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Tupac has always been the person who's made up the game-always, " says Afeni Shakur, Tupac's 47 -year-old mother, a week after his New York arraignment and a day after a hearing in Atlanta. A tiny, dark-complexioned woman with close-cropped hair and deeply etched dimples, Afeni lives in a modest apartment in Decatur, Georgia, an Atlanta suburb, and speaks with an urgency that, she says, comes from her lifelong political activism. "He would have make-believe singing groups, " she continues, "and he would be Prince, or Ralph in New Edition. He was always the lead. " But life wasn't quite that simple for Tupac Amaru Shakur. Named after an Inca chief, Tupac Amaru means "shining serpent, " referring to wisdom and courage. Shakur is Arabic for "thankful to God. " Although he was shaped by many of the problems of inner-city youths growing up in post-civil-rights America-poverty, fatherlessness, constant relocation-Tupac's story began even before he was born.
Afeni Shakur (born Alice Faye Williams in North Carolina), was "like everyone else in the early ' 60 s and watched the civil rights movement on television. " A member of the notorious Disciples gang as a teenager, Afeni points to two primary factors that channeled her frustrations in a political direction: The historic Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Brooklyn, parent-student strike (where her nephew was a student) in 1968, and the formation of the Black Panther Party in New York City. Founded in 1966 in Oakland by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the Panthers quickly grew into a radical wing of the civil rights movement, with support in the hardcore ghettos as well as white patronage from the likes of Jane Fonda and Leonard Bernstein. Best known for their militant display of guns and insurgent tactics, which earned them FBI surveillance and raids, the Panthers were also a community-based organization that provided free breakfast for children and free health clinics in black neighborhoods across the nation. Afeni joined in September 1968. In April 1969 she and 20 other members of the New York Panthers were arrested and charged with numerous felonies, including conspiracy to bomb several public areas in New York City.
The case dragged on for 25 months. While out on bail, Afeni courted two men-Legs, a straight-up gangster ("He sold drugs, he did whatever he needed to make money"), and Billy, a member of the Party. She had previously been married to Lumumba Shakur, one of her co defendants who remained incarcerated. When he found out she was pregnant, he divorced her. When Afeni's bail was revoked in early 1971, she found herself at the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village, pregnant with Tupac. While defending herself in the Panther 21 case, she says she had to fight to receive "one egg and one glass of milk per day" for herself and her unborn son.
Tears fill her eyes at the memory. "I never thought he'd make it here alive. " In May 1971, Afeni and 13 of her colleagues were acquitted of all charges. A month later, on June 16, Tupac was born. Her hands shaking, Afeni leans forward, clasps her fingers around a cigarette, and inhales deeply. She touches her lips and thinks for a moment. "I was scared they were gonna take my child when he was born, " she says, her elbows pushing hard on her knees. "I was nuts and out of it. The doctor took the baby right to my sister, who was standing outside so that she could tell me later; " she begins to cry. "So that she could identify him later and tell me it was really my child. " My mother was hella real with me, " Tupac says later the same day, as he takes a long, reflective drag on a cigarette, sitting on a sofa in his new home outside Atlanta. "She just told me, 'I don't know who your daddy is. ' It wasn't like she was a slut or nothin'. It was just some rough times. " Rough times meant Afeni juggling her political activities with the economic realities of raising two children.
Tupac says his family moved between the Bronx and Harlem a lot, sometimes living in homeless shelters. "I remember crying all the time, " he says. "My major thing growing up was I couldn't fit in. Because I was from everywhere, I didn't have no buddies that I grew up with. "Every time I had to go to a new apartment, I had to reinvent myself. People think just because you born in the ghetto you gonna fit in. A little twist in your life and you don't fit in no matter what. If they push you out of the 'hood and the white people's world, that's criminal. " He brushes smoke away with his hand. "Hell, I felt like my life could be destroyed at any moment... " Tupac still wears a lot of gold-"old-school jewels, " as he calls them-and his pants, baggy khakis, are still wrapped around the crack of his ass. With his razor-sharp cheekbones, long, feminine eyelashes that curve upward at the edges, and bushy eyebrows framing his distinctive, wide, and piercingly dark brown eyes, he looks like the black prince he says his mother's friends called him as a boy.
And this split-level home is his castle. It has a 45 -inch color television in the living room tuned to an all-music video channel, a basement where he plans to build a recording studio, and a huge backyard with a pool. Sneakers, packs of Newport's, empty fast-food bags, and piles of CDs and audio and video cassettes cover the floors. Members of Thug Life, Tupac's posse, stroll in and out. This ghetto centric enclave is on a block where white folks, he says, are frightened of all the young black men driving Mercedes and BMWs and playing their music real loud. In Tupac Shakur, I guess they think they have their worst nightmare as a neighbor. "I was lonely, " he says in a hushed tone.
He played a lot of games as a kid to escape. "I didn't have no big brothers, no big cousins until later. I could remember writing songs, like real love songs. I remember writing poetry. " A look of excitement crosses his face. "I remember I had a book like a diary. And in that book I said I was going to be famous. " His mood swings again. "Looking back, I see that as the actor in me.
Because I had th...
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Research essay sample on Lifestyle Of A Rapper The Life Tupac Shakur
