Unruly

The Highs and Lows of Becoming a Man

Ja Rule

• Publisher: Amistad
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9780062316189
• eBook ISBN:
  9780062316196
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Music Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

"Ja Rule's candid, unvarnished view of guns, drugs, depression, fame, lust, love, and family makes this a remarkable memoir and a worthy read." — Publishers Weekly

Ja Rule, actor, singer, songwriter, and one of the most multi-dimensional rap artists of his time, tells his compelling story—from his youth to his rise to international fame to his transformative two years in Federal prison—and reveals the man beneath the legend.

Unruly is two stories that offer one complete picture of a man and his world: the angry, fatherless rapper, Ja Rule who was "raised by the streets"; and Jeffrey Atkins, the insightful, reflective father and loyal husband who learned the hard way how to be a good man.

Filled with never-before-revealed anecdotes and sixteen pages of black-and-white photos, Unruly shows the determination that it takes to become a man in today's society. Ja Rule considers the lack of role models for many young black men today—a void that leads to bad choices and the wrong paths. Recalling his youth, he illuminates the seductive pull of the streets and the drug dealers who were his earliest role models.

Jeffrey Atkins offers practical wisdom—reflection, growth and hope learned first-hand as an inmate, father, husband, and community role model. He speaks fondly of men who inspired  Unruly—the inmates he met in prison whose misguided ideas of masculinity landed them behind bars—and Louis Farrakhan who mediated the televised encounter with Ja Rule's adversary, 50 Cent.

Unruly is a compelling, personal look at the duality and conflicts that arise in the African-American male psyche from a man who has enjoyed breathtaking fame and suffered heartbreaking misfortune.

PART ONE

Venni Vetti Vecci

PROLOGUE

JULY 2012

ONEIDA CORRECTIONAL FACILITY

THE CORRECTIONS OFFICERS WERE ALL BITCHES. THEY SPOKE to us like the animals that they had made us. There was no respect for any of us, not even me, who had sold 30 million records, traveled the world, won countless awards and flown to meetings on private jets. Who would think a bitch-ass corrections officer would be the one to show me something that I should have already known?

Oneida Correctional Facility in Rome, New York, had a reputation among inmates for being a prison with racist COs and rampant misconduct among its officers. The officers would patrol the yard, always listening for some bit of conversation to get a sense of what the inmates were thinking.

It was another uneventful day in the prison yard as the sun shone on the rusty chain link fences highlighting the age and neglect of the facility. The yard always held a crisp feeling of weighty expectancy, always waiting anxiously for something to jump off. In some corners of the yard, there were the bulky inmates lifting weights, while others concentrated on their chess games. Others just stared into space, dreaming of the day when their prison nightmare would end.

Officer Smith, one of the more difficult officers, was nicknamed “the Klansman.” The Klansman may have been my age or a little younger. He had evil dark blue eyes and slicked-back hair, which revealed his large forehead. His beer belly was bursting through his tight uniform shirt.

“You know, Atkins, your kids are job security for my kids,” Officer Smith said. He just looked at me as if he had said something innocent but what he was really saying was that the cycle never gets broken for Black people.

I could feel my rage bubbling up in my stomach. The urge to choke the shit out of him was overwhelming. The only reason I didn’t was because I knew that fights in the yard only caused sirens to flash, twenty-four-hour lockdowns and a lot of unnecessary paperwork.

The only thing I could safely say in response was, “Not my kids.”

Smith didn’t know what to say to that. He had assumed a whole lot about me based on the color of my skin. He wasn’t expecting me to say shit back at all. That muthafucka didn’t even know me, my family or what we’ve been through. I may have been in prison, but it was partly because muthafuckas with an agenda put me there and partly because of my own doing.

“I’m not supposed to be here,” I whispered under my breath.

Officer Smith was already gone. He walked away not knowing the weight of his words. My head was heavy trying to hold them.

I wasn’t supposed to be here, in prison, but I was. I knew then that it was my fault and my fault only. There were no more excuses. This was just one of those fucked-up Black-people moments, where we learn truths about ourselves through our oppressor’s eyes. It was enlightening to understand how white people see us, as fucking job security. In his mind, Officer Smith, his sons and his grandsons will further their family’s mission of holding Black men down in prison. They will be the keepers of “our place.” It’s scary to admit, but in some ways, it’s kinda true.

We don’t have to be someone’s fucking legacy, keeping them employed by our irresponsibility and disrespect for our communities and ourselves. Our lives mean so much more than that. Our ancestors went through too much for us to be free for me and other Black people to be doing stupid shit that gets us locked up.

After the conversation with CO Smith, I told my homies what that bitch CO had said to me. “See, he didn’t say it to y’all, he said it to me, the most successful muthafucka in here. He was trying to break our spirits, man. He must not have understood that we are descendants of a strong race of people. We come from the Black Panthers, Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, Rosa Parks. How dare that muthafucka belittle me? We can’t let them break us. We can’t.”

Eyes widened. Everyone was blindsided by the deep blow that had just been thrown. Several of them put their heads down, ashamed to even look at each other.

That’s just what they expect from us. What they don’t expect is for us to get the fuck outta here . . .

ONE

Silence

I WAS ONLY FOUR YEARS OLD WHEN MY FATHER CAME IN THE house yelling about some dumb shit. “You should be learning, boy! Not playing with all those toys.”

My Moms could smell my father’s anger mounting again. She could sniff out that rancid scent that she had become too familiar with. The stench of his anger seeped from his every pore. This was an aroma that made her fear for my life and her own.

My father’s tone was particularly harsh that day, and as he railed at me for holding a toy, my Moms recognized that glassy look in his eyes. She could tell that her husband had been somewhere that he didn’t belong. Moms never wanted me to be on the receiving side of my father’s blows. She had taken enough of them herself. There had been too many silent nights of her nursing her wounds with drugstore ice packs and old towels.

That night was not unlike all the rest. He was always yelling about something. My Moms came over to me, scooped me up off the wood floor and placed me in my room. She was proud that we had two bedrooms. The second bedroom would come in handy the night she would change our lives forever.

She trembled as she thought, “At least, I have Jeffrey. He’s worth everything I’m about to do.” In my room, behind a closed door, I played with the toy that she’d given me. While I lost myself in it, I was losing my Dad, at the same time.

MOMS WALKED BACK into the living room and said to her husband, “Nigga, this is the night you gon’ die. I’ve been stupid enough to take these beatings, but if you’re going to abuse my son, like you’ve been abusing me, that’s not going down.”

My father never said a word to her. He didn’t argue. He didn’t say, “I’ll change,” or “You know I would never hurt Little Jeff.” Or even, “I love you.”

“I understand,” is all he said. And then there was silence.

Moms called my grandmother and said calmly into the phone, “I’m leaving Jeff today. I can’t take it anymore.”

My grandmother put her second husband on the phone. Grandpa Cherry okayed the arrangement. He said, “Yes, I’ll come get you and Little Jeff.”

And that was that. There was to be no more yelling and cursing. There was to be no more hitting. And there was to be no more puffy eyes and salty tear stains for Moms to try to hide. There was just to be no more daddy.

That is how he left us. With silence.

MY MOTHER MET MY FATHER at a party in 1974. As soon as William Jeffrey Atkins walked in the door with his half-cut T-shirt and muscular body, she immediately noticed him. She says that he was “quite interesting.” Moms admired his burgundy polyester bell-bottoms and how they hugged his slim frame. She watched her husband-to-be float into the room without a word. It wasn’t until the end of the evening that he finally approached her.

“Didn’t you notice me looking at you? I think I’ve met you before,” he said.

They danced briefly to James Brown’s “The Payback,” which was the anthem of the streets at the time. The song exalted Black folks’ new sense of freedom while acknowledging our collective rage. After they danced, he said, “I’m leaving now, but I’d like to call you. I’ll get a pen and paper. I’ll be back.”

My mother worried that the handsome stranger would float into the crowd, never to return. When he did, my mother went to a nearby table so she could write. The syrupy sound of Tavares’ “She’s Gone” warmed the room. Couples danced and kissed under the colorful lights and the sparkles of the disco ball. It put her into a romantic mood. On the scrap of paper, she neatly wrote “Debra Ann Moorehand, 208 100th Avenue; Hollis, Queens, 11423,” and “718-656-3234.”

William said, smiling, “I didn’t plan on writing you, I was just going to call you.”

Her eagerness slightly embarrassed her. She whispered, “Just in case you wanted to write or come by . . . someday.”

As they said their goodbyes, William Jeffrey Atkins promised to call.

He didn’t call for days.

When he finally did, Debra suggested that William pick her up from school. William didn’t realize that Debra Moorehand was still in high school. He was a few months younger than her. He had graduated from Food and Maritime Trade School and was an aspiring baker. He agreed to pick her up after school, but with a warning: “I’ll have a tie on. I’m job hunting.”

Shit went quick between them two. They dated heavily and fell in love, all within a year. Before Moms knew it, William Jeffrey Atkins was asking her to be his wife. When Moms graduated from Central Commercial High School at seventeen, she walked down the aisle not only with a boyfriend but also with a tiny diamond engagement ring on her finger. They married on September 14, 1974, when she was eighteen.

“I always felt safe with your father. No one was going to bother me with him around,” Moms later told me. Although my mother was comfortable that my Dad was making $500 a week, once he started working, she didn’t realize that he was also picking up a bunch of new friends with some very bad habits.

TWO YEARS LATER, a leap year, I was born on the rare twenty-ninth day of the shortest month of the year. That would be my first and last birthday celebration. We were Jehovah’s Witnesses, so birthdays were not celebrated. The only thing my family ever did was cook a special birthday dinner after the fact. No one even said “happy birthday” to me. They didn’t believe in it.

Moms worked as a secretary at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center right up until the week I was born. Every morning she would take me to my grandmother’s house, work at Creedmoor from eight to four, pick me up at four thirty, take me home, make dinner and clean the house while my father was hanging out in the Village with his new friends and their bad habits.

Soon, Moms and me started to linger at my grandmother’s house every evening, allowing Moms a little time to catch up with my grandmother and hear about the things that I had done to make her laugh that day. I was a well-behaved child and my father’s sisters used to argue with each other over who would take care of me. We would all comfortably sink into the darkening folds of night, passing time and catching up. My grandmother and mother would reminisce about me being in the school play. I was playing Scrooge in A Christmas Carol.There were two of us originally given the role because the play was really long. On the day of our performance the other kid was sick. My teacher had asked me to do that kid’s part, as well as my own. The teacher quickly decided that I would have to write down the other kid’s lines on the inside of the robe. I did the roles so well that the audience gave me a standing ovation. My grandmother was proud. Moms giggled with pride. I loved when my grandmother told that story. It gave me a hint that I was made to entertain. That was the first time I felt the rush of being onstage.

Another evening after we got back to our pristine two bedroom apartment on the third floor of a walk-up in Queens Village, Moms cleaned the already clean house, made dinner for the two of us, gave me a bath and laid out my clothes for the next day. Tired, but not ready to go to sleep, she sat on the couch to read a book, while I played on the floor at her feet.

The young baker busted in and lashed out at Moms. In a rage, he grabbed the book out of her hands and started ripping out the pages, one by one, and then tore them into tiny pieces. He then threw them into the air, sending confetti-like scraps into the air that showered down on my head like snow.

It was on.

My mother was ready to fight. My father punched her in the eye with such force that her brown eye turned black as night. After the scuffle, when she looked in the mirror, she knew she couldn’t go to work the next day. The days ticked by but there was no improvement in her eye. Reluctantly, she returned to work with a new accessory: shades.

Mom’s supervisor, also a Black woman, with a folksy, down-to-earth style, was surprised by the new look. She teased her, saying, “Girl, you need to take those sunglasses off. You must have gotten your ass beat last nig...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• PART I: VENNI VETTI VECCI
• PART II: THE LAST TEMPTATION
• PART III: PAIN IS LOVE
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher