Young Lay
According to the city of Napa, the epicenter of modern-day US winemaking, “[t]he Native American occupation of the area dates back 10,000 years, to about 8000 BC, making Napa Valley one of the longest inhabited regions in California” (page 15). An area of dispute on behalf of the indigenous stewards, the Ohlone tribe and Patwin tribe’s ancestral shell mound burial site, Glen Cove, was, in 2012, “granted a cultural easement to two federally recognized tribes so they can oversee the land in perpetuity”. “Shellmounds are layers of shell and soil that were used to bury the ancestors of the Ohlone and other coastal tribes who considered them monuments and vital to the spiritual life of traditional villages.” Antithetical to the typical portrayal of Native American culture, the bay area tribes were not nomadic. Archaeological studies show ample evidence that the tribes were hunter-gatherers who lived in permanent villages for thousands and thousands of years. This ended abruptly with the Spanish arrival in 1800 and, according to the Suscol Intertribal Council, there is now “no longer a land-based tribe in this county due to historical mass relocation and detrimental exposure to diseases”.
If by any stretch of the imagination there were such things as ghosts, then this continuously occupied territory suddenly violently supressed, no doubt has a great deal of unrequited pneuma percolating in its soil. During the second world war, Mare Island Naval Shipyard employed over 50,000 workers creating a boom in industry for the quiet city of Vallejo. After the war, as with other California suburbs, the economy crashed transforming middle-class family neighborhoods into low-income communities with high crime rates.
On the coattails of the golden era of hip-hop, the children of this generation created an acclaimed rap scene with its own idiosyncratic musical style, vernacular, and influence on the national music scene. Although countless artists emerged from this DIY, artistic, explosion, it was not without its ghosts. It’s hard not to wonder if: when a moment in time occurs that inspires such ferocious artistic output such as that which emerged in the music of 1990s Vallejo, is it possibly connected to the invisible tragedies that transpired less than 200 years previously in the same geographical area?
A story that belongs in the canon of stranger-than-fiction is the meteoric rise to underground and mainstream fame of Young Lay (Lathan Williams). In 1996 Lay’s newborn son, Le-Zhan was kidnapped and Le-Zhan’s mother, Daphne Boyden, murdered in her own home. All of this occurred a few weeks after Lay’s seminal release, “Black ‘N Dangerous”, featuring, among others, the late Tupac Shakur. Following a series of further tragedies and misfortunes, including a 12-year prison sentence, Lay has remained vigilant both as an artist and to find justice for his son and his son’s late mother.
Six years after Le-Zhan’s kidnapping, based on an anonymous tip given to local authorities, the now six-year-old boy was discovered to be attending a Vallejo school less than two miles from the site of his abduction. He was returned to his grandmother and later reunited with Lay after his timely release. These tragedies could be said to be based solely on cultural adversity, hardships, and prejudice that a town such as Vallejo encounters in the wake of the kind of economic downturn it did after the war. Yet such liquidation of equity is a common tale across the US, whereas the inexplicable creative-tragedy found in the otherwise quiet suburb of Vallejo are paralleled by no other city of comparable size. We can’t help but wonder if the spirit of Vallejo art does not have to do, at least, by some measure, with the unrecognized spirits of those who came before us—inspiring those who stand on Vallejo’s soil with both the creative and destructive force of the spirits?
