Russell "Stringer" Bell
Remembering Aristotle's Warren Buffet
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven’t watched The Wire yet, what the fuck is wrong with you?
We are gathered here today to lay to rest Russell “Stringer” Bell, one of the greatest characters of North American literature. A great and sometimes awful man, misunderstood and hated, but so much more than the confines of his bones.
I first met String in back in 2007. I had missed The Wire when it first came out; I think many folks had. Despite low ratings, HBO kept it going because they knew what they had unleashed: a folk-tale that tows the line between reading and watching. Alan Moore called it “the most stunning piece of television full-stop” and likened its intricate storytelling to reading a great book.
Russell Bell was an immediately striking character, partially because he expresses the rags to riches origin story that permeates our culture, and at the same time bearing Aristotle’s definition of a tragic figure, all the while acting a villain who preys on the weak to fill his coffers.
I’ve been trying for a long time to adequately express what David Simon and Ed Burns managed to achieve with this story. Now that everyone on popular television are gray morally (instead of the manichean black and white of our foremothers), I realize that it isn’t as simple as having interchangeable good and bad characters. That story can still be told poorly.
The things that happen to Bell all unfold in the first three seasons, and in each season his story arch is wholly unique.
In the first season, he’s a quiet evil, ordering up murders and torture and making the children under his command witnesses and accomplices to his ruthlessness. He’s also going to school for business, having realized that the drug game is also subject to the same loose rules of economics as the straight game, and we are left to draw our own conclusion, which is that there is no real difference between the two.
Except the bodies, some of the detectives chasing Bell would point out. And yes, flanked by his business partner and street soldier Avon Barksdale, there is carnage. One of the murders Stringer is responsible for saves him from prison. The other two are the reason he’s left us. Only we can savor that fact as we mourn him.
(We should probably mourn his victims more than we do String, and I do remember Brandon and I do remember Wallace and I do remember Dee.)
The second season Bell got a taste of running the show solo, and what did he do? He made an alliance his partner never would have made in order to access better product, and planted the seeds of an OPEC like organization that will eventually manage to curb and control major violence in the West Side of Baltimore.
This is where he and his nemesis Detective James McNulty began to see eye to eye, without even realizing it. They both wanted a reduction in the murder rate, for different reasons. Stringer’s motivation is mostly obvious to me; he wants less scrutiny, he wants to make more money, and less money is made when there is constant attention from the police. McNulty is another can of words, but we aren’t here to mourn him.
In the third season, Avon, like a restless small business owner who micromanages a company he’s better off leaving to be run by his hired staff, came back into the organization and begins to quickly shatter the peace Stringer created. War falls upon Barksdale & Bell enterprises, with the final victim of the conflict being Russell Bell himself, given up to death by Avon himself.
I don’t think Avon ever forgives himself for allowing the murder of his best friend and business partner. And when he learns that Bell did set him up to go back to prison. Bell allowed him to live. Avon authorized String’s death. I think Avon’s pain is palpable and sad because he has to live with it, but I feel little for him, because he saw how he could change for the better, how he could give up the violence in his heart and live on it, sit on it and put it to sleep, but he chooses differently. Do we all have the capacity to change who we are, our soul’s intent, or is that something reserved for a certain few?
But back to Russell Bell, who, in his final moments tried to buy his way out, but, upon realizing it’s too late for him, says to get on with it, motherfuckers. Shotgun and Walther PPK blast to the chest and our dearly departed lies dead on the third floor of his new condo project.
The Wire is a novel without flashbacks; it’s one of the reasons I love the work so much. You are responsible for noting the references and recalling the previous interactions. When Stringer is killed, I flashback to the first season, where the late D’Angelo Barksdale is explaining chess to Wallace and Bodie:
Pawns are capped quick, but if you’re lucky, you might make it to the other side of the board, and become a queen. Stringer is referenced as the queen of their organization; able to move through all aspects of the business.
The Late Wallace asks how you become a king, and of course the answer is:
“The King stay The King.”
Two of the participants in that conversation die because of Queen Stringer. He no saint.
But the blood on his hands doesn’t change the fact that he is admirable in many respects, and fitting the definition of a tragic figure. He works to create a system of selling drugs that positively impacts the murder rate. He uplifts his management team even as he berates them. He teaches them Robert’s Rules of Order and runs tight meetings as the chair. He shifts the drug money into legitimate enterprise, and creates a circumstance whereby his best friend can retire in his early 30s.
When rich people tell poor people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, they should think about Russell Bell. He did that, and more, all the while working to create a safer climate for Baltimore. Whether his intention was noble doesn’t matter: the end result was a good one; one that should have lasted. One that didn’t last because not all humans are capable of change, at least until it’s too late.
Rest in peace.
