Where They're From 
Home Girl
1. Erykah Badu Sings and Dances 2. Raises Her Children3. Grows Herbs4. Rides a Skateboard5. Saves Her Old Hood in Dallas6. And Works on Her New Album, Which Will Be Finished When It’s Finished
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When she returned, the students were aligned in rows for warm-up exercises, and Badu slipped into the second one, three kids in. Weiss, a short Filipino American woman who has won several distinguished teaching awards, started the music and energetically clapped her hands, calling out cadences as the students went through a litany of the various exercises—“One and two and circle your arm!”—modern-dance students have been doing forever. Badu had done the same ones two decades earlier and followed along as if she had done them yesterday. When the group started prancing across the hardwood floor, leaping and high-stepping to drills, Badu followed along. By now several teachers had come in to sit and watch. Rosann McLaughlin Cox, a white-haired woman who is the founder of the school’s dance program, said to no one in particular, “See her back there? She looks like one of the babies!”
Weiss kept up the clapping and the banter. “Come on, you guys,” she called. “Life is good! You’ve got Erykah Badu dancing with you!” Badu was clearly as eager to please Weiss and prove herself as the students were. At one point Weiss called out, “You guys, she looks just like you! She is!” As the dancers would gather on the side waiting for the others to cross, Badu acted like a teenager, joking and fidgeting. When a girl fell, Badu hugged her. At one point I heard her say to one of the boys, “How’s your mom?” The boy, named Jabril Johnson, answered quietly, and Badu nodded.
His mother, it turned out, had had a part to play in Badu’s leaving dance behind and becoming a recording artist. After she graduated from high school, she did various things—rapped in local clubs and on a radio station, studied theater at Louisiana’s Grambling State University, taught dance and theater to kids in South Dallas, and worked at Steve Harvey’s Comedy House, in Oak Cliff, selling tickets, waitressing, and sometimes getting onstage to perform. One night Jabril’s mother happened to see her there and called her brother, talent agent Tim Grace. He was impressed enough with Badu’s improv—and then with her rapping and singing—to become her manager. Badu had been performing with her cousin Robert Bradford and they had made a tape; with Grace’s help she shopped it to some labels and landed a deal with Universal. In 1995 she moved to Brooklyn with, she told me, “a backpack and my Daisy Dukes.” She was a hippie girl from Dallas, wearing a T-shirt and jeans, eating no meat or dairy, studying African history, and reading Angela Davis. But now she changed her name to Erykah Badu (for the scat syllables, ba-du, ba-du, ba-du) and began in earnest putting together her sound, philosophy, and image.
They came together on Baduizm, where she used jazz guys like Hargrove and Ron Carter and hip-hop guys like the Roots to fashion something fresh; soon artists like Maxwell and Macy Gray were following her lead. People in Dallas knew that Badu could rap, but on Baduizm she showed she could also sing: vulnerable like Billie Holiday, pop-sexy like Diana Ross, just plain sexy like Chaka Khan. And songs such as “Appletree” were the kind a Natural Black Woman would write:
I don’t walk ’round trying to
be what I’m not
I don’t waste my time trying
to get what you got
I work at pleasin’ me ’cause
I can’t please you
And that’s why I do what I do
My soul flies free like a willow tree
Doo wee doo wee doo wee.
The single “On & On” had the memorable line “My cipher keeps moving like a rolling stone,” which was puzzled over by millions when the song became a number one R&B hit. Universal rushed out a live follow-up that had another hit, “Tyrone,” a novelty song about a bad boyfriend that Badu had improvised onstage in London; it would become a crowd-pleasing feminist put-down anthem.
Her next studio album, Mama’s Gun, was almost four years coming, delayed by writer’s block and Badu being Badu. She began using a line she would pull out when needed: “I don’t go by the deadlines,” she’d say. “I go by the lifelines.” Mama’s Gun, which she produced herself, was harder and funkier than Baduizm and yielded another hit, “Bag Lady,” an advice song to women about cutting loose their emotional pain (“Girl, I know sometimes it’s hard and we can’t let go . . . Let it go”). By then Badu had tired of the gele and surprised audiences on tour with a shaved head. Her fourth album, Worldwide Underground, took another three years, much of it written on the road, improvised during sound checks and performances. The result was weirder than anything she’d done before, with riffs and syllables repeating for minutes at a time, more Laurie Anderson than Lauryn Hill. The album had nothing on it approaching a hit, and on the cover Badu wore a giant Afro, Angela Davis—style. Next to her head were the words “Neo-Soul Is Dead.”
After thirty minutes the class was done, and everyone stood around sweating and smiling. Badu and the kids got together for a group photo; then she, with Weiss at her side, gave a brief speech. “You guys,” she said, “I was not the best dancer—”
“But,” Weiss interrupted, “she had more than that. She had heart, which is what every artist has to have.” Everyone clapped. Someone in the group began singing “Tyrone” and others joined in: “I think you better call Tyrone. And tell him, come on, help you get your shit . . .”
Everyone looked at one another and laughed; they knew they would get a pass because Badu had written it. By now there were two dozen other students and teachers in the room watching. Someone called, “Sing!” and someone else added, “‘Tyrone’!” Badu laughed, sat down, and made everyone else sit in front of her. “I’m gonna sing,” she said, “but not ‘Tyrone.’” She started snapping her fingers slowly, and everyone followed. Then she began singing softly, and again they followed: “Ohh, oh-ohh, oh-ohh, oh-ohh, oh-oh-oh-ohh.” It was “Bag Lady,” and the students knew every word. Badu was completely relaxed, doing what she loves to do more than anything: perform.
Afterward, she hugged teachers and talked with students, many of whom took her picture with their cell phones. She said about her alma mater, “I still go there when I want to think.” Then she added with a laugh, “Before I went to New York, I went to Pegasus [a campus sculpture of the school mascot] to ask permission: ‘Oh, Great One.’” A young, dark-skinned girl approached her. “I heard you’re from South Dallas,” she said. Badu smiled and nodded. “That’s my hood. I just want to look at you,” the girl continued, talking fast. “You’re a superstar. Maybe I can take a picture with you?” Someone said, “She can sing too,” and after a little prompting from her friends, the girl asked Badu if it was okay if she sang something. Sure, said Badu. The girl shut her eyes and opened her mouth; her voice was big and powerful, from the church. “I keep on falling in and out of looooooove”—here she employed the gospel melisma that is inescapable in R&B and pop music these days—“with you. Sometimes—” and she stopped abruptly. “Thank you so much for listening,” she chattered. “So, like, when you see me in a few years—I want fame just like yours. I don’t know if you can hear it in my voice . . .” Badu kept a smile on her face, and the girl eventually stopped and ran off with her friends, whooping.
“Now that,” Denise said, “was a first.”
“This used to be one of the most beautiful neighborhoods ever,” Badu said as we drove along Pennsylvania Avenue in South Dallas. “Families were active, lawns were beautiful, trees looked nice, people put up Christmas lights at Christmastime. It was a neighborhood. Now I feel like I’m in New Orleans after Katrina.” We turned onto some of the cross streets. Many houses were abandoned, while most just looked worn-out. Plenty had their windows boarded up. Yards were muddy, and stray dogs walked slowly down the street. “South Dallas dogs are so slow,” said Badu with a chuckle. We drove some more. “South Dallas used to be called Sunny South Dallas,” Badu said, sighing. “It’s not called that anymore.”
It was the usual suspects, she said: “Time, drugs, lack of money, lack of education, lack of willpower.” So how, then, did you get out of here? “My family. I was raised by strong women. My mother made me this way.” Badu’s late father, William “Toosie” Wright, spent most of her life in prison, so she and her sister and brother were raised by her mother, Kolleen, while spending a lot of time with her two grandmothers, Thelma Gipson and Viola Wilson. “I had a progressive-thinking family. My mother had a lot of friends who would introduce us to things, give us tickets to go places. My mother gave me my sense of style and wit and sophistication, but she also wanted us to stay in South Dallas—she wanted us to know who we are. I got my manners and morality from Thelma and my spirituality from Viola. There was also my godmother, Gwen Hargrove [Roy’s mother], who was my mom’s best friend. She ran the MLK rec center and gave me my sense of art.”
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