by Wyclef Jean
“You can’t do that! I’m gonna tell Mom!”
I didn’t care. I had a plan.
“Listen to me,” I told everyone. “The old lady always asks for her milk at four o’clock. One of us warms it up for her every day.”
I looked at my older cousin Jean. “You and I are going to be in charge of warming up her milk today,” I said. “And we’re going to put Ajax in it.”
“What?” asked my brother Sam.
“I saw this on television,” I said. “It is the quickest way to kill someone.”
All of them looked at me in silence.
“We will have approximately one minute before she recognizes that there is Ajax in her milk because it will turn a different color. But if we put it in first she will get enough of it down to put her out and then I will pour the rest of it into her mouth. This will work. Everyone who is for this raise your hand.”
Everyone except my sisters raised their hands.
“Why you didn’t raise your hand?” I asked them.
“She’s our grandmother,” Melky said. Grandma had never laid a hand on them, so they didn’t see it the way we did. They never did anything bad, either.
“Listen, you’ve got no part of this,” I said to them. “You stay back while we handle it, okay? You’ve got nothing to do with it.”
“Okay,” they said. They didn’t look very happy about it.
When four o’clock came around, right on time, Grandma asked for her warm milk. I went and warmed it up, stirred the Ajax in, and when it looked somewhat white again, I brought it to her. I don’t know who I was trying to fool; this shit smelled horrible. I can’t even believe I once wanted to do this to my grandmother.
My grandmother was the wisest woman, and a shark. She took the cup like it was nothing and started singing a song to me.
“Come sing with me, Wyclef,” she said. And she started singing a song she made up as she went along that went something like this: “Sun up gets nice, sun up gets nice, but you’re a snake, you’re a snake. I don’t trust you … sun up, gets nice.”
“Yes, I am,” I sang along halfheartedly with her. “Sun up gets nice.” I had no idea where this thing was going.
My grandmother usually took her milk in the kitchen, leaving us kids in front of the television for a while. This day she brought her milk with her into the family room and sat down with all of us.
“What are we going to watch today?” she said. None of us could stop staring at her milk, which she hadn’t even come close to sipping.
Yo, just drink that milk, Grandma, I kept thinking.
Grandma sat there for close to an hour, knowing damn well what she was doing. She ignored the fact that the more time went by, the more us kids began to act like we had ants in our pants. We were shifting in our seats like waterdrops on a hot frying pan.
“Line!” Grandma shouted all of a sudden. Like my mother, when she had something to say and wanted our complete attention, she’d say “line” and we’d have to all get in line.
Except when Grandmother told us to get in line, it was even worse than when my mother told us to get in line. My younger siblings had the same reactions, but much worse. My brother Sam had his hand over his mouth to keep from throwing up before he even got in line. My sisters were babbling and whining and blaming us for things that hadn’t even happened, while my cousins Nason, Jean, and I stood there stoically, insisting we hadn’t done anything at all.
“No one is in trouble,” Grandma said. “No one is in trouble, children.”
Everyone got quiet, because now she had us. We were really lost. She didn’t even need a broom to get us into the palm of her hand.
“You see, today I was thinking,” she said. “It is not nice of me to keep my milk all to myself every afternoon. So I decided that we should share this milk. Together we will choose one of you to drink the milk each day, starting this afternoon. So, children, who is going to be the lucky one?”
No one made a move.
“If no one comes forward then I suppose we must choose,” she said. “How about … Stephen—he will drink the milk.”
Stephen was one of our youngest cousins and probably the only one who was too little to understand what we’d done to it and what was going on. He would drink it just because Grandma asked him to and she knew this.
“Yes, that is what we will do. Stephen will drink the milk, then George, then the girls.” She named all the youngest kids. We couldn’t let that happen, but before Nason and I could figure a way out of it, our cousin George gave us up.
“Clef and Nason put Ajax in the milk, Grandma,” he said. “They want to poison you. Don’t make me drink that!”
Grandma knew we were up to something, because we were stupid to think that Ajax—which is green and white—wouldn’t change the color of the milk. You could see all the particles swirling around in there, and with the heat and all that, it turned completely funky. She knew we put something in it because you could smell it, too. But hearing the truth really shocked her. She got quiet and stared at us intensely for a long moment. Then she got up and walked out of the room. We could hear her talking to herself in the kitchen.
“I can’t believe this,” she said. “These children want to kill me! What am I doing wrong? My own grandchildren …”
By the time my mother showed up after work to get us, my grandmother’s sadness had turned to anger and disgust.
“Your little rats tried to kill me,” she said to my mother. “They put Ajax in my milk and tried to poison me.”
My mother looked horrified.
“These things that came from your womb,” my grandmother said. “They tried to kill me today.”
When we got home, my dad got his belt and started swinging at whichever one of us was closest, and then he kept on going. He chased us into our bedrooms and one by one gave us the most vicious of all the beatings we ever experienced. Then he threw my brother and me into a cold shower so the water made our skin tight and the wounds hurt more. Who could blame him for it? We had tried to poison his mother. He never forgot it, and neither did she.
My parents were strict, but how they raised us is what kept us out of trouble and in my case it probably kept me alive. Just like dozens of kids in the neighborhood, many of them my friends, I started staying out late, doing petty crimes, on my way down a path that would lead to prison or death. Most of what I got into was burglary, but some of my friends were killing and selling drugs before we were even in high school. As a young man I didn’t think anything could touch me, but as I started seeing kids I knew get shot left and right, I began to change my mind.
My mother, more than anyone else, also had a lot to do with it. When she felt me slipping down the wrong slope, she sat me down and told me all about her life so that how my parents had lived and all they’d done to get to America would be in my thoughts. She told me about giving birth to me and all of the pain she went through, she told me how my father had run from immigration and worked in sweatshops, and she told me something I never forgot.
“You have purpose, son; there is a reason that you are here,” she said. “This is something you do not see now, but it is the truth. There is a reason we named you after John Wycliffe. We did not give you this name for you to run wild in the streets and end up deported back to Haiti.”
I didn’t know what my purpose was yet, but she was right. I knew I’d end up dead or in prison, just like all the kids around me, if I didn’t change my ways. Sitting here today in my house with my wife and little girl, I’m glad for those punishments, because if I hadn’t learned those lessons, I wouldn’t have all of this. My parents are why I’m alive and thriving while six of my best friends from school died before they were twenty.
One of them was named Gene Swarrow, whose father was a minister, just like mine. We were inseparable, and he was my right-hand man. We cut school together, we went on double dates, we did it all. Both of us loved music and both of us rapped and both of our fathers forbade us fr
om hanging out together, because they saw we were two of a kind. It didn’t matter that we weren’t supposed to be friends anymore; we spent all our time together anyway. What happened to Gene was exactly what my mother foresaw for me if I didn’t change my ways.
When we were both about nineteen, Gene robbed somebody with a shotgun. I wasn’t with him then, because I’d thrown myself into music, which got me off the streets. After that incident his family sent Gene down to Florida to live with some relatives and make a new start, but I talked to him all the time.
“I’m getting my life straight down here, man,” he’d say. “You have the right idea with music; I’m doing that, too. I’m working with some local dudes. We’re getting a group together.”
“You being good? You sure you’re not into that crazy stuff, man?”
“Nah, nah, everything is good.”
That very well could have been me, because my parents were definitely the type who might send me away to get myself together. My mother felt that the surroundings were the problem, not her son. But sometimes getting away doesn’t solve the problem.
Gene wasn’t staying out of trouble, and some boys he had a beef with down in Florida ended up chasing him down the highway. He tried to outrun them, but he couldn’t. They shot him, and his car went off the road and into a tree.
I wish I had been more strong-willed as a young man and more intent on my purpose to not go down that path. Gene was like a brother to me, and he was as strong-minded as I, but maybe I could have pulled him onto my side. He had such potential that I wish he could have shown to the world.
MY REAL SAVING GRACE was music, and in junior high, I met a few characters who guided my development and changed my life. The first was Robert Frazier, who came to be known as the rapper Chill Rob G in the late eighties. Rob released a classic album called Ride the Rhythm that got a lot of attention when the German group Snap! sampled his song “Let the Words Flow” without permission in their song “The Power.” That song was such a huge hit that Rob did a version of it himself, which gave his career a nice jump-off. He had skills and an incredible flow, and things were looking up for him, but a few incidents in his personal life caused him to drop out of the game at the height of things and he’s never really returned to it.
Long before that, Rob and I became friends at Our Lady Help of Christians. Like most Catholic schools, we had to wear our uniforms, which were blue pants and Oxford shoes with black socks and plaid ties. We were definitely the only kids for a three-mile radius wearing hard-bottom shoes. There was nothing fresh about us at all.
Rob was a rock star at school though, because he got around that rule by bringing a change of clothes with him. At recess he would put on his street gear and that was coolest thing to me. He was the coolest guy I’d ever met and he taught me how to rap. I was in sixth grade, about twelve years old, when we started talking on the playground, me in my uniform, and him in some Pumas and a tracksuit.
“Hey man, how come you don’t have a uniform?”
“Yo, this is lunch period. The playground. You could wear what you want. Then you go back and change.”
“What’s your name, man?” I asked him.
“Rob G, man. What’s your name?”
“My name is Nel.”
“Oh yeah? From now on, you know what your name is gonna be?”
“No.”
“Nelly Nel.”
Man, I ran with the name Nelly Nel for a good five or six years. People would call me Nel and I’d say, “Nah. I’m Nelly Nel, ya hear me?”
At recess every day Rob would rap with a whole bunch of people surrounding him and hanging on every word. He was cool, he could rhyme, he had the pretty girls. I wanted to be just like him.
“Man, how do you know how to rap?”
“You know, just poetry, man. Just poetry.”
“Could you teach it to me?”
Rob G was my first rap teacher. He was my guide into hip-hop, at recess. He taught me that rap was more than just rhyming to be fresh and clever. He taught me to tell a story; he laid out what our songs would be and we started practicing routines. Rapping with Rob directed my energy toward something positive and away from wanting to pull the fire alarm and argue with the priests and blow up the school. I stopped thinking about throwing egg bombs because I thought rap was cool and wanted to concentrate on that instead. I was an egg-bomb expert by the way. I would boil six eggs, cut them open, and let them sit in a bag for three weeks. Then I’d bring it to school, open the door to a classroom, throw it in there, and run.
Rob naming me Nelly Nel was one thing, but I had to do something about my clothes, because I was making the dude look bad.
“Girls need to see that you take off that uniform and put on something fly, my man,” he said.
That was a risky proposition for someone like me. Stashing clothes in my bag, with my mom searching us like the secret police every morning, wasn’t a good idea.
Every other weekend we’d go to see my grandmother out in Brooklyn where she lived with my uncle and cousins, and that’s when I’d hang out with my cousin Nason. He was just like me: always starting trouble, always the center of attention, always running a scheme. On those weekends, if Nason got a beating, I’d get one, too, because you could be sure that we were both to blame.
When we visited next I said to him, “Nason, yo dude, I need some clothes.” Nason always had great clothes—where and how he got them, nobody had to know.
“I got you.”
He gave me three sets of Pumas, a gold chain, and two Adidas tracksuits. I was chillin’, dude.
It was a risk, but I took it: on Monday I snuck the clothes out in my bag, underneath my books, and at lunch period I dressed up cool, like Rob G. And that day began the first official Rob G and Wyclef cipher there on the playground of Our Lady Help of Christians. My name was Nelly Nel, and I had come correct, but I had a problem: I didn’t know what to rap about.
“Rap about whatever it is that’s inside of you, whatever it is you want people to know,” Rob G said. “But at the same time, you’ve got to keep it fly so that the girls don’t get bored.”
With that in mind, the first line I ever came up with was “Back in the Bronx, where I came from, MCs danced to the beat that went ah-rum-pa-pum-pum.”
Rob G said, “Nelly Nel is the place to be, grab the microphone because you visciously!”
And then I came out with my line.
Rob G stopped the cipher right there and pulled me aside.
“Back in the Bronx? You wasn’t in the Bronx. You lived in Brooklyn, man.”
“Yeah, but you said to say what naturally came out of my head, but to say it so the girls wouldn’t think it was boring.”
Rob just shook his head.
We developed it from there, mostly because Rob kept us up on the best rappers around.
“Yo, we got to check out the Start Us Crew.”
The Start Us Crew were the best; everyone knew it. They were older than us, in East Orange High School. They had Mike C, Sergio—all these guys Rob and I learned from just by watching them.
They had taken Rob G in like a son, and he had taken me in as his little brother, and one day while they were rapping they sang a chorus together: “This is the way we harm-on-ize.”
“Yo, Rob, that’s cool. They singing,” I said.
“No, man, they harmonizing.”
Rob didn’t realize that I’d learned all about singing in church. In his world of hip-hop, they called it harmonizing.
“Listen man, these dudes get elevated. That’s how they come up with all this stuff,” he said to me one day.
“What’s that mean?”
“They be smoking the ganja.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m gonna show you.”
Rob got some ganja from a dude over on Walnut Street and he rolled it up.
“Yo dude, this looks like tea, man.”
“It ain’t tea.”
I did not wa
nt to smoke this stuff because my mom didn’t want me to do drugs. She said if I ever did drugs I’d end up on Walnut Street with the thieves and the fiends.
“I can’t do no drugs, man,” I said. “My momma will kill me.”
“Nah, nah, nah, man, this ain’t drugs. It’s sensi. Sensi ain’t drugs.”
I started to feel a little bit better about it, because this shit looked harmless, just like tea. And if I was smoking tea, well that wasn’t so bad.
“It looks like tea. My momma can’t get mad at me for that.”
“Your call, man,” Rob G said.
“I got an idea.”
Next day I got home and took a tea bag and brought it to school. In the afternoon we went to Rob’s house and I took my tea bag out, took the tea out of it, and rolled it up in the joint paper. I lit it, took two pulls off of it, and I don’t know what happened, but I went unconscious. I passed right out and hit the floor of Rob’s room.
“Yo Nel! Yo Nel! Yo Nel!”
I woke up when he poured water on my face.
“You see, motherfucka! If you would just smoke the sensi, this shit wouldn’t have happened!”
That was my first encounter with marijuana. Rather than smoke weed, I smoked a tea bag. After that I wouldn’t smoke shit. I thought I’d die if I smoked anything, if something as simple as tea could make me pass out. I got over that fear later, of course.
Our Lady Help of Christians had a talent show right before graduation, and that was the first performance of Nelly Nel and Rob G in all their glory. That is what I consider my first hip-hop experience, onstage, in that little gym at school. The kids loved it, because they thought we were cool: Rob was the star and I was his sidekick. We had them clapping, all their hands in the air, and as I looked out at the crowd I thought to myself, This is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life.
I felt like I had a purpose and that was to make people feel good no matter what they were going through. I could provide them with something they didn’t have: an escape from their reality. Through my music, I wanted to bring them to a world, at least for a little while, where everything was going to be okay.