wendell, if you’re ever arrested, never fall asleep,” Jimmy said. “We bring in a suspect, we put him in the box, and we just watch him for a while. If he goes to sleep, we know we’ve got the right one.”

  I told him I didn’t understand.

  “Think about it,” Jimmy said. “You’ve just killed a guy. You’ve been on the run for two weeks. You can’t sleep. You’re running. Once we finally catch you, you’ve been up for two weeks trying to figure out how to get out of this, and running from us. When they go to sleep, we know we’ve got the right one.

  “It’s not scientific, and it won’t hold up in court, but goddamnit, it’s the right place to start.”

  In the same way, Jimmy said, innocent people tend not to fall asleep in the interrogation room. They’re scared and agitated. Sleeplessness is no guarantee of innocence, the detective told me, but interrogators have learned from experience that it’s a pretty good sign.