The New York Times · https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/27/magazine/jayz-songwriter-rap-brooklyn-artist.html
Adnis Reeves left when his son was 11. Decades later the woman he left kept arranging the talk, even after he stood them up.
He will turn the hearts of the fathers to the children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.
Malachi 4:6
In the spring of 2003, Gloria Carter set up a meeting between her son and the man who had left them. When the first one fell through, she set it up again. Adnis Reeves had walked out on her and their four children in Brooklyn's Marcy Houses when their son, who grew up to be Jay-Z, was 11. In the fourth episode of HBO's "JAŸ-Z in 8," which aired on September 25, Jay-Z remembered the day his father never showed: "Like, I knew it. I told you. All those feelings come back."
A week later his mother asked again if he wanted to meet his dad. "I'm like, why are you doing this to me? No. She's like, 'You have to do it.'" She knew something he didn't want to know. Reeves was sick, his liver failing, and she knew, her son says now, "that had he passed without a conversation that I would never recover." The person with the best excuse to let that man go was the one who kept making room for him.
Malachi wrote to people who had come home from exile and gone cold, priests cutting corners and men walking out on "the wife of your youth" (Malachi 2:14). His book ends with God promising to send a messenger ahead of him, named as Elijah in verse 5. That go-between would turn hearts both ways, fathers toward their children and children back toward their fathers. The other outcome, the line warns, is a curse.
The hearts turn, but someone has to be sent to turn them.
The second time, Reeves came, and he was defensive. He told his son he could have come to see him. Jay-Z pushed back that he had been the child, and then, he says, "the realness of what I was saying broke through somewhere." Afterward he found his father an apartment, and about a month later, in June 2003, his sister Andrea found Reeves dead at 53. The talk didn't fix everything. It "opened me up," Jay-Z says, "but I still didn't have the tools to know how to."
So does a son owe the father who left him a conversation? Jay-Z had every reason to say no, and he did say no. His mother was thinking less about what he owed and more about what he could survive, because she knew he "would never recover" from a silence like that. Malachi's promise needed a messenger, and in Marcy Houses the messenger was a woman who had been left too, and who asked twice.