health among communities deemed most needful of aid. To that end, Set’s father, Dr. Shakur, practiced acupuncture. He established the Bana Clinic in the basement of his Brownstone in Harlem, and was especially known for successfully treating addicts with the techniques he had learned during his training in China. He supervised a staff of people and also had a clinic at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx.
Set’s mother, Afeni, and her aunt and Godmother worked in the community at the Harlem Legal Services as paralegals for an attorney working in the area of fair housing.
The Panthers were a community within the larger community. They had dedicated their lives to the transformation of the United States in order to eliminate the injustices of prejudice. They helped each other in the true spirit of community, and there were frequent ceremonies and celebrations, such as Kwanza and naming ceremonies. During a naming ceremony, the baby or young child was anointed with spices, including honey, sugar and cayenne, and then passed among the community as each person made wishes and promises for the child being named. In the year that Set was born, the group had begun honoring children as heroes.
Set was the youngest girl of a small group of children, which she describes as much like The Little Rascals of television reruns. Their mothers, with the idea that the older children would keep track of the younger ones, sent the group off to school. They rode four trains and a bus by themselves to get to the special school their parents had chosen for them. Needless to say, these little rascals did some exploring in New York City without their mother’s knowledge. From time to time, Set would get separated from the group and be lost. The group would frantically search for her and swear each other to secrecy so that they wouldn’t be in trouble for shirking their duties of keeping track of each other. Set is giggling as she says that she was the one who was mischievous and always getting the others in trouble for some minor infraction.
This happy time came to an abrupt end when the FBI began investigating the Panthers. The homes of most of the Panther families were systematically raided, and agents who were searching for her father kicked in the Shakur’s front door. Dr. Shakur became a fugitive from the FBI when Set was five years old. She says that because she was a naïve and trusting child, she didn’t understand how scary the police and FBI agents could be or that anyone would be trying to avoid them. “This was just my life,” she says. “When the police came to our apartment building asking which apartment was ours, I pointed it out and welcomed them! The authorities dusted our apartment for fingerprints and I remember having to help everyone clean the dusting medium from the banisters, the children’s toys, and everything after they left.” Many of the men were arrested on various charges, one after the other. The women in the community tried to carry on as normally as possible, maintaining the ceremonies and celebrations as well as they could. But, life had changed dramatically.
When Dr. Shakur disappeared, Set’s mother tried to maintain her job and financial security; but within a short time, she, too, was in danger of being arrested and was losing ground financially. By the time Set was eight, her family could no longer hang on in New York, and they moved to Baltimore, where they had family connections. They had been plunged into poverty. While they had lived a life full of culture, pride, and community in New York, what awaited them in Baltimore was quite different. “It was barren in Baltimore,” Set says. “The people were ignorant, mean, and small minded. I had dark skin, short hair, and dressed in African-style clothes. They said things to me like, ‘You’re black as the street!’ It was horrible. Then my brother moved out of the house and my mother fell into deep despair. Eventually my mother’s younger boyfriend moved in with us and I didn’t like him. When I began to enter puberty my personality changed. I wasn’t that sweet little girl anymore.”
At twelve, Set was sent to Marin City, CA, for the summer, to live with the wife of a family friend. The summer came and went, and Set remained in Marin City. Baltimore was not a good place for the family and eventually her mother and brother joined her in California and they lived with one of her aunts. This particular aunt was stressed with the arrival of more relatives in her home, and Set says she thought this woman was mean. In retrospect, she thinks it must have been hard to care for a displaced young teenager, but at the time, the woman just seemed nasty. By the time Set’s mother arrived, Set was no longer speaking to the woman and her mother asked her why she was silent. “Speak up!” her mother encouraged. “I hate her,” Set answered sullenly. Set’s mother was adamant in saying that if that was how she felt; they should pack up and leave immediately. “If that is how you feel, she shouldn’t have to have someone in her home that feels that way about her,” her mother said. “We had no where to go and no place to stay,” Set explains. “It was the beginning of our being homeless. My mother taught me the hard lesson of standing behind my words. She did not blame me and she never spoke of it again. I know that my mouth can be sharp and I am sometimes willing to cut off my nose to spite my face. But, if it comes out of my mouth, then I’ll stand behind it.”
Set is quick to say that she does not blame the woman she said she hated. “She was actually sweet in many ways. She was just tired and I was twelve and thirteen. Marin City is a tough place and it took away the sweet baby girl in me. Whatever Baltimore didn’t drain from us, Marin City did. There was such ignorance there.”
“Tupac had arrived that first October and by May he had left to pursue his career. I was there essentially by myself. Everyone in the community was depressed. My mother was mostly absent, and I was left to raise and fend for myself. I became the girl who didn’t fit in and got beat up on a regular basis. I no longer had my big brother to protect me. There was just no protection for me.”
Set had found some solace in her church’s Christian Youth group, but by the time she was thirteen she had stopped going and had begun hanging out with the “bad girls.” “I was drinking alcohol at thirteen and had a twenty-three year-old boyfriend when I was fourteen. I had gone from being this good, good girl, to being horrible. I was drinking, fighting, and skipping school. My friends were smoking marijuana and some of their parents were “crack heads.” One day I was handed marijuana and for some reason I just saw my life fast-forward to what it would become. I had been kicked out of a store for some sort of misbehavior and Tupac and his girlfriend wouldn’t help me. In school I was getting all “F’s.” So, I made arrangements to go back to New York to be with my Aunt Gloria. Aunt Glo’s husband, Tom, drove the subway, and there was stability in their home. I got a job at Love’s Rite Aid Beauty Supply and finished high school in two years with straight “A’s.” I also worked in the school office. My mother eventually moved back to New York and began getting her life back together.”
Prior to this, in 1986, when Set was ten years old, her father was apprehended and arrested in California. She says she was really happy when he was found because she thought he was dead. But, then she was disappointed, because he was not safely in Africa, as she had hoped.
Dr. Shakur stood trial in 1987 and according to Set he was convicted on the basis of the sole testimony of a confidential informant. He was sentenced to forty years in prison and remains incarcerated at the time of this writing.
Set was fifteen when Tupac Shakur made his first movie. He was nineteen, and though they were fairly distant, she was proud of him. He sent their aunt a check for $100 every month to help support his sister.
Set says that nobody realized that Tupac was her brother until he came to New York on tour. She heard a song he had performed on the radio that he dedicated to her. It was titled, “Pretty Brown Eyes,” and she hadn’t known about it. She says that when he was in New York, she would go to his hotel room to visit him. “I never asked him for money,” she says. “I would make myself busy by straightening up his hotel room. Of course, since hotels have maid service and housekeeping, there wasn’t much straightening to do. He would try to pay me and I would take the money and then hide it where he would eventually find it, like in the refrigerator. It bothered him that I wouldn’t take his money. Some people in the family may have taken money from him, but those of us who were closest to him from the old ‘little rascals’
