My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem (12 page)

The protective-services people were indignant. Nathan has dark eyes and an olive complexion, but I’m fair with blue eyes.

“Oh, bullshit, you’re no American Indian,” one case worker said. I just smiled.

With Nan’s help I tracked our history back to the Echota Tribe of Alabama. Then I called the tribe. They couldn’t have been more helpful. We did lots of research and, sure enough, we were eligible. Nathan and I were issued with tribal membership cards. Marshall said he didn’t want one—he preferred to hang onto his Scottish heritage. He also believed he was part Irish, because my half-sister Betti Renee’s father, Ron Gilpin, was. It didn’t matter how many times I told him that wasn’t the case; he insisted on celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day.

I was fascinated by the history of the Echota Cherokee. They’d lived peacefully alongside the first English settlers, but by the end of the seventeenth century had been forced into war over land. In 1838, during federal removal, they’d been ordered to join the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma. But a handful managed to remain, living secretly, denying their heritage. In the 1910 U.S. census, just nine Cherokees were listed as living in Alabama; today there are twenty-two thousand. The tribe was not officially recognized until 1980, and then only in state but not federal law. The name Echota was chosen because the word means sanctuary. It was something the tribe now offered Nathan and me. If the court wouldn’t let me have Nathan back, the tribe would take Nathan. We had a safe haven; all we had to do now was prove it in court. And thank God that the American Indian Association and Faye Gibbons encouraged me to fight on.

Marshall and I agreed that Christmas 1996 was the lowest point for our family. Nathan was still in foster care, and I was trying desperately to get him back. Kim and Marshall stayed at my house in Saint Clair Shores, while I moved to the new place in Casco Township, where there were better schools for Nathan. My lawyer suggested I stay away from Marshall; otherwise he too could lose his visitation rights to Nathan. We weren’t to speak to each other, even when he brought Nate to the house in Saint Clair Shores the couple of times they allowed Nate to stay overnight there.

I remember going by there just to watch through the front window as Nate sat on the floor playing with Hailie. My heart was broken. I felt I should be in there with them. Marshall once caught me and told me I had to leave, or he’d lose his visits with Nathan. I was shattered. I cried all the way home.

Then Marshall lost his job at Gilbert’s Lodge, and his debut solo album, Infinite flopped. He reckoned he’d sold maybe 500 copies, and the only mentions he got on local radio were mocking. The disc jockeys said he was a phony just like Vanilla Ice. They even laughed at him for thanking Kim and me for our support.

I loved
Infinite
and felt so proud of Marshall. He’d written about his struggles to support Hailie, his feelings for Kim, and his rap battles at the Hip-Hop Shop, where he now had a regular Saturday night gig.

He got one positive review.
Underground Soundz
noted, “His mastery of the English language allows him to write coherent stories, not just freestyle ramblings that happen to rhyme.”

I tried to cheer him up, saying he’d proved his teachers wrong when they’d given him C grades in English. But Marshall just shook his head in despair. One of the tracks, “Searchin’,’’ got occasional airplay in Detroit, but he knew it wasn’t enough to gain national attention. He kept on writing, but he no longer showed me his lyrics.

Marshall was subpoenaed by the State of Michigan to testify against me. He had no choice in the matter but was deeply unhappy about it.

The trial date was set for April 15. I was charged with neglect and abuse of Nathan. My lawyers, Betsy Mellos and Mike Friedman; were working with the Macomb County prosecutors on a possible plea bargain, but I wanted a jury trial. I wasn’t going to leave anything to chance. Almost a 150 people, including medical experts for both sides, had been called to give evidence. I had seen three psychiatrists, enrolled in good-parenting classes, and enlisted the help of our local media. The headline in the
Macomb Daily
on the day of the trial read, MOTHER ACCUSED OF HARMING HER CHILD FOR SYMPATHY. It went on to explain Munchausen syndrome by proxy.

Marshall was one of the first witnesses to take the stand for the prosecution. The court officials sniggered at his big baggy pants. They pulled faces behind his back.

The state lawyers asked him about our house in Saint Clair Shores, where he was still living with Kim. They hadn’t paid the bills, and the house was being foreclosed. The lawyers tried to make Marshall look like an ass because he didn’t understand the difference between cancelled checks, which had been paid, and duplicate ones, which were merely copies.

Then he tried to explain how he thought Nathan might have drunk from a baby bottle until he was six or seven. The lawyer asked, “So did he take it to school with him?” Many people chuckled as Marshall said “No.” He pointed out that Nathan had always been fed proper food.

When asked if I was a good or bad mother, Marshall didn’t hesitate in answering, “She’s a good mom.”

He also said I’d never hurt Nathan, that I had never done anything wrong beyond maybe striking Nate on his rear end once when he was a five-year-old. For a witness called by the opposition, he’d done a great job for my defense.

They also asked him, “Do you love your mother?” He did not reply.

Other witnesses were called. The school claimed I’d taken Nathan to nine or ten different doctors. I could prove otherwise. Our lovely longtime family general practitioner, Dr. Sal, said that wasn’t the case. When asked what sort of a mother I was, he made me—and the judge—smile when he referred to June Cleaver, the perfect mom in the popular TV series
Leave It to Beaver
.

“She may not be June Cleaver,” he said. “but she’s awfully damn close.”

Nathan had been to the doctor eight times in nine years. I worried that the judge would say that wasn’t enough. Also, in the sixteen months he’d been in foster care, he’d had numerous accidents and needed medical treatment after breaking several fingers and hurting his collarbone. He’d also been badly hurt when someone hit him in the eye with a golf club.

Three days into the trial, the case abruptly stopped. My lawyers and the prosecution had reached a plea bargain. If I agreed to cooperate fully with social workers visiting our house, take parenting classes, and give an assurance that Nathan would go to school, I could have him back. Nathan begged me to agree, and of course I said yes.

We still had to wait a few more weeks before Nathan was finally allowed home. He had to finish school first. I organized a big welcome-back party, decking out the house with balloons and ribbons. All the neighbors and their children came along. The local newspaper took a beautiful photo of us being reunited.

I’d worked very closely with the American Indian Association. One of the staff, Faye Gibbons, had become a friend. She always remarked on my fighting sprit.

“You’re not a survivor: you’re an overachiever,” she said. “Even that’s an understatement. If there were four of you, you’d be running the country.”

I told her I was going to fight on, using the Indian Child Welfare Act to make sure no other Native American would be removed from a family member. She encouraged me totally and was as delighted as I was when Michigan’s Children’s Ombudsman ruled that Macomb County hadn’t complied with state law or Family Independence Agency policy when they removed Nathan. The letter said that the FIA was now working with tribal members to revise and update their policies. I’d set a precedent; I knew it would help countless families in the future.

Meanwhile, Marshall was going through another off-episode with Kim. He moved in with us—Nan was living with us too. Marshall was allowed to have Hailie stay sometimes for days at a time. I was thrilled. Hailie was such a bright little thing. Every evening after she’d brushed her hair, she’d spin around in a nightdress in front of the mirror and ask, “Am I beautiful?” We’d all chorus back that she was. I nicknamed her Fuss Bucket; she called me Mama.

“Don’t ever let Kim hear her call you Mama,” Marshall warned. I agreed. Kim still flitted in and out of our lives, creating havoc.

Marshall got a mention in
Source
magazine’s “Unsigned Hype” column. The skinny white kid had conquered his critics on the Detroit music scene and now he was one of their star freestyle rappers. The radio station disc jockeys who had once laughed at him now invited him to perform on air.

He’d also created a new alter ego. Slim Shady was a comic antihero who inflicted violence on all the people who’d annoyed Marshall in the past. This, he told me, included school bullies, Kim, and the people who’d sneered at his
Infinite
album.

“It’s a big joke, Mom,” he assured me. “The songs are funny. They aren’t meant to be taken seriously.”

Detroit producers Mark and Jeff Bass had believed in Marshall when no one else did. He’d recorded
Infinite
in their studio, and at the beginning of 1997, he was back there again, recording
The Slim Shady EP
.

Suddenly there was a buzz about Marshall, or should I say Eminem and Slim Shady? He was still flat broke, struggling to support Hailie, and battling constantly with Kim. But on the Detroit rap scene, he was famous.

He flew to Los Angeles to take part in the Rap Olympics, where he came in second out of fifty contestants. He performed live on an influential radio program called
The Wake-Up Show
. Not long afterwards he was named as the
Wake Up Show
’s freestyle performer of the year. Along the way, Marshall caught the attention of Dr Dre.

He came back from L.A. all excited, talking nonstop. I took a phone call from Dre. As I handed the phone to Marshall, he high-fived me, covered the receiver with one hand, then punched the air, mouthing, “Yes, yes!”

Dre helped form NWA—originally known as Niggaz With Attitude—in the late 1980s. Their album
Straight Outta Compton
was one of Marshall’s favorites. At seventeen he’d wanted to be Dre—lip-synching in sunglasses in front of the bedroom mirror! Dre quit NWA to produce for Death Row Records. When he left to start his own label, Aftermath, I predicted he’d be a perfect match for Marshall. Dre was keen to discover unsigned new acts.

Now, finally, Marshall was getting the big break I knew he deserved after years of rejection. In January 1998, he signed with Aftermath and went straight into Dre’s Los Angeles recording studio. He phoned to talk to me, Hailie, and Nate every other night. He knew that when Hailie was there she was in good hands—we had so much fun, going to Chuck E. Cheese’s, Fun House Pizza, and bumper-bowling.

Marshall was full of excitement, telling me about the people he’d met, the lyrics he’d recorded, and his plans for a national tour. He finished every conversation, as he always did, by telling me he loved me and that he couldn’t wait to get back to see his baby girl, Nan, and the rest of us.

When Marshall returned home almost a month later, his language was foul, and he’d invented another new persona for himself. He said he had to prove himself to the hip-hop industry because of his color. He was constantly fighting against prejudice from people who wrongly assumed that he was rich and born with a silver spoon in his mouth.

I found fifteen to twenty pills on his bedroom floor. He told me they were aspirin. I was worried Hailie or the dog would swallow them, so I flushed them down the toilet. He went berserk when he woke up. The pills were Vicodin, really strong painkillers.

He’d had problems sleeping; he said the pills helped.

Kim was back on the scene again. Marshall was no longer “a useless nobody,” as she had called him. He was on his way to becoming a rap star. She was now a looming presence at his concerts; she loved the fame and glamour. I was told she also fed him pills to calm his stage fright.

When Marshall wasn’t on the road, he was rapping in Detroit. But he didn’t forget his old friends. I still have a hand-drawn poster he did for an outdoor concert, featuring Proof, Da Klinic, and Mass Hysteria, on July 25, 1998.

He didn’t play me any of his Slim Shady songs. But as far as I knew they weren’t offensive—he needed radio airplay. The lyric sheets he left lying around usually mentioned Hailie, although one dealt with a pill overdose, noting he was “scared of losin’ everything I got.” He was almost twenty-six, still living at home, and the thing he feared losing most of all was his daughter.

After years of being alone, I’d fallen in love again. John Briggs was about to become husband number four. Everyone loved John, except Marshall.

When I tried to introduce them, Marshall said, “Keep that son of a bitch away from me.”

He was furious when John and I decided to make a fresh start in Saint Joseph.

“If you leave you’ll miss out on Hailie,” he said.

I told him not to be silly, that I’d be back to visit all the time.

“You’ll regret it. I’ll never speak to you again if you go back to Saint Joe,” he said.

“Why? What’s the problem?” I asked.

“You can forget about me,” he warned. “I don’t like the creep.”

Marshall wanted me to stay in Casco Township. He loved the area the house was in and was very comfortable with all of us there—it was very nice.

I talked to Nan, who was in ailing health. She encouraged me to move. Nan would come to Missouri in a few months. Meanwhile, she wanted to go back to her home in Warren, where Todd was living. Nathan also was happier in Missouri. I tried to explain all this to Marshall, but he still wasn’t happy.

“Son, you have your life now,” I said. “You have Hailie and Kim. Your career is about to take off. Please let me have a life too.”

“You have a life here with me, Nathan, Hailie, and Nan,” he said.

In the end we agreed that he could keep the house—once again Kim promised to pay the bills and make the mortgage repayments. I left all the utilities in my name and started making preparations to move back to Saint Joe.