Part One: A Number Calls My Name
In 2005 I put the number 109 on my car. My personalized license plate read “109LAW2” — my birthdate, October 9th, and my initials. It was a deliberate act of personal claiming. Looking back I recognize it as the beginning of a pattern I wouldn’t fully understand for years.
That same year I visited the major Jean-Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. It ran from July 17 to October 10 — closing the day after my birthday. Basquiat’s work unsettled me deeply. What disturbed me most was learning that he was dead. I found myself asking a question I had asked before about Huey P. Newton, about Tupac Shakur — why can’t Black men live? Basquiat joined a long line of heroes I had inherited already gone. I claimed his work anyway. Perhaps especially because of that.
Two years later I left Los Angeles and moved to South Korea to teach English — my first time living abroad. In America my birthday, October 9th, had always been just another day. But in South Korea I discovered something that surprised me: October 9th is a national holiday. Hanguel Day — the celebration of the Korean alphabet’s promulgation. For the first time the date I was born carried public meaning beyond my own existence. I noted it without fully understanding why it felt significant.
I stayed in South Korea for nine years. I taught English, built a life, and continued to encounter the number 109 in various forms across the countries I visited. Each appearance felt personal in ways I couldn’t fully articulate. Whether those appearances constituted a genuine pattern or simply the human tendency to notice what we are already looking for is a question I hold honestly. What I can say is that the number had become meaningful to me — and meaning, once established, tends to find confirmation.
By 2016 I was ready for a more deliberate expansion. I moved to Saudi Arabia in August of that year, beginning what would become one of the most consequential periods of my life. I had spent nine years in South Korea teaching but not traveling enough. I would not let that pattern continue. In 2017 alone I traveled to 17 countries.
One of those countries was Ethiopia. I landed in Addis Ababa on March 31, 2017 — a date whose significance I would not understand until exactly two years later. I walked through ancient streets and absorbed a history that felt personally relevant. I learned about the Battle of Adwa — Ethiopia’s decisive defeat of the Italian colonial army on March 1, 1896. The only African nation to successfully repel a European colonial power during the Scramble for Africa. That history settled into me and stayed.
During those years I deepened my admiration for the work of Jean-Michel Basquiat. In 2018, on a layover in Frankfurt, I wandered the city and happened upon a Basquiat exhibition. I was far from home and the work made me feel grounded. I stood before paintings I had first encountered in Los Angeles in 2005 and others I was seeing for the first time. His work had followed me across the world — or perhaps I had been following it.
I left Saudi Arabia in November 2018. In February 2019 I returned to the Gulf region — this time to Nizwa, Oman — to continue my career as an international English teacher.
I was eight thousand miles from home when March 2019 arrived.
I had been following Nipsey Hussle’s career with the particular intensity of someone who needs proof that the place they come from can produce greatness. We were both from Los Angeles. He was from Crenshaw. I knew those streets. When I watched him build his empire — the Marathon Clothing store, the music, the community investments, the philosophy of ownership and self-determination — I didn’t see a celebrity. I saw a mirror. One week before he was killed I read the article about him in Forbes magazine. I was proud. I thought admiringly about my hometown and the success it was experiencing through him.
A year earlier, in 2018, I had walked through the streets of Addis Ababa wearing a Nipsey Hussle Crenshaw branded sweatshirt. Walking through Ethiopia in that sweatshirt felt like a declaration — “I hear you, Nipsey.” I proudly wore that sweatshirt even though the average Ethiopian probably had no clue what it referenced. That year I had culminated my admiration of Nipsey Hussle’s movement by purchasing that sweatshirt. Wearing that sweatshirt at once informed onlookers that I was from Los Angeles and that I was a fan of Nipsey’s. What made it even more significant is that I was doing exactly what Nipsey talked about in his song: “Who Detached Us?” In that song, Nipsey rapped about Black people having lost our collective identity. Through traveling to Africa, I was getting reconnected, reacquainted.
Dawit, Nipsey’s father was Eritrean. He made it a point that Nipsey and his brother, Sam, visit Africa. Before my arrival in East Africa in 2018, Nipsey, his father, and brother made similar trips to East Africa to connect with the people, culture, food, and their family. Eritrea and Ethiopia share a border, a history, and a complicated intimacy. I imagined that by wearing Nipsey’s branded sweatshirt in some small way I was confidently walking in the same spirit as him when he visited Africa.
So when March 2019 began I was already in a particular state of mind — proud, reflective, attuned to the history of Black resistance and Black triumph. I began that month reading Raymond Jonas’s The Battle of Adwa, celebrating Ethiopia’s extraordinary victory.
That mood would not last.
On March 10, Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 crashed shortly after takeoff from Addis Ababa, killing all 157 people on board from 35 countries. Of all the world’s news that month this landed closest. I had flown Ethiopian Airlines. I had stood in that airport. The grief was compounded by the emerging evidence that these lives had been lost to corporate negligence — a Boeing 737 MAX that should never have been in the air.
The month had begun in celebration and turned toward mourning. But it was not finished.
On the morning of April 1, 2019 I woke up in Nizwa and reached for my phone. Scrolling through Instagram I learned that Nipsey Hussle had been shot and killed the previous day outside his Marathon Clothing store at the corner of Crenshaw and Slauson Avenue in Los Angeles. He was 33 years old.
I cried. Another Black man killed. It unsettled me the way learning about Tupac had unsettled me. The way learning about Biggie had unsettled me. The way standing in the MOCA gallery in 2005 and learning that Basquiat was dead had unsettled me. Why can’t Black men live? The question I had been asking my entire adult life had no answer. It just kept asking itself.
I still had to go to work.
I got dressed and left my home at 7:30am as I regularly did. The desert morning was quiet. Approaching the school roundabout a truck barreled toward me without stopping. I swerved. The truck passed. My heart was still racing when I registered its license plate: 1090.
The number I had put on my own car in 2005. The number that had greeted me on a national holiday in South Korea. On the morning I learned Nipsey Hussle was dead, driving through the desert of Oman toward a school where I would have to teach as if the world were normal, a truck with that number nearly ran me off the road.
I noticed it. I couldn’t explain it. I’m not sure I need to.
I did not yet know about Romans 10:9. I did not yet know about a painting made in 1982 by a young man of Haitian descent — a painting I would one day feel had been waiting for me to find it.
But something was calling my attention that morning. Something was asking me to pay attention.
I was listening.
Part Two: Basquiat and the Shamanic Imagination
Jean-Michel Basquiat was not a shaman. He never claimed to be one. He was a painter — born in Brooklyn in 1960, dead at 27 in 1988, the son of a Haitian father and a Puerto Rican mother. He came out of graffiti, out of downtown New York, out of a particular moment when the streets and the galleries briefly occupied the same conversation.
But something in his practice invites a different kind of attention — and that attention is worth paying carefully and honestly.
How Basquiat worked
Throughout his catalog Basquiat repeated words and names with a persistence that goes beyond decoration. In Horn Players he writes “ORNITHOLOGY” five times. In his portrait of Picasso he writes “PABLO PICASSO” seven times. Scholars have described this repetition as incantatory — as a form of invocation rather than mere emphasis. Whether or not Basquiat consciously intended that effect, the practice connects his work to a long tradition of mark-making in which repetition calls something into presence.
He also crossed out words throughout his paintings. He explained this himself: the obscuring made the viewer want to read them more. But the gesture does something additional. The crossed out word is simultaneously present and hidden. It exists in two states at once. Visible and concealed. This is a practice that rewards the patient and initiated viewer — the one willing to look beneath the surface.
He placed crowns above the heads of Black figures throughout his career — athletes, musicians, historical figures. His sister Lisane described this as self-coronation — a statement of identity and worth. It was Basquiat’s consistent insistence that Black genius be seen, named, and honored on its own terms.
These are documented practices. They are part of the scholarly record of his work. Whether they constitute shamanic practice in any formal sense is a matter of interpretation rather than established fact. What they do establish is that Basquiat was deeply invested in the power of symbols, names, and marks to carry meaning beyond their surface appearance.
His Haitian inheritance
Basquiat’s father Gerard came from Haiti — the birthplace of the only successful slave revolution in human history. Haitian Vodou is a sophisticated theological and cultural system in which ancestral memory, spiritual transmission, and communal practice are deeply intertwined. Whether Basquiat practiced Vodou formally is not documented. What is documented is that he wrote the name Toussaint L’Ouverture — the leader of the Haitian Revolution — directly onto the canvas of ALL COLORED CAST PART III. That is an act of ancestral acknowledgment. It places his Haitian heritage explicitly within the painting’s frame of reference.
What Nipsey knew
What makes the connection between Basquiat and Nipsey Hussle more than purely interpretive is that Nipsey himself drew it explicitly while he was alive. In his song “Face The World” he invoked Jean-Michel Basquiat by his full name — using him as a moral reference point for a passage about self-destruction and resilience. The line is precise: he compared people who destroy their own potential to Basquiat destroying his pictures. He understood something about Basquiat that went beyond aesthetic appreciation. He understood that Basquiat’s life carried a lesson — about genius, about self-destruction, about what it costs to have something real and squander it.
Of all the painters in human history Nipsey could have named, he named Basquiat. That acknowledgment is documented. It happened in his own voice while he was alive. It is the single most concrete connection between these two men and it deserves to be treated as such.
What this section does not claim
This essay does not claim that Basquiat was a shaman in any formal or technical sense. It does not claim that his artistic practices constitute proof of spiritual transmission or prophetic vision. What it claims is more modest and more honest — that Basquiat worked within a creative tradition deeply informed by African diasporic culture and heritage, that his practices bear genuine resemblance to traditions of invocation and ancestral acknowledgment, and that Nipsey Hussle recognized something in that tradition worth naming explicitly.
That recognition — one extraordinary man of African diasporic heritage claiming another across decades — is where the argument rests most honestly. Everything else is interpretation. The reader is entitled to their own.
Part Three: The Painting and the Man
ALL COLORED CAST PART III is not a quiet painting. It demands attention. It crowds the canvas with words, symbols, figures, and marks that accumulate meaning the longer you look. It was made by Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1982 — three years before Ermias Asghedom was born in Los Angeles on August 15, 1985.
That fact is worth stating plainly before anything else is said. Basquiat made this painting three years before Nipsey Hussle existed. What follows is not a claim that Basquiat knew or depicted Nipsey Hussle. What follows is an honest account of what the painting contains and what Nipsey Hussle’s life contained — and an invitation to consider what those two inventories share.
Where the painting may have been made
It is documented that beginning in November 1982 Basquiat lived and worked at art dealer Larry Gagosian’s residence on Market Street in Venice, California. Between November 1982 and May 1984 he produced approximately one hundred paintings there. ALL COLORED CAST PART III was created in 1982. Whether it was made specifically at the Market Street studio has not been confirmed. But it is a reasonable possibility that this painting was made within approximately twelve miles of Crenshaw — the neighborhood where Nipsey Hussle would later be raised and build his life’s work.
That geographic proximity is worth noting. It is not evidence of anything beyond geography. But geography is where lives are lived and where culture takes root.
Alexander the Great
At the top of the canvas Basquiat wrote: ALEXANDER THE GREAT.
It is the first thing you read. It is the painting’s most legible proclamation.
Alexander the Great connects historically to two specific cultural artifacts that are directly relevant to Nipsey Hussle’s life and brand.
The first is the Marathon. The Battle of Marathon in 490 BC is the documented origin of the modern marathon race. From that battle came not only the athletic event but the concept of the marathon as an act of ultimate endurance — commitment to a message that must be delivered regardless of personal cost.
Nipsey Hussle named his clothing store the Marathon. He named his philosophy the Marathon. His final studio album was titled Victory Lap. He said repeatedly: the marathon continues. This was not a casual brand choice. It was a philosophy of endurance and commitment that he lived publicly and consistently until his death.
The second is the word Nike. In ancient Greek, nike means victory. It was the name of the Greek goddess of victory invoked after the triumph at Marathon. The modern athletic brand took its name directly from that goddess.
Nipsey Hussle used “Nipsey Hussle Tha Great” as his Twitter username. Not simply great — Tha Great. A designation that echoes the one Basquiat placed at the top of this canvas.
These are documented facts placed in honest proximity to each other. Basquiat wrote ALEXANDER THE GREAT. Nipsey called himself Tha Great and built his public identity around the Marathon and Victory. The constellation of references — Alexander, Marathon, Nike, Victory, greatness — appears in a painting made in Los Angeles in 1982 and in the life of a man born in Los Angeles three years later. What that means, if it means anything beyond coincidence, is a question this essay cannot answer definitively. It belongs to the reader.
Toussaint L’Ouverture
On the left side of the canvas Basquiat wrote the name Toussaint L’Ouverture.
Toussaint L’Ouverture was the leader of the Haitian Revolution — the only successful slave revolt in human history. He rose from slavery to lead a nation, was captured through betrayal, imprisoned, and died in captivity in 1803 — one year before the Haitian declaration of independence his revolution made possible. He did not live to see the full fruit of what he had built.
Basquiat’s father Gerard came from Haiti. Writing Toussaint L’Ouverture on this canvas was an act of ancestral acknowledgment — a man placing his lineage explicitly within his work.
Nipsey Hussle’s mother Angelique Smith came from Louisiana — the destination of the 1809 migration of Haitian refugees following the Haitian Revolution. That migration carried the spiritual and cultural DNA of Toussaint’s Haiti into the American South. This is documented history.
The name Toussaint L’Ouverture on this canvas therefore connects Basquiat’s Haitian paternal heritage to the Louisiana maternal heritage that shaped Nipsey Hussle. That connection is historical fact rather than interpretation.
What is interpretation is the observation that Toussaint L’Ouverture’s story — a man of genius who rose from oppressive circumstances, built something extraordinary, was taken before he could see it fully realized, and whose legacy proved larger than his life — bears a striking resemblance to Nipsey Hussle’s own story. The reader can assess that resemblance for themselves.
What the painting does not prove
ALL COLORED CAST PART III does not prove that Basquiat predicted or depicted Nipsey Hussle. The Alexander the Great reference predates Nipsey by centuries. The Toussaint L’Ouverture reference is ancestral and historical rather than prophetic. An honest reading of the evidence cannot claim otherwise and this essay does not.
What the painting does is encode a set of values, histories, and figures that would find expression in Nipsey Hussle’s life and work decades later. Whether that encoding constitutes unconscious spiritual transmission, meaningful coincidence, or simply two men of African diasporic heritage drawing from the same deep well of history and culture is a question this essay holds openly rather than resolves.
The connection Nipsey made himself
It is worth returning one final time to the fact that Nipsey Hussle named Basquiat explicitly in his own voice while he was alive. In “Face The World” he invoked Jean-Michel Basquiat as a moral reference point. Of all the painters he could have named he named Basquiat.
That is the most concrete and documented connection between these two men. It requires no interpretive framework. It happened. Nipsey said it. It is recorded.
Everything else this essay has observed — the Alexander the Great constellation, the Toussaint L’Ouverture connection, the shared spiritual lineage through Haiti and Louisiana — is offered as context for that documented connection. As a way of understanding why, of all the painters in the world, a man from Crenshaw reached across decades and claimed a man from Brooklyn as his own.
Perhaps the answer is simply that they recognized each other. That the same history moved through both of them. That the well they both drew from is deep enough and old enough to connect people across time without anyone deciding that it should.
That is not a supernatural claim. It is a human one.
Part Four: The Well
This essay has made a series of claims across four parts. Before drawing anything together it is worth being honest one final time about what those claims actually are.
What is documented: Basquiat’s father came from Haiti. Nipsey Hussle’s mother came from Louisiana. The 1809 migration of Haitian refugees to New Orleans is historical fact. Nipsey named Basquiat in “Face The World” while he was alive. Alexander the Great appears at the top of ALL COLORED CAST PART III. Marathon and Nike connect to Nipsey’s defining brands. Toussaint L’Ouverture appears on the canvas.
What is interpretation: That these documented facts constitute a meaningful pattern connecting the two men. That the painting resonates with Nipsey’s life in ways worth examining seriously.
What is personal: The author’s experience of March and April 2019. The grief. The truck. The number 109 across a decade of living abroad. The night a painting appeared on a television screen and felt like a revelation.
Keeping those three categories honest is not a limitation of this essay. It is its foundation.
The shared inheritance
Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Hoodoo are not exotic belief systems requiring supernatural proof to be meaningful. They are ways of understanding how the past moves through the present — how ancestral patterns repeat across generations, how certain figures carry something larger than themselves without always knowing it, how culture survives the most brutal attempts to destroy it.
Within that framework Basquiat and Nipsey Hussle are connected not because one predicted the other but because both inherited the same living tradition. A tradition that survived the Middle Passage. That survived slavery. That survived colonialism. That encoded itself in paint and music and street culture because those were the vessels available.
Basquiat carried that tradition through his Haitian paternal heritage. Nipsey carried it through his Louisiana maternal heritage — itself shaped by the Haitian diaspora that arrived in New Orleans in 1809. Neither man chose this inheritance consciously. It moved through them the way inheritance always moves — without permission, without announcement, and with more force than either could have fully understood.
What both men shared
Both Basquiat and Nipsey Hussle were men of the African diaspora who refused the terms their environments offered them. Basquiat refused to be dismissed as a graffiti artist. Nipsey refused to be dismissed as a gang member. Both built something extraordinary from materials their worlds told them were worthless. Both were taken too soon. Both are more fully understood after death than during life. Both left behind work that continues to teach.
These are documented biographical facts placed honestly in proximity to each other. What they mean is something each reader must decide. This essay does not decide for them.
What cannot be claimed and why it matters
Throughout this essay the temptation has been to reach for a stronger claim — that ALL COLORED CAST PART III is a prophetic portrait, that Basquiat was a shaman operating on a timeline longer than his own, that the number 109 connecting these experiences across continents and years is evidence of something beyond coincidence.
Those claims are not supported by the documented evidence. This essay has tried to be honest about that distinction throughout. Where it has fallen short of that honesty the reader deserves to know it.
What can be claimed honestly is this: two extraordinary men of African diasporic heritage — separated by decades, connected by history and culture — drew from the same ancestral well and arrived at the same images, the same figures, the same philosophical coordinates. The marathon as endurance. Victory as birthright. The crowned Black hero who rises against impossible odds. The revolutionary whose legacy outlasts his life.
That is not supernatural. That is what a living culture does. It nourishes everyone who reaches it with the same water.
A final reflection
This essay began in the desert of Oman on the morning of April 1, 2019. A man from Los Angeles, eight thousand miles from home, learning through a phone screen that someone he admired was gone. Getting dressed anyway. Driving to work anyway. A truck barreling toward him through the desert. A license plate he had been noticing for years.
None of that proves anything. But it is real. It happened. And it set in motion a years-long process of looking carefully at a painting and asking what it might share with a life.
The looking itself is the point. The willingness to pay attention — to Basquiat’s work, to Nipsey’s life, to the history that connects them, to the grief that makes us search for meaning in the aftermath of loss — is not a weakness. It is a deeply human response to a deeply human experience.
Jean-Michel Basquiat died at 27 in 1988. Ermias Asghedom died at 33 in 2019. Both left behind work that rewards careful attention. Both deserve to be seen clearly — not through the distortion of mythology or the flattening of dismissal, but honestly, precisely, and with the full weight of what they actually accomplished.
That is what this essay has tried to do. Whether it has succeeded is for the reader to decide.
The marathon continues. The well remains.