Purpose Page 12

  There was only one way to do this: I had to learn to battle rap, because it was all that the black American kids cared about. This wasn’t Rob G and me on the playground, running things while the girls looked on. These kids were serious. The ciphers were bigger, the audience was bigger, and the rappers were better. The whole school would skip class if they heard two good rappers were going to square off.

  My entrance into that world came through a guy I met named Robin Andre, who was a Guyanese Muslim kid. He was a great musician who played piano and loved Stevie Wonder. He could do anything in his catalog. We started hanging out, bonding over music, and becoming friends. We had the religion thing in common, too, because even though I didn’t believe as strongly as my father, it was a big part of my life. Robin even taught me the Lord’s Prayer in Arabic. Another friend I made through music was named Rodney. He was a freshman like me and he was really into the battle rap scene at school.

  I wanted to gain acceptance in school by doing what the American kids did, but better, so when I got into the game I decided to come packing. My dad had gotten himself a gold microphone that he used on Sundays in church. It just sat in the pulpit the rest of the week, so Monday through Friday I brought it to school with me in an old briefcase. I’d take it in the morning and return it at night. The briefcase and mic really completed my Culture Club look.

  I waited for the right time, which was one day when this dude Shamu was freestyling in a cipher at lunch. He was very clean-cut, with wavy hair swayed up on the side. I was eating lunch with my friends Robin and Rodney, watching this guy, who’d got the whole crowd going. He was rhyming and looking around the room, and when I caught his eye, he started making fun of my outfit. He started taunting me.

  “Funny derby on his head like the Pet Shop Boys,” he said. And then, “He’s so black he’s blue; he need to go back to Timbuktu.” All the kids were laughing.

  Shamu was the dopest, most swaggered kid in school, and every time he started rhyming, a crowd of girls, guys—everyone from all grades—formed. And there was I, this skinny Haitian kid looking like he just came from a Culture Club concert.

  I didn’t care. I popped the combination on the briefcase and got out my gold microphone. I jumped on the cafeteria table and my first line was: “Back in the Bronx, where came from, I danced to the beat that goes par-um-pa-pa-pum-pum.”

  That was just tradition; then I got to work. “I may be from Timbuktu, but even if I point it out on a map, he still don’t know where Africa’s at.” The rest of my rhymes were about him underestimating me and how I was going to take his girlfriends and chew him up and spit him out. What I didn’t realize is that I was taking out the best rapper in school, and I was just a freshman.

  Battle rapping is a face-off between two individuals. It’s like a one-on-one basketball game, except an audience decides who wins, so it’s more like a dunk contest than a one-on-one game. When you dropped a dope line on someone, all the kids watching would scream, and the loudest cheer won the day. Their approval was like they were saying, “He just slammed that ball in your face!”

  My plan worked; pretty soon word got around that Nelly Nel was something else. Shamu, of course, didn’t like the way it went down, so he asked his friend Rah Ski, this junior who really was the best rapper in school, to go against this Haitian freshman and take him out.

  Whenever there was going to be a rap battle that everyone wanted to see, it would be organized in school and it would go down during one of the two lunch periods that day. Then every kid would spread the word and people would cut class to check it out. Word would spread down the hallways like wildfire. Dudes would just open the doors to classrooms and say, “Second period lunch, Rah Ski gonna battle!” and run off before they got in trouble. Our school was like a combination of the schools in Fame, Beat Street, and Breakin’, all mixed together—intellect, poetry, and the streets. When kids caught wind of a battle like that going on, half the school would cut class to see what went down.

  I walked into that lunch period with my gold microphone, and Rah Ski was already there. He had his boys with him and I had mine with me. The second he saw me he started in.

  “In Spanish today I learned ‘yente yente,’ you look like the man they call Kunta Kinte.”

  I saw my opening there and I took it and made fun of the fact that he only knew two words in Spanish. “Let me teach you something about it,” and then I insulted him in Spanish. Most people in school didn’t even know I knew Spanish.

  The kids went ballistic. It took him literally ten minutes to even get a line out because they were screaming so loud. After that we went toe-to-toe for the next hour, all through lunch. It got to the point that the principal came down to see what was going on.

  Later on I put this all in song with the line, “The principal said, ‘who is responsible is due for detention’ because in this school I got a rap education.” That is really what happened. The principal came in and said that if he ever saw Rah Ski or me rapping again in the cafeteria we would be suspended. That is how big of a disturbance it was.

  I was much younger than Rah Ski, but I earned his respect the only way you can in rap battles: through rhymes and vocabulary. I wanted that respect, because it wasn’t about impressing girls on the playground anymore; it was about earning a place of equality for all of my Haitian brothers and sisters in school. Playing guitar, singing in church, writing songs—that was my natural element. Rapping was something I had to work hard at. So this was a real victory to me. English wasn’t my first language either—Creole was—but I had just proved to every kid in my neighborhood that I could do it as well as any black American kid in our school.

  I became the Kobe Bryant of the cafeteria and school yard, and guys began to step to me. One of them was named Abdullah, and to me he was a rookie, so I didn’t pay him no mind. He was the only kid I battled who actually hit my Achilles heel, though. Abdullah knew something that I had managed to keep hidden all that time: he knew I lived in a funeral home. Like any cocky champion might, I didn’t see it coming. My first line even set him up.

  “Spit your verse, because I’m about to put you in a hearse.”

  The dude looked right at me and said, “Oh yeah? You always acting like you in the zone, but I’m gonna pop your secret out today. You live in a funeral home.”

  That hurt. It was personal and I wasn’t expecting it. The crowd started laughing like hyenas, running in all directions, holding their stomachs. I had to think fast.

  “Why you all running? Where you going, come back. Y’all know I didn’t start the drama. Yesterday I was sleepin’ with his mama.”

  It was a pretty good line, but it wasn’t good enough. His line was so strong he had left this gladiator bleeding in the sand and set Rome on fire before I even tried to get up and strike back.

  Battle raps are wordplays that go 16 bars, 48 bars, 64 bars—whatever it takes. They are always spur-of-the-moment and they are always focused on your opponent. But the best battle rappers always come prepared. The best ones have a lot of rhymes memorized that they can spit back at any given time. That was usually my strength, but Abdullah burst my bubble when he built off of my hearse metaphor.

  The battle-rap circuit extended beyond our school, too. It was real underground, and you have to remember this was years before anything like the Internet was there to connect people. By word of mouth, kids in school would talk to other kids in other schools about the best rappers they’d seen at lunch or in the school yard. Reputations would be built, and just like any competitive sport, the athletes and the audience would want to see who was best. There was a circuit, and kids would set up these battles. They would meet outside each other’s schools and sneak each other in to watch a battle royale between the school champions. It was just like football or anything else—it would be Newark versus East Orange—just in rap.

  SOMETHING I NEVER GOT used to in my American inner-city school experience was that tradition called Haitian Day. The Haitian popula
tion was definitely set apart: we sat at our own tables in the lunchroom; we walked home together; we hung out together. And one day a year, we defended ourselves from the rest of the student body together. My first year at Vailsburg High School, the other students really pulled out the stops, too. They let it be known that as soon as the school bell rang at the end of the day, it was on. The Haitians knew it was coming, and word went out that we were going to fight back as hard as we had to, no matter what they did. I figured this was going to be some stupid school prank shit: some roughhousing, stealing our books, just typical stuff. I was wrong. As the clock ticked those last few minutes off, the school courtyard began to look like the end of Do the Right Thing: two sides just staring each other down. Kids had brought pieces of pipe and tire irons: this was serious. It was the day the Haitian kids said, collectively, “We ain’t gonna have it.”

  Then the bell rang.

  The fighting broke out and it was such a mob scene that it spread onto the street. I wasn’t even getting messed with because by then I fit in so well; all my American friends didn’t think of me as one of the Haitians. I didn’t like what was happening to my Haitian people though, so out in front of the school I jumped on the hood of some car and broke the windshield.

  “Nel, I thought you was on our side!” this American kid yelled at me. “What are you doing man?”

  “No, I’m Haitian, man! And you can’t be messing with these people like this!” Then I got off the car and kicked in the headlights.

  The fighting became a small riot. People got pipes, bats, garbage can lids, whatever they could find to beat on each other. Kids were breaking into cars, looting school property, and destroying a lot of innocent people’s front yards. A few people got stabbed and were taken off in ambulances.

  The next day, things were different. There was a mutual respect, or maybe it was mutual fear, because no one wanted to see that happen again. There was too much violence and it was too widespread for the school to even try to pin the fighting on anyone in particular. A few kids got suspended just to make a point, but they had probably already been in trouble anyway. That day was the sound of an entire school exploding.

  I was cool with the black Americans, so some of my friends asked me to talk to some of the Haitian kids, just to make peace, since I was accepted in both groups. And after that day, I made a point to start rapping about being Haitian whenever I got involved in a cipher or a battle in school. Through my art, I began to represent my people in a different way, which helped to calm the tension and prevent any further violence. The anger between the two groups wasn’t over, but because of hip-hop, I became a mediator and negotiator in my school. Before things could escalate between these very big groups, I would be able to go back and forth and keep anything bad from happening. The school didn’t have someone like that before I started going there. And the language I used to do it all was hip-hop.

  At the same time that I was using this new American language of rap that I’d learned, I was expanding my horizons musically. I remember sitting at the piano in the music room freshman year and playing it when no one was in there between classes. The choir teacher, Miss Price, heard me from down the hall and came in.

  “Did someone teach you what you’re playing?” she asked.

  “No, I just learned how to play.”

  “Can you read music?”

  “No, I play by ear.”

  “You are very good,” she said. “You really have an amazing ability. You should join the choir.”

  “Aw, hell no!” I said to myself. If I joined the choir, dudes wouldn’t think I was street anymore. I already had to cope with everyone knowing I was in my dad’s church band; being in choir in school would be too much. I wanted anything but that at school: I wanted to explore other areas of music I couldn’t do at home.

  “I don’t know about that, Miss Price,” I said. “That’s not really what I want to do with music. I’m already in my dad’s church band and that’s enough. The kids here all know me as Nelly Nel. And Nelly Nel wouldn’t be in no choir.”

  Eventually she convinced me otherwise by asking me to sing a song or two with the choir whenever they performed. I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, so I became a full-time member. Through choir, I got to know Mr. Hayes, another music teacher, who convinced me to join the jazz band. The two of them were my mentors.

  One afternoon before choir practice, Miss Price came over to me at the piano, where I was playing, waiting for all the other kids to arrive.

  “You should learn to read music, Nel,” she said.

  “Do I need to? I can play what I want by listening,” I said.

  “You write songs, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well if you ever want your songs to be used in a movie or have an orchestra play them, then you’ll have to pay someone else to write out the music, so you might as well learn to do it yourself.”

  I stopped playing. “People get paid to listen to music and write it out?” I asked. “How much do they get paid?”

  “Sometimes they get up to fifty thousand dollars,” she said. Miss Price knew how to motivate her students.

  “Where do I start?” I said.

  Miss Price taught me to read and write music and once I did, I really began to love her class. We were doing renditions of “Birdland” by Joe Zawinul in both the choir and the jazz band, so I began to play the upright bass in both bands. Mr. Hayes taught me everything about playing that instrument, as well some guitar. He was all about technique. If he taught you to play “Take the A Train” by Billy Strayhorn you had to play it back for him exactly as it was written on the sheet music. He wasn’t a fan of improvisation in class because his job was to make sure we mastered the basics. Once I started getting good at bass, I decided to make my performance more exciting by spinning the bass around while I played. Mr. Hayes stopped us cold.

  “Nel, what were you doing?”

  “I was playing. Did I make a mistake?”

  “This is not a circus show, Nel. This is serious business. This is jazz. You have to pay attention. You have to focus. You can’t distract the audience from this piece of music with flashy showmanship. This piece of music was created to be played at a standard that is expected. Do not do that again.”

  I didn’t do that in class again, but I tried to funk up the jazz band with my playing style as much as I could. I also liked to get to the music room early to warm up and as I played my scales, I made sure to spin my bass.

  I learned technique from Mr. Hayes, but Miss Price expanded my musical mind intellectually. “If it’s music, you have to know a piece of it,” she’d tell us. She’d teach us everything from Bach to Beethoven to Art Blakey, some country, standards, and everything in between.

  All of this was the first formal training I had, because music to me was something that came naturally. It was something I had figured out with my brothers and sisters and learned from the villagers back in Haiti. I’m not saying it wasn’t something I didn’t take seriously, but it wasn’t something I ever thought could be taught with a pen and paper, the way we learned math and English. It was more than a hobby for me, but it sure wasn’t school. My two teachers changed it all for me and I began to see music as a discipline, as something as important to learn properly as a language.

  I studied it hard, and my efforts paid off my sophomore year, when our jazz band qualified for a national competition to be held in Pasadena, California. I thought I’d made the big time, because I hadn’t been on a plane since the one that brought me over from Haiti. We rehearsed a ton, we had everything ready, and I thought to myself, We’re gonna rock this. Though I’d not spun my bass in his presence since that day in class, Mr. Hayes knew me by then, so he kept reminding me to stay focused during the weeks leading up to the competition.

  “I know, Mr. Hayes. I won’t spin my bass.”

  Landing in California, I felt like I was in Hollywood. It was sunny compared to home; every block looked like a movie
set. I couldn’t believe a place that shiny and new was even a part of the same country. We got to our hotel, which was incredible to me. There was soap and shampoo in little bottles for us here and we didn’t have to pay for them? I put as many as I could find in my bag to take home. We had chaperones and all that, but I felt like a grown-up taking a plane to California and staying in a real hotel room. I guess in a way I was.

  We got to the competition and I saw right away that these other bands meant business. Every band was going to play the same number, and there was some sick playing by some really, really good players. I took it upon myself to figure out how we could stand out, because in my mind, if we didn’t take home the trophy, we shouldn’t have come. There was only one thing to do: spin my bass and do my thing when we got out there. Mr. Hayes would thank me when we won.

  Finally it was our turn. Just as the other teachers had done, Miss Price and Mr. Hayes helped us set up and introduced each of us. Then they announced what we would be playing, and took their seats.

  I stayed cool for the first few moments of the song, but then I had to show my character. I smiled at the judges, I spun my bass, and I did every single thing Mr. Hayes had told me not to do. I had to give them something special; this was Hollywood.

  He was fuming when we got off the stage. He took me outside of the auditorium and practically knocked me out.

  “This could cost us the competition! Do you know how selfish that was?”

  “I’m sorry Mr. Hayes … I was just trying to make us stand out.”

  “You did that alright. You looked like a fool. You were showboating while everyone else playing with you took it seriously. You need to apologize to them!”

  Mr. Hayes was right. We played very well and we ended up in the top three, but we didn’t win. And it probably was my fault.