A Tupac Shakur Biographer Goes Looking For Brenda's Baby

We are sitting outside a Starbucks in Las Vegas. The sky is light blue, pocked by cloudy streaks of white. It is a Saturday morning in early April of 2023, and here, two miles off the Strip, the world feels tranquil and still.

Davonn Hodge is drinking a water.

I am sipping on a coffee.

He is a handsome thirty-three-year-old Black man with a faded goatee and brown eyes that peek out from beneath a Yankees cap. His voice is soft. Though this is our first time meeting, it feels familiar. We chat about LeBron, about Mahomes, about the weather and Wendy’s and marijuana. The reason we are here looms, of course, hanging above us like an oversized umbrella. But we talk enough to push back the awkwardness until silence overtakes us and it can be pushed back no longer.

“So,” I say. “Brenda.”

Davonn nods.

“Yeah,” he replies. “Brenda.”

On the morning of April 21, 1991, a nineteen-year-old rapper-actor named Tupac Amaru Shakur was in New York City, working on his debut film, Juice. The project was low-budget in every sense of the word—a mere $5 million to play with, a cast of inexpensive newcomers, a director (Ernest Dickerson) trying to break free from the shadow of his mentor, Spike Lee. Shakur, who captured one of the four starring roles with an out-of-the-blue audition that, decades later, Dickerson refers to as “at a different level,” had been kicking back in his trailer, likely smoking one of that day’s fifty (or so) Newports or twenty (or so) blunts, when a production assistant knocked on the door and handed him the latest edition of the New York Daily News. A voracious news junkie who grew up devouring The New York Times, Tupac sat down to read. The stories were mostly standard Big Apple fare—a Bronx National Guard unit being called up for active duty, an infant’s arm torn off by a dog, Brian Quinnett starting at forward for the Knicks.

Then Shakur’s eyes turned to the headline atop page 7, “Cries In The Night.”

The piece, penned by staff writer Linda Yglesias, told the story of a twelve-year-old Brooklyn girl who had been raped by a cousin, hid her pregnancy from her family, delivered a baby on the bathroom floor of an apartment in the Noble Drew Ali public housing project in Brownsville, wrapped the infant in a Job Lot bag, and threw it down the garbage chute.

A few hours later McArthur Williams, the building’s maintenance man, pushed a button to activate the trash compactor when he heard a high-pitched cry—“Like somebody fighting for life,” he said. The police were called, and a Sergeant Philip Insardi stepped to the compactor, flicked on his flashlight, and knelt down.

“I saw two toes pointing at 2 o’clock, the bottom of its feet facing me, under a double-page newspaper,” he told Yglesias. “The baby was dry and sticky. It felt dehydrated. The cord looked ripped. It was cold. There was a little dried blood on the left shoulder, in the armpit.

“Its hair was matted to its head. Little pieces of leaves were in its eyes. It didn’t look like it had been washed. It didn’t make a sound. I thought it was dead.”

When Insardi touched the baby’s stomach, he felt it squirm. He removed his jacket, wrapped the infant in a sleeve, and carried him to an ambulance.

Shakur couldn’t believe what he was reading. Actually, scratch that—as the son of a crack addict, who knew what it was to be homeless with rats burrowing through his mattress, Shakur could believe what he was reading. He sought out pen and paper and returned to his trailer.

“I need a half hour,” he said to a PA. “Alone.”

Upon emerging, Shakur handed a piece of notebook paper to Omar Epps, his seventeen-year-old costar. In blue ballpoint pen, with his trademark neat handwriting, the words soared from the page:

She didn’t know what to throw away and what to keep

She wrapped the baby up and threw him in the trash heap

I guess she thought she’d get away, wouldn’t hear the cries

She didn’t realize

How much the little baby had her eyes

He named the song “Brenda’s Got a Baby.”

Seven months later, Tupac Shakur’s debut album, 2Pacalypse Now, hit stores and received a fairly muted reception from the hip-hop universe. There are thirteen tracks, twelve of which failed to resonate on a national level.

Yet something about “Brenda’s Got a Baby” stuck. To this day, the opening line—“I hear Brenda’s got a baby. But Brenda’s barely got a brain”—is widely recognized. It is not merely a song, but Shakur screaming, Fucking pay attention!

With the exception of hip-hop diehards, however, few were ever made aware of the story behind the story. To most listeners, Brenda is a fictional character. And as the years passed, and Tupac Shakur rose from star to superstar to—in the aftermath of his 1996 murder—icon, curiosity about the song largely faded. With so much to discuss, why bother with a thirty-something-year-old tune?

And yet…

The mind of a biographer is overwhelmed by obsessiveness. In tackling a subject, one doesn’t merely observe. He dives in. He chases. He craves. He crawls. He seeks. It is never enough to know that Martin Luther King smoked cigarettes. No. The biographer needs to know he smoked Kents and L&Ms, as Jonathan Eig wrote in King: A Life. When Mark Kriegel wrote Namath: A Biography, it wasn’t sufficient to report that Broadway Joe enjoyed nights on the town. No—the clubs he hit were The Pussycat and Bachelors III.

So as I worked on this book, I found myself returning to “Brenda’s Got a Baby.” Via a lightly viewed Epps YouTube interview from nine years ago, I learned the skeletal basics of the song’s origins, and then I tracked down Yglesias’s article. What continued to gnaw at me, though, was the fate of the baby—and of Brenda. Over the three decades that have passed, the identity of neither child nor mother had ever been revealed.

Were they alive?

Were they dead?

Hell, had they ever actually existed?

Thanks to the good fortune of having attended Mahopac (New York) High School in the late 1980s, I knew Michele Soulli, a former classmate and one of America’s outstanding researchers. I reached out to her, and we discussed the complications of trying to locate a nameless baby and a nameless mother.

“Lemme see what I can do,” Michele told me.

A few weeks later, Michele texted me the phone number of someone named Davonn Hodge.

“Who the hell is Davonn Hodge?” I asked Michele.

“I can’t guarantee,” she replied. “But I think it’s Brenda’s baby.”

I didn’t believe it. Yet, according to Michele, the birthdays seemed to match, as did the geography. So on March 21, 2023, I fired off what must go down as some of the crudest out-of-the-blue texts in the history of modern telecommunication. First, I asked whether this was, in fact, the Davonn Hodge who had been born in New York City in 1991.

It was.

Then I asked (glub) whether he’d been thrown down a trash chute.

“I will call you tomorrow,” he replied.

He called the next day.

That is how, less than two weeks later, I found myself at the Las Vegas Starbucks, sitting across from the ghost of “Brenda’s Got a Baby.”

“This is crazy,” Hodge muttered.

A pause.

“This is crazy.”

Davonn had been raised in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn until age thirteen, when his adoptive parents, Robert and Marsha Hodge, relocated to Las Vegas to retire in the desert. Davonn’s mother told him he had been adopted out of a traumatic circumstance, but they never provided details. Then, within a short span of time, his mother and father died—Robert of cardiovascular pulmonary disease, Marsha of a heart attack.

That’s why, on March 26, 2022, Davonn Hodge paid a hundred dollars to spit into an Ancestry.com tube and take a DNA test. “I was all alone,” he said. “I wanted to find out who I really was.”

When the results arrived via email, Hodge was confounded. There, before him, was a listing of names—all first cousins, all pinpointed in Brooklyn. He reached out to one, a woman named Lotitha Govan. “As soon as I told her my age, and being adopted, she knew exactly who I was,” Davonn said. Within a few days, he was on video call with a handful of relatives. They laughed and sighed and bemoaned the weirdness of life. They told him about his old home.

Then one asked the question that changed everything.

“So, Davonn,” he said, “how do you feel about Tupac?”

Davonn Hodge loved Tupac. He could run off all the songs, from “Hit ’Em Up” and “I Get Around” to “Dear Mama” and “Keep Ya Head Up.” Had seen plenty of the movies. Knew of his relationship with Madonna, of his work with Snoop and Dr. Dre. Of Thug Life and Death Row and…

“Tupac,” he said, “speaks to a lot of people.”

So when his newfound cousin mentioned “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” Davonn nodded.

“Well,” the cousin said, “supposedly that song is you.”

Silence.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“That song—‘Brenda’s Got a Baby,’” the cousin said. “We’re pretty sure you’re the baby.”

With that, Davonn was filled in on the details of his infant odyssey.

Seven months later, he took a trip to Brooklyn and the Noble Drew Ali public housing project in Brownsville, where many of his relatives still lived. He was greeted, Antwone Fisher-like, by scores of aunts and uncles, cousins and nieces and nephews. They hugged him, kissed him, and fed him. “Just the excitement on their faces,” he said. “These are people who never thought I’d be back. They couldn’t believe it. They looked at me as a miracle.”

At one point, a cousin’s friend guided him into a hallway and pointed to a trash chute.

“That’s where she put you,” he said.

Davonn opened it and looked down.

“It was tiny and dark,” he said. “To think I was thrown away like that . . .”

The mom went missing. That’s what Davonn’s newfound relatives told him. She was a twelve-year-old mother who had nearly killed her baby, and she needed to escape. So, one way or another, she vanished, never to be heard from again.

“No one has seen her in years and years,” Davonn told me at Starbucks. “I’d obviously love to find her, because she is my mother. But I dunno if that’s possible.”

Reenter Michele Soulli. Cobbling together bits of information from Davonn combined with bits of information from some old newspaper articles combined with a genealogist’s intuition, Michele found what she thought might well be a phone number for the woman who birthed Davonn. This was a few weeks after the Starbucks meeting, and Michele was fairly certain she had the right person. But how do you approach someone who was raped as a child, then deposited her child into the garbage?

“I thought about it and I finally said, ‘Screw it,’ and called,” Michele said. “I actually called twice, and then I just texted.”

Without much of a plan, Michele wrote, Hey, Jeanette. How are you? It’s Michele. How’s it going? It’s been so long.

Seconds later, her phone rang.

JEANETTE: “Who is this?”

MICHELE: “It’s Michele.”

JEANETTE: “Michele who?”

MICHELE: “I’m a researcher, and I was hired to find you.”

JEANETTE: “Why?”

MICHELE: “You have a son named Davonn?”

This is where the screaming began. Then, the tears. Lots of tears. Some sobs, too.

JEANETTE: “You know where my son is?”

More screaming.

MICHELE: “Yes.”

JEANETTE: “Oh my God! Oh my God! I have to get home to Newark. Oh my God! I need to get home! Oh my God!”

MICHELE: “Hold on. Please.”

JEANETTE: “Oh my God!”

MICHELE: “Where are you?”

JEANETTE: “I live in New Jersey, but I’m away from home for a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert.”

MICHELE: “Oh. Where are they playing?”

JEANETTE: “In Las Vegas.”

They met that night in the lobby of Caesars Palace. For Davonn, the kisses felt like home. So did the hugs and the hours of conversation that went deep into the night. On her right forearm, Jeanette had a tattoo, in blue script, that read DAVONN, with a crown atop the D. It looked old and a bit faded, as if it had been inked long ago.

“After they found you in the garbage, they found me,” she explained.

“They took me to the hospital and let me hold you. I was able to name you, so I chose Davonn.” Jeanette told her son she had spent decades searching for him, but with no luck. She had all but given up. So, way back when, she had his name affixed in ink.

That the reunion took place a mere eight-tenths of a mile from where, on September 7, 1996, Tupac Shakur was gunned down, on the corner of Flamingo and Koval, was lost on mother and son. They were basking in the moment.

A couple of days later, I called Yaasmyn Fula, Tupac’s former business manager, longtime family friend, and the mother of Yaki Kadafi from the Outlawz (Tupac’s hip-hop group), to share the news. She listened quietly, and when I was done she told me the chills running up and down her arm were a sign from Tupac.

“He would have loved that one song brought those people together,” she told me. “He would have really loved that.”

Excerpted from the book Only God Can Judge Me by Jeff Pearlman. Copyright © 2025 by Jeff Pearlman. From Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers. Reprinted by permission.