Carmencita of the Bronx!

“Dedicated 2 Carmen”: the volume The Rose That Grew from Concrete reveals nothing more than this dedication about the woman behind Carmencita of the Bronx!. Who she was is not documented. The title places her in the Bronx, that is, in New York: that is where Tupac was born in 1971 and lived until the family moved to Baltimore in 1984. Whether the poem traces back to a childhood love from that period remains an assumption, not an established fact. It tells of a parting without bitterness from a woman who is now expecting a child.

Congratulations to the Man at Her Side

The poem looks back. The speaker remembers a time when she embodied pure innocence for him and he wanted her more than himself. She was his last thought in the evening and his first in the morning. That was long ago; only occasionally does the memory of her smile carry him through a day.

Then the news that prompts the poem arrives: she is with someone else and expecting a child. The speaker reacts without bitterness. He wishes her luck and calls the other man fortunate because he gets to wake up next to her every morning. At the end stands a greeting that is both a farewell and a promise: see you in heaven.

How the Closing Line Became an Obituary

That very closing line later took on a meaning of its own. The poet Nikki Giovanni placed it above her foreword to the book: “Tupac, C U in Heaven”. In it, she called for a postage stamp featuring a pensive Tupac and those exact words. A private farewell to a youthful love thus became a farewell to Tupac himself.

The motif of reuniting in the afterlife also appears in the book in 2 People with 1 Wish. According to the foreword by Afeni Shakur, Carmencita of the Bronx! was written between 1989 and 1991; the poem is not dated more precisely.

The introduction provides an overview of the entire book and all the poems.