The song Tupac Shakur’s friends tell you to listen to—the one they say you have to hear to know him as he was—is the rap he wrote for Afeni, who carried him unborn in a jail cell and kissed him goodbye 25 years later in a trauma ward.

“Dear Mama,” it is called, and she’s what it’s all about: a single mother on welfare who came home after working late and tried to fix her kids a hot plate; a woman who “even as a crack fiend always was a black queen”; a heroine who “always was committed.”

“Tell me,” he cries, “how you did it.”

“Even though I act crazy,” he calls out to her at the finish, “I gotta thank the Lord that you made me. But the plan is to show you that I understand. You are appreciated. There’s no one above you.”

Afeni Shakur listens to that song often these days, at home in the house her son bought for her in Stone Mountain, Georgia. It is a fine place, far finer than the prison cage she knew a quarter-century ago during what used to be called “The Movement.”

She was a Black Panther then, accused by the People of the State of New York of plotting to blow up department stores and police stations. It was a fantastical charge, and Leonard Bernstein, Otto Preminger, Donald Sutherland, and Jane Fonda proclaimed her innocent. But the prosecutors had one thing right: Afeni Shakur was a person to contend with. How else to describe a woman who fought her jailers for the daily milk and egg she needed for the child inside her?

You can hear the grit in her still, when she talks of her boy. “Let me tell you the reality,” she begins, her words as sharp as his lyrics. “My great-grandmother was a slave. My grandmother was a sharecropper. My mother was a domestic, and I was whatever the fuck I was. That child changed things for all of us.”

There are moments, though, remembering the man that child became, when Afeni grasps her shoulders and, like any grieving mother, shakes with pain. Listening to “Dear Mama” is one of these moments. Remembering the ringing phone that broke her sleep the night of September 7, another.

Her friend Yaasmyn was on the phone. “Tupac’s been shot,” she said. “In Las Vegas. They say it’s bad.” Afeni didn’t need details. She’d always known this call was coming. “From the moment he was born,” she says, “I measured his life in five-year periods. When he was five, I was so grateful. When he was 10, I thanked God he was 10. Fifteen, 20, 25, I was always amazed he’d survived. He was a gift.”

He was snatched away just as his music predicted: gangsta-style, in a hail of heavy-caliber metal, fired, fittingly, from a late-model Cadillac.

Months before, he had filmed his own death in a video. “It’s just a fun little game . . . the game of life,” Tupac said while working on the piece which showed him expiring, bulletriddled, in an ambulance. “I know one day they’re gonna shut the game down, but I gotta go around the board as many times as I can before it’s my turn to leave.”

Go around, Tupac Shakur did: taking turns without asking, breaking hearts and rules. And when he left the board, gunned down by still-unknown assailants for still-unknown reasons, the chips were piled high: tens of millions in record sales; six movies; hundreds of poems and lyrics; plans upon plans upon plans, including funding a chain of day-care centers to ease the burdens of mothers like Afeni. There was a darker legacy, too: drug dealing, arrests for assault and weapons possession, a prison term after an alleged gang rape. He was a roil of opposites—warm and sensitive one instant, cold and quick-tempered the next—and the explosiveness of the mix made him rap’s most dangerous star. A prophet, said Rolling Stone; a menace, said Bob Dole—and both were right. Studios dubbed him “the next James Dean,” salons, “the next Genet.” Untamed, untamable, he embodied the black-male myth, made art of it, was imprisoned by it. “I’m going to save the young niggas,” he said. And called himself a “souljah.” The name was apt. Because Tupac Shakur was born in the middle of a war.