How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(32)
While we literally thought we could rhyme at least as well as a twenty-one-year-old Tupac Shakur, when the music stopped, he refused to hit us upside the head with clumsy clichés and twinkly phraseology. He told the truth, without rhyme, unlike anyone we’d ever heard. During Tupac’s first interview for MTV, Kurt Loder lobbed the trite question, “Can you tell me some of the things that someone like you who grows up in the inner city deals with?”
Tupac told him, “Our family crest was cotton. The only thing we can leave behind is culture, is music. Dignity and determination, that’s what we have. I feel like I’m cheated! Instead of me fulfilling my prophecy, I have to start one. Instead of me doing a good job of carrying on an empire, I have to build one. That’s a hell of a job for a twenty-one-year-old. That’s a hell of a job for any youngster, male or female, to have to build an empire for your family…”
By 1994, at age twenty-three, Tupac was the reckless outlaw of his, and other’s, lyrical compositions. Like too many of us, he flirted recklessly with bullets, police, money, curious women, and mean men. While the media focused on his first shooting in New York City and the eleven months he served in a correctional facility for sexually abusing a nineteen-year-old woman, something else was happening. The precision and believability of his art finally caught up with the breadth of his social vision.
Somehow, Tupac’s voice, which had once seemed almost brittle to us, became an inflected instrument, one that could whisper, chant, and bellow at any point in a song. His majestic manipulation of the long “e” in words like “adversary,” “crazy,” “cemetery,” “memories,” “bury,” “Hennessy,” “misery,” “bleed,” “please,” “free,” “g’s,” “me,” and of course “enemies” made millions of people believe not only in Tupac, but in his version of their truth.
Then he got shot on November 7, 1996.
I was twenty-one, four years younger than Tupac. Bullets and love had run me away from Mississippi one year earlier and I had landed in a progressive place out in the middle of some Ohio cornfields. Oberlin College was peopled with what my grandma called “good white folks.” One of these good white folks, a short wobbly drunk whose name I can’t remember, tapped me on my shoulder as I was coming out of the shower late one Saturday night. He told me that Tupac had been shot again in Las Vegas.
“MTV told me,” he said. “It’s true.”
Without knowing how many times he’d been shot, where the bullets landed, how, or if, he made it to the hospital alive, even if Tupac Shakur had actually been shot, I knew he was going to die.
I didn’t know much in the fall of 1996, but I knew intimately the ways that black American ambition, unchecked by healthy doses of fear, would lead to slow, painful death. This was our American story. I also knew that when enough rusty bullets were fired from traumatized citizens at moving black targets (no matter how passionate, willful, sensual, and imaginative those targets might be), the targets would eventually cease to exist.
It was inevitable.
As a grown man who now makes a living teaching and tapping on the worn screen doors of American memory and imagination, I still can’t find space for a Tupac Shakur in his forties. I’d like to believe that Tupac would have gotten even better as an artist, activist, and critical citizen. But I can’t figure out how someone so brilliant, so committed to honest exploration, so willing to fight for us, with us, and against us, could ever live beyond twenty-five in our United States.
Sixteen years after Tupac’s death, I need help imagining how a twenty-five-year-old Tupac might have engaged with the world the day after September 11, 2001. What would that twenty-five-year-old Tupac have done after his people were left drowning in poisonous water on August 29, 2005? What would he say to the relentless American politicians on the left and right who take no responsibility for their part in our American mess? How would he touch the millions of brothers and sisters in prison-industrial complexes and the thousands of young brothers taking turns dying and killing in Chicago, Jackson, Oakland, Little Rock, New Orleans, Newark, Detroit, Gary, Poughkeepsie, and Flint?
Eerily, the 2012 Republican and Democratic national conventions ended without one mention of these American citizens or the responsibility this nation has to them. Not only would the convention speakers not talk to them; they refused to even talk about them. While many of us were beaming with joy at the speeches we heard from Michelle, Bill, and Barack, and thanking our lucky stars that Mitt Romney and his band of Unimaginative American Thieves were… well, obviously unimaginative American thieves, a part of me was remembering the political stars of our nation, on both the right and left, when they were twenty-five.
Bill Clinton was milling around the halls of Yale Law School hitting on a fellow student named Hillary Rodham. Barack Obama was trying his hand at community organizing in Chicago. Michelle Robinson had just finished her first year as an associate at Sidley & Austin, a corporate law firm in Chicago. Mitt Romney was finishing up his senior year as an English major at BYU.
Strange.
By age twenty-five, Tupac Amaru Shakur had recorded six albums and starred in five movies. Five bullets had entered his body and he’d gone to prison for eleven months. He’d travelled around the world, influencing the life and art of millions of people and talking about organizing a movement against poverty and police brutality. He had shot two white off-duty cops in Atlanta who were harassing a black man, and beat the case. By age twenty-five, Tupac Shakur had fought to stay alive for six days in a Las Vegas hospital after three new bullets entered his body. And less than three months after his twenty-fifth birthday, Tupac Shakur was dead.