Prince was thirteen years old when his father put him out of the house.
He spent weeks moving between relatives, couches, and corners of Minneapolis that offered no permanent place for him. Then his best friend Andre brought him home to a brick house at 1244 Russell Avenue North on the north side of the city.
The house was already crowded. Bernadette Anderson was raising six children alone, working long hours at the YWCA while trying to earn a degree she barely had time to study for.
She let him stay anyway.
She understood what it meant to have nowhere to go. Bernadette had been a foster child herself, separated from her sisters after her parents became ill with tuberculosis, moving between homes as a child. She had married at fourteen and had her first child at the same age. By the early 1970s she was a single mother of six, working constantly, building a life through determination and very little help.
She called his mother, talked it through, and made space.
He shared Andre’s bedroom for a few months. Then they cleared the basement, and it became his.
That basement had concrete walls, low ceilings, and little light. It had a stereo, a piano, and whatever instruments they could find. Two radio stations did most of the teaching. KQRS-FM played Joni Mitchell and Carlos Santana late at night, and KUXL-AM carried the funk and soul records that would shape his sound.
Bernadette had one rule. The same one she gave her own children. He had to finish school.
Beyond that, she let him be himself.
He was small, barely five foot two, with large eyes and a quiet presence that only changed when he picked up an instrument. In that basement, with Andre on bass, Linda on keyboards, and Morris Day on drums, the band that would become Grand Central practiced nearly every night. Bernadette would come home from work, hear the noise through the floor, shake her head, and start cooking.
"It sounded like a lot of noise," she later said. "But after a few years, I understood how serious it was."
Jimmy Jam came through that basement. So did Terry Lewis, Alexander O'Neal, and Morris Day, who would later lead The Time. That basement in North Minneapolis became the birthplace of what would be called the Minneapolis Sound, one of the most distinctive styles in American music.
In 1977, he left 1244 Russell Avenue with a Warner Bros. contract that gave him creative control over his first three albums and ownership of his publishing rights. He was eighteen years old. The deal was unheard of.
His debut album For You was released on April 7, 1978. He played all twenty-seven instruments himself.
Six years later, in the summer of 1984, Prince became the first artist in American history to hold the number one film, the number one album, and the number one single at the same time. All three were Purple Rain.
He was twenty-six.
By 1995, he was famous enough to challenge Warner Bros. publicly. He wrote the word SLAVE on his face and changed his name to a symbol, because the company still owned the master recordings of music that had begun on Bernadette’s basement floor. He spent two decades fighting for those rights. He won.
What the public did not fully see while he was alive was that the boy who had once been taken in spent his life quietly taking others in.
After Trayvon Martin was killed in 2012, Prince invited Van Jones to Paisley Park. From that came Yes We Code, a program to prepare low-income young people of color for careers in technology. Prince funded it quietly, asking that his name stay out of the spotlight.
After Freddie Gray died in Baltimore in 2015, Prince flew in and performed a Rally 4 Peace concert. He debuted a new song, "Baltimore," and used the proceeds to fund jobs for local youth.
He sent money to families in need. He supported organizations bringing solar energy to underserved communities. He helped musicians who had fallen on hard times. He made calls to people in trouble and never spoke about it publicly.
