August 29, 2020

“I love the city because of the fact that it made me who I am, but at the same time, it's discouraging because I know the underworld. It's not really a place of prosperity for the most part. Our city was built on scarcity. That's what makes our culture so rich because we didn't have a lot. But the stuff that we made from it, is what makes it, it.”

The city of New Orleans is a place of great promise and great sorrow. Like most cities you can find the good and the bad. Alvin “Allay” Earhart has spent his entire life there. He was a child during Hurricane Katrina and witnessed the perils of mother nature and the incompetence of the United States government in their failed efforts to offer aid to the city’s most impoverish people. He is the founder VäKú, a clothing brand that doubles as a community outreach organization. He met the woman he hopes to marry. He’s lost loved ones. He’s been a victim of racial profiling. He’s experienced the good and the bad in the Big Easy.

August 2020, Earhart has money on his mind. His various ventures in the fashion and music industries are prospering. He returns home from a trip in Dallas and is looking forward to settling back in. Then comes more bad. As he describes it, this is a constant in his life. The good mixed with the bad. “Every time I come back home something weird happens that just shows that I'm not supposed to be here,” said Earhart.

The next morning after returning home from Dallas, Earhart’s phone rings, “I got a phone call from my older cousin asking me, have I spoke to my baby sister. She lives in another house, we got different moms and I was like, ‘no, why what’s up?’ Well your baby brother shot himself in the head. I'm like, What?”

After receiving this news, Earhart is uneasy. Something doesn’t sit right with him and his innate feeling is that something is off. He immediately pushes those thoughts out of his head and rushes to the hospital.

At first Earhart is optimistic that his 13-year-old baby brother Ahmad Brown will pull through. That’s all one can do when dealt with unpleasant news. Unfortunately he doesn’t, “I got the news that he had passed away and, you know, it definitely hit me, but it didn't really hit me hard until they came back with a date of the funeral. The funeral was set on my birthday, August 29th.”

This is where things start to get a lil messy. That funny feeling Earhart had when he first heard that his brother shot himself in the head proved to be an accurate sixth sense. “Some of our cousins were really messed up about his death. They were just speaking like they wanted to kill the guy who killed my brother. My brother was actually killed by his cousin. He didn't shoot himself,” Earhart told me.

Initially the shooting looked like it could have been accidental, but Earhart claims the family of the alleged shooter may have tampered with evidence prompting a criminal investigation. The alleged shooter who was the same age of Earhart’s brother is now on the run.

Earhart, although not present at the time of the shooting, feels some sort of guilt. He and his brother lived in separate households growing up as a result of having different mothers. “I can tell it had an effect. And that's a big reason why I don't want to have children with multiple women. You can still be present, but if you're not in the household that your child is in, you don’t know what other influences are within that household,” said Earhart.

Their relationship shifted even more after their father died. Earhart’s brother didn’t come to the funeral and that made Earhart feel some type of way. Instead of being the bigger brother and understanding where little brother was coming from, his pride and ego got in the way.

During this time Earhart was mentoring other kids the same as his brother. That haunts him a bit, “I was so accessible to other people and helping them out that I neglected my own blood.”

Their relationship started to come back around in the weeks leading up to his brother’s death. Earhart realized there was a disconnect and looked to a common thread to get him and Ahmad communicating again, “I realized young dudes like money, especially him. I could speak positivity all day but if I'm not showing him how to make money, then he really not going to listen.”

Earhart used his brand VäKú as the catalyst to reunite their relationship and it was working, “I spoke with his mom after he passed. She was like, yeah, that was one of the last things he was telling me about, how happy he was that he was about to start selling merchandise with you.”

Although Earhart may have missed the chance to save his Ahmad’s life, he plans to continue mentoring the New Orleans youth, “I’m going to start mentoring kids in the same age range. When our pops passed [Ahmad] was in that range and I know that's a very pivotal moment.”

One of Earhart’s life mottos is ‘keep swimming’ and that is what he intends to do, “you have to keep swimming to get to the happiness. It's not going to be just peaches and cream every single day. But that's the irony of VäKú, the crazy good times. That's what VäKú means, the indescribable happiness. You might go through a lot of shit but when the dust settles it's going to be VäKú.”

~Earhart’s clothing brand can be found here and his music here.