Black Woman

Above the poem stand four characters: “4 Marquita”. Who Marquita was is not documented. In the book The Rose That Grew from Concrete, Black Woman appears in the second section, “Nothing Can Come Between Us”. It is one of the texts in which Tupac shapes his image of the Black woman: dignified, strong, and independent.

What Attracted Him Must Keep Both Standing

The poem has three stanzas, and all revolve around one word: strength. The speaker says he saw it in the woman from the very first day, a strong spirit that attracted him. He wishes that a smile replace the sorrow she experienced in the past. And he draws a clear conclusion: what attracted him must also sustain the relationship.

In the third stanza, the text turns against the speaker himself. He warns of his own negative side, which will try to change the woman, and asks her to resist it with all her strength. Her strength is meant to keep both standing when others fall. A love poem that openly names the man’s weakness and makes the woman the sustaining force was unusual for a young rapper in the late 1980s.

An Ideal That Reaches All the Way to “Keep Ya Head Up”

The ideal of the strong Black woman appears in other places in the book: in Jada just as in the poems to his mother, such as Family Tree. In his music, it became the theme of Keep Ya Head Up (1993), a song explicitly addressed to Black women that calls for respect. That Black Woman is a precursor to it is an obvious interpretation, but not documented.

According to the preface by Afeni Shakur, the poem was written between 1989 and 1991; it is not dated more precisely. An overview of the entire book and all poems is provided in the introduction.