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

But Dad was not half stepping. And where others talked and complained, he journeyed through the library stacks, found a trove of books and pamphlets that expressed the world from our angle. Then he followed the notes from these books until he was enmeshed in a forgotten world of black literature and scholarship. The titles ran the gamut from lynching to ancient Ethiopia to the memoirs of cowboy Nat Love.

He began in the basement of our Park Heights row house, with a tabletop offset printer and four out-of-print pamphlets brought back from the edge. It was 1978, and this was a different magic. The Panthers were a sweeping romance — the young promise of shooting and fucking your way out of Donna Reed and into Pam Grier. But when Dad went to publishing, he scaled back into matrimony and left the world of mass upheaval. History would be altered, not in the swoop but with the long slow reawakening.

In my early years, I only barely understood how different my family was. When I was six we moved to a lovely house on Barrington Road. Our neighborhood was an island in the sky. There were windows everywhere, each with a different, awesome view of the world. A broad wooden porch extended from the front door and around to the side, until it formed a large L. When it rained, I’d sit outside listening to thunder, counting the seconds between sound and light. In the attic, I threaded trains and tracks through green foam mountains and imagined stops in sleepy towns far to the north.

I was down with my brother Malik. With three years between us, and a shared interest in alternative reality, I was closest to him in age and disposition. On weekends, we would sprawl across the living room floor in front of the wood-burning stove, and go rooting through the Isle of Dread or In Search of the Unknown. When I held polyhedral dice, their many sides were all futures, shards of other worlds where Medusae flashed their dead gazes and my dwarven thrower shattered against stone. I was young, chubby, and still completely smiles. My skin was clear and brown. My eyes were wide like my name. My styleless haircut was the work of my father, my widow’s peak crawling out like a spy. Life was as open and possible as those emerald dice from Geppi’s.

Ma would say that one day I would fly. She did not know. On the living room floor I had papers spread in front of me, with wisdom, saves, and spells. Those papers were lives. They unfurled scrolls and spoke words to animate the dead. They were cursed by intelligent swords that hungered for the blood of elves. They courted pegasi in old tongues, then soared over hills that billowed green, glacial mountains dusted white, bogs sagging with plague and dead hope. They were honored in Kara-Tur, Greyhawk, and Krynn.

What did I know of white kids gone demonic, Patricia Pulling, and steam tunnels? Fuck the dumb dichotomies and what people think this means. Even then, I was dreaming of Raistlin’s black robes one moment, and Dorsett’s spin move the next. This was what my father deeded — that our Knowledge of Self be more than America, that we understand the brain death that sprawled from the projects to the subdivisions. Consciousness was a beginning, but the imagination that could turn straight 18s into paladins in plate, could make warrens in tunnels from graph paper, could pull armies of gnolls from miniatures — this was the Knowledge that ultimately would find a way out.

My father was black as the universe, but the doctrinaire could get the bozak. He tried his hand at jewel crafting, until the cadmium almost killed him. Behind our crib on Barrington, he kept bees in a hive of movable frames. On weekends, you’d see him and Brother Howard spacewalking in white masks and giant suits. They’d return with trays of honey and wax. Big Bill would chew the wax like tobacco. The raw honey made me sick. Once a drone stung my mother, and Dad joked that these were the origins of young Menelik, born early that next year.

These were the years where I knew six brothers and sisters were a gorgeous gift. Me and Menelik were the only permanent residents of Barrington Road. But then on weekends — or when Patsy, Selah, or Linda just got sick — any combination of kids could appear, and with them another world. My sister Kris brought boxes of dubbed tapes, put me on to New Edition and later Big Daddy Kane. Bill would ball up socks and pillowcases into a makeshift football, and on our knees we’d crash into one another until someone hit the floor.

Our best days were those weekends, when all the kids flowed through on Friday night. They always stuck me with the itchy cover. I was too young to put up a fight. Saturday, Dad would make pancake batter from scratch, then pull a bottle of Alaga syrup from the fridge and set it in a pan of boiling water. He would fire up his old black griddle and I would stand back and watch. Dad loved to take chances — once he tossed in a can of corn. Another time it was cottage cheese for milk. Either way we all would pile into the kitchen and eat pancakes in stacks of three. When I’d go back for more Dad would claim my stomach was smaller than my eyes.

By noon we were out on the front lawn. Dad would fiddle with his secondhand camera, which hung from a long black strap around his neck. Everyone feared that strap, because Dad could also deploy it to enlighten children and bring them into balance. Ma would arrange us into a giggling pyramid, with Menelik up top. Dad would flick away until Kelly, John, or Kris — someone at the bottom — got restless and shook the core. We’d tumble to the grass like clowns out of a rainbow-colored car, then shove, stumble, and laugh. Ma would step back and pull Menelik close. Dad just flicked away, until these moments were encased in amber.

By Sunday night, it was me and Menelik again, all alone as we were, and I was lost in the sprawl of this house and its many doors, stairs. On Monday, I’d eat a bowl of Chex, grab my lunch, and head up Ayrdale. I’d stop off at Butch’s and reveal four nickels, enough for ten Squirrel Nuts and ten lemon cookies. At Callaway Elementary, I’d stand out front, hoping to get a look at big-eyed Terry or her mom. Grandma lived a few blocks away, right off Penhurst. In the daytime she drove a big white car to somewhere near Reisterstown and took care of grown white people who could barely spell their names. Sometimes I’d show up after school, and I will always remember her smiling and saying — Boy, you ain’t worth two cents — before making me a plate of french fries.

All my classmates were gifted and talented. But twice a day, Ms. Rhone pulled five or six and took us to a room with a fountain, brown tables, and walls painted sea blue. We tended a hermit crab and came to understand that all animals, even us, have a habitat. All our homework was weird and open-ended. We made dioramas that moved and told stories, and concocted creatures of papier-mâché.

We fielded a team for the Olympics of the Mind. When we practiced, Ms. Rhone played Danse Macabre, and the strings jabbed like many shards of ice. Then she’d ask us to meditate on the color blue, and go around the room awarding points to whoever’s answers were most surreal. We competed over at the local liberal university and lost to a group of white kids, who looked like they did this thing in their sleep. I fantasized about taking them on again, but that would not happen. At the end of the year my parents removed me from these special classes, because I was screwing up in the part of school that mattered. From that point forward no part of any school mattered to me again.

Dad pushed me out of the island in the sky, citing a sack of problems that I couldn’t understand. The oil went too fast. The basement constantly flooded. Mr. Wilder built his fence onto our backyard.

My folks sold the house, and after a stint renting in Edmondson Village, we came to Tioga. This was 1984. I was older. I played Little League football. I traded World and Ranger Rick for Computer Gazette . From the back I’d transcribe programs in BASIC that predicted elections and sent hot air balloons in varying colors falling across the screen. I was like that for a year or so before things changed.