My grandmother only ever loved one rap song. No, it wasn’t that she was a hip-hop hater on a crusade against the genre’s vulgarity or anything like that—she was a fiery woman, barely over five feet tall, who could talk shit with the best of them. She just didn’t care much for modern pop culture. Whenever I popped up at her crib in the New Brighton neighborhood of Staten Island, she would be sitting at her dining room table cutting up coupons and nibbling on something sweet while the radio was dialed to church music, soul oldies (she liked the Black girl groups of the ’60s), or news from St. Maarten, where she grew up in a small fishing town in the 1940s and 1950s. She otherwise entertained herself by gossiping on the phone, looking for sales in the aisles of Macy’s, and working in the small garden in her backyard. To her annoyance, her garden was surrounded by old broken-down cars that my grandfather refused to scrap and his handbuilt pigeon coop where he kept almost 100 birds. She hated the hell out of them damn birds.

When I first moved to Staten Island from Brooklyn in elementary school, I spent weekday afternoons and sometimes evenings with my grandparents. By that time of the day, my grandmother, a full-time homemaker whom the immediate family called “Baba,” was usually working on dinner, and my grandfather, a retired MTA bus driver named Eddie, was sitting in his chair, quietly taking in old Clint Eastwood shoot-’em-ups. I’d sit and listen to Baba tell me stories from her childhood as Eddie kept one eye on me and one eye on his movie. Finally, he’d get up to go sit on the back porch and watch his birds. That’s when I could bumrush the TV, switch the channel from AMC to BET, and watch rap videos.

Baba would sometimes take a little break from the meal (probably chicken lokri) and pull up a chair next to me while I was glued to Rap City or 106 & Park. She watched but never really said anything as I pointed out my favorites to her. One day, all of a sudden, she started laughing deliriously at one video, blurting out the kind of over-exaggerated guffaw you might expect from Meryl Streep. Real tears formed in her eyes, a reaction I had seen her have only when she’d tell a story about St. Maarten’s farm animals or when she’d clown her husband a little too hard. It was all from Fat Joe and Terror Squad’s No. 1 hit “Lean Back.”