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

That was the summer of 1988—the first great season of my generation. The Grand Incredible was dead, KRS converted to Consciousness and assumed the sentinel pose of Malik Shabazz. All the world’s boom boxes were transformed into pulpits for Public Enemy. Before now, the music was escapist and fun — some beats and the dozens, fat chains and gilded belt buckles. But Chuck D pulled us back into the real. He premiered in the colors of Al Davis, did not dance; and when he grabbed the mic, it transformed into the lost rifle of Robert Charles.

Here in Baltimore, brothers would put on the Enemy and recoil. We had never heard anything so grating — drums crashed into whistles, sirens blared off beat. But the cacophony was addictive and everywhere. In the alley behind Liberty, “Don’t Believe the Hype” was the loop. On weekends, amid modules, the Player’s Handbook , and dice, Malik would play “Cold Lamping” and quote Flavor Flav. Dad heard “She Watch Channel Zero?!” and pointed at Ma — That’s how I feel about them damn romance novels. She reads. She reads. She reads. I was a reluctant convert but captured by the many layers, the hints at revelation, and a sound that I did not so much enjoy as I felt compelled to understand. Every track was a disheveled history of music. And armed with an array of sonics, Chuck D came forward and revealed a new level of Knowledge.

His style was baffling. I caught disjointed phrases and images, times and places that did not cohere—“goddamn Grammys,” a “government of suckers,” “they see me, fear me.” By the tenth session, the sonic blur sharpened into a recovered collective memory. The story began in our glory years with the banishing of Bull Conner and all his backward dragons. Never had the mountaintop seemed so close at hand. But marching from victory we stumbled into a void. And now we were here in the pit, clawing out one another’s eyes. We were all — even me — so angry. We could not comprehend how it came to this. Dad tried to explain the Fall, but he was an elder and full with his own agenda. Chuck was one of us, and once we got it, we understood that he spoke beautifully in the lingua franca of our time. He took us back to ’66, showed us Hoover and his array of phone taps, the grafted devils with their drugs and guns like pox blankets for Indians. We fell, blinded, corrupted, consumed by Reaganomics, base heads, and black on black. But now was the hour of ’88. Now was the time to reverse our debased years, to take over, grab our guns again, and be men.

By then I had met the great lion, Afeni Shakur, most famous of the Panther 21. She’d moved to Baltimore some years earlier, and among the Conscious she was legend. Afeni was an old comrade of my father’s, but when the Panthers went to war with one another, they came down on different sides. They had comrades who’d killed their comrades, but, still in all, through another decade, the human touch pulled them back together.

I had heard the tales, and measured against the everyday sameness of my father, Afeni was large. But the legend was human — she smiled when she saw me, cooked spaghetti, and found my baby brother amusing. Her son and daughter spent time among us. Bill and Tupac traded lyrics. I took Sekyiwa to see Snow White . But even then their clan was glamorous and of that final faction that held out a Marxist hope of the empire’s ruin.

Here is how it all came together: Bill, Sekyiwa, all of us, we knew who we were, in the rote manner of knowing where two streets intersect. But anything more than that, a feeling for why any kid would grab a black beret, guns, and law books was only partially there. I was slowly coming to a dawning, and then one afternoon Sekyiwa and me sat on my bedroom floor pumping “Rebel Without a Pause”—“Hard — my calling card / Recorded and ordered — supporter of Chesimard.”

Sekyiwa looked up. That’s my aunt. Rather her aunt’s slave name. But Sekyiwa only partially understood how the name Chesimard had come to Chuck D.

The next day I went to my father for the story. The story was all of two sentences, and then Dad reaching up to his bookshelf for the Knowledge of Self. On the cover, her face was off center. She wore an Afro and glanced over her shoulder. On the cover was her name — Assata Shakur. I’d started down this path a few months earlier, burrowing through African Glory, a book my father republished. But now I truly became a seeker. This was not my father’s story and then it was; for there, inside the tale of one Panther, was the story of them all. The cowboy impulse took me first — the thought that I, for all my awkward hands and Krazy-Glued glasses, was rebel blood; and that thought filled me with a stupid, childish pride. But all of us need myths. And here out West, where we all had lost religion, had taken to barbarian law, what would be our magic? What would be sacred words?

I took to Consciousness because there was nothing else, no other sorcery to counter death for suede, leather, and gold. My father bet his life on change. For the glory of ex-cons, abandoned mothers, and black boys lost, he had made peace with his end. I was a coward, mostly concerned with getting from one day to the next. How could I square my young life with this lineage? What would I say to the theology of my father, which held that the Conscious Act was worth more than sex, bread, or even drawn breath?

There were no answers in the broader body, where the best of us went out like Sammy Davis and spoke like there had never been war. I will avoid the cartoons — the hard rocks loved Billy Ocean, Luther was classic, and, indeed, I did sit in my seventh period music class eyeing Arletta Holly and humming “Lost in Emotion.” But you must remember the era. Niggers were on MTV in lipstick and curls, extolling their exotic quadroons, big-upping Fred Astaire, and speaking like the rest of us didn’t exist. I’m talking S-curls and sequins, Lionel Richie dancing on the ceiling. I’m talking the corporate pop of Whitney, and Richard Pryor turning into the toy. Was like Parliament had never happened, like James Brown had never hit. All our champions were disconnected and dishonored, handing out Image Awards, while we bled in the streets.

But now the word turned Conscious, De La refused to scowl and Stetsasonic shouted across the Atlantic gap. First, Chuck, then KRS, and then everywhere you looked MCs were reaching for Garvey’s tricolor, shouting across the land, self-destruction was at an end, that the logic of white people’s ice had failed us, that the day of awareness was now.

Across the land, the masses fell sway to the gospel. Old Panthers came out in camouflage to salute Chuck D. Cold killers would get a taste of “Raise the Flag,” drop their guns, and turn vegan. Brothers quoted Farrakhan with wine on their breath. Harlots performed salaat, covered their blond french rolls in mud cloth and royal kente. Dark girls slashed their Apollonia posters, burned their green contacts, cut their hair, threw in braids. Gold was stashed in the top dresser drawer. The fashion became your father’s dashiki, beads, and Africa medallions.

The music boosted the words of my father, though he only partially understood. He was frustrated by me, even as my Consciousness bloomed. He kept a notebook chronicling my slow progress: Ta-Nehisi came to work ten minutes late today. He then spent fifteen minutes in the bathroom. He worked for ten minutes. He then spent fifteen more minutes in the bathroom. He came out and played with Menelik. He was trying to shape us before the winter age of eighteen, and change, though coming, was never fast enough.

But we were changing. Big Bill was touched by the transformation, trading the everyday struggle for the Struggle. The same music that pulled me out of my fog, left him reeling. Again and again he went back to the lab, reveled in mourning bass lines, and crafted sweeping images of the great Satan’s fall. They added Joey on the keyboard, changed the group’s name to the Foundation, and switched their sound until it was holy and urging rebellion. I played his tapes along with all the others, and began to understand.