From thug to star
GRACE AFTER MIDNIGHT: A memoir
By Felicia “Snoop” Pearson and David Ritz
240 pp. Grand Central Publishing $22.00
Reviewed by Ruth Douillette
A captivating title, Grace After Midnight, and the tag that follows—a memoir—might draw a second glance from me in a bookstore.
On the cover, the solemn young author, Felicia “Snoop” Pearson, gazes directly at the camera. She looks like a twelve-year-old boy, hair in cornrows, wearing an oversized jacket.
“Snoop? Who’s that?” I’d think. I probably wouldn’t have read the book if it hadn’t arrived for review.
Unless you’re a fan of HBO’s hit show The Wire, you probably haven’t heard of Felicia Pearson, who plays herself—more accurately, her former self: a street thug. The Wire, about to begin its fifth and final season, is filmed in Baltimore, on the same streets Pearson worked dealing drugs from the time she was a little girl.
Both The Wire and Snoop have avid fans, and this book is for them, first and foremost. They discuss episodes and characters in online chat rooms, and they anxiously awaited Snoop’s book, co-authored by David Ritz, which came out on November 1st.
One fan posts on HBO: The Wire Bulletin Board, “My favorite [character] has to be Snoop! I pre-ordered her book on Amazon.com and it came yesterday in the mail. It is funny, cruel and sad all at the same time. I read the whole book in like three hours, but remember I am a fan. I suggest all of Snoop’s fans pick it up!”
It is safe to say there would be no Grace After Midnight if it were not for the show that brought Snoop to fame. She’d be another anonymous crack baby who grew up on the street. If not for the salvation the show provided, she’d have landed back in jail, or, more likely, been shot and killed in a drug deal gone bad.
Her fans will devour the book, but what will the “Who’s Snoop?” bookstore browsers find in the 240 pages if they carry the book to the checkout line?
Grace After Midnight is the “as told to” tale of Felicia Pearson’s life from birth to fame in a TV role that turned out to be “play yourself,” making it easy for her to transition from drug dealer to actor without missing a beat.
“On the show,” she says, “I had to be me: someone who hits the block. They want me to keep my walk and my talk and even my name. They wanted me to be Snoop.
“So there I was, doing what I’d always done, being a thug, only being a thug in front of the camera.
“What kind of crazy shit is that? Snoop is real-life me and Snoop is a pretend-life character on TV. The script is flipped.”
Literary it is not. The sentences are short and simple. Ritz does his best to preserve her trademark Baltimore street talk. This is how Snoop describes killing a woman in self-defense when she was fourteen:
Before she got to me, I got to her.
I shot her clean.
My lead stopped her lead.
She fell to the ground.
Dead.
I ran.
Snoop struggles through childhood with loving but inept foster parents, drops out of school and roams the streets, protected and used by men she calls “Uncle” and “Father.” She’s jailed at fourteen for shooting a woman who swung a lead bat at her head.
She undergoes a spiritual transformation in jail, when she feels the presence of her much loved “Uncle” who had died. This is her “grace after midnight” moment, and an answer to her foster mother’s prayers.
Upon release at 20, Snoop is fired from two jobs when her bosses find out about her jail time. She goes back to drug dealing, the only thing she’s been successful at. At this low point she is “discovered” in a Baltimore bar by an actor on The Wire. For a while she continues to deal drugs, but eventually she gives up street life for the show.
She weaves a lesbian thread through the spare narrative, knowing early on that she is more boy than girl. It is who she is, and in her most emotional chapter she describes her reaction as she watched the movie Boys Don’t Cry, strongly identifying with Hilary Swank, who played Brandon. When Brandon inevitably gets raped, Snoop describes in graphic detail what she’d do to a man who raped her.
The reader will come away with respect for the strength and determination that kept Snoop alive against all odds, and might even marvel at the grace that pulled her safely from the streets.
At the end she says, “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.”
Ruth Douillette is an associate editor of The Internet Review of Books.