Keep ya head up

It didn’t bother her at first.

On their first date, he lit up when he talked about him. How his music had touched him, gotten him through rough patches.

What rough patches, she’d asked.

“Nah, too heavy,” he’d said after a pause and flashed her that grin that had gotten her there – to this date at a restaurant that smelled like onions and looked like the ‘70s. The grin was all teeth. It would have been goofy on anyone else, but charming on him.

He was a mixture of edge and heart. She saw that almost immediately.

She didn’t realize until later that it was modelled on his idol – a long-dead musician he believed was still alive.

---

They met at the mall.

She was working at a cheap jewelry store at Yorkdale Mall that did its best to be impressive.

He’d sauntered in just as she was about to close. Low baggy jeans, blue hat tilted sideways, and a gold chain. Though she would never admit it, for just one second, she was nervous.

But then he’d grinned and she’d pushed her shoulder-length black hair behind her ears and stood tall.

“Can I help you?”

He was looking for a gift for his mom, he said. She tried to ignore the warm feelings spreading through her that he didn’t have a girlfriend, that he was a family man.

Later, when she told her best-friend Jamila, she scoffed.

“Girl, he a mama’s boy.”

Jamila, it turned out, was right.

Kamau was indeed a mama’s boy. A mama’s boy with mama issues. It was another thing that tied him to his idol.

“Even as a crack fiend, mama, you always were a black queen, mama,” he’d rap along to the CD as he drove her around in a grey Pontiac Sunfire with a dent in the front of the passenger side from when he’d smashed it into another car while trying to park during a fight with said mama.

His mom was not a crack fiend. She was a hard-working nurse and churchgoer with a strict sense of right and wrong. Appropriate and inappropriate.

Rap was definitely on the inappropriate side.

“Thug music,” she called it.

Unfortunately for both mother and son, Beatrice Roberts’s son worshipped a rapper who had Thug Life tattooed across his belly.

---

He was purportedly studying chemistry in college.

She was pretty sure he mostly went to school to sell his mixtapes.

Jamila laughed when she heard that he was an aspiring rapper. “No one’s checking for a rapper from Toronto. Tell him to stick to chemistry.”

Their favourite rapper was 50 Cent. She and Jamila knew all the words to “In Da Club.” Jamila’s favourite line was “I'm into having sex, I ain't into making love”, and she always sang along loudest to that line, gyrating her hips and licking her lips.

Kamau was unimpressed. “This nigga whack,” he’d say, often and repeatedly, to both her and Jamila. “Rappers these days just wanna talk about parties, drugs, and hoes. Where’s your “Brenda’s Got a Baby” or “Keep Ya Head Up”?

Jamila always ignored him. She did, too, but she wanted to scream “your favourite rapper WAS a hoe.” She never did, though, because she liked how seriously he took her, his smile, his intellect, and his passion — even when it infuriated her.

---

She could have lived with it: the unwavering adoration, his long monologues about Pac’s life, from an “unjust” prison sentence to a “faked” death, listening to Me Against the World for what felt like the 500^th time. Because she saw how the ghost of Tupac Amaru Shakur drove Kamau Roberts.

It gave him patience with Beatrice, a widow with lots of love and too much faith. Or faith practised in the wrong way as Kamau saw it.

It gave him a worthwhile competitor. Kamau wouldn’t perform anything publicly unless he thought it was something that Pac would have been proud of. Or perhaps jealous of.

It kept him focused.

She saw how though Kamau loved — no, worshipped — Tupac, he’d sanctified the parts that he didn’t like.

“I mean, he was just human,” he’d say to dismiss criticism. Because the 2Pac that Kamau loved was the poet, the seer, the friend to women.

She could have lived with all of this, except that the ghost that drove Kamau wasn’t a ghost at all. To him, Tupac was a still-alive rapper in hiding in Cuba.

And even then, she could have lived with all of that.

Because Kamau was kind, and she believed that he was really talented. In a rare departure of opinion from Jamila, she believed that there could be a rapper from Toronto who eventually made it, and that his name would be Kamau Roberts.

---

What brought on the end, well, their end, was a LiveJournal group named Tupac Against the World.

She’s not sure how he came across it. Did he stumble upon it like those “secret” after-hours bars that were popping up around the University of Toronto, or had he been purposefully looking for it?

She had to keep reminding herself that it didn’t matter. Because once he found it, he was firmly in its grip. It turned him from a casual believer that Tupac wasn’t dead to a full-on evangelist.

---

“I think I gotta go down to Cuba,” he said to her back one night.

It was February 2004, and she was tired. Tired of winter, tired of him, and especially tired of a man she had never met — a man that had died when she was 11.  

“That’s a good idea,” she mumbled into her pillow.

He moved closer, placing his head into the crook of her neck and nudging up her yellow satin headscarf.

She sighed and adjusted it before turning around to face him.

“I love you. You know that, right?” he said.

She thought how handsome he was then. Even in the blue bandana that he always wore now, which she hated, she thought he was the most handsome man that she would ever know.

She almost said it back. She touched his cheeks, traced a finger over his lips, and then his nose. She touched the silver stud that had appeared there only a month prior.

“This is over,” she said.

And he smiled with no teeth. “I know.”

In the morning, he was gone.

---

Four years later, she checked her email at an internet café in Nairobi.

The top one was one from Jamila, as were the two following that.

She took a sip of her tea and leaned back into her chair, clicking on the top email.

It was only a link and she only briefly registered the words Pitchfork before clicking on it.

“Toronto rapper with a California sound makes waves with debut album” read the headline, accompanied by a photo of a face that she’d never forgotten.

He looked the same.

She suddenly felt 10 years older.

She clicked the browser window shut, stood up, and walked into the sweltering Nairobi street.