A Tale of Two Mothers

In a season of grim anniversaries, another passed last week, little noticed. It has been 10 years since rapper Tupac Shakur was shot on a street in Las Vegas. And in six months Voletta Wallace, the mother of Notorious B.I.G., will arrive for the 10th time at the date on which her son fell to a bullet in Los Angeles. While to the wider world, Biggie and Tupac were multiplatinum artists, hip-hop ambassadors and friends turned envenomed foes, to Wallace and Afeni Shakur they were sons, repositories of dreams and years of nurturing. "It's like I got the phone call yesterday," Shakur says of Tupac's death. "All I could do was learn to live in a world where my child was not there."

That lesson has played out in different ways for each woman. Having been unable to prevent her only son's death, Shakur, 59, has sought immortality for him. Armed with a seemingly limitless catalog of unreleased material, she has supervised the production of seven posthumous albums, the documentary Tupac: Resurrection and the new book Tupac Shakur Legacy. Plus she has opened the Tupac Amaru Shakur Center for the Arts, to encourage youngsters to pursue their artistic dreams. Mostly through her work, Tupac has become rap's first cult figure. For Wallace the issue is justice. She has spent the past four years embroiled in a wrongful-death suit against the city of Los Angeles. The suit alleges that crooked L.A.P.D. cops conspired with Death Row records owner Suge Knight to have Biggie murdered. (Knight has denied the allegation.) In July, her actions forced the L.A.P.D. to assign a new task force to investigate the murder.

Just as children resolve not to make the mistakes of their parents, the paths the two women have chosen reverse the approaches taken by their offspring. Tupac was a troublemaker. By the time he died at age 25, he had shot two off-duty cops, been convicted of sexual abuse, and assaulted a film director. He had also sold about 20 million records and starred in six movies. Wallace's son spent time as a drug dealer on the corners of Brooklyn's Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood but got credibility from his way with rap rather than his rap sheet. Tupac was more prolific (when he died, he left some 150 unreleased songs; Biggie, who was 24 when he died, left none). But Biggie's intricate rhyme schemes, impeccable rhythm and perverse sense of humor made him a god among rap cognoscenti. In death, however, it is Tupac who has emerged as the artist and Biggie as a problem for law enforcement.

Perhaps the mothers also grieve in different ways because of their contrasting relationships with their sons. Afeni Shakur was a black power--era radical who fell into drug addiction in the 1980s. Out of Tupac's difficult childhood, he crafted a tortured persona as a man both blessed and cursed. Throughout his career, he invoked the pride and shame he felt about his mother, making hits out of confessionals like Dear Mama and Keep Ya Head Up.