She wanted to get out of there. She knew she would.

When she was 5, Sonja Sohn would crawl atop a generator behind her home in Tidewater Virginia. Her father would lie beside her. “I’d ask, ‘What’s the difference between an astronomer and an astrologer?’” she says. “He saw where I was going.”

He told her she could be a lawyer. She liked hearing that. But she also knew it wouldn’t be easy: Drugs permeated the streets of her rough neighborhood, drugs she’d later experiment with.
Sohn’s life would be a balancing act — between wanting to help others and having the resources and background to do so; escaping an abusive situation at home and having the guts to run away; filling life roles as mother, friend, actor and feeling fulfilled.

It’s a similar unwieldy line Sohn’s character on HBO’s Baltimore-set crime saga “The Wire,” Det. Kima Greggs, had to walk — Kima could be tough-as-nails one scene and show heartbreaking vulnerability the next.

After all these years, Sohn’s standing straight on life’s tightrope. “A lifelong purpose has meant a lot of me,” says Sohn. “I’ve been on that search since I was 5 years old.”

Sohn says she doesn’t really do press interviews. She nervously taps her fingers on the booth at the Evergreen Cafe in Roland Park, picks at an egg sandwich. She takes out a laptop and plays with her phone, as if to say, “I’m here, but not really.”

She loathes celebrity puff pieces. She refuses to give her age (various reports place her birth around 1964. If that’s true, she looks 10 years younger), where she was born (she’ll say only “Tidewater Virginia,” but various sources say Newport News) or where she lives now. She wants to talk about Rewired for Change, a nonprofit she’s launched in Baltimore that uses “The Wire” as a teaching tool to help children who live in underserved communities. But there’s something she can’t ignore: Her personal life inspired Rewired for Change.

We talk for 2½ hours and it pours out of her. She brings her husky voice to a whisper, when she reveals elements of her painful past.

“I always knew I was born to help people,” she says. “I knew that. I just didn’t know how to do it.”

Sohn, a vivacious and outgoing child, was born to an African-American father and Korean-American mother. She casually mentions, but opts not to elaborate on, episodes of abuse during her childhood, and by the age of 7, she says, she was planning “my mom’s escape.” By early adolescence, she began wondering how she would ever live her life without threats of violence (without much explanation, Sohn adds that she has reconciled with her father and they now have a good relationship).

By age 11, she smoked pot. By age 12, she started drinking. In eighth and ninth grade, she tried speed and acid. But she played basketball, field hockey and volleyball. She was a cheerleader. She became student body president. “When I was 12, I said to myself, ‘OK. I’m here. So I have to make the best of it,’” she says.

But the situation at home was unbearable. She failed classes on purpose. She often gave up hope that she could ever better herself.

— —
There’s now a core group of a dozen Rewired for Change participants, meeting twice a week in a small room at the University of Maryland School of Social Work downtown. Sohn says 95 percent of the Rewired participants have been court-ordered or recommended by other service organizations to be here. They have had repeated run-ins with the law for myriad offenses, including drugs, theft or assault.

The idea for Rewired for Change is to use “The Wire,” for participants to analyze its situations and characters through the lens of their own lives. Sohn believes that through self-reflection and development of critical thinking skills, personal transformation can occur.

In this session, the class is discussing the death of Orlando, the frontman for a strip club the Barksdale crew ran. Orlando had wanted to get into the drug game but later agreed to be a police informant. He is killed in a sting operation.

One of Sohn’s Rewired for Change partners is Greg Carpenter, a mentoring coordinator for Jericho, a Baltimore program that provides job training and placement to male ex-offenders. Carpenter, who says he has worked with at-risk populations for 30 years, is leading the discussion.

“Too many people get caught up in the game,” Carpenter explains. “And Orlando lasted five seconds flat.”

When asked whether Orlando had to get in the game, most of the participants say they believe he didn’t have a choice. “You have to start making choices — or at least thinking them through,” Carpenter says. Carpenter calls the game “amoral, an exploitation of people in the worst way.”

“You have to switch the way your mind wants to go,” Sohn explains. “It’s constructive versus destructive thinking.”

The class seems to get it. “The fact you guys are here — we’re waking up,” Carpenter adds.

— —
It wasn’t until her 20s that, Sohn says, she turned her life around. In and out of college for several years, she moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., got married and had two daughters. She also began writing in a journal.

She went back to school, majoring in English at Brooklyn College. “Here I was, five hours away from Tidewater, telling my story.” Poetry became her outlet, her healing tool, and poetry, she says, “is still my essence. My truth.” She’d share readings in class and in open-mic nights. “Through my experience through poetry, I would be able to touch people who had similar experiences,” she said.

Though Sohn says “acting was a career I ran from,” she’d end up mixing poetry and acting. She had taken a part in a student film, and the director, impressed with her skill, encouraged her to take lessons. She co-wrote and starred in 1998’s “Slam,” the fictional story of a young man, Ray Joshua, who lives in a housing project riddled with gangs. He uses slam poetry as an escape. Sohn wrote her own story arc — she played a teacher who inspires Ray with her writing class — and dialogue for the film, which won the grand jury prize at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. Sohn netted an Independent Spirit Award nomination for her role.

“I said to myself, ‘OK, I get it. I get it. This is where you want me,’” she says, looking skyward. “This is part of my purpose.”

— —
“Who wrote something for me?” Sohn is asking of poetry; the Rewired participants had an assignment. Sohn implements poetry into the program, and she hopes the participants will be able to perform their poetry at a Rewired for Change fundraiser.

The participants trudge toward the front of the class to read their poems. A 15-year-old slowly describes running away from home to be with a guy. A boy says that when he was 9, he began fighting in school. At 14, he was “hanging out with the wrong people” and got locked up for stealing cars and selling drugs. “Tonight is the night I give up street life/My brother and I try to beat the street,” another reads with a rap rhythm. One poem describes life as a chess game. “To get out of the hole will take strategic thinking” is read with confidence.

“I’m so proud of you guys,” Sohn says, clapping after every poem.

— —
“I almost quit ‘The Wire’ the first year,” Sohn says. At the time she was separated from her husband, living off child support. Her acting career had dried up. “The effects of early life, those things have a way … it’s soot,” she says. “You can’t see it, but it’s in the crevices. You have to f—ing repair it.”

Sohn said every day on the first season of “The Wire” felt like walking through the gates of hell. She couldn’t remember lines. “I had a difficult time playing a cop,” she says. “Everyone hated the cops growing up. They took away friends of yours. They seemed to only care when there was trouble.”

She tried to separate her personal life from the stories of the show. But she couldn’t.

They shot in low-rises that looked similar to the places she grew up. She was having flashbacks. “There was one scene where I had to beat Bodie up,” she says of a drug soldier. “There was a cue for me to move. I looked into one of the homes, and it reminded me of a friend’s home when I was little. Hours later, we were shooting at the police precinct headquarters and part of me shut down.” She mostly worked through her pain silently, and focused on simply being technically proficient on “The Wire.”

Years later, while doing campaign work for Barack Obama in North Carolina, she finally found that her role as an actor could help people. “Most of us on ‘The Wire’ are professional actors, and several of us have histories that informed these portrayals of people in these underserved communities,” she says. “I saw people could related to us.”

Back on the campaign bus, the idea for Rewired for Change poured out of her. “This was my purpose,” she says.

— —
The Rewired for Change students knew “The Wire” before they even saw the show; they’ve lived it. They come mostly from hard-knock East and West Baltimore neighborhoods. “It was like they modeled it on us, on our lives,” says 21-year-old Sean Hawkins, who wrote the “Life Is a Chess Game” poem.

Hawkins was told about Rewired for Change through Yo Baltimore, a career-training organization for young adults where he is working to get his GED; he’s the most outspoken of the Rewired bunch. Tall and witty, with a 10-month-old daughter at home, he talks quickly and passionately about Rewired. He won’t discuss what trouble he’s gotten into in the past; it’s clear he instead wants to look forward. “When you come here, it’s a third family,” he says. “You share pain and joy and pleasures. It’s a support group.”

Others were initially more reticent to speak up in sessions. “I didn’t want to say nothing,” says 17-year-old Ed Smith. “Coming from the street, the street is your life. In the beginning, I wasn’t talking. But then I thought, ‘Well, I’m here for a reason.’” Torrio Harrell, 18, says he, at first, “couldn’t tell them how I felt. It was too painful.”

Eventually they started to share, especially through Sohn’s poetry sessions. “I wrote that poem on the bus,” says Sean, referring to “Life is a Chess Game.” “But it took 21 years to feel that. You keep it real with yourself. Whatever happens, happens. I just know I have to make it.”

Latavia Cornish, who turns 18 next month, learned about Rewired from her probation officer. In her poem, Latavia wrote about being arrested five times, for various offenses from the time she was 15. Latavia says she has seen her friend murdered. She says she was at the East Baltimore cookout in late July where 12 were shot. She describes her past as a whole page that she’s torn from the book of her life. She now wants to move to New York. “I want to go to any school,” she says.

— —
After the session, Carpenter and Sohn split time between one-on-one’s with the students’ poetry and joking around with them. Sohn says the program, launched in June, is finally starting to come together. They have a good core group now, a group that gets it, that sees how important this is.

“They’ve never known what the best chance looks like,” Carpenter says. “For most, that’s getting in the game, prostitution, drug dealing. When you see a person as young as this, misguided as this, they will go down that misguided path unless something is done.”

Sohn and Carpenter walk out of the School of Medicine with a handful of their Rewired students. They stand outside, give them last-minute suggestions on their work. They make sure they catch the bus home.

“I want this program to be in Baltimore. I believe in Baltimore. It’s natural,” says Sohn. “There are other cities where I could take this, but I believe here is the place.”

Jordan Bartel is assistant editor at b. Contact him at jordan@bthesite.com

IF YOU GO
Rewired for Change launch celebration
WHEN: 6:30-9pm Sept. 10
where: Frederick Douglass Isaac Myers Maritime Park and Museum, 1417 Thames St., Fells Point
cost: $50-75 tickets, $150 VIP reception. For information, call 410.340.0096 or e-mail info@rewiredforchange.com
information: rewiredforchange.com

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