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’ gang didn’t. His fame really had no part in our relationship,” she says.
When Set’s uncle retired, he and his family moved to Atlanta. She did not want to move. Her mother said that if she could find a place to live, she could remain in New York. She stayed awhile in New York and eventually joined her family in Atlanta.
When Set was eighteen she had her first child, a daughter she named N’Zhinga. Though she was a single mother, she says that she never felt like a single mother, because when she left N’Zhinga’s father, she always had a boyfriend. Within a short time, she had met the man who would become the father of her son, Malik, who was born when she was nineteen.
At this point, Set says that her brother had become a bigger part of her life inasmuch as his financial success allowed him to be more like a father and a protector. “He took care of me and my children and many of the children of our former ‘little rascals’ gang,” she says. But, when Set’s son, Malik, was nine months old, Tupac was killed in Las Vegas in a crime that was never solved. Shortly after Tupac’s death, Set’s God brother, Yaki, was murdered. He was one of the ‘little rascals. ’ He looked up to me,” Set says. “He taught me that I could be admired. Because I am so sensitive and emotional, his admiration bonded us.”
Insightfully, Set explains: “The absence of my father stamped everything in my life. It influenced my relationships with every boyfriend I ever had. I felt dingy and insecure, and that I had no firm ground to stand on. I was clingy and terrified of abandonment.” She also points out that she is proud of her father’s pride in himself. “He’s a Leo, and such a lion. He taught me how to have that pride, but his absence really affected me.”
Set was able to see her father infrequently after his arrest. When he was moved to the penitentiary in Atlanta, she was able to see him weekly. He is moved from time to time, which makes it difficult for Set to see him with any regularity. Though held in a maximum-security prison, Dr. Shakur continues to correspond with and talk to his children frequently; attempting to be the best father and grandfather he can be under the circumstances.
Set speaks in a straightforward way of the rage in her that would break through her more typical sweetness from time to time. “I’d have a huge rage at least once a month. It would happen when I would interpret something as abandonment. Maybe it would come out when Tupac would go out with friends, or when he’d have friends over and I might get teased. I didn’t know it, but I probably also had post-partum depression.” At any rate, shortly after Tupac and Yaki were killed, Set broke up with Malik’s father. She says that she felt fat and ugly. “I just felt that I could not go on without my brothers. I was beginning to have suicidal feelings, just wanting to be with my brothers. I called my mother and let her know this was it. There were other friends around me who were dying, and some by suicide; one of them cut her own throat. I just couldn’t understand it and I asked my mom, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ My mother said that some people were just sad beings, that they had a sad spirit. I asked her if there were any sad beings who ‘made it’. She was very quiet and then she thought of the name of one who had ‘made it’ and gave me her phone number. I had bought my first house and my mother hadn’t been there yet, but she came there and stayed up all night to keep me safe. During this stressful and confusing time, I believed that I saw God, and Tupac and Yaki, who had both died. I was thinking to myself that God would not be mad at me if I just wanted to come home and be with my brothers. But, what I saw was that all three turned their backs on me, and so I decided not to kill myself. My mother asked me if I wanted to go to a hospital or a spa. I said, ‘a hospital,’ and someone recommended Sierra Tucson in Tucson, Arizona.”
Sierra Tucson is a unique treatment center dedicated to the prevention, education and treatment of addictions, and behavioral and psychiatric disorders