DMX Is Born in Mount Vernon

Earl Simmons was born on December 18, 1970, in Mount Vernon to 19-year-old Arnett Simmons and 18-year-old Joe Barker. At five his mother sent him to live with relatives in Yonkers, in the School Street housing apartments, and that block became the whole backdrop of his childhood. He grew up mostly on his own there, closer to stray dogs than to people, and by his teens he was sleeping in storage bins after things at home broke down completely. Every part of what the world later knew as DMX, the growl, the prayers stitched into his rhymes, the refusal to prettify a hard upbringing, started on that Yonkers street.