“I just [started] crying,” she says. “Then I was like, ‘You know what, put on some 50 Cent. We gotta get gangsta.’ Because I don’t be crying; I be chilling.”

Since bursting onto the scene in 2017, Tierra has been working. In May 2018, she released her debut studio album, Whack World, and was heralded by critics as the next major rap artist. In Tierra’s 2018 FADER cover story, writer Rawiya Kameir called her “the poster child of a kind of post-clout-era artist.” Tierra’s single "Mumbo Jumbo" went on to earn her a best-new-video nomination at the 2019 Grammy Awards, and last year, she was among the handpicked few to be featured on Beyoncé’s Grammy-nominated The Lion King: The Gift album. Now, her 2020 tour is starting and a new album is in the works.

But before the critical acclaim, there was hood fame.

In 2011, then known as Dizzle Dizz, the 15-year-old appeared in a freestyle video produced by Philly’s underground music collective, We Run the Streets. Tierra and her mother happened to be driving by while they were shooting, and her mother spurred her to get up and rap. “She circled the block real slow and she gave me that time. I didn't really give her an answer. But a mother knows her child.” Tierra got out, busted a freestyle, and impressed a small crowd of men who had gathered around. The virality of the video is what first put Tierra on the map in the Philly circuit.

Tierra went on to become a vocal major at the Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush in Philadelphia before finishing up high school in Atlanta. She was one of few Black students in a predominately white graduating class, a dynamic that put her in a position she couldn’t run from.

With some difficulty, she and her friends persuaded their principal to let them perform a rendition of the finale number from Sister Act 2: Back in the Habit for a school showcase. Tierra fittingly took on Lauryn Hill’s rap verse from the film; it was an undertaking that could not have come to form without a young Tierra’s ambition. Though she couldn’t foresee that she would go on to tour with her idol years later, that experience helped cultivate a part of her that would anchor her career and life.

“I knew that I was a leader. If my people felt a way, I would go speak on it,” she says. “I was the class president. I can't look weak to the people. I knew I had to lead. If they feel this way, I have to make sure I go to work. I felt like Malcolm X or something,” she says jokingly.

The teachers in one of the schools she visited during her Vans tour kept telling to her that one of the staff members, who taught her back in the day, wanted to let her know that she was proud. The gesture, Tierra believes, is more of an effort to smooth over old tensions — and an apology. Last year, she ran into her former principal, who she says was equally unsupportive of her back then. Now, they too are suddenly proud of her.

“I just let it go. I knew what it was then,” Tierra says. “She might just feel bad about it now…. That stuff can eat away at you. I hate to say it, and it may sound selfish, but I kind of always knew that I was gonna get there, and I just feel like, ‘I told you so. I succeeded. I’m doing everything I wanted to do.’” Tierra knew who she wanted to be from a young age; she wasn’t a directionless youth who intimidated people. Her favorite teacher once told her she was an “alpha-female,” a phrase Tierra would spend most of her formative years decoding.