Through examining key moments in my life, I examine the impact that Sade has had on the development of my personhood.
It is 2003. I was 17 and walking to my grandmother’s condo in Jackson Heights, on 93rd Street right off Northern Boulevard in Queens. It was winter. My city of birth felt too large. I was doing my best to belong. My Timbs were scuffed and creased. I had on an 
ENYCE bomber jacket that was the pride of my limited clothing collection. I donned a matched fitted and du-rag that nourished nascent waves; they would never truly come in. I was giving my best go at the Uniform to burnish up what I truly was—shy, introverted, bookish, and prone to obsessing over literature and music.
At this time of my life, I was super fixated on music. I carried all my CDs with me in a pouch I guarded with my life throughout my daily commute. Nas. Dipset. Jay-Z. Scarface. Lauryn Hill. Talib Kweli. Black Thought. When it came to rap, I studied flows and mimicked them in my book of rhymes.
But sometimes I wandered to R&B. I had accidently pocketed Sade’s Diamond Life and skimmed many of the classic tracks on there—”Smooth Operator”, “Frankie’s First Affair”, “Your Love is King.” A new classic, however, arose when I heard “I Will Be Your Friend” for the first time. In the winter my adolescence, Sade sang to me:
When you’re fallin’ apart
I pick up each piece
Build a wall around your dreams…
The punches to your heart
Melt away when you never thought they’d heal…
A sense of shrinking overwhelmed me. It was comforting, though I did not understand it completely at the moment. I put that track on repeat.
It is 2009. I am 22 and, this winter, am driving from rural Arkansas to my mom’s home in 
Charlotte for the first time in my used 2004 Honda Fit. Road tripping was a new challenge for me. I had no idea how to fill up the hours or boredom, or to look at the directions I printed out from Google Maps without driving my car off the side of the road. I pumped gas in many small Tennessee and Georgia towns that terrified me with their poverty and whiteness. All I had for road entertainment was my iPod Nano plugged into the car’s AUX port.
I was considering leaving teaching after my commitment was done. I wasn’t making any money. I wasn’t dating. My life was seemingly in a professional and personal stasis. I felt the benefits of college would be sweeter than what I had earned.
Sade’s “Pearls” came on frequently during the trip:
There is a woman in Somalia
The sun gives her no mercy
The same sky we lay under
Burns her to the bone
Long as afternoon shadows
It’s gonna take her to get home
Each grain carefully wrapped up
Pearls for her little girl
Her voiced stretched across the road and the hours I drove. She sang, and I felt smaller. Intense. Focused. My thoughts wandered to deliverance, and if I could find it in the small town I was making my living.
I ended up settling in Arkansas for the next 11 years.
It is 2012. Winter; Christmastime. I am in Las Vegas, wearing a tuxedo that my wife, many years of date nights later, would tell me she wouldn’t have chosen if she were responsible for dressing me up for our wedding. We wedded where we met, in the city of casino lights. Family and friends watched as we sealed the deal with a kiss and a lemon crème wedding cake.
My mother was there, in a red dress, beaming, happy that I had found my partner I life. When she gave her toast, she paraphrased the Bible. “It is a good thing,” she proclaimed, “when a man finds a wife.” I was anxious as to what song to choose for our mother-son dance. I had thought hard about what song I was going to choose for the mother and son dance and, honestly, had only settled on during the drive from Arkansas to the Memphis airport.
My new adventure did not mean that I would abandon my oldest quest—the loving, caring, and nurturing relationship I’ve had with my mother that has spanned three decades. As we danced, I let Sade tell it:
You think I’d leave your side, baby
You know me better than that
The room shrank. I danced stiffly, like a scarecrow in gale winds, because that’s my nature; my mom smiled and laughed at my lack of rhythm. For four minutes and 35 seconds, it was just the two of us in the room, me thanking her in song form for raising me to be a man that could find and maintain love.
I give my creative muses non de plumes. In my diaries and journals, I refer to Helen Folasade Adu as the Empress. Her connective thread throughout my life is one of conquest. Of equal potency to citalopram and therapy, Sade’s voice has always forced submission from my anxieties. She’s developed a reputation (wrongly, I will add) as background music to coffee shops and jazzy businesses—ubiquitous in her imperialism. I don’t, however, take such a capitalist view of her reach. Rather, her voice seizes me and forces me to think and feel small.
Smallness is not the worst thing in the world. Like an iris behaves when squinting to see something unclear and important in the distance, shrinking allows one to focus. I think all music does this, but Sade’s does it uniquely due to her voice—a Black voice filled with a personhood that expresses coolness, and calmness, and victory. Her music tells us that there is only one thing important beyond the grand adventure of love—yourself. How you will live after, how you will make your living, and that you’ve got to be cool about it all to appreciate it.
I want to study how she evolved such an ability to make me focus. I want to know—what is the Empress?