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Choices.  We all have to make them.  They are consistently placed before us as a buffet in a restaurant but what happens when the choices we make aren’t the right ones?    

Brothatone was born in Camden Arkansas.  At the age of nine, life took a dramatic turn when his mother and father separated.  With no father figure in the home, Tone began to make the choices that many urban youth choose with no guidance.  He sought out the street life.  “I joined a street gang, the nineties crips, when I was 12 years old,”  Brothatone elaborates.  “I gained respect by fighting rival gang members, breaking in people cribs, and robbing people. Since moms worked long hours on her job to make ends meet, the streets became my babysitter.”

On January 18, 1994, Brothatone’s uncle, mentor, and fellow gang member was shot and killed at the age of 16.  Devastated by this event, Tone life began to spiral out of control.  “It took such a tremendous toll on my life that I became depressed and suicidal,”  Brothatone recalls.  

That summer he was sent to Dallas to live with his cousin where he began to write poems.  Eventually, those poems became rap lyrics and people throughout his local community were drawn to his charismatic freestyles.  Although his popularity grew within his local context, the patience of the school, law enforcement, and rival gangs began to grow thin.  In 1996, he was sent to a juvenile facility in Oklahoma and then Louisiana for auto theft.  After his release, things got worse.  At 18 years old, he had been suspended from school indefinitely, received death threats from rival gangs, and had been arrested for armed robbery and battery in the first.   

A year later, a youth pastor invited Brothatone to church.  “When I was 19, I accepted an invitation to go to church from a youth pastor. After attending 2 Sunday morning services, I gave my life to Christ during an alter call after hearing a teaching from Mathew 24,”  Tone reminisces.  “ It was good to know that I was finally free from a life that had me bound for years, and that joy was strongly felt while I was at church.”  

Although things didn’t change much at home, God was faithful to keep Brothatone.  He prayed that the Lord would not take his gift of rhyming but let him keep that gift to influence, convict, and impact lives of men.  The Lord honored his request and has been consistently expanding Brothatone’s platform for his name sake .

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