Voletta Wallace, the mother of Biggie Smalls, aka Notorious B.I.G. has passed away at the age of 78. She passed Feb. 21 in her Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania, home, Monroe County coroner Thomas Yanac confirmed to TMZ.
Wallace, a Jamaican immigrant, was a Brooklyn school teacher. Describing her childhood as “wonderful” and “innocent” to the Pocono Record, she said she loved to garden in her free time and regularly shared updates on her floral and fauna to social media. In addition to promoting her son’s music, she often wrote inspirational messages alongside her posts.
She later published her memoir Biggie in 2005, and in 2021 she worked as an executive producer on the Netflix documentary Biggie: I Got A Story To Tell. When promoting that film, she told the Associated Press: “They never knew me. The public never knew me. I was thrust into this environment, I should say, after he passed away, because I’m a very private person. Extremely private.”
“What he was doing out there, maybe I should have known. But honestly, I didn’t. And to this day, there are people who are saying, ’Oh, she knew. [whispers] But I never knew.”
She spoke of her joy at Biggie’s induction into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 2020. “Brooklyn we did it!!! This is so long overdue,” she wrote. “Thank you to everyone that helped make this happen for Christopher. Love you all.”
After the murder of her son in 1997–the drive-by shooting that remains unsolved–she became instrumental in growing his estate and establishing his legacy. To accomplish her aspirations for her superstar son’s legacy, Wallace established the Christopher Wallace Memorial Foundation. According to Celebrity Net Worth, Wallace was instrumental in growing Biggie’s estate from $10 Million to $160 Million.
Multiple sources said Wallas was “furious” when B.I.G. told her he wanted to be a rapper, but she respected her son’s art.
“I didn’t like it because I didn’t know what they were saying, but my son, I knew his words,” she told the Pocono Record. “He could articulate his story. I never liked profanity. I still don’t, but I understand what he was saying.”
“People were saying that he caused his death,” continued Wallace. “He sang, you know, whatever–he recited his death. And so, as a mother, I had to listen to it. He had told me earlier not to listen to it because rap was not for me. I want to find out what is it that some people like about it, what they love about it and what they hated about it. And I wanted to find out if I hated it, too. And I love the music. I love some of the stories. I just hated some of the story lines.”
In Biggie’s song, “Things Done Changed”, Biggie rapped that he was stressed about his mother’s breast cancer. But in reality, not much has changed in that area for Black women. Black women are still more likely to die from breast cancer than all races of women, though they are less likely than white women to be diagnosed with it. That mortality gap has continued to widen since the 1990s.
My Momma got cancer in her breast, Don’t ask me why I’m motherf*cking stressed, things done changed” — The Notorious B.I.G., in “Things Done Changed” from Ready to Die
“When my son passed away I had my first bout with breast cancer,” explains Wallace to Ed Gordon in an NPR interview. “I had my first mastectomy, ’93. And I just had my second mastectomy two and a half years ago. As far as breast cancer is concerned, all I can encourage young ones to do is be educated and do very, very regular examinations. Because if you don’t, it is death. But breast cancer doesn’t have to be a death sentence. It can be life if you know what you’re doing with your body.”
On “Ready to Die,” Biggie’s award-winning first album, murder seemed like the central theme of some self-fulfilling prophecy that was constantly on his mind. The 1994 album is filled with a series of poems illustrating the kind of street war gunplay that would eventually take his life. The Brooklyn rapper imagined multiple scenarios under which his death might occur: In a shootout with cops while pursuing pathways out of poverty that President Obama would not approve of (“Gimme The Loot”); killed by jealous acquaintances who want to rob him for his riches (“Warning”); or, by his own finger on the trigger (“Suicidal Thoughts”).
But of all the ways Big imagined himself dying on that album, none of them reflected the real-life horror of death that affects African Americans today–especially his mother, Voletta Wallace.
According to Grist.org, health conditions as a black woman in Brooklyn, and even in all of New York City, cancer was the second-highest cause of death at the time. According to a 2002 report from the New York City Department of Health, from 1992 to 1996, there were 104 cancer deaths in Brooklyn for every 100,000 people. Of the seven leading death causes, homicide was in last place, with 11 cases per 100,000.
All of this is to show that while Biggie and many other young black folks were worried about stick-up kids and gun-wielding hustlers, many of their mothers were worried about killers with no guns or faces.
“If life has taught me anything, it’s to keep pushing forward no matter what,” she wrote in a Jan. 2024 Instagram post, “and to keep love in your heart.”
Voletta is survived by her grandchildren, T’yanna Wallace and C.J. Wallace, Biggie’s respective children with ex Jan Jackson and wife Faith Evans.
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