Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Beautiful Struggle - A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood

Dad wanted me present to everything, my entire neurology cocked. But I sleepwalked through the world, hoping one day to wake up on a fantastic other side and realize that this had all been a dream. I was clueless to more than just the street shit — I was the type of child who lost his hats and jackets on the first warm day of the year. Dad would lecture, and the words would fly straight past. It was like I heard them but could not translate.

When I turned nine, I got my first set of house keys, and lost them an average of once a month. This was heresy and Dad’s warnings stretched into double digits, until follow-through was all that was left.

Where’re your keys? he demanded.

I don’t have them, I mumbled.

He was standing in the living room, off from work, always off from work at the most awful times. House keys seem small, but to my father they embodied everything about me that could someday get me killed.

Well, where are they?

This kid at school took them from me and threw them in the trash.

Did you pull them out?

No.

Did you pop the kid in the mouth?

No.

What did you do?

Nothing.

This is when Dad snapped. There was some calculation and illusion here. Dad wasn’t the type to have a bad day at work and come home and start swinging. Equally, there would be days when the teacher called home and you were certain a beating was on the way, and he would sit at the table and talk. But this made it worse, because when we were wrong, we felt trapped in a horror movie. We never knew what was coming, how it was coming, or when.

Dad walked up the steps and came back with his black leather belt, folded so that the buckle met the tip. He jabbed me in the chest and asked who I was more scared of — him or them.

I bring this here to intimidate, he said. To show you what I am. To show you that I mean business. But this isn’t what it’s about anymore.

Then he dropped the belt on the brown carpet and started swinging.

My father fought his whole life, but once he’d been like me — from the street but not of it. He was indoctrinated at eight. Dad lived with his tangled family on Markoe Street in West Philadelphia. His father had kids by three sisters, so that Aunt Pearl, who Dad loved, defied classification, and his four brothers and sisters were also cousins. My grandfather was in his late forties, and winding down his reign as the satyr king of North Philly. He was profligate, and seemed to reveal new children the way others revealed ordinary vases, penny loafers, and belt buckles. He was pretty — tall, light, and did not need stocking caps, hot water, and Murray’s grease for waves. He loved the newspaper, and it fell on my father to feed this daily hunger. He did this faithfully until one evening, he returned holding nothing, crying about kids on the corner who’d roughed him up.

Go get my paper, my grandfather told him. If you come back without it, you’ll have to fight me.

Dad protested.

Son, he told him, the first one who says something, you pop him in the mouth and try to kill him. You do that and I promise you’ll have my paper.

This is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual detail. In Dad’s telling the fight is two shadows rolling around, but what is solid is the feeling, not of explicit triumph but of an awkward victory — the win that does not come from vanquishing a foe but fear. Conjuring the will to campaign. Now he was armed with that magic, that first taste of freedom earned, and he knew he could walk his block as he pleased, could buy his father’s paper at midnight under a starless sky, if that’s what he wanted. Predators would never see him as easy, because he’d reached out and tapped into the great forces that ward the vultures away. That Knowledge was for beyond Markoe Street. Years later, these same kids would be adults, subtle and dignified. But Dad could see their beaks, red eyes, and battered black wings.

Still even then he was Dad, not meant to make a life on the block. He had no real swagger or pose. He was an incompetent thug, the sort of boy who knew how to keep the heat off but not how to bring it. He got caught stealing and throwing bottles at white boys. He dropped out of school, bragged that there was nothing there for him to learn. He haunted libraries at odd hours in search of more Mickey Spillane. You could have asked him what he wanted to be back then, and though he could not name it, he would have told you about the trips downtown, how’d he run his hand across the base of tall buildings that he was sure he would one day own.

Dad was of that era, an acolyte of that peculiar black faith that makes us patriots despite the yoke. So he worshipped JFK, got amped off old war movies, dreamed of leaping over sand hills, driving tanks, and tossing grenades. He was semi-Conscious then. He worked delivering groceries for A&P on Broad Street, a few doors down from the Uptown. Next door was the state liquor store and on the second floor a Nation of Islam mosque. He saw Malcolm in the flesh, and noted with interest the nationalists out on Columbia Avenue and their posters of noble Ethiopians, the ones who would not beg. Martin Luther King was just beginning his tour of the South. Dad had never seen a water fountain or toilet reserved by race, and could not access the Other Knowledge that called on young men to sing while barbarians swung clubs and unleashed dogs.

There were few options in his vicinity, no collegiates on his block, and whenever he strayed from his own street the reception he got was Hey, mutherfucker, where you from? So he fell back on his dreams of John Wayne. In the army, he handled dogs for the military police, was shipped to Vietnam with only the vaguest sense of its place in politics or history. He was the only brother in his unit. It was like anything else — some of the white boys were human, but others ran cock block between Dad and the Vietnamese girls. When he busted out his battery-powered record player and threw on the latest Stax, they’d howl and laugh. While on leave he concocted payback, bought an armful of Dylan records, knowing only that Dylan sounded hillbilly.

In the tent he shared with his unit, he played “Masters of War,” and mocked them, but more mocked himself. They loved Dylan like Dad loved Pat Boone, which is to say not at all. But his image of whiteness was so flat that he assumed they all banged to the same soulless beat. Then the plot inverted. Dylan’s voice was awful, an aged quaver that sounded nothing like the deep-throated or silky R&B that Dad took as gospel. But the lyrics wore him down, until he played Dylan in that addicted manner of college kids who cordon off portions of their lives to decipher the prophecies of their favorite band. Dad heard poetry, but more than that an angle that confirmed what a latent part of him had already suspected. This war was bullshit.

Even then, in his army days, Dad was more aware than most. Back in training he’d scuffled with a Native American soldier, who tried to better his social standing by airing out the unit’s only black. After they were pulled apart, Dad walked up to his room, calmed down, and then returned to the common area. On a small table, he saw a copy of Black Boy . He just knew someone was fucking with him. But he picked up the book, and discerned that it was Nobody Smiling. He took it up to his room, mostly because he was touched but also to keep the book from playing a part in any further racist slights.

In Richard Wright, Dad found a literature of himself. He’d read Manchild in the Promised Land and Another Country, but from Wright he learned that there was an entire shadow canon, a tradition of writers who grabbed the pen, not out of leisure but to break the chain. He bubbled on the edge of Consciousness. The night they gunned Malcolm down, Dad and a few black soldiers were headed into town to carouse and drink. The message came over the radio, but the rest of the car kept talking.