For Voletta Wallace, there was life after death

Known in hip hop as simply “Miss Wallace,” Voletta Wallace, the mother of late rapper the Notorious B.I.G., died on February 21 at her home in Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, where she was reportedly under hospice care. According to her family, Wallace died from natural causes. She was 78.

When Christopher Wallace was hustling on the streets of Brooklyn, emotions were a sign of weakness. All that mattered was the next fiend, the next dollar, the next pack — and avoiding the next cop or bullet at all costs. Death was no stranger to him, even at 21. But when he saw his mother in the hospital in 1993 battling breast cancer, all the young man known as “Big” or “Fat Chris” could do was cry.

“That’s mom dukes. What I’m ‘posed to be like when she had cancer and sh–? ‘F— you! Get your own tea!’ Nah, that’s mom dukes, you know what I’m saying?” Christopher Wallace, known the world over as The Notorious B.I.G. aka Biggie Smalls recalled in an interview. “I got to take care of my moms. I’m the only n—- she got.”

Wallace’s story isn’t just a hip-hop odyssey of tragedy and finding purpose again. Her story is an American one, resonating even more given the current state of the country she moved to in search of a better life as a teenager in the late 1960s.

Like many immigrants, Wallace landed at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport after leaving her home in Jamaica, fantasizing about the American dream. But she’d quickly come to learn about the American reality. By the time her son was a toddler in the mid-1970s, their relationship was defined by so much: America’s war on drugs happening outside her apartment; society’s hyper-focus on the Black family and her status as a single parent; and the escalating financial crisis in New York — all of which would become the backdrop for a musical genre that would change her family’s trajectory.

Most importantly, Wallace and her young son represented a Brooklyn love story that will forever define the borough. And they were a hell of a pair — a young boy who excelled in school in part because he knew it would please his schoolteacher mother. Her idea of prosperity came from education and a relentless work ethic. For Biggie, ruling his block and the relentless paper chase America drilled in his head was the epitome of “making it.”

I never met Voletta Wallace. But when I was working on my book about her son, one memory still haunts me. In the early morning hours of March 9, 1997, she received a phone call from her son’s best friend, Damien “D-Roc” Butler. While she heard inconsolable cries in the background, Wallace pleaded to know what happened to her son. My heart bled for a woman I always yearned to interview. How she mustered whatever strength in her body to take a cross-country flight to Los Angeles is beyond me. Envisioning her sitting in her son’s empty hotel room, preserving the last seconds of mother-son time they’d ever have, remains heartbreaking. Picturing her screaming in the coroner’s office, demanding to see her son’s body is enough to elicit tears.

Wallace is a one-of-one figure in hip-hop’s history. She represents a pristine matriarchal figure, much like Tupac’s mom, Afeni Shakur, in a genre that has long championed mothers. But Wallace was much more than Biggie’s mom; an indescribable reverence arrived with the title. She was gentle, yet — pun intended — notoriously fierce in defending any and everything she loved. Wallace was the typical mom who saw her child’s most remarkable qualities, even amid controversy and obvious bias. But she was also never afraid to hold his feet to the fire as she often did during Wallace’s brief, meteoric life.

Biggie’s legacy is revered because Wallace never allowed him to be relegated to history. She kept him current, and in death, she kept him alive. After his death, Wallace reportedly increased her son’s estate from $10M to $160M, creating the generational wealth Biggie rapped about on “Sky’s the Limit.”

The Christopher Wallace Foundation, a philanthropic undertaking Wallace created to enrich the lives of disadvantaged children through arts and education, was a big part of her mission to build community. She also never waved the white flag on finding justice for her son’s murder, once suing the Los Angeles Police Department for the wrongful death of her son. The suit was eventually dismissed, but it was an example of just how far a mother would go to protect her child, even in death. Wallace’s life was about so much more than just being a parent — but as a parent, her child constituted so much of her life that held a purpose.

While working on my book, Wallace and I never spoke. Not directly, at least. However, Biggie’s estate, run by Wallace and Wayne Barrow, never demanded that I stopped writing the book. And they never blocked me from doing so, a gesture nearly as beneficial as a co-sign in the publishing world. Nevertheless, as I spoke with person after person, I heard similar stories about Wallace. She was wonderfully kind but also commanded equal parts respectful fear and admiration. No one from her Brooklyn neighborhood wanted to agitate Miss Wallace. However, they also understood what unconditional love resembled because of her. Young people flocked to her son, but she was the star of his own self-consumed universe.

While she worked hard to keep his memory alive, Wallace never received the justice she demanded for her son. I interviewed former LAPD detective Greg Kading for my book. His team’s investigations into the murders of Tupac and Biggie are viewed by many as the closest to identifying the responsible parties. The critically acclaimed miniseries Unsolved was based on Kading’s work, which Wallace once called “98 percent accurate.” Kading spoke of a woman called Theresa Swann (her real name was concealed for her safety). Swann’s confession to Kading in the mid-2000s painted her as the middlewoman between her then-boyfriend, Suge Knight, and Wardell “Poochie” Fouse. Swann will never face justice because she was granted immunity.

“But she has to live with her own kids, family, and people in her life knowing what she did. Is that justice? Probably not. I think there should be more to it,” Kading told me then. “I believe the woman involved in Biggie’s murder has a responsibility to Miss Wallace. To apologize and to admit her role in the whole thing.”

Despite the pain involved in getting to the bottom of what happened to her son, Wallace never let it stop her.

“What I remember most about [meeting Miss Wallace], she was just a very comfortable person to sit down with. She was extremely gracious. For God’s sake, we’re in her living room, and she’s sitting there with an open ear, mind and heart,” Kading recalled. “I mentioned who an individual was, and she put her hand up like, ‘Oh, my God!’ I believe there was a realization that maybe she hadn’t been getting all the straight facts … She started crying. I started crying. My wife started crying. It was just this moment of intimacy, honesty and vulnerability. I remember her saying [at a later date] that she would extend her grand hand to forgiveness if Swann would extend her hand of apology.”

Voletta Wallace’s life was about so much more than the darkest moment of her life. There is a sense of emptiness, knowing she never got the answers she sought. There is a woman somewhere in the world sitting with this grief, and now she’ll never be able to give a mother the closure she would yearn for had the roles been tragically reversed. That is, perhaps, the hardest pill to swallow, given Wallace’s death. Her passing follows a string of notable deaths of those who played undeniable roles in her son’s life and legend. Integral forces like DJ 50 Grand, Junior M.A.F.I.A’s Chico Del Vic, DJ Mister Cee and former record executive Rob Stone were all people I spoke to for It Was All a Dream. They also all spoke of Wallace in a near-religious tone.

He was still hers, no matter how much Biggie stressed her out with his decision-making. And she was his. And without Wallace, there was no him. Without him, who knows how different the cultural landscape in America would be. In the spiritual sense, it’s beautiful to envision the son greeting his mother in heaven. It’s a reunion over a quarter century in the making. Though grief never left her, Wallace lived a life filled with purpose. She found that through her son’s legacy, her grandchildren, and her purpose as a mother and Black woman in a country that would attempt to rob her of peace if she ever gave up. Wallace never quit in life.

“We approach tragedies in so many different ways. For me, my faith keeps me going. I’m a Christian and I have a hope that someday I’m going to see my son [again]. So I can smile about that,” Wallace said in an interview almost 20 years ago. “When I think of my son, I don’t think of the tragedy. I think of the beautiful times we’ve had in the past, and this way, I can smile.”

Voletta Wallace no longer has to think about the past to smile. She now has eternity — and Christopher — once again.