Jenée Desmond-Harris Tupac and My Non-thug Life

Instructor's Notes

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Courtesy of Jenée Desmond-Harris

JENÉE DESMOND-HARRIS is the race, law, and politics reporter at Vox.com. Before that she was White House correspondent and associate editor at The Root, an online magazine dedicated to African American news, social justice, and culture. A graduate of Howard University and Harvard Law School, Desmond-Harris has been a contributor to such news outlets as Time magazine, CNN, MSNBC, and the Huffington Post. The following selection was published in The Root in 2011. It chronicles Desmond-Harris’s reaction to the murder of gangsta rap icon Tupac Shakur in a Las Vegas drive-by shooting in 1996. Desmond-Harris mentions Tupac’s mother, Afeni, as well as the “East Coast–West Coast war” — the rivalry between Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie Smalls), who was suspected of being involved in Tupac’s murder.

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As you read, consider the photograph that appeared in the article:

1

I learned about Tupac’s death when I got home from cheerleading practice that Friday afternoon in September 1996. I was a sophomore in high school in Mill Valley, Calif. I remember trotting up my apartment building’s stairs, physically tired but buzzing with the frenetic energy and possibilities for change that accompany fall and a new school year. I’d been cautiously allowing myself to think during the walk home about a topic that felt frighteningly taboo (at least in my world, where discussion of race was avoided as delicately as obesity or mental illness): what it meant to be biracial and on the school’s mostly white cheerleading team instead of the mostly black dance team. I remember acknowledging, to the sound of an 8-count that still pounded in my head as I walked through the door, that I didn’t really have a choice: I could memorize a series of stiff and precise motions but couldn’t actually dance.

2

My private musings on identity and belonging — not original in the least, but novel to me — were interrupted when my mom heard me slam the front door and drop my bags: “Your friend died!” she called out from another room. Confused silence. “You know, that rapper you and Thea love so much!”

Mourning a Death in Vegas

3

The news was turned on, with coverage of the deadly Vegas shooting. Phone calls were made. Ultimately my best friend, Thea, and I were left to our own 15-year-old devices to mourn that weekend. Her mother and stepfather were out of town. Their expansive, million-dollar home was perched on a hillside less than an hour from Tupac’s former stomping grounds in Oakland and Marin City. Of course, her home was also worlds away from both places.

4

We couldn’t “pour out” much alcohol undetected for a libation, so we limited ourselves to doing somber shots of liqueur from a well-stocked cabinet. One each. Tipsy, in a high-ceilinged kitchen surrounded by hardwood floors and Zen flower arrangements, we baked cookies for his mother. We packed them up to ship to Afeni with a handmade card. (“Did we really do that?” I asked Thea this week. I wanted to ensure that this story, which people who know me now find hilarious, hadn’t morphed into some sort of personal urban legend over the past 15 years. “Yes,” she said. “We put them in a lovely tin.”)

5

On a sound system that echoed through speakers perched discreetly throughout the airy house, we played “Life Goes On” on a loop and sobbed. We analyzed lyrics for premonitions of the tragedy. We, of course, cursed Biggie. Who knew that the East Coast–West Coast war had two earnest soldiers in flannel pajamas, lying on a king-size bed decorated with pink toe shoes that dangled from one of its posts? There, we studied our pictures of Tupac and re-created his tattoos on each other’s body with a Sharpie. I got “Thug Life” on my stomach. I gave Thea “Exodus 1811” inside a giant cross. Both are flanked by “West Side.”

6

A snapshot taken that Monday on our high school’s front lawn (seen here) shows the two of us lying side by side, shirts lifted to display the tributes in black marker. Despite our best efforts, it’s the innocent, bubbly lettering of notes passed in class and of poster boards made for social studies presentations. My hair has recently been straightened with my first (and last) relaxer and a Gold ’N Hot flatiron on too high a setting. Hers is slicked back with the mixture of Herbal Essences and Blue Magic that we formulated in a bathroom laboratory.

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The author (left) with her friend Thea
Courtesy of Jenée Desmond-Harris

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7

My rainbow-striped tee and her white wifebeater capture a transition between our skater-inspired Salvation Army shopping phase and the next one, during which we’d wear the same jeans slung from our hip bones, revealing peeks of flat stomach, but transforming ourselves from Alternative Nation to MTV Jams imitators. We would get bubble coats in primary colors that Christmas and start using silver eyeliner, trying — and failing — to look something like Aaliyah.1

Mixed Identities: Tupac and Me

8

Did we take ourselves seriously? Did we feel a real stake in the life of this “hard-core” gangsta rapper, and a real loss in his death? We did, even though we were two mixed-race girls raised by our white moms in a privileged community where we could easily rattle off the names of the small handful of other kids in town who also had one black parent: Sienna. Rashea. Brandon. Aaron. Sudan. Akio. Lauren. Alicia. Even though the most subversive thing we did was make prank calls. Even though we hadn’t yet met our first boyfriends, and Shock G’s proclamations about putting satin on people’s panties sent us into absolute giggling fits. And even though we’d been so delicately cared for, nurtured and protected from any of life’s hard edges — with special efforts made to shield us from those involving race — that we sometimes felt ready to explode with boredom. Or maybe because of all that.

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I mourned Tupac’s death then, and continue to mourn him now, because his music represents the years when I was both forced and privileged to confront what it meant to be black. That time, like his music, was about exploring the contradictory textures of this identity: The ambience and indulgence of the fun side, as in “California Love” and “Picture Me Rollin’.” But also the burdensome anxiety and outright anger — “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” “Changes” and “Hit ’Em Up.”

10

For Thea and me, his songs were the musical score to our transition to high school, where there emerged a vague, lunchtime geography to race: White kids perched on a sloping green lawn and the benches above it. Below, black kids sat on a wall outside the gym. The bottom of the hill beckoned. Thea, more outgoing, with more admirers among the boys, stepped down boldly, and I followed timidly. Our formal invitations came in the form of unsolicited hall passes to go to Black Student Union meetings during free periods. We were assigned to recite Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” at the Black History Month assembly.

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Tupac was the literal sound track when our school’s basketball team would come charging onto the court, and our ragtag group of cheerleaders kicked furiously to “Toss It Up” in a humid gymnasium. Those were the games when we might breathlessly join the dance team after our cheer during time-outs if they did the single “African step” we’d mastered for BSU performances.

Everything Black — and Cool

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. . . Blackness became something cool, something to which we had brand-new access. We flaunted it, buying Kwanzaa candles and insisting on celebrating privately (really, just lighting the candles and excluding our friends) at a sleepover. We memorized “I Get Around”2and took turns singing verses to each other as we drove through Marin County suburbs in Thea’s green Toyota station wagon. Because he was with us through all of this, we were in love with Tupac and wanted to embody him. On Halloween, Thea donned a bald cap and a do-rag, penciled in her already-full eyebrows and was a dead ringer.

13

Tupac’s music, while full of social commentary (and now even on the Vatican’s playlist), probably wasn’t made to be a treatise on racial identity. Surely it wasn’t created to accompany two girls (little girls, really) as they embarked on a coming-of-age journey. But it was there for us when we desperately needed it.

[REFLECT]

Make connections: Searching for identity.

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Remembering high school, Desmond-Harris describes how students chose to group themselves according to what she calls “a vague, lunchtime geography of race: White kids perched on a sloping green lawn and the benches above it. Below, black kids sat on a wall outside the gym” (par. 10).

School, particularly high school, is notorious for students’ forming peer groups or cliques of various kinds—by ethnicity, gender, popularity, and so on. Recall the cliques in your own school and think about the roles they played, positive and negative, in the search for identity. Your instructor may ask you to post your thoughts to a class discussion board or blog, or to discuss them with other students in class. Use these questions to get started:

[ANALYZE]

Use the basic features.

A WELL-TOLD STORY: FINDING THE ARC OF THE STORY

We have seen that the dramatic arc (Fig. 2.1) is often used to organize a remembered event narrative around a central conflict, arousing curiosity and suspense as it builds toward a climax or emotional high point before resolving the conflict or at least bringing it to a conclusion. This is basically the structure Brandt and Dillard use to tell their stories. Writers, however, do not always follow this straightforward pattern. They may emphasize certain elements of the arc and downplay or even skip others.

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph analyzing the structure of Tupac and My Non-thug Life.

  1. Desmond-Harris could have built up to the surprising news of Tupac’s death, using it as the dramatic climax of her story. Why do you think she chose instead to use his death as the “inciting incident” with which to begin her story?

  2. How does the opening paragraph shed light on the conflict at the heart of Desmond-Harris’s story?

  3. What do the girls’ actions as they mourn Tupac’s death (paragraphs 3–7) as well as their actions later (paragraphs 10 –12) suggest about how the inciting incident of Tupac’s death led them to deal with the underlying conflict?

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VIVID DESCRIPTION OF PEOPLE AND PLACES: USING VISUALS AND BRAND NAMES

Desmond-Harris provides lots of concrete details to enliven her narrative. She also uses a photo and refers to brand names to convey to readers an exact sense of what the girls were like. Notice that she recounts the Sharpie tattooing and then actually shows us a photo of herself and her friend Thea displaying their tattoos. But Desmond-Harris does not let the photo speak for itself; instead, she describes the picture, pointing out features, such as their hairstyles and outfits, that mark the girls’ identity. Consider the references to particular styles and brand names (such as “our skater-inspired Salvation Army shopping phase”) that tag the various roles they were trying on at that time of their lives (par. 7).

ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph or two analyzing Desmond-Harris’s use of a photograph and brand names to enhance her descriptions in Tupac and My Non-thug Life:

  1. Skim paragraphs 5–7, highlighting the specific details in the photo that Desmond-Harris points out as well as the brand names (usually capitalized) and the modifiers (as in skater-inspired) that make them more specific.

  2. Look closely at the photograph itself, and consider its purpose.

    • Why do you think Desmond-Harris included it?

    • What does the photograph contribute or show us that the text alone does not convey?

  3. Consider the effect that the photo and the brand names have on you as a reader (or might have on readers of about Desmond-Harris’s age). How do they help readers envision the girls? What is the dominant impression you get of the young Desmond Harris from these descriptive details?

For more about analyzing visuals, see Chapter 28.

AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SIGNIFICANCE: HANDLING COMPLEX EMOTIONS

Remembered events that have lasting significance nearly always involve mixed or ambivalent feelings. Therefore, readers expect and appreciate some degree of complexity. Multiple layers of meaning make autobiographical stories more, not less, interesting. Significance that seems simplistic or predictable makes stories less successful. For example, if Brandt’s story had ended with her arrest and left out the conversations with her parents, readers would have less insight into Brandt’s still intense and unresolved feelings.

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ANALYZE & WRITE

Write a paragraph or two analyzing Desmond-Harris’s handling of the complex personal and cultural significance in Tupac and My Non-thug Life:

  1. Skim the last two sections (pars. 8 –13), noting passages where Desmond-Harris tells readers her remembered feelings and thoughts at the time and her present perspective as an adult reflecting on the experience. How does Desmond-Harris use her dual perspective—that of the fifteen-year-old experiencing the event and the thirty-year-old writing about it—to help readers understand the event’s significance?

  2. Look closely at paragraph 8, and consider how Desmond-Harris helps her readers grasp the significance of the event by using sentence strategies like these:

    • rhetorical questions (questions writers ask and answer themselves)

    • repeated words and phrases

    • intentional sentence fragments (incomplete sentences used for special effect)

Note that in academic writing, sentence fragments—even those that are used purposely for rhetorical effect—may be frowned on. One of the instructor’s purposes in assigning a writing project is to teach students to use formal academic writing conventions, a process that includes distinguishing between complete sentences and sentence fragments, and knowing how to identify and correct sentence fragments. (For more about intentional fragments, see Handbook section S3.)

[RESPOND]

Consider possible topics: Recognizing a public event as a turning point.

Like Desmond-Harris, you could write about how a public event, like a celebrity death or marriage, an act of heroism or charity, or even the passage of a law helped (or forced) you to confront an aspect of your identity. Consider the complexities of your reaction — the significance the event had for you at the time and the significance the event has for you now. You might make a list of physical traits, as well as beliefs about or aspects of your sense of identity that changed as a result of the event.