Originally posted 12/19/2018
It is 2003. I’m home from college in DC, taking a semester off after having a slight nervous breakdown and leaving my private liberal arts school in Minnesota.
We’re watching The Wire. The show is about Baltimore, a city 45 minutes away from where I live, but one trillion miles removed from my life. At the center of the first season is a kid named Wallace. I remember little about that season but I remember Wallace’s face. Wallace is young, and black, and trapped. He is played by an extraordinary child actor named Michael B Jordan. By the end of the season, Wallace will be dead.
I didn’t cry much about TV until I watched The Wire. There is a helplessness that show induces that is hard to bear. The bearing of it is the point. We must feel helpless so we can understand. We are all Wallace. We are all to blame for his fate.
The creator of The Wire, David Simon, is an alumni of University of Maryland, College Park, the college I will transfer to a few months later. I meet him and DC-based mystery author George Pelecanos at a reading on campus. Simon explains that he is an American Jewish writer from Baltimore, struggling with how to understand and engage with the black experience in America. Pelecanos, whose ear for the DC black vernacular is uncanny, says it’s natural for him to write black characters because these are the people he knows and he loves. He knows every block in DC, every store and bar and school. He knows what people eat and what music they listen to and how they take their coffee and how they talk. He writes what he knows.
After the reading I go up to Pelecanos and tell him how much I love his books and also The Wire, as he’s recently joined the writing staff. Pelecanos asks me where I grew up, and I tell him. Oh, that’s Coolidge territory, he says. Those are good kids. I don’t tell him that my mom got up every year on lottery day to get me into school out-of-boundary, and that in junior high I melted down and my parents gave in and sent me to private school. I tell him I want to write about DC but I don’t know if I want to stay here. He tells me: You can write anywhere.
Fast forward a few years and I am watching a show called Friday Night Lights. Michael B Jordan doesn’t show up until Season 4, and by the time he does, Coach Taylor has been through the ringer. He is defeated and angry and feels like a failure. As Vince, Michael B Jordan is cocky, charming, furious, flawed. His story is one of terrible and wonderful striving. He saves Coach Taylor’s career, but that is almost incidental. Coach Taylor becomes Vince’s greatest admirer, his surrogate father, his strongest advocate. I cry almost every episode. I love him so much it hurts.
On New Years Day in 2009, I am living in Oakland. Oscar Grant is shot at Fruitvale Station, maybe two miles from where I live. Oscar is young, and black, and trapped. Riots break out in Oakland, mostly douchey white anarchist kids who crossed bridges to be there. We watch the news as helicopters circle above us.
I love Oakland. I walk every part of it, including downtown where the riots were. There are boarded up storefronts and burned out buildings where there used to be restaurants, corner stores, homes. People put up Oscar Grant posters to keep rioters from breaking their windows. Sometimes it works. Sometimes it doesn’t.
They make a movie about Oscar Grant in 2013 called Fruitvale Station. I keep saying that I will see it. Everyone says, over and over, that it is extraordinary. It stars Michael B Jordan as Oscar Grant. I am living in Philly by then and it has been four years but I can not bring myself to go see it. I still haven’t seen it. I am afraid of what it will make me feel.
Several years later, I finally sit down with my friend Shannon to watch Creed. Shannon has recently been diagnosed with cancer and is recovering from a complete hysterectomy. We watch the movie in the living room of her father’s apartment, which is filthy. We manage to make jokes about how everything on TV has cancer in it, because that is how we roll. Creed seems like a safe bet. We’ve been told that it will make us cry, but we know it has Michael B Jordan in it and if he is in anything, we will cry.
Creed is about Philly, and Rocky, and boxing. It’s so good. Michael B Jordan is perfect. He is at times young and black and trapped, but he is also a champion. His relationship with the aging Rocky is like a father/son relationship, but it also isn’t. The movie is so Philly and so smart and so great.
We get halfway through before the cancer plotline happens. It is comical and terrible and I am on Wikipedia in seconds to find out if Rocky survives. He does. He is Rocky.
Shannon does not.
When the news breaks that they are making a Black Panther movie and that Ryan Coogler - director of Fruitvale Station and Creed - will direct, I nearly faint. I know nothing about Black Panther because it is a relatively obscure comic and I am not a true comics nerd, merely a selective reader. I read everything I can find about the production. I watch as they add cast members. Michael B Jordan. Lupita Nyong’o. Chadwick Boseman. Forrest Whitaker. Angela Bassett. When the preview drops, I come close to crying. “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” plays over the footage, and I am transported to my living room, where, as a small child, I would sit on the floor while my dad played Gil Scott-Heron on his record player.
Michael B Jordan looks, in the preview, like a warrior prince. That is in fact what he is.
February 2018 finally arrives and I refuse to read anything about the movie before I see it. I’m glad I do this. It means that I know nothing and that I experience it all for myself with no critical filters. From the moment that Michael B Jordan comes on screen, he is magnetic as hell. I want this movie so much but I also want a movie about his character in which he is at the center. He is young, and black, and trapped. He is Oakland and he is Wakanda. He is trauma and he is resilience. He is beautiful and he is terrible. In some scenes he is Creed, punching his way out of his darkness. In some scenes he is Vince, cocky and yet afraid to look at himself in the mirror. In some scenes he is Oscar Grant, killed unjustly years ago on the streets of Oakland. And in some scenes he is Wallace, and Wallace is everything, and Wallace is broken, and Wallace misses his father, and then Wallace is gone.
Rewind: it is 2012. I am in my first year social work internship at a non-profit in North Philly that works with juvenile drug offenders. In my mind I keep thinking about The Wire. I think about Wallace. Stupid white girl, I think. I am well-meaning but totally unqualified and untrained. Every morning I wake up nauseous.
One day I arrive early at the room where we hold group therapy. A few of the boys are there, and they’ve found an old DVD set of The Wire. Shit is real, one of them says. So real, says another. Where’s Wallace? says a third. Where’s Wallace? echoes the second. Where’s Wallace?