The Corner

by David Simon/Ed Burns

  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.

  Fran’s younger son, DeRodd, avoided all that nicely—his mother’s move to Baltimore County prevented his adolescence on Fayette Street. DeRodd graduated from high school, enrolling in film editing courses and securing a job on HBO’s The Wire, where he labored as an assistant editor. Where his older brother had mastered the job skills for a life of scam and belligerence on the city’s drug corners, DeRodd overcame his natural shyness to become a valued part of the television drama’s post-production team.

  And then, DeAndre.

  Smart, stubborn and as grandly manipulative in his own addictions as his mother had been in hers, DeAndre gave everyone a hard way to go for well more than a decade. He caught only probations on those first adult charges, and then when those probations were violated, he saw the inside of the city jail for days, then weeks, then a couple months at a time.

  Finally, an irate judge gave him a few years on a pending sentence and suddenly, DeAndre, by then in his mid-twenties, was at ECI on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, doing real time. It slowed him down, but not enough so that he didn’t again struggle in the years after his release.

  He battled with his mother. He battled with Tyreeka. He thwarted himself at every opportunity, it seemed, alienating employers and friends and lovers and compromising himself in a string of angry choices.

  He did not, however, completely give himself over to the corner world. While his friends were devoured along McHenry and Fayette Streets, on Fulton or Edmondson Avenues, DeAndre kept one foot in his mother’s increasingly normative world in the county and the other in the streets. But he would not commit to drug trafficking as a full-time occupation—not in the way he had before the bit at ECI. And even more tellingly, from his mid-twenties onward, he did not again slip completely or for any real length of time into the maelstrom of hardcore drug use.

  Why? What held him back?

  Returning home after his incarceration, DeAndre was shocked to see how little remained of the lives of his contemporaries—how many were dead, or dusted out by addiction, or jailed on longer sentences than the one he had endured. And the generation behind him? DeAndre admitted to being in awe.

  “These kids coming up behind us,” he said, offering the very platitude that older men had once thrown at him, “they just don’t care. They are off the damn hook, I swear.”

  And from DeAndre that was saying something as the attrition among his contemporaries had been dramatic enough. Boo and Dinky were long dead, of course, shot to death within the framework of The Corner narrative. Manny Man struggled with addiction and found himself on the Fulton Avenue corners without a shard of a future. R.C. moved with his mother to Vineland, New Jersey and for a time seemed to do better when freed of his West Baltimore patterns; his mother passed a few years later and R.C. found himself again battling addictions and depression both. And Tae, the young leader of the crew who had come so close to graduating from high school, carrying his math text with him everywhere and telling those who asked that he only needed to pass that one last class? Tae went to the corners hard, eventually catching a shooting charge that brought him an eight-year sentence. He was released this year, in fact, and is trying, at this writing, to honor his probation.

  By that standard, DeAndre himself was doing no worse than most, and better than many. He held a job as a counselor at a group home for a notable eighteen months before running afoul of his supervisor. He did well as a part-time actor on The Wire, where some of his charm managed to show through in a handful of scenes. Fo
r a time, he managed a cousin’s fledgling rap career.

  DeAndre refused to give up or fall as had so many of his friends. But neither, it seemed, could he fully commit to the idea that he had a future, or that he, himself, must act for that future. He drifted on toward his thirtieth birthday, until three years ago, when something remarkable happened, something so unlikely that it marks with certainty the most profound intervention that our project ever had on the Boyd family.

  Back in 1994, after we had completed our narrative year on the corners, Ed had been staying in touch with a former informant in a major wiretap case that he had concluded seven years earlier.

  Donnie Andrews was a stick-up artist and the survivor of a remarkable career of robbing drug traffickers in Baltimore. Eventually, Andrews had taken employ with one violent trafficker and, in dramatic fashion, had become involved in a contract killing. Wracked by guilt and anger over his part in this violence, Andrews had confessed to Ed and worn a wire on the men for whom he had killed. Despite his remarkable cooperation, Andrews had been sentenced to a lengthy term in federal prison but had nonetheless endeavored to change. He took college courses in social work and began counseling and mentoring other inmates; all of the money he earned in prison industries went to charities and, most tellingly, Andrews worked hard to maintain his friendship with Ed Burns and the other prosecutors, detectives and federal agents with whom he had worked.

  And Fran Boyd was still struggling to stay clean, and to keep her children from traveling the same path on which she had wasted so many years. On an impulse, Ed told Fran that there was someone with whom she might want to talk. Then, with her agreement, he gave her phone number to Andrews.

  A long-distance telephone relationship began between the struggling mother and the incarcerated, reforming gangster. And even when Fran was at her worst, chasing, she would somehow make sure to be home at four o’clock each day when Andrews would call.

  He became her counselor, her confidante, her unwavering supporter. And eventually, without having ever actually met, the two fell in love. Donnie made Fran strong and Fran, keeping Donnie patient as we waited through a string of disappointments at parole hearings, did the same. Eventually, Fran got on Donnie’s visiting list and with David as a guide, she braved an airplane for the first time in her life to fly halfway across the country. And that first day in the prison visiting room only confirmed what they already knew.

  When Donnie was released in 2005 after serving more than seventeen years, he promptly became the man of the house, and when the couple was married two years later, that arrangement took on the air of permanence.

  Although DeAndre had at times embraced the idea of a having a long-range mentor and counselor in Andrews, the changing dynamic in his mother’s house forced the younger man to assess. As he achieved the age of thirty—something he had routinely prophesized against in his years on Fayette Street—DeAndre came to the conclusion that he was too old to be dependent on the goodwill of others, that he needed to be in control of his own future.

  It was a hard lesson, but DeAndre, for the first time, seemed ready for it. Within the last year, he went back to work, steering clear of the impulses that so often thwarted him with supervisors. He also managed a rapprochement with Tyreeka, and the two are again living together and doing so happily. And he took, and passed, the examination for a general equivalency diploma for high school. Most notably, at this writing, DeAndre McCullough is enrolled at Baltimore City Community College in a nursing program.

  “I got to be thirty and had nothing to show for it,” he confessed. “That’s a hard thing to say to yourself, but I realized I was going to have to do some hard work if I was ever going to have anything for myself.”

  At the end of our narrative, we declared that DeAndre McCullough, as a teenage drug-trafficker and user, was still with us. If anything, that concluding sentence implies that we expected death or incarceration to follow at any moment. But no ending is truly written in a life ongoing, and DeAndre—along with Fran and Donnie, as well—have proven that Fitzgerald’s assessment of American lives was presumptuous and hyperbolic.

  There are sometimes second acts. Third ones, too.

  Not so for Ella Thompson, of course, who is still missed in the Franklin Square neighborhood, where her recreation center was never again the vibrant haven that she made it.

  In 1998, a year after this book was published, she was named “Baltimorean of the Year” by Baltimore magazine. Later that same year, she suffered a massive, sudden stroke while driving donated computer equipment to a Westside rec center. Her untimely death left a void in that community and among her own children and grandchildren, all of whom have gone forward to productive lives of their own.

  She was a rare, forgiving soul not easily forgotten. Since the publication of The Corner, the authors have donated their speaking fees to a fund named for Ella Thompson and dedicated to recreation programming for city children. Administered by the Parks & People Foundation of Baltimore, the Ella Thompson Fund is a tax-deductible opportunity to directly address the needs of children in places such as Fayette Street; readers moved by this narrative might consider searching it out on the internet and doing what they can.

  As for the McCullough family, they took the publication of the book hard, feeling that while the book dealt bluntly with Gary’s addiction and tragedy, it was not a sympathetic or careful portrayal of their family in all of its facets. The authors disagreed, but our relationship with W.M. and Miss Roberta, both of whom we greatly admired, was nonetheless sundered by the book.

  Miss Roberta passed away a few years later and W. M. continued for a time to drive a taxi. He still lives with his son, Rico, at a Fayette Street address. We wish him and his family well and hope that at some future point they feel that this account tried, above all, to treat its subjects with care and respect.

  The shooting gallery at Blue’s house stayed the shooting gallery for a few more years, though Blue would not be a part of that scene. George Epps has been drug-free for more than fifteen years and works as a westside drug counselor. He is also happily married and a homeowner in Southeast Baltimore, and a genuine delight in any setting. His was the only escape: Rita followed Fat Curt and Bread in death. And then, the last man standing, Dennis, Curt’s brother, finally passed. New faces replaced them—and not on the same corners, either.

  Following publication of the book in 1997, the city built a police substation at Fayette and Fulton streets, and the drug markets migrated to Payson and Hollins, as well as Baltimore and Gilmor streets, a few blocks distant. New crews worked new packages, new fiends lined up for testers of a different color and stripe. At some point, there was an election, and a young councilman, sensing an opportunity, held up a copy of The Corner for television cameras at the corner of Monroe and Fayette and declared that if elected, he would take back the drug corners and make the city safe again. He would fight the drug war the way it needed to be fought.

  It was pointed out to the ambitious councilman that the book he was holding was, in fact, an argument against drug prohibition, that it depicted an increasingly draconian legal system’s inability to mitigate against human frailty and despair, against economic neglect and institutional racism, against a failed educational system and the marginalization of America’s urban population.

  The councilman conceded that he had not actually read the book, but that he was nonetheless the man for the job and indeed, he was twice elected the mayor of Baltimore. He is now the governor of Maryland. His police lieutenants have become majors, his majors are now colonels and commissioners.

  The corner, of course, remains. This is the America we have built and paid for, and therefore the America that all of us deserve. Perhaps it is possible to pay for something more, something better. But not without first acknowledging honestly the depth and complexity of the problem itself.

  Until then, it is fair to say that for every individual, no ending is certain and hope itself endures. But the corner, itself
, is immutable.

  —David Simon and Ed Burns

  Baltimore, Md.

  January 2009

  THE CORNER

  David Simon’s Homicide won an Edgar Award and became the basis for the NBC award-winning drama. The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighbourhood was made into an HBO mini-series. Simon is currently the executive producer and writer for HBO’s Peabody Award-winning series The Wire. He lives in Baltimore.

  Ed Burns was a teacher in the Baltimore public school system. Before that he served twenty years in the city police department. For much of that time, he worked as a detective in the homicide unit.

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2009 by

  Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE

  This digital edition first published in 2009 by

  Canongate Books Ltd

  Originally published in hardcover in 1997 and in paperback in 1998 by

  Broadway Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc.,

  1540 Broadway, New York, NY 10036

  Copyright © 1997 David Simon and Edward Burns

  Afterword copyright © 2009 David Simon and Edward Burns

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library