The Coldest Winter Ever (46 page)

My education at Cornell University and Rutgers University, partnered with my own observations and experiences, gave me a solid understanding of not just my ghetto, but ghettos worldwide. I understood how and why they were set up. I understood how they were maintained. I also understood who profited from the arrangement, and who suffered. This knowledge made it possible for me to love still, but now to understand and defend my people. I wanted to have a hand in rebuilding our men, women, and children, our institutions, our culture, our lives. I believed in what many thought was impossible. I believed I could be part of changing the direction of the world.

How I became an activist, traveling the world from America to Europe to Russia, to Africa, speaking before student audiences, organizing events, fighting for rights causes, making television appearances, all before the age of twenty-one is another story. I’ll tell it at some later time. Suffice it to say, when I returned to New York City, which was inevitable, I returned with my brown eyes, sharp mind, and my heart open, ready to work.

I arrived in Harlem to live at age twenty-one. I had a new Madison Avenue job, which paid 200 dollars per week. I got an apartment on 119th Street between Malcolm X Boulevard and Fifth Avenue. I split the 600-dollar rent with a roomate. Working at a civil rights firm, I received information from all around the world about injustices, biased legislation, and racism. The issue that I connected with most, however, was the homeless families and their children living right there in midtown Manhattan next to my job. (For greater detail see my first book, nonfiction,
No Disrespect
.) I struck up a relationship with one of the young homeless girls, which led to a relationship with
all of them. I got a firsthand glimpse at the miserable way they were surviving. Because of the love I carried within, the knowledge I gained in life, I felt responsible for them.

These homeless children gave me a great gift. They were young, honest, and raw. They were the truth. They brought me down to the earth after having been in educational orbit. I thought to myself, Souljah, if you’ve been to so many places, read so many books, and know so much, fix this. By interacting with them and their families, I was back in the middle of the same world I feared as a child—the world of drugs, drug dealers, and drug users. The world of poverty. Not the poverty sheltered by grandmothers, scholarships, or college dorms, the real world of the have-nots, lower than the world of project poverty, welfare, section eight, and Medicaid that I grew up in. This was the world of no place to lay your head at night besides a welfare hotel. So at seven years old, these kids worked the streets at all hours, stopping cars and begging for money, or selling whatever they could find or steal. They had nice hiding spots for the little monies they earned, which was necessary to keep their crackhead relatives from smoking it. They would only sleep for a couple of hours during the day, the time it was least likely that they would be molested or raped.

I met these young homeless girls and boys, their older brothers and sisters, boyfriends, mothers, and mommas’ boyfriends. I came into this world through an eleven-year-old girl, the first homeless child I met. I was not afraid of the people I encountered from knowing her. I met young cats I knew hustled drugs because the children told me. They were not the scary drug dealers of my childhood. Physically in fact they were beautiful, pretty brown to awesome black skins, crafted physiques, clean, even, perfect teeth, alluring.

In their homeless state (living in a one-room “welfare hotel” with maybe five to eight other family members, one bathroom, no cooking, no kitchen, no privacy, no amenities), these young black males had high confidence and a great sense of masculinity, much more masculinity and confidence than most college men whom I had met throughout the world. As drug dealers, they were not rich or even close to it. They were lookouts, workers, and hand-to-hand dealers who were just getting by. Their sums earned equaled enough to pay for food for the family of eight, “basic living” expenses, with some left over to style so that they never appeared to be homeless to other friends, girlfriends, and associates whose opinion definitely mattered.

If a college degree does not make you a problem solver, you might as well take it back and demand a refund. So I started to educate the homeless children, the five through eleven year olds. Over time it became clear that I needed a separate space to give the full impact that was needed to change their lives, for real.

After conducting careful conversations and research (see
No Disrespect
), I developed a curriculum for an academic, cultural, and recreational summer sleepaway camp. I knew for certain, after traveling throughout the city with a gang of little kids, to the movies, the museums, conferences, libraries, and restaurants, that I needed to offer them more than educational outings, my measly paycheck, and used clothing and shoes. I needed to offer them what I had; peace of mind, safe surroundings, the tools to think, information, intelligence, and the strength to bring about a new reality in a life that had started out all wrong. Returning them every day to the same crazy, state-controlled, drug-infested, prostitution-funded environment was not going to make the lessons stick.

The number one thing that held these kids together was hip-hop music. It was the only thing that they could agree on. It was the only device that made them go from combative hotheads to a cool calmness. It was the only popular thing through which their lives and struggles were recognized and celebrated. It was the only thing that they would listen to, and really hear. Hip-hop artists were rhyming the only words these kids would memorize. They were the only ones discussing the jacked-up conditions, so they were the only black leaders in the minds of these children. There was no Malcolm X or Marcus Garvey. Who were they anyway? “Who cares,” they would say. We want Eric B. & Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, and Salt-N-Pepa.

There was no sense, I believed, in fighting the hip-hop celebrities for one of the leadership positions in the ears, hearts, and minds of ghetto youth. I was open to seeing hip-hop as a vehicle, a means to an end. I realized also, if I could make a way into hip-hop, we could save not only these children, we could rock youth worldwide into a new way of living, thinking, and producing.

I knew hip-hop music too, personally. I had grown up right beside it. Whether you were from the ghetto or the ’burbs, there was no way to miss the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979. The entire country received “The Message” from Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five in 1981. My brother would play driving hip-hop beats in his
room huddled together with his all-male crew. Hot beats, break beats were valuable, shared in secret by the young like a bottle of hypnotic. The walls in my bedroom would buckle when those beats came through his speakers. In junior high and high school, I was never allowed to go out to party the way he was. Usually I was studying something somewhere, probably far away. It would not have mattered much even if I was home. I was never a party girl. I stayed away from parties on purpose. They seemed like obvious places to have fun while making the biggest mistakes a pretty young girl could make. Everybody jammed into a small space, body to body. Parents absent on purpose. The lights out, the music real loud. The beats infectious and sexual. The breasts and thighs sucked into a vacuum of desire. Plenty of young heads ready to satisfy a girl’s need. One altercation or wrong glance leading to a casual shooting. It was more than I knew I could handle.

After careful thought, however, I now realized that twenty-one-year-old Souljah needed to get involved in the hip-hop. Not the party, the business. I needed to flip some money into a huge amount that would be enough to send a hundred or more homeless kids away for a safe, educational, cultural, and positive experience for the summer months.

Big ideas came to mind. I needed to let the world know about these kids, who I thought were pure gold. I used the talk radio shows to tell the metropolitan area what was going on in the middle of the financial capital of the world, New York City. This was in the late 80s when radio was open to working with the community instead of against it. Many youth, adults, and even elders from the broader black community became aware and supportive. Precious pennies and small amounts of money were donated in drips. We were grateful. Students from Rutgers, Columbia University, and City College began to help through a student organization that I created along with a handful of friends, The National African Youth Student Alliance.

The hard, cold reality was that I needed more than the popularity of the welfare hotel, homeless kids issue. We needed money, big money to hire buses, rent the camp facility, pay the counselors, purchase the supplies, and a bunch of other important things.

A popular nighttime talk radio personality, Bob Law, introduced me to Bill Stephney, then the vice president of Def Jam Recordings. After a couple of meetings with him, we struck an agreement for him
to allow his artists, LL Cool J, Run-D.M.C., and a host of others, to perform at the world famous Apollo Theater. They would donate their performances. I would control the ticket prices. I would pay the cost of renting the theater, the limos, the backstage amenities, security, and the upgraded sound system.

Truthfully, I had no idea what I was doing. I had never done this before. I had never even attended a real music concert before. But everybody had seen me in the five buroughs of New York with these kids who loved me because I was there every day, putting real heart, mind, and time in. People had seen me and the children together on the trains, in the parks, theaters, and museums. The realness made them want to help. Maybe also, the fact that I was willing to do what no one else was willing to do, with the population that no one in power wanted to acknowledge, address, or stand beside.

After learning incredible lessons, small but important details, business practices and requirements, I arrived at the week of the actual concert. The buzz on this event was unbelievable. So many popular artists had signed on to appear. LL Cool J was the headliner. Run-D.M.C. and Salt-N-Pepa dropped out, but Big Daddy Kane, KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions, Queen Latifah, and Rob Base had signed on. All together there were about ten major artists performing, the biggest hip-hop show ever in the history of the Apollo. I was able to raise the ticket prices to an unprecedented amount because of the demand, and because it was a charity event. I was amazed as the artists battled for more onstage performance minutes, when no one was being paid a cent.

On a security walk-through, I learned more than anyone could learn from a book. This was becoming both my business training ground and my street boot camp. I was instructed by the security team on how to deal with hustlers. That’s right.
I was told that the drug dealers would be out in full force to my show. I was shown where they would sit, how they would act, and what they would require. I was told that they were friends and not enemies. Many of them were buying up entire rows. The box seats had sold at triple the regular price. It was important that certain ones be seen. It was important that I had a popular and appealing show host. It was important the dealers and their crew be acknowledged and respected. Quietly, I was shocked that the elderly man in charge of the security detail, as well as the appointed police officers, were in full awareness of and cooperation with the dealers.

I was told that the dealers were good for business. After all, they would buy the jewels for their girls from the merchants whose shops were located on 125th Street. They would buy their own gold and diamonds out of the 47th Street diamond district. Their dentists would mold new gold fronts and gap fillers. They would have their outfits custom made at Dapper Dan’s, a famous African tailor who had a shop on 125th Street. Everybody would purchase new kicks, fresh designer clothing. All of the beauty salons would be packed with girls needing fabulous same-day styles. There would be limos ordered, cars rented, upgraded, and exchanged. There would be new cars, pimped out and rimmed up. Even some Harlem crackheads who had formed an impromptu car-wash business would profit. The drug dealers clearly were big business for the shops owned by whites, blacks, Jews, and Asians. The money makers could not be any happier. The dealers were insiders. “Rabble rousers,” community organizers, and activists like myself, who challenged the system and who worked with the poor and powerless, were less acceptable to these businessmen, and made to feel much more uncomfortable than those who supplied the neighborhoods with the illegal drugs that had destroyed so many of us.

Preparing for the show, I learned bits and pieces of what to expect from Harlem, where I lived, versus what to expect from Brooklyn youth or the Bronx or Queens or Staten Island. After breaking through the initial shock that a twenty-one-year-old female was the promoter of the biggest hip-hop show ever, the regular street people, show people, and record industry insiders were toughening me up.

I had to own up to the idea that most of the political and conscious blacks knew me, but the street blacks and middlemen business types did not. The political ones knew me from my activism on behalf of our community. They had seen me on the political television shows and heard me on the political radio shows. They knew my intellectual toughness, cultural commitment, work ethic, and sharp tongue. The streets were just getting to know me. The middlemen in business were in awe and envy. They saw me as incoming competition that must either be coopted or crushed. It became clear that I needed to consider making some kind of alliance.

I hired the Fruit of Islam to do security for me. As far as I was concerned, at that time they were running things. They were an army of big, beautiful, strong black men respected by and respectful of the black community. The artists, the businessmen, the youth, and even
the dealers would yield to them. They were under the direction of Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, who was on fire in the ’80s, and I knew that they respected me as well and would hold me down, making sure that everything was at peace, and everybody played their part correctly.