The girl who abandoned her newborn baby in a garbage chute

On the morning of April 21, 1991, 19-year-old Tupac Amaru Shakur was in New York City, starring in his debut film, Juice, while racing to finish his first album, 2Pacalypse Now. A production assistant knocked on his trailer door and handed him a copy of the New York Daily News. Tupac's eloquence, forged by his mother and Black Panther luminary Afeni, who made him read the New York Times cover to cover as a child, had grown into a reading addiction. He could recite the  American Constitution better than his legal representatives.

 On that particular day, his eyes locked onto the page-seven headline: Cries in the Night. The story, by Linda Yglesias, recounted how a 12-year-old Black Brooklyn girl had been raped by her cousin, and hidden her pregnancy from her family. 

Also read: California Love: Rapper Tupac honored with star in Hollywood

Disillusioned by profound psychological trauma, she gave birth alone on a bathroom floor in Brownsville's most violent housing project. She then wrapped the newborn in a Job Lot bag and dropped him down a garbage chute.

At 2 am, McArthur Williams, the building’s maintenance custodian, pushed a button to activate the trash compactor and heard a high-pitched cry. He called police. Sergeant Philip Insardi knelt by the compactor, flashlight in hand, and spotted two tiny toes peeking from under an old newspaper. He wrapped the baby in his jacket sleeve and rushed him to an ambulance.

As the son of Afeni, a recovering crack addict, Tupac resonated with the baby’s impoverished homelessness and recalled how rats would burrow through his dilapidated floor mattress.

Using a blue ballpoint pen, he wrote a powerful, poetic, masterpiece of the story in 30 minutes, in his trademark flawless handwriting. He named the song Brenda’s Got a Baby and included the timeless anthem in his upcoming 13 track debut album 2Pacalypse Now, which was released under Los Angeles record label Interscope, seven months later.

When Jeff Pearlman began working on Tupac's biography Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur, he was overcome by curiosity about the song's coded inscription. Michele Soulli, his former classmate at New York's Mahopac High School, was one of America’s most outstanding genealogists and researchers. Jeff discussed with Michele the complications of trying to locate the nameless baby and his nameless mother.

A few weeks later, Michele texted Jeff the phone number of someone named Davonn Hodge, along with the message: "I think that's Brenda's Baby." Jeff was dumbfounded. On March 21, 2023, he sent a text to that contact and asked if he had been born in New York City in April 1991. Davonn confirmed it.

Davonn had been raised in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, until age 13, when his adoptive parents, Robert and Marsha Hodge, relocated to Las Vegas, Nevada, to retire. Davonn's adoptive mother told him that he had been adopted out of traumatic circumstances, but she never elaborated. His parents died in rapid succession: Robert of cardiovascular pulmonary disease, and Marsha of a heart attack.

Also read: The life and times of Tupac Shakur’s mother

Out of indignation, Davonn paid a hundred dollars on March 26, 2022, to spit into an Ancestry.com tube and take a DNA test, to reclaim his past. When the results arrived via email, he was confounded. The report listed names, all first cousins, pinpointed to Brooklyn, New York. He reached out to one of them, a woman named Lotitha Govan. As soon as he told her his adoption story, she identified him, and within days, he was on a video call with a handful of relatives.

Suddenly, one of his relatives asked: "How do you feel about Tupac?" Davonn had always harbored an eerie love for Tupac, and the rapper's songs filled his playlist. When a cousin revealed that "Brenda's Got a Baby" was about him, Davonn was left perplexed, startled, and stunned.

Seven months later, he travelled to Brooklyn and visited the Noble Drew Ali public housing project in Brownsville. A cousin's friend guided him to the trash chute where he his mother had dumped him. It was tiny and dark. He was also told that his mother had vanished after abandoning him. To help locate her, genealogist Michele Soulli pieced together bits of information from Davonn, combined with details from old newspaper articles, and eventually found her phone number. Her name was Jeanette.

Michele called Jeanette twice before texting her; and Jeanette phoned back and asked, "You know where my son is?" When Michele confirmed she did, Jeanette began sobbing uncontrollably. She lived in Newark, New Jersey, just 45 minutes across the George Washington Bridge from New York, but at that moment, she was attending a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert in Las Vegas, where Davonn also lived.

Davonn and his biological mother, Jeanette, reunited that night in the lobby of Caesars Palace on the Vegas Strip, 33 years since she had given birth to him. Their hugs, sobs, and hours of conversation stretched deep into the night. On her right forearm, Jeanette had a faded tattoo in blue script that read 
DAVONN, with a crown atop the D that appeared to have been inked decades earlier.

"After they found you in the garbage, they found me," she explained. "They took me to the hospital and let me hold you and name you, so I chose Davonn." Jeanette revealed to her son that she had spent decades searching for him, but with no leads, she gave up and had his name permanently affixed in ink. That reunion took place a mere eight-tenths of a mile from the corner of Flamingo and Koval, where, 27 years earlier, on September 7, 1996, Tupac,  who had lyrically reunited them, was fatally wounded by South Side Crips gang affiliate Orlando Anderson.

Jeff Anthony is a novelist, Big Brother Africa 2 Kenyan representative and founder of Jeff's Fitness Center @jeffbigbrother