CxD #189: 💔Loss & 🙏Gratitude
I’m writing this exactly 20 years from when this photo was taken. Look at it again if you can.
I was approximately 0.75 miles to the west of it.
I was overwhelmed then, and feel incapable of making sense of it now. It’s also beyond my capacity to say anything smart or insightful or historically relevant.
The only thing that makes sense to me, today, is how urgent it is for all of us to remember that in this life anything can happen. Anything at all. At any time. If out of self-protection you deceive yourself into thinking you are in control and can predict what life will be like for you tomorrow, you’re living from delusion which in time will cause you unnecessary grief.
This sober and heartfelt reflection is not an invitation to despair. It is an invitation to feel gratitude for everything and everyone and every being and plant and memory and sensation you are lucky to experience and call your own. Nothing is given. Everything is a gift.
Anyone who’s known me or been part of the CxD experiment long enough knows that I preach the gospel of The Wire because it is glorious, bountiful, and I can’t help myself from proselytizing when the cause is so righteous.
This week, we lost Michael Williams who played the role of Omar Little, a man who tried to live honestly outside the law.
Despite the difference in magnitude of scale relative to 9/11, I feel the tragic loss in my bones because I felt like I knew Omar personally, which is a gift that the best artists bestow on us, for us, with us.
Here, this is what it’s like to live by your own code robbing drug dealers. Here’s what seeing through arbitrary divisions and assumptions about who’s in charge of what looks like.
It was his ability to find the vulnerabilities and shadings within these outsized characters — to make an Omar or a Chalky into a human being who just wore the cloak of legend — that made him so great, and that makes his loss feel so acute.
Omar, understandably, will be the character everyone first thinks about as they hear the terrible news of Williams’ passing. It’s a spectacular merging of actor and role, one of the most memorable figures in the long history of television as a medium. Black, gay, and loquacious, with a flair for the dramatic and a rigid moral code, he felt at once wholly new, and yet so fully realized that it was a wonder we hadn’t seen the likes of him before.
About 15 minutes into the third episode of The Wire, Omar Little is sitting on a stoop with two of his crew members. One of the men, Brandon, is under Omar’s arm, his head leaning on Omar’s chest. The second member, John, looks on uncomfortably. As the scene progresses, Omar and Brandon tenderly play with each other’s fingers, leading to Omar delivering a light forehead kiss and a tender caress of his chin.
By this point in the series, we’d already watched Omar, trademark shotgun in tow, and his posse rob a drug house. He’d been established as a snarling Rambo who struck fear in the hearts of everyone who heard his name in Baltimore. And now, the audience learned that he was gay, not as the crux of a plot twist played up for shock, but in a subtle moment of affection.
I was 22 when I saw that scene of Omar kissing Brandon, and it floored me. I had been catching up on the series after it had just ended a few months earlier in March 2008 — using a now-prehistoric version of Netflix to get the DVDs delivered to my door every three days or so. I’d grown up in Mississippi and gone to college in North Carolina and could probably count the number of openly gay men I’d met on my fingers and toes; a smaller number I’d call friends. The idea of someone like Omar, who, just an hour earlier I’d considered one of the most intimidating characters I’d seen on TV, as also being gay, was an epiphany.
A lot has and will be said about what Michael K. Williams, who was pronounced dead at 54 over the weekend, contributed to the world of acting, art and representation for the LGBTQ+ community. But he also helped me, a young Black man who is cisgender and heterosexual, understand masculinity and what it means for myself and those around me. I’d considered myself an ally and supporter of my LGBTQ+ friends, but Williams showed me how much further I had to go and what was possible with fullhearted and fearless love.
It would be sensationalist to say that one moment of Omar romantically loving another man undid two-plus decades of toxic masculinity, stereotypes about gay men, and ideas of what it means to be a man. But Williams’ portrayal of Omar and subsequent career changed me, reshaping what I believed about manhood.
Want to listen to the songs that Michael Williams put on his headphones when transforming himself into Omar? Here you go:
As I Walked Out One Evening
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
'Love has no ending.
'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
'I'll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
'The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.'
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
'O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
'In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
'In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
'Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver's brilliant bow.
'O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you've missed.
'The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
'O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
'O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.'
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.