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It's a brisk Wednesday morning in November-the
day before Thanksgiving-and courtroom 120 at 100 Centre
Street in downtown Manhattan is filled to capacity with
mostly black and Latino men. There is a uniform sense
of disillusionment among them: Some slump on the long
benches while others reflexively spin their bodies around
every so often to see who is coming into court. There
would be little excitement on this day were it not for
the presence of the media and a celebrity defendant.
"That's Tupac!" a gap-toothed black girl whispers with
glee to no one in particular. Two broad-chested white
boys with thick Queens accents join in the chorus of
saying his name as if they, too, had made a great discovery.
Tupac Shakur notices none of this and glances from
time to time at today's presiding judge. Charged with
sodomy and sexual abuse, Tupac has been at the center
of a heavy media barrage for the past week, made more
intense by the arrests of two other hip hop icons, Snoop
Doggy Dogg and Flavor Flav. The New York City papers
have reported that on November 18, Tupac allegedly forced
himself on a black 20-year-old woman he had met days
before at a local club. The woman claims that she went
to visit Tupac at the Parker Meridian, a posh Manhattan
hotel, and that they embraced in his bedroom. When,
moments later, three of Tupac's friends came in, she
tried to leave. But, she charges, the four men held
her there, pulled her hair, sexually abused her, and
sodomized her numerous times. As the prosecutor put
it, Tupac "liked her so much, he decided to share her
as a reward for his boys." These charges come only a
few weeks after Tupac was arrested in Atlanta for allegedly
shooting two off-duty police officers and released on
$55,000 bail.
In an effort to rebut the charges and beat back the
negative publicity, Tupac's attorney, Michael Warren,
has charged law-enforcement officials in New York with
erasing sexually explicit telephone messages to Tupac
left by the accuser. Warren claims that on November
14-the night Tupac and his accuser met-eyewitnesses
saw the young woman engaging in oral sex with the rapper
on the dancefloor of the club. Further, the prosecutor
has admitted the woman testified to having had consensual
sex with him that night. In a press conference scheduled
for later this week, Warren plans to introduce Michelle
Fuentes, an 18-year-old fan who visited him at his hotel
without incident, in the hopes of portraying Tupac's
relationships with women as amiable. The lawyer says
his team has interviewed a number of young women who've
had encounters-sexual or otherwise-with Tupac and that,
"as time goes on, you'll see more young ladies step
forward" as character witnesses.
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But Tupac's taste for posing with guns and publicly
dissin' black women (one young black woman has claimed
Tupac berated her in the hotel lobby at last year's
Black Radio Exclusive convention) make one wonder how
he can survive any of this. That these charges coincide
with his biggest hit ever, the Top 10 "Keep Ya Head
Up"-which both praises women and criticizes men for
disrespecting them-is emblematic of Tupac's contradictory
nature.
With a cloud of controversy surrounding him and a
movie in progress-he has been in New York City shooting
the high school basketball drama Above the Rim, directed
by Jeffrey Pollack-Tupac looks nothing like the happy-go-lucky
22-year-old I met at the black-music convention "Jack
The Rapper" in Atlanta last August. Back then the surprisingly
tall Tupac was fresh off his starring role in Poetic
Justice opposite Janet Jackson, and his single "I Get
Around" was jacking the rap charts. Unsure what to make
of him as he stood in the hotel lobby absorbing the
"oohs" and "ahhs" of female and male admirers alike,
I introduced myself. The posing stopped-at least momentarily-and
Tupac gave me a pound and exclaimed loudly, "Whassup,
nigga?! You my man from that MTV show. I had your back,
dog..."
Today, Tupac is just a shadow of that B-boy machismo.
Surrounded by an entourage of black men of various hues
and sizes, he steps before the judge with his codefendants,
looking like a lost little boy. The charges are read,
he is given a return date, and the reporters ready themselves
outside the courthouse. On the night of his arrest,
Tupac puffed up his chest and cold-smacked the media:
"I'm young, black...I'm making money and they can't
stop me. They can't find a way to make me dirty, and
I'm clean." But as he and his entourage move out of
the courtroom today, that defiance is tucked away, enveloped
by the muscular arms of security guards who push him
through the throng, into a waiting van that speeds off,
leaving news teams on the curb, befuddled.
Before all this trouble, before the New York and Atlanta
cases, no one was eager to tell the story of Tupac Shakur,
save a few fanzines. As his career evolved and as his
brushes with the law piled up, I kept mental notes,
preparing for interviews that would eventually provide
the basis for a piece not just about a rapper but about
the young-black-male identity crisis in America today,
about the troubling contradictions inherent in hip hop
culture, 1994. Tupac seemed a fitting symbol, a lightning
rod, in fact, for many of these issues.
But then the story changed. Yeah, he is an angry young
black man. But why is he so angry? Where did he come
from? What compels him to say and do the things that
he does? Are the cases pending against Tupac Shakur
merely coincidences, part of an elaborate "setup," as
his lawyers would have us believe, or evidence of a
deeper problem? Is he the symbolic young black man shackled
by the system, or an individual young black man out
of control?
Tupac seemed on the verge of a breakdown as I pursued
this interview in November and December, calling his
publicist, his manager, his record company, close friends,
even his mother. The media had been unfair, they said,
and he didn't want to talk anymore. He finally agreed
to talk to me, perhaps because I had been working on
the story long before these arrests, and perhaps because
he saw it as his one good chance to tell his side of
the story.
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 '60s 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 codefendants 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..."
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