Remembering Voletta Wallace, Mother of Rapper Biggie Smalls

Biggie Smalls

Source: Biggie SmallsSource: "Murder of Biggie Smalls/St. Martin's Press

Voletta Wallace died this week at 78. Her only son was the late Christopher Wallace, a.k.a. hip-hop artist Biggie Smalls and Notorious B.I.G. It seems fitting that she left this world during Black History Month.

A gunman fatally shot Biggie in a 1997 drive-by shooting following an event he attended at the Petersen Automotive Museum in Los Angeles. He was 24.

I interviewed Voletta several times by phone about her son for a biography, The Murder of Biggie Smalls. When I traveled to New York City to research the book, Voletta invited me to her Teaneck, New Jersey, home that Biggie had left her, and I interviewed her there.

Voletta worked as a substitute teacher and raised her son as a single parent in their Brooklyn walk-up. She tried hard, she told me, to keep him off the streets and out of gangs in their tough Bedford-Stuyvesant borough.

When Biggie was 10, his school had a Father's Day celebration for the kids to describe their relationships with their fathers. With his father absent from his life, Biggie spoke about his mother instead.

"I remember him saying to me, 'Ma, what their fathers did for them is what you did for me.'" She couldn't have been prouder.

She tried to instill a strong work ethic in her son. By age 11, Biggie bagged groceries at Met Foods, a corner market at Fulton and Saint James just a block and a half down the street from his walk-up.

As a teenager, Biggie did take to the street corner, not as a thug but as a wannabe rapper.

Most of the kids from Biggie's neighborhood rapped. It was characteristic of life on the streets of black America, where kids rapped a combination of different rhymes and stories, which became a national anthem of sorts on the streets, something to identify with. Biggie was a product of that life in the 'hood in the 1980s.

Voletta and Christopher Wallace''s walk-up apartment

Source: Cathy Scott

Biggie's time on the streets paid off after he signed a music contract with Bad Boy Records. Voletta could not have been prouder.

Several years after his death, Voletta filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles Police Department. A judge later dismissed it. Voletta sued, because, she

said, she wanted justice for her son.

Unlike the late mother of rapper Tupac, Afeni Shakur was more about Tupac's music and poetry than his death. Tupac Shakur was gunned down in September 1996 in Las Vegas, six months before Biggie. Shei told me in an interview that solving Tupac's murder would not get her son back. Keeping his legacy alive was the gift Afeni gave him after his death.

Voletta, on the other hand, felt strongly about putting her energy into bringing a killer to justice and keeping his memory alive through activism and advocacy. She founded the Christopher Wallace Memorial Foundation for community empowerment through the arts and education. Before his death, Voletta played a part in Biggie's music career; she often joined him on stage when he did music industry presentations.

While in Los Angeles to film music videos with Bad Boy Records producer Sean "Diddy" Combs during the last month of Biggie's life, he felt at home there.

"Yes, Christopher was comfortable in L.A.," Voletta conceded during a phone conversation after her son's death. "Maybe he was too comfortable."

His death broke his mother's heart. Fighting for justice, Voletta said, helped her overcome her sorrow. She felt she owed it to him. It was the least a mother could do, she often said. Biggie was the center of her life. As Voletta told me, "He was my baby, my Chrissy-poo."