Scenes from my life A memoir

Michael Kenneth Williams

Book - 2022

"When Michael K. Williams died on September 6, 2021, he left behind a career as one of the most electrifying actors of his generation. From his star turn as Omar Little in The Wire to Chalky White in Boardwalk Empire to Emmy-nominated roles in HBO's The Night Of and Lovecraft Country, Williams inhabited a slew of indelible roles that he portrayed with a rawness and vulnerability that leapt off the screen. Beyond the nominations and acclaim, Williams played characters who connected, whose humanity couldn't be denied, whose stories were too often left out of the main narrative. At the time of his death, Williams had nearly finished a memoir that tells the story of his past while looking to the future, a book that merges his lif...e and his life's work. Mike, as his friends knew him, was so much more than an actor. In Scenes from My Life, he traces his life in whole, from his childhood in East Flatbush and his early years as a dancer to his battles with addiction and the bar fight that left his face with his distinguishing scar. He was a committed Brooklyn resident and activist who dedicated his life to working with social justice organizations and his community, especially in helping at-risk youth find their voice and carve out their future. Williams worked to keep the spotlight on those he fought for and with, whom he believed in with his whole heart. Imbued with poignance and raw honesty, Scenes from My Life is the story of a performer who gave his all to everything he did-in his own voice, in his own words, as only he could"--

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Subjects
Genres
Autobiographies
Biographies
Published
New York : Crown [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Michael Kenneth Williams (author)
Other Authors
Jon Sternfeld (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xvii, 259 pages, 8 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations (chiefly color) ; 22 cm
ISBN
9780593240373
  • The cracks
  • Janet
  • Paula and Booker T.
  • The veer
  • Kenneth
  • Strung
  • Day one
  • Scars
  • The breaks
  • Art + life
  • Omar
  • Hiding out in Newark
  • Influence
  • The world beneath the world
  • Voice
  • Our kids
  • The work
  • Coming home.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The late Emmy-nominated actor recounts his endeavor to overcome poverty, abuse, and addiction in this immensely inspiring and candid debut. Born in Brooklyn in 1966, Williams endured a difficult childhood marked by an absentee father, a suffocating and abusive mother, bullying friends, and molestation, before turning to drugs as a way of "letting me disappear from myself." Employing the arts as a "form of rebellion," Williams became a backup dancer and began appearing in music videos, where he started to unlearn "macho code" of suppressing his feelings: "If you push something down, it'll find its way out," he writes in one of the book's many raw and moving scenes. "Jay-Z says we can't heal what we never reveal. And it's true." A couple years later, Tupac Shakur spotted Williams's headshot and launched his acting career in the mid 1990s, leading Williams to land his breakout role nearly a decade later as Omar on The Wire. While the intensity of his performances often reawakened Williams's addiction struggles, he recounts how he used his hardships as inspiration "to bring others up" via organizations--such as his own nonprofit, Making Kids Win--that were dedicated to ending cycles of violence and poverty in marginalized communities. This bittersweet and poignant work will leave readers in awe. (Aug.)

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Review by Library Journal Review

Reading about Williams's insecurities and growing up the target of bullies makes it hard to believe he so fully embodied Omar on The Wire, one of TVs toughest iconic characters, who had no doubts about his life and choices. Williams's first break was as a backup dancer for musical acts and starring roles in music videos. From there, he modeled and began his acting career. He discusses his addiction at length and is clear that he would never be free of it. Raw and vulnerable, narrator Dion Graham helps listeners relate to the poverty, success, addiction, and struggles that led to Williams advocating for criminal justice reform, helping at-risk youth, and giving back to the community. The examination of his past and a direction for the future illuminates an unlikely journey. While Graham never disappoints, it would have been amazing to hear this in Williams's own voice. Unfortunately, this memoir was not finished when Williams died of an accidental overdose in September of 2021 at the age of 54. VERDICT This powerful audiobook reveals the humanity of a charismatic performer and is recommended for public libraries.--Christa Van Herreweghe

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The late TV star's memoir of life in Brooklyn, Baltimore, and the depths of addiction. Williams (1966-2021), who died from a drug overdose, was best known for playing Omar Little, the scar-faced antihero of The Wire, one of the most memorable TV characters of the past few decades. Omar, he writes, was informed by his upbringing in Brooklyn's projects and his own experience as an addict and gay Black man. Much of this memoir hits all the more poignantly with his death: He repeatedly notes how a recovering addict is only "one choice away" from falling off the wagon. Despite his tough exterior, Williams describes his early life as defined by vulnerability. He was the product of a broken home, often shy, and insecure about his sexuality. New York's club scene and an early career dancing in music videos gave him an escape hatch and a career path but also introduced him to a yearslong, off-and-on struggle with cocaine and crack addiction. He recalls coming off a three-day bender when he first met Barack Obama, a fan of The Wire, and his fame as Omar was psychically brutalizing: "I meditate on painful things all day long for a scene and when it's over, it's little wonder I'm tempted to go off and smoke crack." The prose is rarely more than workmanlike--co-author Sternfeld says the book was near completion when Williams died--but he projects an engaging humility and candor throughout. Those qualities are especially stark in the final pages, as Williams relates his growing awareness of politics, social justice, and the school-to-prison pipeline that undermines the lives of young Black boys. The author describes himself as having gotten closer to reconciling his art with his activism and conquering his demons, which makes his loss feel especially tragic. A bittersweet memento of a generational talent gone too soon. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Chapter 1 The Cracks Cleveland, Ohio November 2018 "Mr. Michael, could I ask you a question?" His voice was still a child's, but his tone had that grit, the kind that comes from experience. Daniel did not talk like someone with only sixteen years under his belt. But one thing I knew for sure: not everyone's year on this Earth is created equal. "Sure thing, my man," I said. "Shoot." "Okay," he said, leaning forward to be heard above the noise of the table. "Are you happy?" My face likely betrayed me. Daniel was rangy and loose in the way of confident teenagers. And with one simple question, he had pulled my skin right off. "Sorry, what?" I asked, tilting my ear forward. I'd heard him just fine, but I was thrown off. The smile across my face was for defense, honed over many years of self-protection. But Daniel saw right through it. Maybe that's why he asked the question in the first place. "Are you, like, happy?" he asked again, a little more hesitant, more like a teenager. Maybe he sensed my nervousness. Daniel and I had known each other for only a few hours, but I was already struck by how this kid talked. When I met him, through members of the ACLU of Ohio, one of the first things he said was, "Yeah, I've been working to turn my life around." Turn my life around? What kid talks like that? What does it say about America that the life of a sixteen-year-old boy was already so far in the wrong direction that he needed to turn it around? Daniel was from a rough part of Cleveland, a city that often had one of the highest murder rates in the country. "Too much death," he had said earlier, "a lot of friends dying. Or in jail." He lived one block over from the projects, and that closeness wasn't just about geography. He was teetering on the edge between two worlds, and turning his life around meant facing threats on both sides. One threat were the gangs, and the violence that grew out of them. "Sometimes people in the streets are bullied and they need protection," he told me. "They're sick of being the one who's the victim, getting guns pulled on them, and they turn into the person that starts doing stuff like that." "Yeah, I get it," I said. I remembered gangs forming in the Brooklyn projects of my youth. It felt like overnight it went from a rivalry between buildings and courts--kid stuff--into violent gangs. Some of them came together because they wanted to and some because they felt they needed to. From what I could see, not much had changed, except each generation is starting a little earlier than the last. "There's people younger than me that carry guns now, it's crazy," he said. "Fourteen-year-olds walking around with guns you'd see on an officer. And they're not little guns; they really got stuff." Daniel told me a story about how one night he was walking to his friend's building and looked down to see a bright-green beam, like from the sights of an automatic weapon, on his chest. Instantly, he froze. The beam lingered. He didn't know whether to turn around and run or what. Paralyzed, he just stood there. And then, the beam disappeared. When his heart stopped rumbling, he took off running down the street. It's moments like these--a fear that most can't imagine, a stress that doesn't just pass--that makes some people's years weigh heavier than others. The other threat came from those who should be protecting him. Cleveland was actually the birthplace of stop and frisk, an excuse to harass Black and Brown citizens on their way to work or school. Daniel told me about times he was held up at the mass-transit station for no reason, handcuffed to a bench for suspicion of carrying drugs while all he had was a backpack of schoolbooks. Calm and polite to the officers, Daniel had had enough of these police encounters to know they were looking for a reason to escalate. Most Black men know this from experience--cops doing things just because they can, because it sends a message about power and belonging. It's a trap, because if you react, you just feed into it. So the best move is to be quiet, to take it, though every fiber in your being wants to explode. "I think it's all like a setup, man," Daniel said. "It's designed for you to fail out here, for real." He's not wrong. He told me another story that just tore at my insides. When Daniel was thirteen, he and his friends went out to a nice neighborhood to trick or treat on Halloween. "Out of the ghetto and to the suburbs, where all the mansions at," he said. "Once you go under the bridge, the whole scenery changes." But a group of Black boys on the clean white sidewalks, knocking on the doors of clean white houses, made some people nervous. And people pay good money to live in places where they don't ever have to feel nervous. So neighbors called the cops--who actually showed up. "The cops told us we couldn't be there," Daniel said. "That we were in the wrong neighborhood." I thought about that phrase--"wrong neighborhood"--and how it got twisted inside out. "Wrong" is what most people would call Daniel's neighborhood, as in we got caught after hours in the wrong neighborhood. But here, it meant the opposite--the kind of beautiful place that kept Daniel and his friends out. It was the wrong neighborhood for their skin color. When the cops rounded up Daniel and his friends, they didn't bring them into the precinct. They couldn't: there was no charge. So they just dropped the kids off back in the hood. Where they belonged. Over time, Black boys get the message. Every Black man was once a Black boy who got that same message. Daniel was carrying two traumas: the loss of his mother when he was very young and the murder of his best friend in eighth grade. Eighth grade. Think about meaningful or memorable things that happened to you around that age, how you carry them with you, how they shaped who you are. Most people can't fathom what that kind of trauma does to a young mind. He's lost more friends to gun violence since then, and a childhood like that grows heavy, like a weight chained to his foot. You don't just run free with something like that attached to you. So there was this rawness about him, this tenderness, like his heart was on the outside of his body. His question to me wasn't a challenge; he just wanted to know. What does happy look like? I'm gonna ask this guy. He seems to be doing okay. Maybe he knows. Considering what I knew about this kid, his question had gravity. Answering it felt like a responsibility, maybe bigger than I could handle. I was ill equipped, especially at that moment, teetering on the edge myself that day. But I'll get to that later. We were at dinner with about twenty people, sitting at a long L-shaped set of tables at a restaurant in the Shaker Square neighborhood of Cleveland. Daniel was the only kid there, invited along by the ACLU of Ohio, where he was completing a mentorship. At the table were members of the organization, along with members of the Innocence Project and social justice advocates from both Cleveland and New York, including NYC Together's Dana Rachlin, and my nephew Dominic. It had been a heavy day, so by dinner that night, I had let my guard down and switched into off mode. But I was sitting across from someone who didn't have that luxury. When the dinner was over and we said our goodbyes, I could leave. But Daniel had to go home. So when he asked me if I was happy, I wanted to give him a real answer. Other people at the table must have sensed the energy shift because they stopped talking and looked over at us. Now, I like to think I'm an open book. I actually pride myself on it. Friends know they can tell me anything, acquaintances tend to confide in me, full-on strangers walk up to me on the street and just start talking like we go way back. But maybe my openness was a front, a screen to make sure nobody ever got too close to the white meat. Daniel went right for it. Happy? Was I happy? This kid didn't have questions about Hollywood or Tupac or The Wire. I knew how to answer those. That's just part of the job. But this? I was flying blind. "Well, that's an interesting question," I said, stalling for time. Searching my brain, the voice of Reverend Ronald B. Christian popped into my head. Rev. Ron--the man who had saved my life. "You know," I said, "my friend once explained that the word 'happy' is derived from the word 'happenstance.' Which means things that are given to you. So when you seek happiness, its source is outside of you." Daniel's eyes were locked on mine--not just waiting to talk, but actually interested in the answer. Young people are open in a way that adults never are. Show me a struggling man and I'll show you a boy never given a chance to change. "But joy, he said, comes from a different source," I continued. "When you have joy, there's peace of mind. So you're content with yourself. And I always took that as my goal." I thought Daniel might laugh at me or call BS. But instead he nodded, the words landing. "I get you, sure. I get it," he said, leaning back. "Yeah, content. I like that." Excerpted from Scenes from My Life: A Memoir by Michael K. Williams, Jon Sternfeld All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.