27/04/2026
Prince was thirteen when his daddy put him out of the house. A single Black mother of six on the north side of Minneapolis took him into her basement and let him stay until he was eighteen years old.
Her name was Bernadette Anderson, and the Minneapolis sound was born on her cement floor. The block her house sits on is now a street with her name on it.
Prince Rogers Nelson was thirteen years old when his father put him out of the house. After a few weeks of bouncing between relatives' couches in Minneapolis, his best friend Andre brought him home to a brick house at 1244 Russell Avenue North.
The house was already too crowded. Bernadette Anderson was raising six children there alone, working long shifts at the YWCA at North Commons Park and chasing a degree she had no time to study for.
She let him in anyway.
The boy at her door was given his name so completely by his father that the older man would later tell a reporter, "I named my son Prince because I wanted him to do everything I wanted to do." His childhood nickname, the one his family used, was Skipper.
Skipper had spent the months before bouncing between his mother's house, his stepfather's house, his father's apartment, and his aunt's place. He later described it to a reporter without bitterness, saying, "I was constantly running from family to family. I was bitter for a while, but I adjusted."
Bernadette knew something about being shuffled around. She had been a foster child herself, sent into the system as a small girl when her parents fell sick with tuberculosis, separated from her sisters and passed between strangers.
She had married at fourteen and had her first child at fourteen. By the early 1970s she was a single mother of six, working at the YWCA, and she would later go back and finish high school and earn a bachelor's degree in public policy from the University of Minnesota.
She had also been friends with Skipper's mother for years. Their families had crossed at church first, the Seventh-Day Adventist congregation where their husbands ran in the same musician circles, and Andre's father had once played in the Prince Rogers Trio, the very group Skipper was named after.
So when Andre walked his friend through the door at 1244 Russell, Bernadette did the only thing she knew how to do. She called Skipper's mother, talked it through, and made room.
He shared Andre's bedroom for a few months. Then they cleared out the basement and he claimed it as his own.
That basement had cement walls, low ceilings, and not much light. It had a stereo, a piano, and whatever instruments the boys could borrow or scrape together for.
It also had two radio stations that did most of the early educating. KQRS-FM played Joni Mitchell and Carlos Santana late at night, and KUXL-AM, the small Black community station that broadcast to a single section of North Minneapolis, carried the funk and soul records that would shape his life.
For the next five years, that basement was his classroom. Bernadette had only one rule for him, the same one she had for her own children, and it was that he had to finish school.
Outside of that, she let him be who he was.
He was small, five foot two, with eyes that took up half his face and a quietness that read as shyness until you put him near an instrument. He had been a sickly child, born with epilepsy, and the way he later told the story of how the seizures stopped became one of the most quoted moments of his life.
"My mother told me one day I walked in to her and said, 'Mom, I'm not going to be sick anymore,' and she said, 'Why?' and I said, 'Because an angel told me so,'" Prince remembered.
He never had another seizure. The morning in his mother's kitchen, with the angel he could not see, became the through-line of every spiritual song he would ever write.
In Bernadette's basement, with Andre on bass and Andre's sister Linda on keyboards and Morris Day on drums, the band that would become Grand Central practiced six and seven nights a week. Bernadette would come home from her shift at the YWCA, hear the noise rising up through the floor, and just shake her head and start dinner.
"It sounded like a lot of noise," she told a reporter years later. "But after the first couple of years, I realized the seriousness of it."
That basement is now widely understood to be the birthplace of what came to be called the Minneapolis sound. Jimmy Jam came through that basement, and so did Terry Lewis, Alexander O'Neal, and Morris Day, who would later front The Time.
In 1977, Skipper walked out of 1244 Russell with a Warner Bros. recording contract that gave him creative control over his first three albums and ownership of his publishing rights. He was eighteen years old, and the deal was unprecedented for an artist that age.
He never forgot Bernadette.
Years later, when he began writing his memoir at Paisley Park in early 2016, he intended to dedicate an entire chapter to her. In the pages he finished before he died, he wrote, "Eye can always let my guard down when there's a woman present."
His debut album, For You, came out on April 7, 1978. He played all twenty-seven instruments on the record himself.
Six years after that, 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 in the country at the same time. All three were Purple Rain.
He was twenty-six years old.
By 1995 he was famous enough to fight Warner Bros. publicly. He wrote the word SLAVE on his cheek and legally changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol, because the company still owned the master tapes of music that had started in Bernadette's basement.
He spent twenty years fighting for those tapes. He won.
What the world did not know yet was that the boy who had once been taken in had built a second life as the man doing the taking in.
Sometime after Trayvon Martin was killed in Sanford, Florida, in February 2012, Prince invited a young activist named Van Jones to Paisley Park. Jones, a former Obama administration green jobs advisor, had been on television talking about racism and hoodies and the way young Black men in the same outerwear as Mark Zuckerberg got read as thugs while white kids in hoodies got read as billionaires-in-waiting.
Prince had been listening. When Jones got to Minnesota, Prince looked at him across a room at Paisley Park and said something Jones would repeat for the rest of his life.
"Maybe you civil rights guys haven't created enough Mark Zuckerbergs."
Out of that conversation came Yes We Code, an initiative aimed at preparing 100,000 low-income kids of color for tech careers. Prince agreed to headline the 2014 Essence Festival on the condition that the launch of the program be folded into the festivities, and he put his own money behind the project on the condition that his name stay off the marketing.
That was the part he let people see. The part he hid was bigger.
After Prince died on April 21, 2016, in an elevator at Paisley Park, Van Jones went on CNN with Don Lemon and finally said the sentence Prince had made him sit on for years. "There are people who have solar panels on their houses right now in Oakland, California, that don't know Prince paid for them," Jones said, his voice breaking.
"He was a Jehovah's Witness, so he was not allowed to speak publicly about any of his good acts. But the world needs to know it wasn't just the music."
He had sent money to the family of Trayvon Martin. He had quietly underwritten Green for All, the organization putting young people of color to work installing solar panels in some of the country's most polluted neighborhoods.
He had sent checks to old jazz musicians who had fallen on hard times. He had made phone calls to people in trouble whose names he never spoke publicly.
After Freddie Gray died in police custody in Baltimore in April 2015, Prince flew in two weeks later and played a Rally 4 Peace concert at Royal Farms Arena. He stood on the stage in front of a crowd dressed in gray and told them, "I am your servant tonight, Baltimore. We are your house band."
He had written a new song the day before called "Baltimore." He debuted it that night with the lyric, "Does anybody hear us pray for Michael Brown or Freddie Gray?"
The proceeds from that concert paid the salaries of twenty Baltimore kids in the city's youth employment program that summer.
"I guarantee you," Jones told Don Lemon, "anybody struggling, anywhere in the world, he was sending checks. He was making phone calls. But he did not want it to be known."
Prince was found unresponsive in the Paisley Park elevator at 9:43 in the morning on April 21, 2016. He was fifty-seven years old, and the autopsy ruled it an accidental overdose of fentanyl prescribed for chronic hip pain he had carried for years from thousands of nights of jumping off pianos in heels.
He had no will. He left thirty-nine studio albums, a vault at Paisley Park containing thousands of unreleased recordings, and an estate that would take seven years to settle.
He also left an address.
In September 2024, the city of Minneapolis renamed the 1200 block of Russell Avenue North to Bernadette Anderson Way. Andre Cymone played at the unveiling.
The fire chief of Minneapolis spoke that day, and so did the state senate president, and both men identified themselves the same way before they said anything else: as kids Bernadette had helped raise.
Bernadette had passed away in 2003 at the age of seventy-one. The basement was still there.
The street sign on the corner of Plymouth and Russell now carries her name.
Ten years after Prince died, that is the part of the story that holds. A single Black mother who had been a foster child herself opened her door to a thirteen-year-old boy with nowhere to go, and he grew into a man who spent the rest of his life opening doors for strangers he never met.
Somewhere in Oakland tonight, a light is on, and the family in that house has no idea why. From Black History Archives
