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

It is now 1973. My mother is living with Grandma on Penhurst Avenue. Grandma had come up from the Eastern Shore, endured a broken marriage, raised kids in the projects, and now owned her own home. My mother was her last daughter. She was just out of college, teaching school in Baltimore, and on her way, like her sisters, into the soft, safe arms of the middle class. Had it gone the way it should have, my name might be Otha or Ray. I might have played soccer, worshipped Christmas, joined the Scouts. Ma was from a righteous old-school black family. They believed in the supremacy of God and country and the grand power of hard work. My father was not a detour, was not a hard right but a parallel universe — Stormshadow and Spirit — where each one of those values was worshipped to a different end.

But my mother was done different. She was one of three sisters. The oldest, Ava, was dubbed the smart one. The middle girl, Jo-Ann, was brown and lovely. Ma scrounged for her place. She was skinny. She wore Coke bottle glasses. She had bad hair and a gap between her teeth. She failed third grade and did not learn to read until she was nine. Around the way, kids teased her and laughed. She was slow with her words and quick with her fists. She was the sort of girl whose aunts told her that personality would take her a long way. There was truth there. She was tough but magnetic, lived to entertain and make family and friends laugh. She was a lovely dancer — once stood in her uncle Otha’s record shop with a Dreamsicle and did the twist until the ice cream shot off the stick and flew away.

She grew up around her own. White people were absent, theoretical, and subject to unsubstantiated conjecture. She remembers the assassination of Martin Luther King most clearly because the rioting interrupted her senior prom. Still, there was that same vague sense that something was wrong, and in her already alienation, she felt that gnaw. She went natural in high school, and only permed her hair again for her sister’s wedding after Grandma threatened to leave her out. At college, she was arrested for protesting. She hung posters of the Panthers in her dorm room.

She briefly met Dad once, after she donated to the Panthers’ free clothing program. And then again when her best friend suggested they visit the George Jackson Prison Movement. She was one of many who came there to study various books. Dad made an unromantic impression. He wore cheap clothes. His hair rebelled against combs. He had five kids, who at any moment could be roaming about the bookstore. He wore old shoes. He lived with various women. But he was all brainpower. He had dropped out of high school but could think in ways that the credentialed class could not conceive. He helped my mother get an A on her senior thesis. He preached about the people’s need for books, and he provided them. He organized social activities — celebrations of the family or children’s books. His kids were always with him. His various lovers were put to work.

By now, Linda had thrown him out. He erected a partition in the back of the Jackson Movement’s headquarters and lived in this makeshift half-room for many months. Ma would come to the festivals and discussions, and then tease him for being homeless. At the time she was in love with an ex-con. She gave this man an autographed copy of Black Man of the Nile, one of the texts Dad had prescribed. The book had no effect, and instead of grabbing the mantle of his ancestors, Ma’s paramour robbed a church. Ma was carrying his baby. He called her—

Cheryl, the money is hidden in my apartment, in my bedroom. Please take it to my lawyer.

Ma went and got the cash, took what she needed for an abortion, and gave the rest to his lawyer. She did not answer any more of his calls.

When she returned to the bookstore, she was solo. She had graduated from college, now teaching. She bought an orange Volkswagen bug.

Dad: When do I get to ride in your car?

Ma: Let’s go.

Dad was ill acquainted with the social intricacies of courting. No woman affiliated with him can remember anything resembling a date. He was not cheap or dispassionate as much as he was uncouth and all about business. Even among the Conscious brothers he was different. He seldom wore dashikis. His Afro was negligible. He would not light the candles of Kwanzaa. He was a world my mother had not seen. He cooked beans without meat. He bought fried fish from Ray’s Seafood near North and Smallwood and poured on hot sauce until she cried. After hours, she would stop by and find Dad in the back with brother Howard tackling a pint of Jack.

He chafed at the thought of more kids. But when my mother saw him, she thought of redemption. Whenever he appeared, Bill, Kelly, Malik, or some other child was hanging on his neck, and he was so in love with them all. They were out driving to anyone knows where. She was firm and direct. Dad pulled the Volkswagen bug over to the side of the road.

Dad: Cheryl, I can’t have more kids. I have five. I can barely provide for the ones I have.

Ma: You have five, but I have none. And I don’t need you to provide — I can do that on my own. What I need is someone to be a man, and I think you’re a wonderful father. I think you are raising beautiful kids.

Dad’s ego swelled all over him. It was the winter of ’74. I was born in the fall of ’75. My father was twenty-nine. My mother was twenty-four. Dad had evolved and was present for my birth. I was brought home to a broken row house on Park Heights Avenue. Rats sped down the storm drain. They moved further down Park Heights. The weekly rent was $41, and it was the hardest money Dad ever had to earn in his life.

The life of a revolutionary was not paying off. He was conned into becoming a better man. The VA promised checks in compensation for each of his kids, if he would go back to school. He enrolled at Antioch College with no plans for graduation, strictly in it for the checks. And then he watched as brothers who came after him left before. He was thirty, an age he never expected to reach, and he began to comprehend the need for some sort of plan.

When I was three, he got his BA, then shipped off to Atlanta University for a master’s. He came back and took his first professional job sorting histories for the official library of the Mecca. By then, he boiled down his dream of vertical integration to the step that fascinated him most. He’d begun publishing just before he left for Atlanta. Now he plumbed through all the old works by black scholars, works lost to time, and brought them back, restored in all their splendor.

Among the Conscious, a man is only worth his latest reading. Each page pulled you farther out of slumber, and among the most enlightened it was not uncommon to hear an entire conversation composed of footnotes.

In his bookstore days, Dad would sit behind the counter, nodding his way through the zealous interrogation of a new convert, who had nothing better to do than go to school.

Conscious: You read J. A. Rogers’s “Hitler and the Negro”? Do you carry 100 Amazing Facts ?

Dad: It’s in the back.

Conscious: Yeah, I see you got that. But what about As Nature Leads ?

Dad: We don’t carry either.

Conscious: See, that’s the problem with black bookstores. Can’t have enough J. A., brother.

Dad: Right, right. Mmmhmm.

Conscious: See, brother, those books are out of print. You know what that means? The white man ain’t gonna let you see those. He don’t want those books in print.