One of my best friends was named June June, aka Infinite, who I first met in high school. He was a six-foot-two-inch, wavy-haired, jet-black motherfucker, and a born fighter. I wish he were still alive; he could have become a heavyweight fighter.
He showed me about what having heart really meant and to not be afraid of anybody. Even if he was, he’d hide it real good and take them on anyway. I was smaller than a lot of other dudes, but I was already a fighter with heart, and had been for years. So he kept my little yellow ass around.
I learned so much from him. I learned that if I got into a fight and I got lumped up, I’d just take my beating. That’s heart. And that’s something I learned from him, because he lost fights, too.
He and I would be walking down the street or hanging out, and we’d see someone who had a rep for fighting.
“Yo, God, you think he could get me?” In other words, do you think he can beat me?
“I don’t know, Infinite.”
That’s all he needed to hear. He’d go over and start a fight
with the dude. Either he’d win or he’d lose. Usually he’d win, but if he lost, he’d take the loss. He wouldn’t cry and go get his gun. He would say, “I’ma see that dude in three months.”
That’s all he’d say to whoever beat him. He’d go work out crazy hard for three months, then come back and challenge him to another fight. And he’d knock him the fuck out. Every. Time.
Infinite also taught me that you can take a loss and you can come back strong. That’s the true heart of a champion. He was a notorious knockout artist on Staten Island. To this day, if I said his name there, people would know who he was.
I remember before he died, he got locked up at Rikers Island and came home with twenty-two cuts on his back and face. He showed me the scars on his back—it was gruesome. I asked him what happened.
“I was goin’ to war in Rikers!” he said. “As soon as I arrived in the Four Building [the prison dorm], my name’s ringin’ bells. ‘June June’s in the house!’”
See, the moment you get in jail, you gotta act a certain way, or other dudes are gonna try to take advantage of you any way they can. That’s your reputation, and if it’s solid, it can protect you from a lotta shit. Of course, the bigger rep you have, the bigger target you can be, too. June June knew this, and since he had a rep for knockin’ dudes out, he knew guys were gonna come at him, hoping to improve their rep by taking him down.
“Them lil’ dudes all had to gang up on me, there musta been about twenty of ’em,” June June said. “They climbed up on me, and I was knocking ’em out one by one. But after that, I came out of the infirmary, and the whole jail was dialed down.”
That’s just how he was. He was one of those dudes that everywhere he went, you always knew he was in the house. Everyone knew not to mess with him, or if they didn’t know, they learned damn quick. Matter of fact, during that stretch was when he changed his name to Infinite. He went in June June, he came out Infinite.
I loved that man. He had a lot of people that didn’t like him, but then he also had mad peoples who loved him. And he didn’t like that many people, but I was lucky to be one of them. He even got along with my moms.
Unfortunately, like a lot of the good brothers I grew up with, he got killed. He ran up on some little shorty who was scared of him, and he shot June June in the chest with a .45. Just murdered him. The guy who shot him was a little sucka punk, but he feared June June, so he shot him. I always told June June he couldn’t keep just running up on people like that. But he wasn’t trying to hear that, and it got him killed.
4.
THE 5 PERCENTERS
I wasn’t awakened and truly empowered as a black man in America until I started hanging out with the 5 Percent. That knowledge and experience provided the foundation for both the Wu-Tang Clan and my own manhood.
I would always see those brothers on the corner, talking positive and addressing issues in the community. The way they spoke and the terminology they used, I didn’t really understand it at first, but when I was around thirteen or fourteen, it drew me in:
“Peace, Allah. Come build with the brothers in the cipher.”
“The black man is God, don’t believe in no mystery God in the sky!”
“Peace, God. What’s today’s Mathematics?”
My name, U-God, came from my enlightener Dakim, the person who gave me knowledge of self. The U in my name is short for Universal. The word universal means multidimensional, infinite, comprehensive. Basically, anything I put my mind to, I will figure out how to get it done. I was given the Universal name because I carry the Ambassador torch every day. I can go anywhere, I can talk to anyone, it’s just who I am.
My full name is U-God Allah. The name U-God is a statement saying that inside of you, the all, the making of you is God. In our terminology, when we say God, it means being a supreme being. A supreme being’s seed/sperm is dominant. He can change the face of the earth physically.
Much of this comes from Islam and Muslim culture. Allah is the All Eye Seeing. Christians and Catholics believe that God is some mysterious force in the sky. We believe the black man is God, and Allah is the All Eye Seeing (Jehovah, God, etc.). The black man is the original man, the maker of civilization. How can you tell the originator what is what?
Knowledge of self is the terminology of 5 Percenters—5 Percent lessons taught blacks in America our true history and made us understand the reality of how we got in our current situation in America. Public schools and textbooks told us we were from Africa, were slaves for four hundred years, freed eventually by Abraham Lincoln, and further freed by Martin Luther King Jr. This is not our true history.
Our true black American history is contained within 120 Lessons, which were given to us by Clarence 13X, who was a contemporary of Malcolm X. The 120 Lessons teach us that we were stripped of our identity, broken down, and made to fear—and that fear was implanted in our babies, everything done to control us like cattle and property.
With this bit of knowledge that was given to us by Elijah Muhammad (who received it from Baby G, a half-black, half-white man who disappeared without a trace soon afterward) and Wallace Fard Muhammad before him, and a lot of very powerful Muslim guys who were awakened by some strange force, they passed that on to us as kids. The Muslim degrees that we received as kids are called the 120.
Clarence 13X brought these Lessons to the streets, gave them to us to wake us up. He was different because he brought Islam to the hustlers, pimps, drug dealers, and thieves on the street corners who needed it most. The 120 was for gangsters, pimps, all the street dwellers in the black community. You received these Lessons and became enlightened depending on the type of person you were.
The majority of the world is the 85 percent. They are the deaf, dumb, and blind masses, basically Savages in pursuit of happiness, who are often poison-animal eaters (certain foods, like pork, make a person docile, and added antibiotics and artificial ingredients just make it worse), who have no knowledge of self, and therefore are slaves to the 10 percent who are in power.
The 10 percent are the slave owners and bloodsuckers of the poor masses, like priests and politicians. They control the system; they know the truth, but keep it to themselves, so they hide the facts proving who the true and living God is.
Then you have the 5 Percent, who are the Poor Righteous Teachers. They’re trying to educate the 85 percent and awaken them out of their sleep state. Basically, the 5 Percent has to civilize the uncivilized. That makes up the entire 100 percent of the population on earth.
The 5 Percent Lessons taught you that everything in existence came from the black man, the Original Man, the father of civilization, God of the Universe. It’s a great source of pride and takes a lot of reflection because as a kid, you get bombarded by so much white America that you don’t know that blacks have contributed massive amounts of things to this world.
The 120 Lessons aren’t prejudiced against white people; the Lessons are for us. The
120 taught us to unlearn the lies that shackled us and replace that with genuine attempts to fill in history that was purposefully left out of history books. From birth, we’re bombarded with a single idea: that we were and are slaves. Our history is basically four hundred years of free labor. According to that version of history, we didn’t invent anything, we didn’t create anything, we were good for nothing else. So they took advantage of the place they put us in. They separated us. They fed us the wrong foods. And they keep us this way, with the trickery they use to do things. The 120 broke down everything.
Even at a young age, these degrees, the 120 Lessons, gave me and my crew our first real knowledge of self. You couldn’t trick us with stupid shit anymore. Why? Because the degrees told us about the tricknology, how we were taught lies and deceit. They allowed us to see the truth of our situation.
The degrees also gave us high self-esteem, allowing us to carry ourselves differently, with the idea that we mattered in this world. I think that’s a big problem with much of today’s youth, especially black youth; they feel like they don’t matter in today’s society. Granted, much of today’s society isn’t helping—it’s very clear to me that the deck is still stacked against young black men—but they have to rise above what society thinks of them in general and be true to themselves, hold their heads up high and keep doing what they’re doing every day, regardless of what anyone else thinks.
But mainstream society keeps trying to throw that shit in our face like we give a fuck anymore. I mean like, “Know your place, boy.” Naw, we don’t know anything about that. We black people don’t give a fuck about no place—what place you talkin’ about? All I know is that as long as I got some money in my pocket, I can do whatever the fuck I wanna do. And anyone trying to tell us otherwise just makes us go harder.
We need to realize that we’re standing on the shoulders of everyone who came before us. We’re the seed of the seed of the seed of those ancestors that made our history. All of us, we’re the best of the best right now. Those that made it, we survived everything that was thrown at us—diseases, plagues, violence, slaughter—to actually get to this level of humanity where we can actually read and write and chill on the couch and watch TV, do all the things we take for granted today.
We made it, we all survived to reach this point. But what comes next? What are you going to do with this life that your ancestors suffered and fought and bled and died for? How are you going to carry their legacy forward and leave your own mark—whether it be big or small—on the world? No matter what you choose to focus on, you should aspire to be the very best you can be, whether that’s being a drug dealer or a fireman or a teacher. If you want to be a poet, if you want to be a rapper, if you want to be an athlete, whatever you want to do, just always be striving for more—more skill, more knowledge, more experience—to be the best at it.
*
When I was thirteen, my enlighteners were Dakim and Love God, who both dropped Supreme Mathematics into my lap. At the time, being 5 Percent was a big fucking deal. You had to know at least the basic Mathematics, or you were catching a beating. They never beat me because we were younger, and they were just happy the young Gods were picking up the lessons.
I got my degrees at fifteen. First came knowledge, which was just knowing the degrees. Then came wisdom, which was to be able to speak about the degrees. Finally came understanding, when the lightbulb came on and my world was forever changed—I was awake now.
Though Supreme Mathematics guided me through my teenage years, it really took hold of me when I got to about twenty-one years old. What really pulled me into it, the teachings of this offshoot of Islam, was that my last name is Hawkins. In case you don’t know, the first English slave trader was named John Hardy Hawkins. He was the first Englishman to bring slaves to America. He was sanctioned by the pope. The Roman Catholic Church gave him the okay to enslave us and bring us to North America. When I found that out, it blew my mind. That pulled me in. I wanted to know what this shit was about and why I shared that devil’s last name. Both my grandmother and I have tried to have our DNA analyzed, but the results have either been inconclusive or never came back.
The Mathematics encouraged me to learn how our families were split up and our history was stolen. How we were renamed after our masters. How we’re still doing the same shit to each other years and years down the line. How we need unity and structure to better our situation, but fall victim to the manipulative ways of the powers that be until we can’t stick together. We’re still attempting to bring down anybody who is doing better than us in our community, like crabs in a barrel. Still doing stupid shit the powers that be want us to do. My own kind will throw each other into slavery for profit and power. Still fighting and killing each other over stupid, petty shit. And this isn’t just a black thing, it’s a human condition. But black people are more direct about trying to fuck up your shit.
Worse yet, our lack of knowledge has us trying to drink from this one little well of drugs, entertainment, and sports. There’s so many ways to make money legitimately, but all we see is drugs, entertainment, and sports. See, that’s the thing about knowledge. When you get knowledge, you don’t even know you have it until you apply it. In essence, you don’t even have it until it gets used.
What it really all comes down to is knowledge of self: what you know—knowing your history and where you truly come from—how you know it, who you know. Listen to the people around you, observe the world around you. The average person in the hood isn’t seeing that; they’re just going by what they know and their limited worldview. But there’s more things under the sun than they can possibly imagine.
*
The illest aspect of the degrees that I internalized was to not look in the sky for salvation. Religion is only a moral ceiling; you still have to live life as though there are repercussions for the shit you do, but I realized as a kid that I couldn’t rely on a mystery God.
People pray for things, then they think things are gonna come to them. Actually, that’s not the way it works. God helps those that help themselves, that’s basically what it means. You can’t wait for a mystery God to bring you food, clothes, and shelter. You’d be out there on the streets homeless. The act of doing, that’s where the blessing takes place.
And during the crack era of Park Hill, we needed to be reminded that we were the only ones who could save ourselves.
5.
HIP-HOP WAS OUR WAY OF LIFE
Eventually, my mother got kicked out of our old building at 260 Park Hill. The dude upstairs from us used to make so much fucking noise that she got into an argument with him. She and her boyfriend went up there and they all got into an even bigger argument, which ended up in a fight, so they kicked us out, and we moved across the street to 339 Vanderbilt Avenue.
While we were living there, I became best friends with the landlord’s son, an older kid named Tom who lived below us. He was like a mentor to me, the big brother I never had.
Tom used to DJ at parties, and I’d help him with his records and gear. Crazy shit about Tom was that he used to make his own speakers. He’d go to a hardware store and get wood and cut out a box. Then we’d get amps, woofers, and tweeters from a used-electronics store and build the box around it and put insulation in it for soundproofing, and he’d have the best speakers in the hood for practically no money.
Tom had a friendly rivalry with Thurman, another DJ on the block, and they were always trying to one-up the other with speaker builds, whose was louder, all that. We were a little more innovative with the shit back then. And every time there was a little party popping off, I’d be over there helping Tom, carrying records, whatever.
I was always listening to music while growing up. When I was punished, my mother would send me to my room. All I had was my box and my radio. We used to make our own tapes. We would put the tape in the recorder, press the record button, and record songs off the radio. We were listening to Mr. Magic’s show and all those old-school rappers, that’
s how you did it back in the day. I started listening to rap in ’84, but it has always influenced me. It was our music. It wasn’t popular like it is now.
*
Tom was my first real mentor for hip-hop, him and my uncle Matt. Now, we’d heard hip-hop before this, but it wasn’t super rhymes and classic beats and all that. It was groups like the Treacherous Three, Grand Wizard Theodore and the Fantastic Five, and the Cold Crush Brothers. The movie Wild Style came out, which really moved hip-hop culture forward.
Myman Tom was already collecting records and DJing. He had a mixer and two turntables, and we’d just be in the basement listening to music all day long. It was here where I first started listening to the roots of what would become the rap and hip-hop the next generation would kick out. Sampling was just starting at this time, and we would sample this song or sample that beat. We would come up with ideas or concepts or put routines together, things we still do to this day.
On top of this, Uncle Matt would come out to Staten Island whenever he’d get in trouble, that was his little hiding spot. He’d come and stay with us, and he’d bring tapes of live performances from Harlem World, a popular club that hosted everyone who was anyone in hip-hop, like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Lady Smiley, Busy Bee Starski, Doug E. Fresh, and Kool Moe Dee. Old rappers and all that stuff, and we’d listen to those on the stoop of the house all day long. That was where I started honing the craft of hip-hop. Hip-hop started getting into me at that time.
I still remember the first time I hung out with RZA. It was at a block party in Stapleton Park. Tom and I went down there together. Back then he’d give little house parties with the blue light or the red light, and Tom would get his big speakers out and the rest of his equipment and start DJing.
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