The Portable Promised Land Page 14

  Was she a modern-day Robin Hood, a vigilante taking out community scourges, or a serial killer and a parasite in the drug jungle? Is the story a myth she’s allowed to grow for her own purposes? All great MCs are actors at heart — even if they’re keepin it real, they may still be playing a character based on themselves. So how to know where the memoir ends and the myth begins? Looking inside The Black Widow’s light eyes I can’t tell how much truth I’m getting. When I push her she refuses to go deep into her past as a cleaner, except to say that she has, “just in case of emergency,” a house on the beach in Cuba and never goes anywhere without her open-ended first-class plane ticket and passport.

  One morning a year and a half ago, The Black Widow mapped a career shift away from cleaning and into rhyming. That now-historic morning planning session was held beneath the sheets, where she laid with Marcy’s finest. She touches her immaculate platinum-and-diamond black-widow neck chain, a gift from Hovah, as her voice turns soft and quiet for the only time during our days together. Even though she and he no longer see each other, she, for one, is still in love with Jay-Z. “Shawn,” she says, “is so rare.”

  The first thing you see when you walk into The Black Widow’s three-floor brownstone — in a section of Brooklyn she asked remain undisclosed — is a framed, life-sized photograph of her mother, Renee Neblett, a beautiful chocolate-skinned woman who worked as a painter and an art teacher but could’ve been a model. The one-time Black Panther now runs a school in Ghana. “Momma is my rock,” she says.

  When The Black Widow was ten, her father left the family and her mother started a massive education campaign. “She called it mental immunization.” Each day after school for two hours, Mom would read to Isis and her two younger sisters from Franz Fanon, Stokely Carmichael, Angela Davis, Malcolm X, and Assata Shakur. “The Insurrection of Nat Turner was a bedtime story in my house,” The Black Widow recalls. “She read to us over and over how he broke away from the plantation and led his crew from home to home, slaughtering more than sixty MCs. I always loved the part when he saw his destiny. A few months before the killings, he said, ‘I had a vision, and I saw white spirits and Black spirits engaged in battle, and the sun was darkened — the thunder rolled in the heavens, and blood flowed in the streams — and I heard a voice saying, ‘Such is your luck, such you are called to see; and let it come rough or smooth, you must surely bear it.’ Word. Let it come.”

  Years of this schooling turned her political mind sharp and unbreakable like a fine sword. “MCs’ minds are diseased,” she says. “Racism is the comic, pathetic, and logical invention of a thoroughly diseased skull. It is a malignant, inoperable tumor that has come to reside in every cell of their bodies and effect their every waking decision. Actually, the word racism is too vague and confusing. It leads to the thinking that we’re talking about race prejudice, which Black people can practice. Black people are not the problem. The word is white supremacy. And when you realize how second nature the supremacy of whiteness is in their minds, then you begin to understand that no amount of hand holding or million marching or consciousness raising will cleanse them. There is only one antidote for white supremacy. It is a bullet, delivered swiftly to the cranium. The higher the caliber, the more effective the treatment.”

  The Black Widow leads the way to her second-floor living room. On a large glass table, Vogue sits next to Ammo next to an exquisite wooden chess set in the middle of an unfinished game. On the couch is a thick, red book called The 48 Laws of Power. (Her three favorites: “Law Fifteen: Crush Your Enemy Totally,” “Law Three: Conceal Your Intentions,” and “Law Thirty-Seven: Create Compelling Spectacles.”)

  She ducks into her bedroom to put Sly Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin On on the turntable and say hi to her pit bull, Huey Newton. In the kitchen her Macintosh G4 is on sleep — the screen-saver is Angela Davis in court, giving the Black Power salute to the camera. Beside it sits a cute stuffed teddy bear holding a little stuffed Uzi and a high-school drama trophy. On the refrigerator are acceptance letters from Stanford, Yale, and Spelman.

  She returns to the living room in a loose Che Guevara T-shirt, lights a Newport, and sets up the chess set for a game. “You ain’t gonna win,” she says, “but if you don’t at least make me work, this interview is over.” She opens by quickly setting both bishops into attack formation.

  “Why did your mother start her mental immunization program?”

  “Well, after my father left, she sortof snapped to attention. She began to understand how warped she had been for allowing this MC into her home and how the virus of white supremacy may’ve seeped into us.”

  “Your father was white?”

  “Yeah.”

  A series of offensive pawn moves leaves me no forward space. I have to sacrifice a knight to clear out room.

  “When did you start thinking about race war?”

  “When my father left I realized Blacks and MCs can’t live together in a context, small or large. After that I came to understand that the noose of white supremacy would never be loosened by pleas or bargaining or bribes. We will never have real progress without purposeful violence.”

  “Why is it,” I ask, “that so many people who are very light skinned or biracial become the most passionate, floor-stomping advocates of Blackness? I’m thinking of Malcolm X, who was a quarter white, and Bob Marley, who was half white, and countless examples from my own experience where recently miscegenated people seem to overcompensate for a physical lacking — or perceived lacking — with an oversized political view, as if they’re dealing with some racial Napolean complex.”

  Without looking up from the board she says, “I’m Black. Period. There is no point in distinguishing between Black people. That’s dividing our army. The only important distinction is us and them.”

  She bangs her knight down onto my seventh rank, giving check while attacking my queen. My heart sinks.

  “Your stuff is reminiscent of Public Enemy....”

  “Fuck that. Chuck is a pussy. He was no revolutionary. To him the political aspect of it was artifice, a marketing tool. He was no artist, he was a businessman. For me this is not business. This is not music. It’s revolution.”

  My queen is gone. My king is running scared. “Have you spoken to your father lately?”

  “It’s been years. He broke out in the middle of the night without even saying goodbye. I’ve been considering hiring a detective to find his ass so I can give him some of my white supremacy medicine.”

  She silently searches for a move. I await the boom that’ll kill my dying king. But she abruptly heads off to her bedroom. A phone dials. “Hi, Mom,” she says with a sad crack in her voice.

  . . .

  It’s about three 3 a.m. when The Black Widow pulls up to the back door of Tramps, a nightclub in downtown Manhattan. Her Range is flanked by KCC members on motorcycles like some sort of urban secret service. Inside, a capacity crowd awaits as Myesha primes them for the upcoming assault by spinning searingly cold old-school funk — Funkadelic’s “Maggot Brain,” James Brown’s “King Heroin.”

  In The Black Widow’s dressing room, things are sedate. The dimmer lamps keep things kinda dark, as does Jay’s Reasonable Doubt playing in the background. Kyla, Poo Poo, Berries, and Z sit and talk, everyone holding their own bottle of Dom Perignon and swilling it straight out the bottle. The Black Widow sits alone in the corner in front of the large-screen TV, watching a British television documentary on Elaine Brown, chairwoman of the Black Panthers in the 70s. She’s holding her pink Uzi in her hands. “I ain’t goin nowhere without Lil’ Sis.”

  With two minutes to showtime, The Black Widow changes out of a Gucci T-shirt and silk Gucci jeans into something from her latest shopping trip: a velvet skintight leopard-print catsuit. It shows off every curve, from her shoulders through her hips down to the bottom of her long legs. The KCC forms a tight circle around her, almost a group hug, and whispers fiercely into her ear until they begin bouncing on their toes in uniso
n, everyone sing-rhyming in the style of an old slave work song: “Black Widow...on a mission! And God is on our side! Victory ...is assured! Cuz the Devil can’t stop my nine!”

  Onstage, the lights dim, then go black. The crowd starts to scream. From offstage The Black Widow screams into the microphone, “ WELCOME TO THE REVOLUTION!” Myesha drops the needle on “He’ll Die, Too.” The beat, built from a loop of the opening bass line of Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” picks up steam while an unseen Black Widow states and restates the chorus — “Brother from another mother, maybe that’s true / But he’s an MC / So he’ll die too.”

  The lights flare up and The Black Widow is standing at the lip of the stage, looking down on them as she fires off rhymes tight and fast — “Now don’t you look like that / play like it ain’t still fact / jus cuz you know you could rap / my man, but still ain’t Black / know my desire’s to annihilate / I don’t hold back / MC, you know I love you / jus one thing that you lack.” She just stands there in the minimalist onstage style of Rakim and Jigga — moving little, almost sneering at the audience, commanding every ounce of their attention through conviction and aura and sexiness. “You never seen my eyes gleam / I gets hot like the sun / millennium, me and Sis predictin battles to come / you in the lead / who you take / thinkin stakes was high / Eminem, so how you figure / there’s no chocolate inside / And let me tell ya Slim / ain’t much the shade gon do / Lil’ Sis done took a likin / told me, ‘He’ll die, too’ / She’ll put a bullet in ya face / show ya how we do / lemme know, ‘Yo, he’s your boy, Black’ / ‘and he’ll die, too.’”

  She rips through “I Feel Naked Without My Gun” (the chorus: “Tits and ass and swole-up clit / I may as well be without my clip / it’s what it’s gon be when my guns spit / jus keep em in line / when MCs trip”) and then roars into the epic “Still Are Warriors,” a firestorm of a record. Over a loop from U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” with its euphoric battle drums and eerie guitar lick, as well as the undercurrent of Mike Tyson’s lispy voice talking wickedly evil smack, she spits furiously, like a fascist dictator emoting for the masses at the back of the stadium — “Who on the front lines? / Yeah, cuz we the enemy now / by any means, was necessary / so we sprayin em down / like Nat Turn we set it off / you did on Indian tribes / Black Widow eradicate / you’ll never see my gentlecide / When I’m strapped it’s a fact that I’m bout six-four / with all the strength of an Amazon warrior / What you sweatin at the threat of an Armageddon for / our revolution got you noosed / and spillin blood on the floor / entertain you, yeah we might / but niggas don’t dance no more / those race riots had you shook / now we got more in store!”

  The Black Widow finishes her rhyme, then throws her microphone on the stage as the beat rumbles on. She walks into the middle of the crowd, grabs a white boy by the shirt, and practically drags him onstage. Berries whips out a chair and The Black Widow points for him to sit down. She turns toward him, licking her lips, seduction written across her face. He melts into the chair. Without speaking she circles him, her eyes never leaving him, then leans over in front of him, hands on his knees, melons in his face. She moves in, his eyes widen, the crowd gasps. Her pillow-soft lips delicately touch his, then pull back. She smiles at him. Suddenly, the KCC storms the stage — Berries cuffs his hands behind the chair, Poo Poo throws a black pointed mask over his head, Z hands The Black Widow her pink Uzi. She points it at his chest. She pulls the trigger and unloads half the clip into him. His body goes limp and blood pours out from him. The KCC whisks the chair away before it can spill on the stage.

  The “Still Are Warriors” beat plays on. The Black Widow stands at the lip of the stage, staring at the crowd, roaring, “ THIS...IS REVOLUTION!” Somehow it sounds different now that she’s added to her body count right before our eyes. The crowd stands paralyzed by what they’ve seen. After a confused moment some head for the door. Some vomit on their shoes. But some cheer manically, energized by The Black Widow’s example, ready to follow her to the earth’s end.

  Backstage the KCC drag the corpse far from the audience’s line of vision, then set the chair on its feet. Kyla says, “We’re cool,” and pulls off the hood. The corpse comes to life. He opens his eyes and stands up. They uncuff him and pull off his messy shirt. “Thanks,” Kyla says. “We’ll call you tomorrow, Greg.”

  To be continued...

  YOUNG, BLACK, AND UNSTOPPABLE,

  OR DEATHOF A ZEITGEIST JOCKEY

  The Black Widow Prequel and Sequel

  It was the day after The Black Widow’s album You Are Who You Kill had finally come out. It’d been slated for six months earlier, but the release had been held up by our trial on charges of obscenity and murder. The interludes on her album were actual recordings of people being killed. The prosecutor said we’d made “a snuff film on CD,” and indicted The Black Widow, my twin brother Sugar Dice, and me, J-Love Lucid. But no one had been killed by us. They kept the album off the shelves, but couldn’t stop us from having daily press conferences on the courthouse steps and making her single “He’ll Die, Too” fucking ubiquitous. You heard it flowing from boomboxes and lips, MTV and mix tapes. You read about it in the New York Times, where Maureen Dowd gagged as The Black Widow professed love for Eminem while promising that when the race war comes, “He’ll die, too.” By the time the judge ruled — “A more repugnant and less-deserving group of defendants I can hardly imagine, yet sadly I am bound by the First Amendment....”— The Black Widow had become one of the biggest stars in America. We drove custom-made convertible Land Rovers, Concorded to Paris for dinner, and weekended in an oceanfront villa on the coast of Bora Bora. We were young, Black, and unstoppable. But it was all built on lies.

  The Black Widow, we found out much later, was not the daughter of a Black Panther and was not told about Nat Turner as a bedtime story. She was a Park Avenue penthouse princess finished by Chapin. Her dad was a big lawyer and her mom a failed actress. The whole Black Widow persona started on a dare after drama class. She created a character meant to parody the modern-day MC and amuse her friends. Then Jack Apocalypse, one of Brooklyn’s greatest MCs, was murdered. Then someone five-fingered a textbook-sized book of his unrecorded rhymes. She convinced her dad to spot her $25,000 and took the book home. She wasn’t militaristic or nationalistic or political at all, those were just the rhymes Jack had written. But then she discovered that MCing is a twenty-four-hour job. Everywhere she went people expected to see The Black Widow — the pink Uzi, the badass pimp-stride, the bodacious political talk: “The only antidote for white supremacy is a bullet, delivered swiftly to the cranium. The higher the caliber, the more effective the treatment.” So she began living it, letting the persona sink in, making Isis Jackson disappear. But she never really believed what she was saying, so she was likely to say anything.

  Everything started to crumble when that little Black girl stood up. She was cornrowed and cross-legged on the stage of MTV’s “Total Request Live,” singing along with some mindless white noise in the middle of a swarm of Bubble Yum-snapping waifs. In the middle of the live broadcast she stood up. A camera flashed to her. She was holding hands with her blond boyfriend and saying the chorus from The Black Widow’s “He’ll Die, Too” — “Brother from another mother, maybe that’s true / But he’s an MC / So he’ll die too.” Then she dug under her Hello Kitty belt and pulled out a Tec-9.

  Three point two million kids watched as she used both hands to lug that thing up to her chest and put a burst of bullets through her big blond boyfriend. Then, as a screaming stream of kids fled and Carson Daly stood frozen, that little girl shot herself.

  That night the three of us drove to MTV for a live midnight interview. I sat in the back, thinking of the days when Mom first got sick and Dad started going crazy. He just sat there watching television all day long. He got three televisions, all with picture-in-picture, and stacked them in a pyramid in his bedroom.

  After Mom died, Dad got an idea. He would start a cable station that showed nothing b
ut commercials. A half hour of Michael Jordan spots, then a block of McDonald’s ads, the original Joe Isuzu liar series, then Nike’s Fun Police. No hosts, no programming breaks, no behind-the-scenes documentaries. No logo so there’d be a mystique. Just an endless parade of the coolest commercials in history: the Apple Computer big-brother spot, the Coca-Cola computerized polar bears, the mysterious Maxwell House couple series, “Please, don’t squeeze the Charmin,” “We will sell no wine before its time,” the Crazy Glue construction guy, Bob Euker and “He missed the tag!,” Tiger Woods and that bouncing ball, Ray Charles and the Uh-Huh Girls, “Where’s the Beef?,” “Pret-ty snea-ky, sis,” “My bologna has a first name, it’s O-S-C-A-R...,” the Bud Bowl, EF Hutton, Mean Joe Greene, Crazy Eddie, O.J. Simpson for Hertz, those faceless guys for cotton Dockers, Jerry Seinfeld for American Express, Bill Cosby for Jell-O pudding, Mikey for Life cereal, “I can bring home the bacon! Enjolie!,” “Nothing comes between me and my Calvins,” “No, my brotha, you got to go get your own,” and “I’ve fallen!!! And I can’t get up!!!” He would call it the Commercial Channel. It took him just a few months to find investors. It was an immediate monster success. No one admitted to watching it, but the Nielsens were astronomical. Artists applauded — it was the ultimate, they said, in found materials as art. Editorial pages declared the approach of the Apocalypse. The big networks introduced the fifteen-minute program to deal with shortening attention spans brought on by Dad’s juggernaut. And he became rich. As in, just-roll-the-truck-up-to-the-yard-and-dump-the-cash-on-the-front-lawn-cuz-we-don’t-have-anymore-room-in-the-bank rich. Dad took to rolling around town in a silver chauffeured Humvee, always carrying a large Ziploc baggie filled with Cuban cigars, wooden matches, a cutter, a passport, and dollars, francs, pounds, lira, krona, and yen. He never left town. He just wanted to appear cosmopolitan.