This is an excerpt from the book Only God Can Judge Me: The Many Lives of Tupac Shakur, by Jeff Pearlman. It was published by Mariner Books in October 2025.
He is here.
Beneath you.
For nearly three decades, the world has been led to believe his ashes were spread to the wind, a kindred spirit let loose to soar among the angels. That is what we have been told. Time after time. He was cremated. His remains were set free. He is one with the universe.1
But, no.
He is here.
Beneath you.
Beneath me.
Perhaps this is a discovery best left undiscovered. Famous resting places are rarely resting places. Think of Jim Morrison, his tombstone in Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery coated in spray paint and graffiti. Think of Marilyn Monroe, her crypt inside the Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery a tacky spot for selfie seekers and shameless gawkers.
But … reality is reality and truth is truth.
He is here.
So as I stand above the buried ashen remains of Tupac Amaru Shakur on a warm March day in 2024, I can’t help but feel heartbroken by the scene’s lack of dignity. For I am not in a beautiful cemetery, surrounded by perfectly manicured greens and floral arrangements. I am also not beneath a glorious oak tree, or alongside a spectacular waterfall, or in a field of Coreopsis and Shasta daisies.
No. I am in Lumberton, North Carolina, at 2630 Seventh Street Road, in the yard of a long-abandoned house surrounded by rusted fencing and overgrown weeds, watching scores of thick black ants scurry in and out of their hills and across a faded headstone that reads:
TUPAC AMARU SHAKUR
JUNE 16, 1971 – SEPT. 13, 1996
BELOVED SON, BROTHER, NEPHEW, UNCLE, COUSIN AND FRIEND
ALWAYS IN OUR HEARTS.
Shortly after Tupac died in 1996, word spread that he was cremated, and his remains were set free into a breeze soaring above the Pacific Ocean.
It was a bit of an exaggeration.
There was, indeed, a release off the coast in Malibu, but only a tiny portion of his ashes were gifted to the water. During a ceremony attended by a gaggle of friends and loved ones, a large, seemingly out-of-nowhere wave crashed into Afeni and sent her sprawling—a message from her son, some of those present thought. Truth be told, Afeni Shakur kept the majority of Tupac’s ashes. When she relocated somewhere new, so went her child’s cremated remains.
In 2002, Afeni Shakur shocked friends and family members by returning to her native turf of Lumberton, where she had a large home built on 56 acres of land. Upon moving in, Afeni decided, at long last, she wanted her son to have a permanent resting place. So she had his ashes buried and placed beneath the headstone.
Alas, her time in Lumberton was far from idyllic. The once-prosperous metropolis had been overtaken by addiction and disrepair, and a downtown she loved as a girl was now a land of broken glass and vacant storefronts. In 2004 she ignored the advice of nearly everyone she knew and married a local preacher named Gust Davis. The union was rocky and weird from the start (Davis referred to himself as “Profit”), and ended in litigation and divorce after 12 years.
Afeni ultimately returned to California, where she resided on a houseboat in Sausalito until her 2016 death. The Lumberton home has remained empty for years. Its hallways are barren. Sealed boxes filled with books and utensils and knickknacks pile in the corners. Dante Powers, a distant cousin who lives locally, is paid by the Shakur estate for basic upkeep of the house and property, but he is one man, and the grave of an icon sits in isolation, alone and overlooked.
“It’s crazy,” Dante says to me. “Most famous rapper in history. Just here in little ol’ Lumberton.
“Resting.”
On November 5, 1996, less than two months after his death, Death Row issued Tupac’s fifth and final studio album, The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory.2
Tupac’s plan was to release it using the artist name “Makaveli” (not Tupac or 2Pac), and Death Row agreed. He explained the idea to Rob Marriott in an interview shortly before he passed. “The Italians I speak about were truly great men,” he said. “And I find any great man, Black or white, I’m going to study them, learn them, so he can’t be great to me no more. Like, Machiavelli. My name is not Machiavelli. My name is Makaveli. I took it, that’s mine. He gave me that. And I don’t feel no guilt. All these motherfuckers stole from us forever. I’m taking back what’s mine. It’s just that they recorded it when he said it. It’s probably something he took from us that they didn’t let us record.”
The breakdown made little sense, and was lost in the blizzard of tragedy. But when the record dropped, the conspiracy theorists perked up their ears. Hadn’t Niccolò Machiavelli, the Italian diplomat and author of The Prince, once faked his own death at 25, only to return 18 years later? Answer: Cough—no, he hadn’t. But with Machiavelli 469 years off the planet, no one with firsthand knowledge could refute the rumor, and it caught fire. Before long, people were legitimately arguing that Tupac Shakur—a man who loved attention as a dog loves sticks—had staged his own death. Seemingly thousands upon thousands of music fans began insisting Tupac was in Cuba planning the revolution, or perhaps in Afeni’s house, or maybe, just maybe, in New York, plotting revenge against Biggie. It hardly helped that one of his last-ever music videos, for the song “I Ain’t Mad at Cha,” depicted Tupac being gunned down in a drive-by, then rising to heaven.
Lost in the inanity was that The Don Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory was a masterpiece. Despite the bizarre title, the album sizzles from Track 1 to Track 12. “Hail Mary” wound up one of the most iconic songs in hip-hop history. “To Live & Die in L.A.” is rap’s answer to Randy Newman’s “I Love L.A.” (only with more gang shoutouts). “Me and My Girlfriend” is such a high-level ode-to-my-gun song it was later picked up and reconfigured by Jay-Z and Beyoncé. The album sold 664,000 copies in its first week, making Tupac the first rapper with two chart-topping releases in a single calendar year.
For three years, while working on this book, I have tried to fully understand Tupac Shakur the man—how he was formed, what he became, what impact remains. I trekked to New York City and Baltimore and Marin City and Oakland and Los Angeles, retracing his steps, speaking with his people. The teachers, the classmates, the crack dealers, the music creators, the friends, the enemies, the relatives. The fans. The detractors. Everyone I could find.
Tupac wore former Duke guard Jeff Capel’s No. 5 Blue Devils jersey to an event—I called Jeff (“I was blown away! Pac is wearing my jersey!”). Tupac spent time with MTV’s Bill Bellamy—I hit up Bill (“He’s the first person I ever hugged that had a bulletproof vest on. In the daytime!”). In Newark, New Jersey, a professional Tupac impersonator named Richard Garcia bounds from weddings to Bar Mitzvahs to birthday parties, bringing his hero back to life. “I performed ‘Dear Mama’ at a funeral,” he said. “Not a dry eye in the building.”
In December 1998, former Virginia Gov. Chuck Robb was holding his family’s annual Christmas party at an estate in McLean. One of the invited guests was Bruce Hornsby, the singer-songwriter whose biggest hit, “The Way It Is,” was transformed and reimagined by Tupac into one of his best-known posthumous jams, “Changes.”
En route to the shindig, Bruce and his wife, Kathy, popped Tupac’s Greatest Hits into the car CD player. “So ‘Changes’ is on there, which was cool, but so are all these songs we don’t know and have never heard before,” Hornsby recalled. “Well, we pull up to the party, and it’s like a scene straight out of a movie. All the valets are young Black men, all the guests are old white people—and the CD is still playing, and as the door opens you hear, ‘That’s why I fucked yo’ bitch, you fat motherfucker!’ just as loud as can be. And it was just a fucking hilarious moment. The parking attendants started laughing their asses off, and so did we. It was an amazing contrast of worlds. But also a commentary on Tupac’s profound impact.”
Like Tupac’s life itself, this journey has been equal parts joyful and exasperating. Never has such a famous figure cast a blurrier shadow. The mystique isn’t part of the story. It is the story. And as I stand here on Afeni’s old property, at the foot of the grave, as physically close to Tupac as possible, I think back to those days after his death, when so many remained convinced he was alive and well and plotting a comeback.
I consider the years that have passed, and all the Tupac-related highs and lows. Movies and plays and a Broadway musical and books chronicling his impact. A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. A street naming in Oakland. “California Love” becoming a hip-hop anthem. A terrific six-part Hulu documentary. More than 75 million albums sold. “He remains the most prolific hip-hop artist we’ve ever seen,” said Chuck Creekmur, founder of AllHipHop.com. “And it’s not even close.”
Tupac released four studio records during his life, but dozens of posthumous offerings exist. There are bootlegs atop bootlegs atop bootlegs. “He wanted to be heard,” said Leila Steinberg. “More than anything, that’s what he wanted.” Thanks to Target and Walmart and the Asian sweatshops he would have abhorred, millions still sport Tupac Shakur shirts. “I was in Amsterdam and I saw people wearing Tupac tees,” said Theon Hill, who teaches a course, the Rhetoric of Rap Music, at Wheaton College. “I see them in South America. When I’m in Indonesia and I mention Tupac Shakur, they know exactly who I’m talking about because his message—while squarely located in Black America—transcends one group of people.”
Tupac was not here for the shooting of Christopher Wallace (aka the Notorious B.I.G.) in 1997, or the death of Orlando Anderson in a gang altercation one year later. He wasn’t around on September 29, 2023, for Duane “Keefe D” Davis’s arrest after being indicted by a grand jury for first-degree murder (Davis experienced the most modern of downfalls—a faded gangbanger can’t resist the siren call of attention, so he goes on the internet and gleefully blabs about his involvement in Tupac’s death) or the baby-oil-fueled public flogging and imprisonment of Sean “Puffy” Combs. He has no clue that Suge Knight sits inside Cell 127 at San Diego’s Richard J. Donovan State Prison, the result of being convicted of voluntary manslaughter in a 2019 hit-and-run accident.
And yet, here’s the thing.
The thing I continue to ponder.
Although Tupac’s ashes are allegedly buried here in Lumberton, I cannot—with 100 percent certainty—confirm their placement beneath my feet. Perhaps it is merely dirt. Perhaps the stone is a hoax. Perhaps he is alive and well and living his best life.
So maybe, just maybe, he calls Havana home, and is busy planning a revolution. Or he’s on a beach in the Bahamas, sipping a pineapple mojito and smiling knowingly as the women stroll by. He could be working the grill at the Freight House Café in Mahopac, New York. Driving a taxi up and down La Rambla in Barcelona. Learning to speak Mikeyir in Ethiopia. Starring as Courfeyrac in a Canadian touring production of Les Mis.
We have been told Tupac Shakur died 29 years ago, the victim of a drive-by shooting. We have been told he is gone.
But when Niccolò Machiavelli famously said, “It is double pleasure to deceive the deceiver,” maybe he wasn’t telling us about himself.
He was telling us about Tupac Shakur. And an empty plot in Lumberton.
- Some members of the Outlawz later claimed they smoked Tupac’s ashes after his death. The Shakur family denied this, um, gross and weird confession. ↩︎
- According to The Tupac Encyclopedia, Death Row actually screwed up Tupac’s plan, which was to name it Killuminati: The 7 Day Theory. He explained the word “Killumi- nati” in an interview: “That’s why I put the ‘K’ to [Illuminati]. Niggas was telling me about this Illuminati shit while I was in jail. . . . That’s another way to keep your self- esteem down. . . . I’m putting the ‘K’ cause I’m killin’ that Illuminati shit.” ↩︎