“But it’s what I know,” she says, returning to Dallas. “It’s where I’ve created, where I started, where I…” She shrugs: it’s everything. Her family is still the basic unit of reality in her life. Both of her grandmothers are still alive and verging on 90—one was once her accountant, the other her archivist, keeping years of articles and reviews and album covers in a tightly organized set of binders. Both, despite retiring from their official duties, remain, Badu says, smirking, “very actively opinionated in my life.” Her mother is her nanny—“and boss.” Her sister Koryan, or Koko, slips around the house, braids of pale-blonde and purple flowing down her back and past her waist; she is personal assistant, house manager, background vocalist. Her brother sells merchandise. Her cousin Ken is her estate manager and travels with her on tour.

“Gotta pay ‘em anyway,” Badu says. “Might as well put ‘em to work.”

Her speaking voice is very clear, very flexible—even when she’s quiet, or travels down an octave for comic effect, she’s audible across the room. She talks in a continuous negotiation between a drawl and a song. Two huge braids tumble out of a knit hat and down her torso; her toes are painted the same bright yellow that accents the house.

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I start to ask a question and realize halfway through that she is looking past me with her eyebrows furrowed, her mouth set sardonically. “Say that again?” she says. “I was looking at Seven.” Before I can repeat myself: “Boy! I thought your dad was picking you up.”

“Yeah,” comes the voice from somewhere behind me. “We about to go eat or something.” Seven—18 years old and skinny, a wide-mouthed second strain of his father walking around in the world—ambles into the living room to hug his mother goodbye.

Later in the afternoon, Badu will meet up with Seven and André—Badu calls her co-parent her “best friend for the past almost 20 years.” An Atlanta native, André moved to Dallas after their son entered high school. The three plan to visit a Buddhist temple to see a priest who gave Seven and André a reading a few weeks ago. Badu says she’s a skeptic, but decided to go along after hearing that the priest told Seven to clean out the refrigerator in his room—something, she says, that he really does need to do.

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I ask what’s in the fridge.

“I don’t know, hot sauce with the top off? It smells like hot sauce when you open the door. I don’t go in there, but it’s… just cans of shit, open.” She smiles with obvious pride. “He’s worked real hard. He home-schooled from 3 to 7, so he’s kinda focused. He’s like a nerd.” Seven likes art, designs shirts and buttons, and has studied Latin since the fifth grade: “So he knows how to spell a whole lot of shit.” Next year, she says, in college, “he’s gonna major in psychology and minor in business, so he can trick people into buying his things. That’s his idea.”

Badu’s second child, Puma, is 11. Her father is the Dallas-native rapper The D.O.C. She sings—“She’s just like me,” Badu says—and she goes to a French immersion school, where she is beginning to dabble in Mandarin. Mars, in the first grade, goes to an immersion school, too—hers for Spanish.

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“I just wanted to make sure,” Badu says, “that whenever I take over the country, I have a secretary of state, defense, and a peace ambassador at hand.”