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

I know that Dad and Ma saved me, pulled up in their silver Rabbit, some time after I made the call; that Dad ran off into the swarming night to find his eldest son, and for the first and only time, I was afraid for him. I know that Bill’s mother, Linda, swooped down to the harbor and found Bill first, shuttled him back out to their crib in Jamestown. I know that Bill returned to Tioga days later, and when I told him how I’d dusted Murphy Homes, how I was on some Kid Flash shit, he was incredulous—

Fool, they let you get away so they could chase me.

If the newspapers Dad left around the house were true, the greater world was obsessed over Challenger and the S&L scandal. But we were another country, fraying at our seams. All the old rules were crumbling around us. The statistics were dire and oft recited—1 in 21 killed by 1 in 21, more of us in jail than college.

A cottage industry sprung up to consider our fate. Jawanza Kunjufu was large in those days, his book Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys promised answers and so was constantly invoked. At conferences, black boys were assembled. At schools we were herded into auditoriums. At home, mothers summoned us to dinner tables, and there they delivered the news: Our time was short.

We lived in a row house in the slope of Tioga Parkway in West Baltimore. There was a small kitchen, three bedrooms, and three bathrooms — but only one that anybody ever wanted to use. All of us slept upstairs. My folks in a modest master. My two sisters, Kris and Kell — when back from Howard University, in an area where Dad also stored his books. There was a terrace out back, with a rotting wooden balcony. I almost died out there one day. Leaning against the crumbling wood I tumbled headlong, but caught myself on the back door roof and came lucky feet-first to the ground.

My room was the smallest, and always checkered with scattered volumes of World Book, Childcraft, Dragonlance, and Narnia. I slept on bunk beds made from thick pine, shared the bottom with my baby brother Menelik. Big Bill, as in all things, was up top. By mere months, he was my father’s first son, but he turned this minor advantage into heraldry. He began sentences with “As the oldest son…” and sought to turn all his younger siblings into warriors. Big Bill was seldom scared. He had a bop that moved the crowd, and preempted beef. When bored, he’d entertain himself, cracking on your busted fade, acne, or your off-brand kicks.

Bill: Ta-Nehisi, get the fuck outta here with those weak-ass N.B.A.s. Know what that shit stands for? Next time buy Adidas. And, Gary, I don’t know what you laughing at in those four-stripe Cugas. Know what that means? Nigger, can u get Adidas…

In those days, crazy Chuckie threatened our neighborhood. When we lined up for five on five, every tackle he took personally, every block was an invite to scrap. Once he pulled a metal stake from the ground, swung it at fat Wayne until he retreated all the way into our living room. That’s when Dad came out and revealed the face of This Is Not a Game. Chuckie cursed and waved the stake. Then he stalked off. That night I lay on the bottom bunk, replaying it all for Bill.

Me: Man, Chuckie is crazy.

Bill: Fuck Chuckie. If he ever step to me, I’ll fuck him up.

That fall, Chuckie killed his father, got gaffled by the jakes, and disappeared into the netherworld of Boys’ Village or Hickey Juvenile.

Private school Stevie lived two doors down. I’d sit outside playing with his G.I. Joes until I realized that this made me a target. Across the street was Mondawmin Mall, the fashion seat of West Baltimore, the pit of sex, beat downs, and cool. Every window glittered with leather, fur, sterling, and stickers with large red numbers and slash marks. But the price tags and fat-ass honeys made boys turn killer. One misstep onto suede Pumas, and the jihad begins. In those days cocaine was the air, and though I never saw a fiend fire up, the smoke darkened everything, turned our homey town into a bazaar of cheap ornaments bought expensively, a Gomorrah on the inner harbor. A young man’s worth was the width of his blond cable-link chain. The space between two, three, then four finger rings marked footmen from cavalry, cavalry from the great gentry of this darker age. In all our dreams we cruised the avenue in black Cherokee Jeeps, then parked at the corner of Hot and Live, our system flogging eardrums, pumping “Latoya” and “Sucker MCs.” Even I shared those dreams, and I was only ten.

While I was hobbled by preteen status and basic nature, Big Bill was enthralled by the lights. This was the summer of ’86. KRS-One laid siege to Queensbridge. I would stand in my bedroom, throwing up my hands, reciting the words of Todd Smith—“Walkin’ down the street, to the hardcore beat/While my JVC vibrates the concrete.” Bill and my brother John spent all summer busing tables. Bill schemed on a fat rope, one that dangled from his neck like sin. Still, his money was young, and he could not stomach the months of layaway. So he returned from the mall with two mini-ziplock bags, each the size of a woman’s fist, each glimmering, like him, in the light. They held massive rings, one adorned with a golden kite, another spanning two fingers, molded into a dollar sign.

He flashed them before me, and I was caught by how the glowing metal made him swell inside his own skin. He was profiling, lost in all his glory, when Dad stepped to him.

Dad: Son. They’re fake. Son, you’ve been had.

Bill: You’re bugging. This is fourteen-karat. I paid cash money.

Dad: Son, Son. Let’s have them smelted down and tested. If it’s ten karats or more, I will pay you for the rings. With interest.

Bill’s head went reeling, the dream within reach: He saw a gold herringbone spread over his Black BVD, and when he bopped through Mondawmin, jennys would jump on his jock and soldiers would collapse or salute. In the order of Slick Rick, Bill would wear the scarlet robe. So he agreed to my father’s proposition, convinced he was on the better end. We were young, drunk on ourselves, and could not know that all the alleys we took as original, he’d stepped through before. He found a place to smelt the gold, do the math. And I don’t know what was worse — the negative results or Dad’s rueful chuckle and sermon. Afterward, Dad went over to Mondawmin and had Bill point out the merchants. Then he walked to the glass counter, brandished the results, and spoke magic words. The magic words were “fraud,” “Black community,” and “State’s attorney.” Bill never felt the same about gold again.

My father was Conscious Man. He stood a solid six feet, was handsome, mostly serious, rarely angry. Weekdays, he scooted out at six and drove an hour to the Mecca, where he guarded the books and curated the history in the exalted hall of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. He was modest — brown slacks, pale yellow shirt, beige Clarks — and hair cut by his own hand.

But at night, he barbecued tofu, steamed basmati, and thought of sedition. He’d untuck his shirt and descend into the cellar, then comb through layers of ancient arcana. He collected out-of-print texts, obscure lectures, and self-published monographs by writers like J. A. Rogers, Dr. Ben, and Drusilla Dunjee Houston, great seers who returned Egypt to Africa and recorded our history, when all the world said we had none. These were words that they did not want us to see, the lost archives, secret collections, folders worn yellow by water and years. But Dad brought them back.

From the day we touched these stolen shores, he’d explain to anyone who’d listen, they infected our minds. They deployed their phrenologists, their backward Darwinists, and forged a false Knowledge to keep us down. But against this demonology, there were those who battled back. Universities scorned them. Compromised professors scoffed at their names. So they published themselves and hawked their Knowledge at street fairs, churches, and bazaars.