Ruby made ends meet working as a housekeeper in Miami Beach, says Cynthia, who for the past year had allowed Will to live with her and her husband. Their pops was a carpenter who would see his children on the weekends, usually to take them on outings to visit relatives. The Bell children also spent time with their older half-siblings: two sisters and a brother from Ruby's first marriage. "Mom nicknamed Will 'Spucky,'" Cynthia recalls. "Everyone in the family called him Spucky, but he never liked being called that in public."
Calvin remembers his older brother would always look after him. When Calvin was 12, Will saved him from drowning in the Edison Park Elementary pool. Three years later, Will handed him his first alcoholic beverage: a bottle of Wild Irish Rose. "I was on our front porch crying like a baby," says Calvin, now 42. "I think he intended to give me something I didn't like so I wouldn't drink."
Courtesy of Cynthia Bell-Lewis
Michael McElroy
Rebecca "Butterfly" Vaughns encouraged Will to stick with poetry as a profession.
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According to his siblings, Will's poetry describes the pain, anger, and resentment he felt throughout his boyhood and teen years because his parents were not together. Calvin's 15-year prison sentence for cocaine trafficking inspired one of Will's poems about the cruelties of the criminal justice system. But when he was a kid, Will never manifested his angst on paper.
Instead, he channeled his rage through sports. He played varsity basketball and football when he attended Miami Edison Senior High. Walter Ramsey, who played defensive tackle, remembers the first time Will took the field as a linebacker for a game. "He hit this boy so hard that the kid's helmet turned sideways," Ramsey gushes. "The guy gets up screaming that he is blind, while me and Bell were just cracking up on the sideline."
Sports kept Will in school, Cynthia says. "He had to maintain good grades if he wanted to stay on the team. He thought he wanted to play sports professionally, but he didn't want to go to college."
So he enlisted in the Army. "I think he only finished school and went to the service to make Mom proud," Cynthia adds. "It's not like he always talked about joining the Army. It was just a sudden decision."
After a two-and-a-half-year military stint, Will returned home. Soon he was hustling on the streets, peddling coke, and carrying a gun for protection. The arrests began piling up. On August 18, 1988, Will was arrested for aggravated assault with a weapon. Two months later, he was nabbed for cocaine possession. He was caught holding eight grams. In November, he was busted for making a false report.
In 1990, he was arrested for aggravated battery in February, carrying a concealed firearm in June, and cocaine possession in October. He was sentenced to ten months in county jail on the aggravated battery and cocaine possession charges, but served only eight. "I think Will turned to hustling because he was confused about his life's direction," Cynthia says. "He didn't know any better."
While he was behind bars, Will tapped into his hidden talent. He penned a love note to an imaginary woman waiting for him, promising to be faithful and to change his delinquent ways. A fellow inmate who read the letter, Lyndell Davis, was instantly moved. "Yo, man, you're writing poetry," Lyndell told Will.
So the pair began writing love letters for other prisoners in exchange for commissary items such as cigarettes and candy bars. The business flourished until Will was released in 1991.
Once he was a free man, the poetry stopped flowing.
For your love
Damn, baby,
For your love
Like Moses, I'll part the sea
Create new levels of intimacy
Climb the highest mountain
And bring you back the peak
Stop traffic in its tracks while you cross the street
Shit, girl, I'll even put a soup line in Ethiopia so the whole country can eat.
Tosca Carroll, a thin 53-year-old real estate broker with a dimpled smile, clicks through an album of photographs on her laptop computer. In one image, she sits on Will's lap. The backdrop is the Hilton Hawaii Village in Waikiki, where they stayed during a two-week vacation in 2005. Another photo shows Will with his arm around Mexican-American actor Danny Trejo in the hotel lobby during the same trip. The next pic catches Da Real One peeking up the skirt of a bronze statue in the middle of a fountain. Tosca also has pictures of her and Will on a Jamaican getaway, where she persuaded her boyfriend to go parasailing. "I can still see him turning green," she says. "He had never been out on a boat."
During a two-hour conversation one week after Will's funeral, Tosca reminisces about her deceased lover's romantic side, like the time he had 11 strangers bring her a single rose each while she was having lunch with a group of friends on Valentine's Day. "Then he walks into the restaurant holding the 12th rose," she says with a beaming grin. "He wrote me love poems too. We were soul mates."
Tosca met Will 13 years ago, before he became a professional poet. At the time, he was employed by the state health department as a homeless outreach worker. He had been married and divorced thrice by the time he encountered Tosca. He spent his workday driving a van, passing out condoms to people on the streets, and driving them to shelters. At night, he gave speeches to victims of domestic violence. Tosca attended one of his talks. "I was pleasantly surprised," she says. "He was empowering the women, and he moved me when he told them that he wanted to apologize for all the wrong things men had done to them."
