The reason why 50 Cent feared his mother
Being raised in South Jamaica, Queens, 50 Cent was taught to confront bullies, gangsters and the everyday noise of a dangerous neighbourhood.
But there was only ecer one individual who really scared him, and it was not somebody in the street. His mother, Sabrina Jackson, was the one. Curtis Jackson was a child who had to survive by the laws of a single teenage mother, who had no tolerance for weakness.
Sabrina gave birth to Curtis at the age of fifteen. When he was old enough to realise what was going on in the world, she was already hustling, taking on several jobs and dealing to make ends meet.
Their part of Queens was danger-laden. Guns, crack crews, gang crews were part of the landscape and his mother was a sharp-sighted iron-spined woman. She was a single mother, who was going to harden him before the streets hardened him. That was love, but it was also discipline with no concession.
The way she did things influenced him even to this day. Even during his tender age, he was not supposed to cry. Should he fall, she bade him rise. She told him to fight it in case he was afraid. It is not a secret he has told us about, since he got shaken by some neighbourhood children and Sabrina gave him a weapon, and she put toys or batteries in his socks so he could swing them. It is cruel, but it was survival.
It was not only the fear of punishment that Curtis experienced. What concerned him was the fact that he was always unable to escape her expectations.
At home, he had no hiding place. She was mother and father combined, vicious and demanding, and decided when to console him, when to close any opening of her weakness. It was this dynamic which formed the basis of his worldview, way before he was rapping bars or wearing a bulletproof vest.
When Curtis was eight years old, Sabrina was killed in a suspicious house fire. His grandparents adopted him, but the lessons that she had pounded into him never left him. He has frequently said that he continues to rate himself by what she would have anticipated. Her hardness was his, which nourished the amoral ambition that took him through the streets, the studio and business empire.
It is at home where the man the world came to know as 50 Cent was raised. And the one who always scared him was the one who instructed him on how to survive in the first place.