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

Back in West Baltimore — the landscape gutted, dead eyes all around, and hundreds of kids slain every year from gunshots and bricks to the skull and every other undignified means to their end — it became clear that we were all in proximity to great heaving change. Bill and I couldn’t name it, but felt it as a fear that jangled like the change in our pockets when we walked to the corner store. Dad responded to the radicalism of the moment with more radicalism that extended the bounds of rational thought. He refused to buy air-conditioning and insisted Baltimore’s muggy summers were best left to Zen: Son, son. The only heat is inside your head.

He deployed many fans, with white plastic cages that swiveled on axes and dual blade systems that could reverse and forward all at once. But all they did was blow the hot air more efficiently. He pushed Black Classic on me even more. He saw me as a special candidate for this. His political harangues had not yet sunk in; still, no one in the house devoured books like me. I read about everything I could find — dolphins and killer whales, volcanoes and alien life, histories of robotics, the gods of ancient Rome. I read to retreat into other worlds, but these Conscious books Dad pushed were just confirmation of the nightmare. And so the Knowledge of Self piled up next to my bed, unfinished.

No matter. Dad had other ways of making his point. I was impressed into the most mundane and monotonous services. In the garage behind our house Dad kept boxes of Black Classic books. My job was to open each box and place a mailing list card into each book — the idea being that each of these cards would float back from around the world requesting our catalog, and the senders would eventually buy books. On weekends, I might watch wrestling all morning, content in my own frantic idleness. But Dad would have been working since seven, and at noon he would appear and send me out back. I dreamed of a day when I made a dent in the inventory and there would be no more books to card. Instead, every weekend the boxes regenerated and overflowed. For this service I was paid the Paul Coates wage — a dollar an hour and no plucks upside the head. Once I protested—

Me: But this isn’t even minimum wage.

Dad: Son, this business puts food on your table. Your minimum wage is the shirt on your back.

This was not true. The press was not profitable. It took food off our table — whatever was left after the basics was reinvested. But in a broader, cosmic sense, he was correct. Black Classic Press — like Lemmel, like the many books suggestively strewn across the house, like Upward Bound — was another tool Dad enlisted to make us into the living manifestations of all that he believed and get us through.

But then, in bed at night, I conspired on many ways out. I thought of allegations of child abuse — certainly this work camp qualified. I thought of matches dropped in the garage, book burning as liberation. I thought about the romance of runaways and living in bus stations with friendly drunks, freight trains that cast about America, and fantasies of squatting in shopping malls where the mannequins came to life when the doors closed. But I never advanced these plans beyond the fantastical mind space that kids reserve for windfall fortunes and birthdays every day. Meanwhile, I was oppressed, persecuted under the rule of this enlightened despot.

The true resistance was led by Big Bill, my bridge to all the illicit and dangerous things that a young man must come to know. Once I came home from a half day at school and found Dante, Jay, and Bill assembled at the table in our small living room, presiding over several bottles. The bottles were filled with different colored liquid, to varying capacity.

Me: Yo, whattup?

Them: ( Glass-eyed nothingness, blank stare, incomprehensible slurring .)

Me: ( Creeping past to the kitchen .) Oookkkkaay…

Them: ( Looking up, laughing ) Mad dog, mad dog, mad dog! MAD DOG!

Bill stood up and filled a plastic cup halfway, then passed it to me. Anything to be worthy of manhood and dap. I snatched the cup and took it to the head. It was like Kool-Aid laced with hot sauce. Applause all around.

But more potent than minor acts of rebellion was the new slang Bill brought to bear on our oppressed situation. This was before Eazy-E brunched with Bush, and in radio there was still money to be had in boasting, “No rap.” Up North, the new sound was the regional anthem and broadcast to whole communities. But where I was from, the word didn’t come around on radio until all the streetlights were lit.

Some of you were there at the proper moment: sprawled across a homeboy’s bed, your back to the mattress, tossing a tennis ball to yourself, debating this year’s O’s. Driving your mother’s blue Cressida down Dolfield, and to all your niggers pointing out the window at Charmaine and then “lying” on your dick. In your cousin’s basement, clutching a joystick, wondering how they could call this single-player fraud Double Dragon. Then the magic moment, when a homey puts the tape in the deck and everything inside gets very quiet.

In Baltimore the feeling was cultish, and taken in only by a few. The music of the city was the erotic throb of house. I followed Bill, but — even at that young age — believed that the times demanded something that spoke to our chaotic, disfigured, and gorgeous world. Bill’s hands were Promethean. He would walk into our small bedroom, toss off his Alabama Starter jacket, throw a tape in the deck, and pump up the volume. Then he’d nod his head to the beat, rhyming along, pointing and waving his hands for emphasis on favorite lines and quips. This was the first music I’d ever known. I’d heard Luther and Deniece Williams, and like all my brethren, I hummed along. But it was nothing that I could own. What I loved about the New York noise was that, like our lives, none of it made sense. Viola loops got the best of me, garbled voice samples flying in from impossible angles, and then where there should have been a bridge, melody, a jangling hook, there were only drums — kicking, booming, angry 808 drums.

Here I am, standing before my small black stereo. Jungle Brothers is spinning on the turntable. Q-Tip pierces the fog with a nativist sword. I am on my third listen and still I do not understand.

They fought back with civil rights

That scarred the soul, it took the sight.

The album is a jumble. I can’t tell you what Mike G is running from. I have never heard of the Violators. I scrounge around the house in search of my father’s atlas, flip pages until I arrive at a map of their great and mythical realm, Strong Island. I expect a kingdom, but all I see is a bunch of dumb islands waiting to float away.

The mystery, those great expansive plains of unsaid, sucked all of us in. No one knew how Kane came to spit in such a way that the roughest breakbeat turned coquettish, a lady in roses on a Saturday evening stroll. I’d search the liner notes for clues, play back lyrics until they were memory, and then play back memory until I gleaned messages, imagined and real. And slowly I began to pull something from the literature. Slowly I came to understand why these boys needed to wear capes, masks, and muscle suits between bars. Slowly I came to feel that I was not the only one who was afraid.

Big Bill’s next step was natural in that age. Across the country black boys were begging their parents for a set of Technic 1200s and an MPC. Failing that, they banged on lunch tables and beat boxed until they could rock the Sanford and Son theme song and play it underwater. Up on Wabash, Bill stood in Marlon’s basement, holding the mic like a lover. They called themselves the West Side Kings, which meant Marlon cutting breakbeats and Bill reciting battle rhymes he’d scrawled on a yellow notepad. He would return to Tioga with demos, play them for hours, and rap along with himself. This went on for two years before I saw the West Side Kings in action. By then the game had changed, and brothers had gotten righteous.