Voletta Wallace, the mother of the late rapper Notorious B.I.G., has died. The death was due to natural causes, according to Variety. She was 78 and died Friday in Strousdburg County, Pa.
Her son, born Christopher Wallace and also known as Biggie Smalls and Frank White, immortalized the Jamaican immigrant in his 1994 song “Juicy,” when he wrote that his mother was happy that his life had progressed from drug dealing in the Bedford-Stuyvesant community of his native Brooklyn to rap success:
And she loves to show me off of course
Smiles everytime my face is up in The Source
The Notorious B.I.G. was shot dead in 1997 at age 24. He was Wallace’s only child.
“What I am feeling inside is like a 100-pound lead weighing down in my chest,” she told NPR in 2005 about her grief. “It’s very cold and it’s very heavy and I am so dying to get rid of it. But it’s not something you can get rid of, because that was my son. He was my baby. I am a mother and I will always be a mother.”
Wallace, a former pre-school teacher, played a central role in asserting her son’s importance to hip-hop culture in the years after his death. She spoke against gun violence, sometimes appearing with the late Afeni Shakur, mother of rapper Tupac Shakur, who had been shot to death in 1995 at age 25. Shakur and B.I.G. had been foes in longstanding disagreements between East Coast and West Coast rappers.
She started The Christopher Wallace Foundation two years after his death. The organization was dedicated to funding education, according to its website, and considered the “B.I.G.” portion of her son’s moniker to stand for “Books Instead of Guns.”
She wrote “Biggie: Voletta Wallace Remembers Her Son, Christopher Wallace, aka Notorious B.I.G.,” in 2005. It detailed her difficulties raising him as a single mother and the terrible aftermath of his violent death.
A few years later, award-winning actress Angela Bassett played her in “Notorious,” a biopic of her son.
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