Becoming Isis Tha Saviour
Chiquita Paschal is an editor for Louder Than A Riot, a new podcast from NPR Music that investigates the interconnected rise of hip-hop and mass incarceration in America.
One in every four Black millennials — closer to one in three for younger Black millennials — has an immediate family member who has been incarcerated. Two years ago, this became personal to me when a DNA test connected me to one of my long-lost sisters: Mary Baxter, aka Isis Tha Saviour, a Philly rapper and activist.
Mary's stage name comes from the Egyptian goddess of motherhood, who always found a way to save herself and her people. As Isis Tha Saviour, she makes autobiographical work stemming from her experiences as a ward of the state and the circumstances which led her to give birth while shackled in prison.
Mary has always had undeniable skill and a powerful message – from her early days in the city's underground rap scene to now, as a well-known Philly rapper and nationwide activist whose videos are shown in art galleries.
Women's individual stories tend to be forgotten in hip-hop – where even some of the most successful women rappers are still seen as accessories to the boys' club – and in the prison system, even though the number of women in prison has been increasing at a rate 50% higher than men for the last 40 years. So, I set out to understand Mary's story through her art, starting with her lyrical assertion, "it's not a school-to-prison pipeline, it's a prison-to-prison pipeline..."
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In Philadelphia — like most places — your zip code can determine your life expectancy. Mary's journey of the prison-to-prison pipeline begins in Francisville, a subsection of the notoriously rough North Philly.
Mary's mom always told her education could be a way out, and she has some good memories of being a kid in a row home on Clifford Street. But growing up in the early '80s, in an under-resourced, over-policed neighborhood — especially in the wake of the MOVE bombing — Mary, like all the kids in her block, learned a keen distrust of the police from jump. Added to that was her mom's schizophrenia; when Mary was a kid, her mom was hospitalized like clockwork.
"She would have an episode," she says, "and would lose her apartment or house or whatever she was renting at the time — like, her whole life, and we'd just have to start over after that."
By 1992, Mary was 11 and life at home was unstable and dangerous. During what Mary calls "a really bad episode," her mom kicked Mary out of the house in the middle of the night. She had nowhere to go.
She crashed at different friends' houses in the neighborhood, but mostly was left to the streets to fend for herself. On one of these homeless nights, when she was out with a play cousin, the course of her life shifted direction. She and a friendshe got picked up by the police. The next thing she knew, she was in the hospital, handcuffed to the bed.
