My Voice: A Memoir Read Free

Street.
    It was there—and at the nearby homes of other family members in the Bronx—where I was first exposed to the same melting pot of musical and cultural influences that also helped shape hip-hop. And on both sides of my family tree, which was mostly Puerto Rican but also Dominican and Cuban, there was always some kind of music playing, something great cooking, and we definitely had colorful characters and strong voices.
    My mother, Shirley Maldonado, who raised me as a single mom, was no exception. At seventeen, she had gotten pregnant and then had me when she was eighteen. She was married one year before she walked in on my father, Julio (aka Nat) in the shower with another woman—or something like that. Despite everything, or perhaps because of everything, my mother always had dreams of getting out of a dysfunctional situation and doing better for herself—having more, learning more, going further. She just wanted more.
    Petite, dark-haired, and fair-skinned, my mother always looked younger than other moms, yet her drive and independence made her seem more mature than most. Even though she and I ended up moving a lot in my early years, what I remember most was growing up with the knowledge that I was loved.
    And that love was always on display whenever we spent time uptown, visiting my grandmother Livia and her husband, Tommy—whom she married after a rough relationship with her first husband, my grandfather Victor. My grandma Livia is a tiny little woman who has a natural warmth. She’s been through a lot and has seen a lot and she’s worked hard her whole life. Still she’s one of the funniest people I know. I get such a kick out of her! Her husband, Tommy, is a stand-up guy with a great smile and a short buzz cut left over from his service in the Marines. Tommy is a real Puerto Rican, strong and stern—but the kind of stern that kids actually like. In fact, he’s the man I know as my grandfather, probably the only steady male figure I’ve ever had in my life. If I ever decide I want to be married, Tommy would be the one to walk me down the aisle.
    The other members of the household in those years included Aunt Melanie, Aunt Cindy, and Uncle Steven, my mom’s three younger siblings. They were all close in age, so there were a lot of sibling fights, usually over clothes or something stupid like that, but they escalated quickly and definitely kept the household lively. Cindy, born after my mother, was the middle child, who was very close to my mom, feisty and petite at four eleven. And Melanie, the youngest, liked to party and hit the clubs in the eighties. She was over five foot eight—which was unusually tall for the whole family. Steven, the only boy in the family, was rambunctious as a kid and later struggled with mental health issues. Even so, he was really close with my grandmother, and she always did her best to protect him.
    Our family’s roots uptown had been planted all the way back in the 1940s when my mother’s grandfather Miguel, Livia’s father, came from Cuba to 172nd and St. Nicholas. We all called him Uelo, short for
Abuelo
(“grandpa” in Spanish). Uelo, who I just adored, had suffered the loss of his wife—my great-grandmother, who was from the Dominican Republic—after a tragic car accident that took her life before I was born.I never met her, but my great-grandmother’s death haunts me to this day. For good reason.
    Uelo, always obsessed with taking photos, used to photograph everything and actually took pictures of the car wreck that killed my great-grandmother. The images of that car crash have stayed with me my whole life. To this day I’m never fully comfortable sitting in the passenger seat of a car.
    Uelo was a larger-than-life figure, and I loved going to visit him. A fair-skinned Cuban, not tall but hefty—he liked to eat—Uelo wore thick reading glasses and long-sleeved flannel shirts and would keep a little disposable camera tucked in his shirt pocket so he could