Wallace kept her son’s musical legacy alive after his drive-by murder in 1997. Wallace was born in Jamaica in 1953. She gave birth to her son Christopher, better known as Notorious BIG or Biggie Smalls, in Brooklyn, New York in 1972. Her son’s father, a Jamaican welder and politician named Selwyn George Latore, left the family when his son was around 2 years old. Wallace raised Christopher in Brooklyn as a single mother while working as a preschool teacher.
![[Voletta Wallace with the artist Kehinde Wiley in front of his portrait of her son Christopher, better known as Notorious BIG, in 2005]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2025/02/21/18/09/GettyImages-55733198.jpeg)
Her son’s musical success brought her material wealth that the family didn’t have when he was young. In one of his biggest hits, the 1994 hip-hop classic “Juicy,” Biggie rapped about being able to buy his mother mink coats and an Acura luxury car: “Thinkin' back on my one-room shack / Now my mom pimps an Ac' with minks on her back.”.
After the rapper’s death in 1997, Wallace helped to run his estate and preserve his musical legacy. In 2005, she published the memoir Biggie: Voletta Wallace Remembers Her Son, Christopher Wallace, aka Notorious BIG. In 2009, she was a producer for the biopic Notorious, in which she was played by Angela Bassett.
“I hope that I see Sean one day and the only thing I want to do is slap the daylights out of him. And you can quote me on that,” Wallace continued. “Because I liked him. I didn’t want to believe all the awful things, but I’m so ashamed and embarrassed.”.
