The Coldest Winter Ever

by Sister Souljah

  The effect of these books and movies was swift. It swept through our community like an airborne infection. The message was loud and clear. Only the men who were willing to become killers and enemies to their own people could make it to the top. Only the men willing to become ruthless would become respected. Only the men with real money could become substantial providers and receive the admiration of their women and children.

  But who was going to tell the story that focused on the fall of a drug kingpin, and of how he descends back into poverty and slavery? How the state places him back in chains naked and pinned in, chained to another slave just like him? How he loses everything he ever loved? How he murdered his own friends and family? How the world pimps his unprotected daughters and dwarfs then devours his sons? I wanted to suck the romanticism out of those blockbuster books and films, all of which I had read and seen, like most ghetto youth.

  My decision to tell my tale through the voice of a teenage ghetto female quenched another desire I had for a long time, the desire to write and show an authentic version of black girls, teens, and women. I felt that Hollywood had completely missed the real story of black girls and women. They had created female images that for me were simply figments of their imagination. They were not authentic. The sound of their voices, the depth of their thoughts, their manner of speech, their style of dress, the gravity of their hearts, the varying levels of love, the challenges they faced, and their attitudes had been all wrong. Writing The Coldest Winter Ever for me was to set it straight, to capture an array of black female personalities, to explore the many psychoses, the real strengths and weaknesses. To allow female characters to speak free from cultural domination or projections of how others thought we are. To get it right, finally.

  It was also an opportunity for me to set a new blueprint and criteria for depicting accurate ghetto girls, teens, and women. Hopefully this one book will help to free black actors from having to fit themselves into the strangely written roles and characters that have been misrepresenting them for years, yet may have paid the bills. Additionally, I hope it will help girls living in and outside the hood to understand that there are many women who you may model yourself after, as you attempt to come into your womanhood. You can be Winter or you can be Sister Souljah. You can be Mrs. Santiaga, or you could be Doc, the medical doctor who owned the building in which Sister Souljah lived. You could become Natalie, famous for blow jobs, or you could become Rashida, who took the help from concerned others and healed herself. I wanted to show all of these different girls and women and the consequences of their choices. This way a young female can pick up the book and decide which one she really wants to be. Which reality and consequence can she really handle?

  After I wrote the novel and it became popular, I was invited to speak at Danbury Federal Prison. I was invited by Kemba Smith, a young lady who was incarcerated for being the girlfriend of a drug dealer. I was amazed as I stood in the room with about three hundred young female inmates. First of all, they looked familiar, although I did not know any of them personally. They rocked the same hairstyles, had the same bodies and faces you would see anywhere in our hood. The group was made up of hundreds of mostly black and Latino women who had all been convicted and locked down for long periods of time because they were in love with a drug dealer, letting him bag up and cook up in their apartment, carrying a package from one location to another, or doing something simple like answering his phone calls, standing beside him at the wrong moment, riding in his car, or receiving and spending his money.

  I thought about how incredibly important my novel was at that moment. I thought about how The Coldest Winter Ever could become responsible for thousands of teenagers, women and men, staying out of prison because they read the book and now understood the truth of the drug deathstyle, the truth that had been for so many years either shrouded in secrecy or glamorized by Hollywood. I became proud of myself, standing there. I became hopeful that I was on the right path in fulfilling my purpose in this short life. I thought about how this was only one women’s prison in America. There were several more. I had already made the rounds as an activist and speaker in various male prisons. I knew those were stuffed to the breaking point with our boys and men, fathers, brothers, and sons.

  I had already been to a women’s prison where the incarcerated thirty- to fortyfiveyearold women who were HIV positive were secluded in one particular wing. But at Danbury, the young females looked strong and healthy. You could be walking down the street or taking a class seated right beside them and not tell the difference between them and anyone else. They did not appear to be drug addicted, sick, or crazy. They appeared to have been ignorant of their reality, the consequences and losses that the “drug game” would create. They were unaware of the specific laws of the United States of America. They were unfamiliar with the intricacies of a conspiracy charge, what it meant and the long extreme punishment it would carry. They had never thought that the men whom they loved and held down (some of them) would receive lesser sentences or none at all. They had never thought that during their incarceration in an unbreakable female prison, their man, or baby’s daddy, would never even write them a letter, pay into their commissary, give them a visit, or take care of his children whom the newly imprisoned mother left out in the world.

  I imagined that most of them had seen or personally experienced the majority of things I had written about in my book. I knew that they knew, that Sister Souljah had not been a street girl and had not participated in the drug game. I understood then why they felt they owned the story, that it was them and theirs, that they were Winter Santiaga. I now accept that the novel that I wrote has a life of its own beyond me, the author.

  3. How did you write the story so authentically when you said that since your early childhood, you separated yourself from people who used and/or sold drugs?

  Yes, great question. As a child, I was engulfed by fear. As I grew, I made a point to learn. I came into knowledge. Knowledge frees you from fear. It brings about complete understanding. It offers each of us the opportunity to explain and develop solutions to the problems we once ran away from.

  At age ten my mother moved us out of the New York projects. We were now officially homeless. We moved in with my grandmother who lived in a small house in the half black, half white suburbs of Northern New Jersey. She accepted us, but we were not welcomed. True, I was out of the ghetto, but my ghetto upbringing was within me. People say “Hey, Souljah, you only did six years in the projects,” from age four through ten. I say so what? How many years do you have to be in Vietnam, or Korea, or Iraq, or Afghanistan to know your ass is at war, or at least under attack? Can those ghetto feelings, observations, the intensity of them, can that ever leave you? Impossible.

  Besides, the black suburbs had problems too. There were still drugs, drug dealers, cultural confusion, and even murders. There was no peace in the souls of the humans who surrounded me. Yet everything looked better, was dressed up and nicely secured behind closed doors framed by manicured lawns. The coverup was much more orchestrated.

  I was a hard worker on every aspect of my life. I worked hard at my studies. I worked hard at maintaining and improving my body. I worked hard at balancing my emotional self. I worked hard at praying, staying sincere in word and deed, and remaining spiritually connected. I worked hard to combat my poverty and the suffering of my family members. I came to be someone who respected work intensely. I never ran away from it.

  I emerged from high school, therefore, a quiet but well-known young lady with a reputation for having a sharp mind, quick wit, and for being a fierce debater. I was the president of my freshman and sophomore classes. I was a thespian, lead actress in all of the school plays. I ran track, played volleyball and basketball. I was captain of the high school rifle team. I played the clarinet. I wrote for the school newspaper, The Oracle. I wrote for the literary magazine, The Eagle. I was the student liaison to the Board of Education. I had lunch with the principals, the mayor, and the head of t
he Board of Education. I won several oratorical contests on the U.S. Constitution. At sixteen years old, I went to Washington, D.C., as a legislative intern. I wrote a book of poetry and recited a few pieces on a New York–based television show. I attended Cornell University as preparatory, earning six college credits while still a high school student. Still I worked at McDonald’s, delivered the town newspaper to local homes on foot, and worked telemarketing jobs. I was the girl who had never smoked weed. I never did a drug. I never took an alcoholic drink. I was still in love with the human soul. I was still in love with black people, our unique experience, challenges, and lives. I was still in love with love. Yes, I was separate, urgent, intense and “deep.”

  Upon entering Rutgers University, I learned concisely and precisely the history of the United States. I was introduced to books, facts, and ideas that were never accessible to me in my local library or in public school. I read The Mis-education of the Negro, The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Angela Davis: An Autobiography, Assata, Institutional Racism in America, A People’s History of the United States, One Hundred Years of Lynching, When and Where I Enter, The Soledad Brother, Blood in My Eye, The Wretched of the Earth, Before the Mayflower, The Choice, Native Son, and American Hunger, among a host of other books. Reading became my way of having the conversations that desperately needed to happen between people but were not. Reading kept me more than well informed. Reading became my means of mind travel.

  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 thro
ugh 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.