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Wallace, 59, an immigrant from Jamaica, raised her only child Christopher--Biggie's real name--in Brooklyn. Biggie's father left the family before Biggie turned 2. But Wallace forged on, holding down two jobs and enrolling her son in Catholic school. She took pride when he made the honor roll but was disappointed when, at 17, he left school to sell drugs. Much like Tupac, Biggie looked to his mother for inspiration for his music. "My Momma got cancer in her breast," he mourned on his debut album, Ready to Die. "Don't ask me why I'm motherf___in' stressed."
The two rappers met in the early '90s and by all accounts became fast friends, performing together in public and hanging out in private. But the relationship swiftly deteriorated after Tupac suspected Biggie of being involved in a robbery attempt that left him shot and hospitalized. They feuded right up until Tupac's death.
On a broiling day in August almost a decade later, Shakur offers me a tour of her newly constructed ranch home in Lumberton, N.C. She shows off a bathroom the size of a small apartment and talks up the 56 acres of farmland where she's growing USDA-certified organic crops and raising animals. That is what her son has left her. And it's easy to see what she gave him. She is excitable and charismatic, and she talks--and curses--freely, laughing in the middle of crying. In the late '60s, Shakur was one of the more outspoken black power voices on the East Coast--one of the "Panther 21," charged with and acquitted of conspiring to blow up the New York Botanical Garden and several department stores. (Full disclosure: I first met Shakur as a child. She and my father were comrades in the Black Panther Party.)
Shakur is proud of her Panther past and of her son, but she is also brutally honest. Shortly before he was killed, Tupac attacked Biggie and virtually every other rapper of note in New York City in a profanity-laced tirade called Hit 'Em Up. Among things unprintable in this magazine, he claimed he had an affair with Biggie's wife Faith Evans. "To tell you the truth, I was proud that Tupac had found an excellent way to get back at [Biggie] without violence," says Shakur. "He could take a word and beat you to death." But now, given some time and perspective, Shakur is less certain. "Faith has children. Biggie has children," she says. "I'm never going to change my son's words or tell anyone I'm sorry for them, but one of the things we want to do is have a space for Biggie in the garden, so people can understand that those two men were a little off point but they were great men."
The garden she refers to is behind the arts center she created nine years ago as part of her effort to shape the public memory of her son--to "cleanse the stain," as she puts it, from his legacy. Every summer a throng of kids comes to the center, which sits off a busy road in Stone Mountain, Ga., to learn dance, creative writing and music.