SUMMER OF LOVE: This is fifth in a series in which Colorado couples share their stories of love, dedication and commitment. Every Thursday in The Denver Post through July.
He gently straightens the shoulder strap on her dress, which is covering her seventh-months-pregnant belly, but she doesn’t break stride in her conversation.
He grasps her hand without taking his gaze off some invisible thing in the distance, and the corner of her mouth curls into a smile.
He constantly refreshes her mug of hot tea made from oat straw, raspberry leaf, nettles and alfalfa, which she’s enjoying despite the fact that it’s nearly 100 degrees outside and their Five Points neighborhood duplex has no air conditioning, only a swamp cooler.
Natasha Neambe LeadonVita and Ietef Hotep Vita sit side-by-side on their small couch. They’re surrounded by paintings, stacks of books, tribal knick-knacks and musical instruments, dressed in bright colors and patterns like African royalty, relaxed but insistent about their mission to remake their community through the strange bedfellows of organic gardening and hip-hop.
Their passion for revolutionary ideas isn’t just an outgrowth of their love for each other, it’s the core of it.
“The way you look at health and food, it’s culture,” Neambe (nay-AHM-bee) says, her husband nodding silently. “We want to change younger peoples’ way of thinking and train them to go out and do it for themselves.”
“The mayor’s actually asked us to come in and talk to city officials about how they can be more effective in those areas,” says Ietef (EE-teff), producing a letter of proclamation from Denver Mayor Michael Hancock that congratulates Ietef on his Brown SugaYouth Fest, which he founded in high school.
Organic-foods activism and boomboxes. Student workshops and late-night DJ gigs. “Going Green and Living Bling,” they’ve dubbed it.
It’s high-minded stuff, being vegan environmentalists and educators. But they’re also hustlers — not in the oft-mythologized sense of hustling for goods or money, but in using hip-hop culture to smuggle unconventional ideas to inner-city kids.
“Our curriculum talks about health and wellness, sustainability, GMOs, organics, making juice smoothies and eating vegan,” 33-year-old Neambe says. “But we also have a hip-hop culture and arts academy.”
Their cultural evangelism spans dozens of roles and titles, all of which barely fit on both sides of a business card.
A sample from 27-year-old Ietef’s: “cultural Jedi, Afro drummer, street activist, beat teacher, hip-hop yogi, B-boy, organic gardener, emcee, deejay, educator, graffiti guru, midwife.”
With poise and charisma to spare, Neambe and Ietef might make it look easy. But it’s not.
Ietef comes from a creative, activist family, while Neambe’s is tight-knit and traditionally structured (she goes by her middle name since it’s a combination of her father’s middle name, Neama and her mother’s first name, Beverely). With two young children and another one on the way, they want a bigger house with its own back yard for gardening, instead of growing much of their food on large plots in community gardens.
They struggle daily to keep their family, careers and creative pursuits in balance — and funded.
“Money makes people do crazy things,” Ietef says, looking out his front window toward the Gilliam Youth Services Center juvenile center at East 28th Avenue and Downing Street, the oldest state-operated detention facility in Colorado. “I grew up in this community and had to walk past that place every day to go to school.”
Gang violence was common among Ietef’s peers in the 1990s, and even his own emphatic Christian upbringing — which prevented him from hearing rap touchstones like Tupac Shakur or the Notorious B.I.G. when they were alive — didn’t stop him from getting into trouble as a kid. But it did result in one of the more unusual hip-hop personas in or outside of Denver.
Ietef is better known as DJ Cavem Moetavation, a prolific, tirelessly self-promotional hip-hop artist and DJ-for-hire who has recorded music with acclaimed rappers such as KRS-One and members of Digable Planets, Arrested Development, Dead Prez and Hieroglyphics.
He boasts a half dozen albums with names like “The Produce Section” and spits verses that inject his OG (or “organic gardener”) swagger with spiritual uplift: “I see the god in you and me, that’s what I aim for / So all my little OGs, just grow more / and if you freeze and save your seeds you can plant more.” They aren’t messages one might expect to hear from any hip-hop artist — “conscious,” gangsta or otherwise. But Ietef comes by it honestly.
He’s the oldest of 10 children by his father, Michael Walker, Jr., a photographer and musician. His mother, Ashara Ekundayo, co-founded Denver’s acclaimed Slam Nuba poetry team and KGNU radio show — which Ietef took over when Ashara moved to Oakland, Calif., in 2011.
Born in Philadelphia but raised in Denver, Neambe has two older brothers and a younger sister. She acknowledges that her parents are less public with their pursuits but also more family-oriented, often numbering four or five dozen at holidays and reunions.
“The holidays are serious,” Ietef says, laughing. “Pretty much my side of my family’s black sheeps. There’s no festivities. That’s why everyone is so artistic. I’m learning a lot from (Neambe’s) family, but at the same time, at events like that I gotta do my own thing.”
“We had some arguments about that,” Neambe says. “But I’ve learned that’s just kind of how he is. That’s why I’m trying teach him how to just go somewhere and have a good time. He’s always like, ‘I don’t care where we are, I’m gonna network!’ “
That combination of artistic aplomb and emphasis on familial structure resulted in a couple who are more entrepreneurial hippies than traditional hip-hop heads.
“Consumer products are marketed with a cultural idea, so that’s why McDonald’s uses hip-hop. But that’s also why I use hip-hop to market organic food,” Ietef explains.
As activists and educators they’ve got their scripts down pat, each able to speak eloquently and at length about the food desert that is Five Points with its dearth of grocery stores, how food should be thought of as medicine, and how self-empowerment is possible through gardening, meditation and creative expression.
They’re also keenly aware of the larger social problems in African-American culture, such as the proliferation of single-parent homes.
Both Neambe and Ietef’s parents divorced when they were young, which is one reason they often take their daughters to their summer workshops at places like Cole Arts & Science Academy and St. Charles Recreation Center.
“Having them see us as a family unit and married couple really did something for a lot of (those kids),” Neambe said. “We’re not just telling them this stuff, but they get to see our children and know who we were are outside of this.”
Their educational program is both slick and dense with messages. In May, for example, they appeared on stage at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House for the city’s TedxYouth session — the student-oriented offshoot of the popular TED Talks series — in front of hundreds of Denver Public Schools kids. Ietef rolled on stage atop a shiny, lime-and-gold lowrider bicycle while Neambe spun records behind a pair of turntables, flanked by a pile of fruits and vegetables and a blender with which to make smoothies.
Perhaps more so than music, food is the lens through which they view their lives. It’s not just that they’re suspicious of the processed, chemical-laden stuff that makes up many Americans’ diets. They also treat each other with elaborate vegetarian meals at home (think delicately seasoned Brussels sprouts, squash, lentils, kale and cabbage), and, when possible, eat out at Caribbean bakeries and Ethiopian buffets.
In fact, food is the reason Neambe even noticed Ietef in the first place.
She had moved back to Denver from Florida after a couple of unfulfilling years of using her interior-design degree at an architecture firm. Among various jobs, she worked as a valet, then a bartender at the Ballpark neighborhood’s Euphoria Lounge and Coffee House.
“I saw him walk in the door, and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s a very handsome man,’ ” she remembers. “I had customers so I couldn’t really watch him, and then when I looked around for him later he was gone.”
Ietef had only dropped in for the Ethiopian buffet, but soon Neambe soon started noticing him everywhere around town, always on his bike and toting a boombox. Eventually she got his phone number from a flier and texted him the message, “I think you’re fly,” to which Ietef replied, “Word. Let’s hang out.”
“We’ve been inseparable since that,” Ietef says.
Marriage, everyone is told, is not something to be entered into lightly, and when Ietef and Neambe decided to tie the knot in 2010, it definitely wasn’t.
“Growing up in a single-parent home, I knew that wasn’t something I wanted to give my children once I had them,” Neambe says. “So it was really important for me to find a mate and to find someone that I was connected with on a deep level. Once I met him and we fell in love, I felt like I could do anything.”
Ietef had already changed his name from Michael Walker III when he was 14, having been inspired from trips to Africa with his mother, so Neambe simply added Vita to her last name.
Being almost seven years older than her husband, Neambe got to live a bit more of her life before meeting Ietef, who celebrated his 27th birthday earlier this week with a blowout bash at hip Larimer Street bar-gallery Cold Crush.
“My twenties are gone and there’s a lot of stuff that I didn’t get to do,” Ietef says while relaxing alone at The Point coffee shop. “I do feel like this is the most challenging year I’ve ever had in my life. But it’s a beautiful challenge, and we’re into a lot of great things.”
He’s quick to praise the life-changing experience of becoming a father. He delivered both of his daughters, Selasia, 3, and Libya, 2, via natural birth in their home. And while he and Neambe don’t take their children to mainstream doctors — initially to the chagrin of their families — he says his children’s health is proof that his family’s method works.
“There’s no claiming of sickness in my house,” he says. “Any time anyone gets any symptom we focus on healing, and we claim that. We say, ‘Oh, my baby’s healing, not, ‘My baby’s sick.'”
Ietef says that Neambe complements him by turning him onto new music, managing and booking him, being the source for his contacts and generally acting as his backbone.
“She’s a great selector and scholar, man,” he says. “She can do ‘me’ without me, and I’m grateful for that. Our differences give us benefits.”
However, maintaining the sanctity of the family unit is difficult when so much of their time is spent helping and teaching others, usually on a nonprofit basis.
That much was clear on a recent weekday afternoon as they lounged on blankets at a public swimming pool at Curtis Park.
While their daughters snacked on red grapes and sipped from eco-friendly water bottles, a steady parade of kids and parents walked by saying hello or asking them questions — some of them folks Neambe and Ietef had known since before they got together.
“Sometimes we feel a little unappreciated, but I think that’s just a part of it when you choose to do community work,” Neambe says. “Being able to shut it off and make it so we have private life is hard, but we’re getting better at it.”
She looks over to Ietef, who smiles at her from behind his sunglasses and fedora.
“As long as he continues handing me water and making sure I have shea butter on my tummy.”
John Wenzel: 303-954-1642, jwenzel@denverpost.com or twitter.com/johntwenzel
