He was nervous. He hadn’t been onstage since the accident. Here he was, 34 years old, a veteran performer, but he felt like an anxious teenager, picking up a microphone for the first time. Would he find the words? He felt somewhat reassured when he summoned the rhythm in his head. He’d approached the mic a thousand times before, first on street corners and in clubs in New York and later on stages around the world. But he surely never anticipated performing in this venue—the rec room and sometimes synagogue of the Haym Salomon Home for Nursing and Rehabilitation near Coney Island, Brooklyn.

Above the makeshift stage hung a long sheet of butcher paper, heralding the HAYM SALOMON TALENT SHOW in bubble letters. After a resident named Betty finished reading poems from her grandchildren, it was his turn to take the stage. He cut an odd figure up there: a six-foot-three former rap legend in a tracksuit, sweating from nerves in front of a room full of frail senior citizens. He may have seemed like a strange booking choice for Haym Salomon—but in fact, he felt right at home. Because he was home. “Please welcome,” the announcer said, “our very own musical maestro, the one and only T La Rock!”

The crowd waited. Some were asleep in their wheelchairs. A few no longer knew their own names. But those who were alert and awake were in quite a festive mood. They tapped their feet as the music started, waving at their fellow resident.

T had been living at Haym Salomon for some time, recovering from a traumatic head injury. Two years earlier, on April 1, 1994, he had been attacked on the street near his house in the Bronx. By the time he got to the hospital, he had slipped into a coma.

The doctors later said T had transient global amnesia, and when he was moved to Haym Salomon—it was one of the few facilities in the five boroughs that could accommodate his kind of injury—he thought at first that he had wound up in some kind of purgatory hotel. His rehabilitation, the doctors warned, would be a long road.

The other residents were mostly elderly Jews, Yiddish speakers whose families had emigrated from the Pale of Settlement. T was from the Bronx, and he had been a direct witness to the birth of hip-hop; ten years earlier, his single “It’s Yours” was the very first hip-hop recording released by Def Jam, hashed out with Rick Rubin in his dorm at N.Y.U. That song became a hit, inspired a whole new sound in rap music, and placed T at the lead of a seismic cultural force. Many of T’s fellow patients knew he was a rapper or singer or something (“That nice boy from the third ﬂoor? They said he was a superstar.” “Yeah, right”), but this was his first chance to show them.

It was, as they say, a warm room. T looked around and saw that everyone was there: Bernie and Leon, rolling back and forth in their chairs; Norma and Sophie and Betty down in front; and on the sidelines, Marshall and Sheila, clapping for him. He’d had to painstakingly re-memorize his rap, a medley of hits from his glory days. At the edge of the stage, a student volunteer started beatboxing, and when T found his way into the rhythm, his confidence swelled. He felt that familiar feeling, the declarative pose of street corners in the Bronx, the self-assurance of a youthful yearning for a place in the world, and as the beat rolled to the edge of the verse it was by instinct that T La Rock reached for the microphone.

T holds the hand of an elderly resident at the nursing home. James Estrin/The New York Times/Redux

I’d heard about T La Rock and his strange fish-out-of-water story from a friend who’d stumbled across an article about him published in The New York Times in 1996, when the rapper still lived in the nursing home. That brief mention made me want to find out more about what his life was like at Haym Salomon. I tracked T down and talked to him at length, along with his family and the former staff of the nursing home, to understand how he had re-discovered himself. There was some irony in T’s predicament, since so much of his music was about identity: proclamatory, sometimes prideful, singing a song of oneself. And yet, T could barely summon a self to sing about.