Where was Fiddy’s daddy?
 
Chapter Three

Cornell Dews knew that when he started talking to his boys about rappers, 50 Cent’s name would come up.
 
Dews teaches 22 third grade boys at Furman Templeton Elementary School in Baltimore. Last year, he taught the same group of boys when they were in the second grade.
 
The 31-year-old Coppin State University grad often talks to his boys about things that happen outside of school. Inevitably the talk about rappers led to talk about gangsta rappers. When one boy said he knew a “gangsta,” Dews asked him who that might be.
 
“50,” the boy answered.
 
“Why do you say he’s a gangsta?” Dews asked.
 
“Because he got shot nine times,” came the rejoinder.
 
That led to a discussion which revealed to Dews that some of his boys want to be like 50. They want to get shot and survive. They want to go to prison to “see what it’s like.”
 
Thank you, Fiddy.
 
And thanks to all you other wannabe gangstas and thugs who make Dews’ job so much harder.
 
For the past two weeks, this column has been devoted to what happens to black kids when their daddies aren’t around. Some -- like half-brothers Kim Nichols, Michael “Mousey” Dowdy and Kevin “KK” Dozier -- end up shot dead. Others, like the 12-year-old girl mentioned in last week’s column, end up pregnant by men in their 20s and 30s.
 
And some end up like Fiddy, shot nine times after slinging drugs for a living and surviving only because of good genetics, some damned excellent surgeons and by the grace of a loving God.
 
According to one not-very-reliable web site (it says the man known as Curtis Jackson was born in 1976 AND 1977), 50’s mother also slung drugs and was killed when a drug deal went bad. He was then raised by his grandparents, did some slinging himself and was shot before he got very lucky and hit it big in the rap game.
 
And 50’s daddy? Not one word. Not one detail.
 
So here’s the situation: one Curtis Jackson, a.k.a. 50 Cent, is arguably the most talented and popular rapper out there. He’s admired by perhaps millions of black children, some of whom think his getting shot nine times is cool, macho and heroic.
 
And then we have guys like Cornell Dews, who’s a true hero of black America. Dews grew up in an East Baltimore neighborhood that makes the Queens neighborhood where 50 sold drugs look like suburbia. Rather than sling drugs, Dews took the time to complete high school and college and now struggles to convince his students that “gangstas” getting shot isn’t cool or heroic.
 
It’s an “occupational hazard.”
 
Dews got his Coppin degree in business. He could be making large bucks now as an investor. That’s what he wanted to do after college. But in 1995, Dews attended the Million Man March.
 
“I took the message of the march seriously,” Dews told me as he and I got ready to play his boys in chess one day after school, “to return to the community and do some good.”
 
It is because of the Million Man March that we see Dews where few black men dare tread these days: in the classroom of a public school in a predominantly black American city, teaching black boys.
 
We should be glad he’s there. Dews is about the same age as 50 and came up on streets far tougher than the ones Curtis Jackson walked. When he tells his boys -- he’s a second father to some, a surrogate father to others -- that slinging drugs, getting shot and going to prison aren’t glamorous lifestyles, he brings a certain credibility.

That credibility is needed, with XXL magazine devoting it’s latest issue -- a “jail issue” -- to “hip-hop’s incarcerated soldiers.” Dews has a problem -- and, frankly, so should you -- with the theme and the cover featuring 50 and, clad in an orange prison jumpsuit, some character named Tony Yayo.
 
Inspired by the saga of Curtis Jackson being shot nine times and surviving, our boys are now being sucked into the culture of criminality. I wonder what 50 would say about that.
 
What would his daddy say?