Now when I heard Jocko say this, I thought to myself, “Jocko, you really don’t know even half the story.” I’ll keep it short and simple…
1)Tupac
Tupac and Jada Pinkett met at the Baltimore school of arts. They were very close. So close that she said, eventually they attempted to kiss each other, and it was disgusting to both of them. So they kept it as friends. She said that, if the kiss would have worked and they entered into a relationship, they probably would have killed each other because, when they disagreed on things, it was major! So it was good that it never worked out. But this aspect of their relationship would never go away.
Even though she said it was never intimacy in their relationship, a poem that Tupac wrote to her at that time manifests something a little different:
U R the omega of my heart
The Foundation 4 my conception of Love
When I think of what a black woman should be
Its u that I First think of
U will never fully understand
How deeply my Heart Feels 4 u
I worry that we’ll grow apart
And I’ll end up losing u
U bring my 2 climax without sex
And u do it all with regal grace
U r my heart in Human Form
A Friend I could never replace
(Tupac)
Anyway, she said that he impacted her because he saw past her sexuality. On the Arsenio Hall Show, she said:
“Pac was probably one of the first male figures that I had in my life that saw the beauty and the talent in my intelligence separated from sex. That’s something that a young girl usually gets from their father. I didn’t have that. Pac was the first one…it wasn’t about sex. ‘It was about you. You’re a beautiful woman. You’re talented. You’re strong. I respect you. You are my girl. You’re going to sit right here and I’m going to protect you. I’m going to make sure that nothing else…You’re getting what you need.’ And that’s what our relationship was like. We kind of did that for each other.”-Jada Pinket Smith (Arsenio Hall Show)
So they had that kind of relationship. Then, sometime during high school, he moved to California with his mother. He would later get into the film and music business.
While in the music business, he would end up getting into situations that would begin to change the trajectory of his music and message. He got into a shootout with police who were unjustly beating up a person of color. Then later, he would end up getting shot five times in a botched robbery in New York. Because he believed that people he knew set him up, this incident began to change how he saw people.
Around the completion and release of his third album (Me Against the World), he ended up getting a rape charge. He was sent to prison in New York. Because prison was such a terrible experience for him, he said he wasn’t inspired to write music. But we now know that he wrote poems and letters while in prison. And many poems he wrote to Jada. He would later say in interviews that people that he thought were his friends turned their backs on him. People whose families that he fed turned on him too. This really changed how he viewed people. He began to distrust people even more. And he really began to hate New York because the betrayal (of the shooting), the robbery, and the fake rape charge all happened in New York.
Because the label didn’t want to pay the million-plus dollar bond (approximately 1.8 million dollars) for him to get out of prison, he was going to have to do the full time. This was until Suge Knight came along. Suge Knight offered to pay the bail of over a million dollars if he signed a multi-record deal with him (on Death Row records). Tupac signed the deal, and he was now going to California. His life would change.
Jada stated that, once Pac got to Death Row, she saw him change in a negative and self-destructive way. She confronted him about it and told him that this new road that he was going down was negative and bad. “I just wasn’t in agreement with the direction that he was taking. I told him that it was a destructive direction. A very scary direction.” He was mad at her also because he claimed that she was going “Hollywood” on him. Because of this, they fell out for two years. At the time of his death, they were still not on a speaking basis, but they knew they loved each other.
Part of Pac’s issue with Jada was that she was with the clean-cut rapper that didn’t curse by the name of Will Smith. He went by the name The Fresh Prince. She said Pac would tell her that she was his base for sanity. He needed her in his life for this balance. He was territorial over her because he didn’t want anyone who would come along and change the dynamics of their relationship.
Not only Pac felt some way about the relationship, but Will Smith did too. At a press run for Bad Boys 3, on The Breakfast Club, when asked about the subject, he responded:
Charlemagne: Were you ever jealous of the love that Jada had for Tupac?
Will Smith: Oh fuck yeah. Oh my God. That was in the early days. That was a big regret for me too. Because I could never open up to interact with Pac. Because we had a little bit of a thing right.. ’Cause they grew up together and they loved each other. But they never had a sexual relationship, but they had come into that age where that was a possibility, and then Jada was with me. So Pac had a little thing on that.
But she just loved him like he was the image of perfection, but she was with the Fresh Prince. I never could…we were in a room a couple of times…I couldn’t speak to him. And he wasn’t going to speak to me about it, and I wasn’t going to speak to him.
Charlamagne: Really? I think you guys would have so much in common?
Will Smith: No, that’s what Jada would say (also) all the time. ‘I’m telling you, y’all are so similar. You’d love him.’ But I could never…that was a huge regret of mine. I couldn’t handle it. I was the soft rapper from Philly, and he was Pac…I was deeply insecure, and I wasn’t man enough to handle it. (breakfast club interview)
Tupac would later be killed before Jada could work out things with him. Will Smith also would regret that he never sat down and talked to Tupac and worked things out. So because of this love that Jada had for Tupac, even though he is dead, he would haunt their marriage. In an MTV interview concerning Tupac, Jada said:
“There’s not a day that goes by that I don’t think about Pac. I think about him every single day.”-Jada Pinkett Smith (MTV interview)
Last Valentine’s Day, Jada read a poem that Tupac wrote to her while in prison that no one had even heard before! Did Will Smith even know about this poem?
Then recently, even Will Smith’s daughter put something up recently:
And keep in mind that she never even met Tupac. She wasn’t even born yet! She was a few years from being born. So her mother is placing this affection for her dead friend in her daughter. A position of adoration that should only be for her father. How would you feel if you saw this letter by your daughter? Or your wife reading a poem that you probably didn’t even know she had stashed somewhere by this man that she loved?
2)Marriage
First Marriage
Before Will Smith married Jada Pinkett, he had been previously married to Sheree Zampino. They were married in 1992 and produced a son (Trey) from that union. They were married from 1992 to 1995. Will Smith said, one day, they went to dinner. He went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror and immediately came to the realization that he married the wrong woman. Reflecting on that divorce, he said, “Divorce was the worst thing in my adult life. Divorce was the ultimate failure for me.”
What I didn’t realize, was that Will was the same as I when it came to the unrelenting desire to get married. I haven’t read his book yet, so I don’t know where his desire to get married stems from, but I know for me, not having a family…being the nephew that my aunt and uncle were taking care of, bothered me. My uncle loved me and saved me from going into the system. He was the only father I knew. But he couldn’t protect me from what was under his nose. And I guess, to keep his marriage intact, he had to go along with some things. Anyway, I digress.
My uncle and aunt’s circle were all dignified, educated, and married people that took care of their children. My aunt’s friends looked down on me and would acknowledge that it wasn’t fair that my aunt had to take care of a child that didn’t come from her womb. This produced two things in me:
- A desire to produce my own children that would receive what I never received…their own parents and an environment where they were loved and cultivated fully like I saw my cousin (that I lived with) and others receive.
- I wanted to be married so that I could create my own family because that’s the only way to produce psychologically healthy children.
So that was my drive…apparently, since Will Smith was 5 years old, he also wanted to get married and produce a good family one day. Recently finding this out through my research for this article, I see why his divorce from his first wife impacted him so much and why he probably won’t leave the marriage that he’s in with Jada Pinkett-Smith because of his determination to accomplish his vision to be (stay) married. (Note: learning this piece of information about his life and studying the bullshit that he has gone through for 25 years with his current wife leads me to do some deeper introspections on myself….Thank you, Will.)
To be continued…Pt. 5…Jada
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