Meet Shameika Stepney, Inspiration to Fiona Apple on Fetch the Bolt Cutters

Shameika Stepney is sitting in a parked car outside her Virginia Beach home, rapping along to a song she wrote. She unspools each bar with cool conviction: “It’s Sha from the mecca, the holy place/Fi gave you the name, now you know the face.” Tears well beneath her long lashes. “Every time I hear this, it makes me cry,” Shameika tells me over FaceTime on an October night, a rush of emotion in her voice. “Girl, I feel this shit. It gives me chills!”

She penned these charged lyrics one day this summer, in response to the song her onetime childhood schoolmate Fiona Apple wrote about her for this year’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters: “Shameika.” Echoing that song’s pep-talk chorus, the new track is called “Shameika Said.” Fiona, who recently reunited with Shameika for the first time since they were kids, contributes freshly recorded vocals. And in Shameika’s lines, which evoke an eclipsing of place and time, her stirring flow is one of a seasoned pro. Shameika has been rapping for more than 30 years.

Fiona’s “Shameika” is a clattering piano ballad that draws on her childhood experiences with bullies at the private Episcopal school St. Hilda’s & St. Hugh’s in West Harlem. More specifically, the song centers on an incident in the third grade, when the cool girls made fun of Fiona for trying to sit with them at lunch. Shameika, then a fourth grader, saw the cruel rejection play out, and intervened. She told Fiona not to give credence to the mean girls. Those words of encouragement impacted Fiona for life. “Shameika said I had potential” is the lightbulb refrain of Fiona’s song, and a defining moment of Fetch the Bolt Cutters, lucidly expressing one of the album’s great themes: The things we endure as kids matter. The titular character of “Shameika” is more than namesake and inspiration. She’s foundational.

In an interview this summer, before her reunion with Shameika, Fiona told me she had begun to realize that her song was “not finished” until she knew the other side. “I’ve had this feeling for my whole life that nobody stands up for me,” she said. “I have no memory of anybody ever getting in the way of somebody else being shitty to me, from when I was a kid to when I was an adult, except for this one moment where this girl walking by saw something going on, and leaned down and said, ‘Hey, why do you care about them? You have potential.’ I got to carry that in my head my whole life. When there was nobody on my side, I was able to call up those words.”

But who was Shameika? Inquiring minds wanted to know. When Fiona wrote the song, she wasn’t entirely sure if its subject was real—maybe Shameika was a composite character, an assemblage of memory. As kids, Fiona and Shameika had never been friends, only schoolmates for a brief time: “She got through to me, and I’ll never see her again,” Fiona sings on Fetch the Bolt Cutters, sounding grateful and sure.

“It’s sort of like I’m trying to send it back to her telepathically,” Fiona told me this summer, “like I’m trying to put a song out there so that maybe, somewhere in her brain, she gets a return… a vote of confidence. Or just a thank you.”

To start, Shameika knew her own potential. “Everything I’ve ever really wanted, I’ve had it,” she tells me early in our FaceTime chat. “At a very young age, I learned about visualization. Seeing things in your mind’s eye.”

Shameika’s hair is in a topknot, and around her neck is a bejeweled Hamsa charm, which she says she wears to ward off the evil eye. On her wrist are bracelets of precious stones: tiger’s eye, lava, smokey quartz. Shameika once worked in a crystal shop in her and Fiona’s native Harlem—“They hold all the secrets,” she says, “the Akashic records”—and she elucidates the virtues of reiki, meditation, and chakra alignment. She is both a self-described empath and a no-bullshit, born-and-bred New Yorker—spiritually inquisitive, sharp, and electric.

She’s been rapping since childhood. Growing up on 145th Street in the historic Sugar Hill neighborhood, Shameika was an MC in several rap groups, including the Harlem Hoodz, Angels With Dirty Faces, and the E Brothers. She was only 14 when her best friend Nomad put her on her first mixtape. Other friends interned at Bad Boy Records—“I met all those people back in the day”—and worked at The Source. Music shaped all their lives.

Her rap moniker has alternately been Dollface or Chyna Doll (long before fellow New Yorker Foxy Brown used that name for her second LP, she says), and her formative influences were Nas, JAY-Z, Lauryn Hill, Mary J. Blige, Wu-Tang, and especially the radical underground sounds of Dead Prez. (“They were spot on. They were conscious.”) Shameika says her own style as a young woman artist was unique because she wasn’t rapping about sex or her body—in her words, she rapped about “gangsta shit.” “My neighborhood was no joke,” she adds. “It literally is the backdrop for the movie Paid in Full.”

In high school, she became close friends with a classmate and rapper named Bloodshed, who was a member of the group Children of the Corn alongside future stars Cam’ron, Ma$e, and Big L. “He graduated and called me and was like, ‘We bout to get signed to Def Jam! I’ma put you on my tape!’” Shameika remembers. But Bloodshed died in a car crash in 1997, and Children of the Corn broke up.

Shameika never stopped making music. By the latter half of the 1990s, she had gone on to collaborate in the studio with the likes of Jodeci’s DeVante Swing and the rapper Kurupt, and for a time she was signed to a production deal with Bryce Wilson of R&B duo Groove Theory. She also rapped on two songs from Blackstreet’s final album, 2003’s Level II. She’s nonchalant about these past musical experiences—she doesn’t like to dwell—and, like Fiona, she loathes celebrity culture. “I’ve been around celebrities my whole life,” Shameika says, “and that shit is wack.”

Shameika is now thriving in Virginia Beach, where she relocated with her family years ago (though she’s hung onto her 212 accent). She works at a vacation timeshare company, selling properties. “I love people and I get to talk to people about time,” Shameika says. “A lot of us are guilty of putting time on the shelf. With everything that’s going on now, everybody is realizing that time waits for no one.”

It was late April, deep in quarantine, when Shameika first found out about Fiona’s song, but not by hearing it. (She was always only vaguely aware of her former schoolmate’s music career.) The news came, instead, via an out-of-the-blue handwritten card sent in the mail by her and Fiona’s adored third grade teacher, Linda Kunhardt.

Shameika remembers venturing to her mailbox one day for a bit of fresh air and finding the curious note. Her disbelief is still palpable as she recalls the contents of the card: “Shameika, I hope this letter is finding you safe during quarantine, I had to write you because I don’t know if you remember this girl Fiona McAfee. You told her not to listen to bullies, and that she had potential. I just wanted to say thank you. And I wanted to let you know that your prophetic words have been turned into a beloved song titled your name…”

“At that point my mouth is, like, unhinged,” Shameika continues, gleefully animated by the memory. “I’m literally sitting there in shock, like: Are you telling me that Fiona wrote a song about… like, is that what you’re saying!?” She typed Fiona’s name into Apple Music, followed by her own. “And I see the song: ‘Shameika’! I was screaming!”—she demonstrates her shriek—“It’s such a humbling thing. You can’t believe that someone would honor you like that. And it’s not just ‘Someone wrote a song about you.’ It’s ‘Shameika said I had potential.’”

When I reach Kunhardt by phone this fall—Fiona and Shameika call her “Ms. Koony”—she says she first learned about the song “Shameika” from a March profile of Fiona in The New Yorker. (In addition to being a teacher, Kunhardt is a poet, and her work has appeared in the magazine.) And while Fiona was unsure if Shameika was real, Kunhardt remembered her clearly.

Kunhardt jumped out of bed and went to the garage of her home in New Hampshire, where she currently works at a domestic violence shelter and teaches poetry at a prison, and located her archive of memories from her St. Hilda’s years. She’d only taught at the school briefly in her 20s (Shameika remembers her teacher as a hip young adventurer who shared photos in class from her travels to the Taj Mahal) but Kunhardt always kept a file of the literary magazines she created with her students. She snapped a photo of Shameika’s entry, sent it to Fiona, and encouraged her to get in touch. (Fiona and Kunhardt had themselves been reacquainted since 2006, after Fiona described Ms. Koony’s lasting influence on her in a Rolling Stone cover story—“She was like Indiana Jones as woman,” Fiona told the reporter.)

Thinking back to Ms. Kunhardt’s fateful letter, Shameika laughs and says, “If she wouldn’t have said anything, I probably would have never realized that there was this song—until I watched the Grammys!”

Listening to Fiona’s track, Shameika was transported back to that incident in the cafeteria three decades ago, when the mean girls wouldn’t let Fiona sit at their table. “This group of girls used to bully people all the time—that was their thing,” she recalls. “But I wasn’t scared of them. I sat at every table. My parents paid like $35,000 a year to send me to that school, so I can sit at any table I want, and you’re not gonna tell me otherwise! All of these tables are mine! I was like a warrior as a little kid—I was fearless.”

Shameika remembers a young Fiona as “so absolutely adorable,” and says she and her sister Amber were vilified by other girls at the school because of their natural beauty. “Fiona’s hair used to be all the way down to her ass, literally,” Shameika says. “You wouldn’t dare see someone pick on this little girl.” She recalls telling Fiona, “Sweetie, you got potential. You don’t have to worry about these girls, Fi. Come sit with me at my table.” Her voice softens. “I’ve always been a protector of anyone else who’s smaller, who can’t defend themselves. I love to speak life on people.”

Over the years, Shameika’s own fraught experiences at St. Hilda’s remained in her subconscious, too, albeit for markedly different reasons. She still has dreams, and nightmares, about being back in that school. “I went through a lot there,” she says. “My first encounter with racism was at this school when I was in the first grade. I will never forget it.”

Her teacher that year was a hostile nun who would separate the students by race and ethnicity. “This lady used to make all of the Black and Latino children push their desks together, and she would put a sign above our heads that said ‘SLOW.’ And then she would make all the white children and Asian children push their desks together, and put a sign above their heads that said ‘FAST.’” Another time, the same teacher snatched Shameika’s gym uniform and locked it away in her desk drawer. “She took my damn uniform so I could not go to gym—so I could fail,” Shameika recalls. “It was racism. As a little kid, I knew that. Me being from Harlem, being street smart as well as educated, having that edge—I knew exactly what was going on at that young age. I couldn’t help but know.”

In fifth grade, the racism became even more pronounced, and Shameika fought back. “I had to beat this girl’s ass on the elevator because she called me the N-word,” she recalls. For the next year, Shameika was no longer allowed to take the elevator. “If we had to go to the 7th floor after chapel, they would make me wait and watch 30 people get on the elevator and then walk up the steps.” She is often in that staircase in her dreams about the school.

“I used to tell my parents: ‘I hate that school. I really don’t want to go back.’ I couldn’t stand it,” she recalls. After fifth grade, only a year removed from her lunchroom talk with Fiona, Shameika was expelled from St. Hilda’s.

“When you deal with these types of traumas when you’re young, they stay in your aura,” she adds. “I’ve done a lot of spiritual work to clean all of that stuff that was thrown on me when I was a child, when I couldn’t protect myself from that type of abuse.”

Shameika was in such shock over the song “Shameika” that it took her nearly three months to reach out to Fiona. They finally FaceTimed in July, unpacking the past and present for almost two hours. “We both cried,” Fiona says, “The word ‘magical’ was used a lot.” When Shameika mentioned that she raps, Fiona lit up: Would she do a remix? Fiona sent over the song’s stems. Shameika and her producer, Rhyte-Jus, ultimately wrote a new track entirely. The process sparked a cross-country collaboration between Shameika and Rhyte-Jus in Virginia Beach, and Fiona and her band in Venice Beach, that is ongoing.

The new song narrates the ballad of Fiona and Shameika—charting the path that led two girls from Harlem back together after three decades to compare notes on life; to learn from the dreams they both still have of St. Hilda’s and from the considerable differences of what they endured there; to embolden one another further. Just as Shameika sparked Fiona’s original song with her 9-year-old sagacity, her wise words gleam here. Over an instrumental that conjures the boom-bap sounds of her youth, she raps, “Didn’t know you had potential back then, now you know your place/Spiritual bath aura shining like amazing grace.” Alongside Fiona’s newly-recorded hooks—belted with a sky-scraping virtuosity she rarely, if ever, unleashes—the story comes full-circle. (Shameika beams: “She sung the shit out of it!”) In the song, Fiona describes the way childhood traumas remained in their respective subconsciouses—“We keep dreaming about back then”—and chronicles the duo’s plot twist: “She stood up for me/I wish I could have done the same for her,” she sings, embodying her words.

“This is a white woman during Black Lives Matter giving a Black woman her flowers,” Shameika says. “That’s some real shit. That’s why it’s so powerful.” Seeing a bigger picture, she hopes the song can help advocate for children and teach them to understand one another.

“When we did the song, it was as though we had been together all of this time and talked every single day, like, This is my girl,” Shameika says, and the reunited pair are still in frequent communication. “We’re never gonna be apart again,” Shameika adds. “We’re like connected spiritually.”

Though Shameika had continued to do a feature here or there in recent years, collaborating with friends, she had put her own music on pause of late. “I love music, and I been doing it my whole life, but I was sitting here for the last couple of years, like, ‘Do I really want to do this?’”

Reconnecting with Fiona shook her out of that. As Shameika contemplates other potential musical directions—she did love old country music growing up, she notes—her energy bounds. “The possibilities are endless!” she says, before cueing her song back up. “Want to hear it again?”

Originally Appeared on Pitchfork