The rap world could surely use a strong female MC right about now. Riding the bench for Ludacris’ DTP team for years, Shawnna is more than ready to prove she’s the destined one. Just give her a chance.

Rashawnna Guy’s father’s parents were sharecroppers in the South back when Blacks were citizens but still couldn’t vote, back before the music of the fields got swallowed up by White people and spit back out as rock ’n roll. Up to Chicago from Louisiana in the ’50s, Shawnna’s daddy did what many with hard times in their blood and a gift for sharing did: he became a bluesman. And not just any old like-to-hear-it-here-it-go street-corner busker with a tin cup and a guitarload of cliches, but a truly elegant purveyor of the form. Buddy Guy became a legend. Even taught Jimi Hendrix a thing or two.

When Buddy bought the single-family home out in Country Club Hills, Ill, it was a step in the right direction—away from the hood. A family, he reasoned, should have a proper home. He himself certainly wouldn’t have minded one growing up.

Suburban houses might keep certain elements out, but the doors always open from the inside. Back in the day, Shawnna used to run back to the familiar, just as everyone else was trying to get away from it. “I still went back to the hood, though,” she says, “’cause that’s where I came from.” And that’s where the rappers were too. Shawnna might not spit that blues. But perhaps more than any other female rapper in the game, Shawnna, now 26, understands the value of dirt. Sure, the velour Baby Phat tracksuit is shiny pink, and the hair is primped and preened, but once her mouth opens, all illusions are cast aside. “I tend to be drawn more to the street,” she says. “That’s where I came from—the subways, the high-school hallways in the circle, the bell ringing and we still out there getting fucking referrals and shit ’cause niggas was like, ‘Hell naw, this girl didn’t beat me.’ But I faded all of them.”

Sometimes you run away from home, and sometimes you come running back. Today, some 20 years after Shawnna’s family first moved to Country Club Hills—and more than a decade after they moved to even tonier confines—the house needs work. Needs some structural help, a few coats of new paint. For the past couple of years, Shawnna’s younger brother Icedrake, a producer who’s worked with Ludacris and Lil’ Kim, has made the house his personal studio and headrest. But the last thing Shawnna needs is a bachelor pad. As the mother of two with a burgeoning artistic career to support—as part of Ludacris’ Disturbing Tha Peace family, with a forthcoming solo album on Def Jam—she needs stability. And so this house, the place that used to represent the antithesis of Shawnna’s streets, is now her base of operations, both professional and personal. One day, she’s laying up in the bed, working on rhymes. The next, she’s figuring out how to cope with the ever-shady home-repair contractors. And the next, she’s arranging for her daughter’s third birthday party. Shawnna juggles these tasks with aplomb. Says taskmaster Ludacris of his young female protégé: “These female artists need to be nervous. Hell, men need to be threatened too.”

Here’s the conundrum of the female rapper: Be hard, but not too hard. Be soft, but not too soft. Be available, but not too available. Be untouchable, but not too untouchable. Write your own rhymes, but have everyone swear the man next to you did. Be dope enough to get noticed by the guys, but not dope enough to threaten their fragile arrogance. Dress to the nines, only to have people say all you have to offer is fashion. Sleep with no one. Sleep with everyone. In short, be a ride-or-die bitch who’s down to stash the piece and then fuck in a back alley and still be prim enough to bring home to Mom for Sunday morning church services. Madonna. Whore. Healer. Bruiser. Fire. Ice.

You can count the number of female rappers who fulfill those criteria on no hands—they don’t exist. Foxy is too schizo, Eve too monotonous. Lauryn too precious, Kim not enough so.

Needless to say, it’s an uphill run Shawnna faces. It has only complicated matters that, each time that she signed her record deals, she’s been pregnant. Nevertheless, the proud mother of two—six-year-old son Raishawn (who was born with cerebral palsy) and daughter Cameron—is more than happy to shoulder the responsibility. “For real, I love my babies,” she says. “They keep my mind off all of the bullshit of the industry. [Having children] made me grow up. It’s more liberating than strenuous.”