But then, on a more serious note, he later had a birthday and we collected money for his birthday, so he could get a birthday gift. Everybody in the company chipped in. Afeni was going through her problems with substances at that time, and so he took that money and he went grocery shopping for his family. He was selfless like that. He wasn’t thinking about himself, he was thinking about his family, his sister, his mama.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING We hung out and we had fun, but because we didn’t get to see each other every day, when we did, it would be a whole occasion for me and him. My aunt would either get me or get him and bring them over or whatever. But it would be like a whole day or a whole weekend of stuff; it would be like an adventure. We would always make time to catch up around what was going on in our little preteen lives. For us, it was deep because we were immersed in a community with family members who were doing a lot of social stuff. And also, as we got older, times were changing. And as times changed, the movement changed, and as the movement changed, our experiences as young people changed. We did a lot of talking around how shit was different.
He was protective of the people that he loved. I think that he understood that the journey that he was on was going to be something that would be big enough to really create a community or continue a community.
LEVY LEE SIMON I think that being a part of the ensemble helped shape him. But I also think it had to do with growing up in New York City and having to be the man of the house at the time. Taking responsibility. He took responsibility for his family. So there was that side of him, underneath all of everything, that was very, very serious. Plus, having a mother like Afeni. It wasn’t just about her issues with substances. She also, don’t forget, was one of the Panther 21. He was raised with that. Afeni was a powerful, powerful presence.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING At that time, that’s like the early, early stages of hip-hop. Regionalism plays a part in it, too, because if you were in New York, at that time, you were rewinding songs, practicing, and learning the lyrics. I had an older brother and we wanted to be just like him. We were probably trying to figure out what was cool based on what my brother was doing, which meant getting into rap.
As I’m thinking about it, I don’t know if, as we were rapping and singing the stuff that was on the radio, was he in the back of his mind like, Oh, yeah, I can do this. But it’s hard to think of any crystallizing hip-hop moment because it’s all baked into the time. I started to see a distinct creative side to him once he went to art school in Baltimore.
LEVY LEE SIMON He hung out with us until maybe fifteen or sixteen, somewhere near when he left to go to Baltimore.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING It was a surprise to me when they moved to Baltimore. We rode with them down there. Afeni probably told them they were moving, but I didn’t know until they came with the car. It was exciting. He was excited. But also, it was like, What is life gonna be like outside of New York? He’s still a young kid, basically, having his whole life uprooted to an entirely different place. So there’s this sense of having no clue what comes next. We thought Baltimore was the country. “You ’bout to move all the way to Baltimore?” The idea of somebody moving—you kind of know: I don’t know when I might see you again, especially when you’re a kid. Baltimore was definitely not the landing place. But all of that rap stuff really happened once he got there. Us growing up, that wasn’t how I viewed him or how I looked at him, or even how his swag was. The rap thing came about after.
CHUCK WALKER The Bourbon Reforms were a series of measures of increased taxes. Basically, the Spanish were losing hegemony to France and England, and they were cranking up the tax machine for the Americas. And so it hit everyone really hard. Indigenous people had to work in the mines. They had to pay a head tax. And those were sort of bad years, those years. There were some climate problems. So it got harder and harder to pay off the taxes. But it wasn’t just fiscal. They wanted to get rid of the office called the cacique, which was this ethnic authority. They wanted neutral people for the role, not traditional people. They wanted to name their own people, and Túpac Amaru II and others rose up in response. It was a growing crescendo of exploitation and frustration.
II
RICHARD PILCHER I came in the first year that BSAI was full-time. The previous year, in 1980, they had an after-school program, and there were a few teachers, but it opened to students full-time in 1981. I was there then as a principal acting teacher, and I remained that until I retired fully a couple years ago. The idea when the school was set up was that working professionals would teach the students. This was unique and still remains unique, frankly, across the country—that the majority of the teachers were adjunct faculty. I was adjunct for about the first nineteen years and then I went full-time. So everybody who was teaching was also working in their profession at the same time.
I think this gave and continues to give the school a really unique flavor. It really did not have some of the hierarchies and groups that ordinary high schools have. For instance, there’s no jock culture there. There are no teams. Your status in the school is pretty much based on how good you are at your art form. And so students who were good dancers or good artists or musicians or actors or whatever, they tended to be in the sort of in-crowd.
There was quite a fair amount of tolerance in the school, I think. Certainly it was racially inclusive. At least 50 percent of the school at any given time is African American and other people of color. That lent kind of a unique quality to the school. I mean, there were students there who would never have met each other if they’d gone to their neighborhood schools. There were friendships that grew up—between straight and gay, Black and white—that just never would have happened. In fact, while he was at BSA, Tupac’s closest friend was a white male.
In many ways, it was a kind of a home for outsiders—for students that, because of their creativity and sensitivity and artistic talents, were often not fully accepted in their regular high schools. No place is perfect. Certainly I’m sure that there were conflicts and cliques. That’s sort of inevitable. But in the main, there was a tremendous amount of acceptance of differences.
BECKY MOSSING BSA was this unbelievable new place, and we were very, very open with one another. It was a utopia, and every possible day, we looked at each other as artists, we were treated like artists. I think that people at BSA really felt like things were moving forward in terms of equality—that things were improving. What we have talked about since, especially in today’s world, is what happened when we all left: culture shock. Every single one of us felt it when we left.
I have a really close friend who was in the same class as me, so we were both a year ahead of Tupac, and he actually wound up going to jail for armed robbery, along with another classmate of Tupac—they were in the same ensemble. They just got out this spring, serving twenty-six years of a fifty-four-year sentence. My friend came from an area in Baltimore that was incredibly impoverished, incredibly crime-ridden, and very, very difficult. He never met a white person until he came to BSA. And one of the things that he says is he wished that BSA could have been a boarding school, and I think this is true of Tupac, too, because coming into the building and then leaving and having to make a switch and going back into your neighborhood was a challenge.
RICHARD PILCHER I have a memory of either Tupac telling me, or someone who knew Tupac telling me, he had been raised to believe that white people were devils. That they were essentially evil. You know about his background and his mother. Then he came to BSA, and he found that that wasn’t the case. There were people there who believed in him—the teachers and other students—and valued him for who he was. They weren’t looking down on him at every moment of the day as an inferior second-class citizen. It was revelatory for him.
BSA is a place where a student would stand up and receive the undivided attention of a teacher for fifteen or twenty minutes or half an hour or whatever it was. That just doesn’t happen in most high schools. So there was a sense that who they were was
being validated—what they were doing and what they were thinking and how they were feeling. And of course, in theater, in particular, a lot of what we do has to do with exploring your feelings, your inner landscape, bringing that out and making it public.
It’s a very tricky thing to do in high school. High school is a time when kids basically want to hide and then come out when they’re eighteen. They’re sort of trying to build a persona that’s keeping them safe. And then you come into a theater class and we say, “We don’t get to be safe. I’m sorry, you have to show who you are, through your characters, and explore your feelings in front of us.” And that’s very scary.
I think what we tried and tried and tried to create was a kind of a safe space where students could be themselves. And I think more often than not, we succeeded, at least to some degree, and I think that Tupac was able to stand up in front of us and his peers in a way that he just wouldn’t have been able to do anyplace else.
BECKY MOSSING I remember being in homeroom, which was in the ballroom of the school, and seeing this kid with his pick in his hair and his wifebeater and jeans and this huge smile, these sparkling teeth. It’s so cliché to say, but he had this light around him. He had this magnetism. I remember sitting back and thinking, Who is that kid? He’s new and people are already drawn to him like he’s been here for years.
We had homeroom together. We had lunch together. School was really small. The theater department was really small. And so we were often together. We had movement classes that were, like, some dance, but more like exploratory movement and how that connected to acting. There were voice classes and musical theater, but the musical theater classes came in your junior year, so he had those during his last year at BSA.
And then we had pretty intense acting classes with two very specific teachers: Richard Pilcher, who did a lot of Shakespeare, and Donald Hicken, who is the head of the program. Tupac would have worked with Richard quite intensely during his first and second years doing scene work, monologue work, theater games.
RICHARD PILCHER He was a really nice kid. People say, “Wait a minute, you mean this guy with a thug tattoo and a pissed-off persona?” I really liked him. He was funny. He was essentially very sweet, very sensitive. I think certainly there was some anger there, although I never really saw it come out. I mean, it was a sense of injustice that he was keenly aware of—how his family, how his people, if you will, have been treated. Highly justifiable. But that wasn’t the primary thing I saw.
We really connected I think mostly in Shakespeare. He, not surprisingly, because of his gift for language, fell in love with Shakespeare. He wasn’t really familiar with it before that, but he had a real talent for it; he had a great sense for the rhythm and music of the verse. He obviously took that love for words and language in a different direction, but he was very charismatic. He had those eyes that just conveyed a whole lot.
And he had a very good, muscular physique. The dance department sort of glommed onto him and used him whenever they could. There’s not really any official crossover between theater and dance now, but in the early days we had more classes that could be perhaps combined; it was a smaller school. I co-taught a class with a dance teacher for dancers and actors that unfortunately didn’t happen anymore after a certain point because the departments just became too demanding. But Tupac went to the dance department and he danced in several productions, rehearsing after school primarily. And he was extremely popular there, particularly among the girls, as you can imagine.
BECKY MOSSING He was always flirting. But then when he had a girlfriend, he was always super honorable. And he was always, always respectful.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING I remember he came up after they moved. We were sitting in my kitchen, and he was telling me about art school. He was really, really excited. And I remember being like, “Yo, this is so dope.” One of the things that made him a good entertainer is that he’s a good storyteller. He’s a Gemini, and growing up reading and being a leader and speaking in front of people, you know how to tell a story. You know how to give the details that matter and draw the audience. He was telling me about his classes. He did the little acting exercise that he was learning. It was, like, super exciting, because you could see that, like—something good is happening out of this.
RICHARD PILCHER Sometimes you’ll run into ego in kids—and adults, too, obviously—where they’re not receptive to coaching. They’re not receptive to being told, “No, this isn’t working. You need to do this another way.” And we’ve had some leave over the years because they just couldn’t take it, couldn’t stand being criticized. The teachers tend to be pretty gentle, but we’re also direct, and there’s a certain professional standard. Well, he was very open to coaching. He was a very eager learner. And he was pretty open about what he didn’t know. He had a kind of vulnerability that, with a little encouragement, he would drop some of that armor. I said to the kids for years: “I don’t know where you’re coming from in terms of neighborhood, family life. I know that you may have to leave here and put up your armor to protect yourself. But here in this class, we need to be able to drop that armor and open up,” and he was able to do that.
BECKY MOSSING During his junior year, his mother was stuck in jail, and he was living in an apartment with a college-age roommate. I never met the roommate. I think he was at the Maryland Institute College of Art because they lived right off North Avenue. He was working so he could pay his rent. He was basically paying his own rent so that he could stay in Baltimore and go to school. He worked a lot; most weekends, a few evenings busing tables.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING That was a difficult time because his mother was really struggling. That’s no secret. It’s difficult to talk about. Black people, we don’t put all our business out there.
I remember him just kind of explaining to me what was going on. We talked a lot about personal things, what was going on as a result of his mother. It was one of those things where you are raised in an environment where you are surrounded by people who love and nurture you and nurture all of the creative aspects of who you are, and you’re in a certain type of environment, and then when you start to struggle and you are no longer in that bubble, you have to develop the other survival skills that you need, but the desire to still be creative and doing the thing that you now realize you really love, you have to figure that out, too.
BECKY MOSSING I remember him sitting on my parents’ deck just quietly staring out at the woods behind our house. I don’t even remember why he was out there, but he was out there by himself. It must’ve been the morning after a party or something, because I remember walking out to see him and seeing him sigh and looking back at me with these long-ass curly eyelashes and just sort of shaking his head and going, “Nature.” And I was like, “Yeah?” And he just shrugged at me and looked back out at the woods.
RICHARD PILCHER I’m not a huge rap expert or even fan, god knows, but I have a book of his raps as poetry, and you can see that pain that he was often dealing with and how he was trying to come to terms with that. A very, very sensitive young man.
BECKY MOSSING In childhood and in middle school, no one I knew used the N-word. It was a bad, bad word. And then, all of a sudden, here’s my friend Tupac using this word. What the hell? Why are you using this word? It’s a horrible, derogatory term.
I remember, very, very clearly, like, saying, “Don’t use that word around me.”
He said, “I am taking that word back. I’m using that word to empower me and to empower my people.”
My little, like, sixteen-, seventeen-year-old self, in my ignorance at the time, I couldn’t even hear that. “Don’t say it to me.”
He said, “Okay. I won’t use it around you.” He did it out of respect for what I felt, that sort of visceral response that I had for that word, and still have.
I was probably wrong at that moment to say that, but he didn’t call me on that. He still had that respect for a friend’s feelings.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVI
NG I remember him telling me about the new friends that he was meeting out there [at BSA] and the balance of trying to maintain for the house and still trying to be creative. The dichotomy that that presents for your thinking and your being. We can talk about the art shit, the community organizations that I’m connecting with and all that, and what I’m feeling about what’s going on in my house. But I gotta be over here, really making sure that everybody is okay.
BECKY MOSSING Often, as an acting teacher, I talk about innate giftedness. I talk about innate presence. Those are not things that you can teach. You can teach process, you can teach craft. You cannot teach that kind of magnetism. Tupac understood how to harness energy and bring people along for the ride. It was something that he just had; he was born with it. But he also was so incredibly smart and so incredibly malleable. So, when he was in a class and he was working with a teacher, and the teacher gave him tools, he could then utilize all those innate gifts that he had and he was just unstoppable.
RICHARD PILCHER He loved the school. When Afeni told him they were leaving, he wept. He did not want to go. This was a kind of home for him that, I think in some ways, he never had—a place where he was really accepted.
SHARONDA DAVILA-IRVING I could tell that he was excited about California. There’s like a whole different kind of vibe and an opportunity to expand his creativity in a new pocket. It was like one of those things where you are on the cusp of something really big.
BECKY MOSSING He always had a notepad with him. He would always be writing, jotting stuff down. And he was so quick-witted. I remember I would say, “Okay, here’s a topic. Rap.” He’d be like, “All right,” and just rhyme. The words that would come out of his mouth, and the way that they would have meaning. I remember thinking, How is it possible that anyone can have a brain that can do that?
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