DEEMI
A BROOKLYN SOUL SURVIVOR
SINGS HER WAY TO SAFE HAVEN

When Deemi says she “wasn’t supposed to be here,” the Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, native isn’t referring to the Manhattan offices of Atlantic Records, where she’s lounging on a sofa, smoking a Black & Mild, and fussing with the bangs peeking from beneath her Yankees fitted. Deemi means she’s not supposed to be alive. Twenty-seven years ago, just moments after her complicated birth, she stopped breathing. Her grandmother, a devout santera, called upon the protective African warrior spirit Tahu to revive the newborn.

Christened Tahu Aponte, the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter has since internalized that will to survive. Deemi gre w up on her mother’s welfare checks, but at 7 she found a ticket out of her ’hood when a rendition of Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” won her first place at a local talent show. Deemi was eventually admitted to Manhattan’s Talent Unlimited High School. “They were singing classical music,” Deemi says with a chuckle. “Me and my friend looked at each other like, What we done got ourselves into?”

Deemi’s singing goals were put on hold when, at 19, she gave birth to her son, Nathan, now 8. Her daughter, Felicity, 7, was born a year later. The pressures of being a poor, young mother were compounded by an abusive five-year relationship with her kids’ father, a round-the-way hustler known as Butta. In 2000 she finally left him (he was killed in Virginia in January 2004); soon thereafter, she met Waynne “Bruce Waynne” Nugent, of production duo Midi Mafia ( 50 Cent’s “ 21 Questions”), who signed her to their imprint, Family Ties Entertainment/Atlantic.

Already, her piano-led ballad
“Soundtrack of My Life,” from her forth-
coming debut of the same title, was in
rotation at New York’s Hot 97 ( WQHT-
FM) and was featured on Wendy
Williams Brings the Heat Vol. 1 (Noo

Trybe, 2005). The single finds Deemi revisiting her real-life wounds—from having no one to help babysit to seeing her baby daddy beat her mother with a metal dustpan.

Deemi’s hard hitting, intimate songs, reminiscent of a young Mary J. Blige, are striking chords with wronged women every where. “You know how you have groups for domestic violence survivors?” Deemi asks. “It’s like I got a big-ass support group all over the world.” Celia San Miguel

Photographed by PETER BESTE on September 21, 2006. At Lafayette and Tompkins, Brooklyn.

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