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

Where others saw the love moment, Bill saw his chance. Their ritual was to put in together for a dime sack. But half the session was spent moaning over headache weed and not enough blunts. Bill was too original for that, thought it would be better to save up some paper, step up his game to an ounce, sell enough for re-up, and keep the profit for his personal. In that fashion he became the dorm connect, and that status plugged him into networks around campus not unlike the ones he’d enjoyed back home. He got bent and partied with his new friends. After class, they dribbled the rock to the local court and, understanding the rules, stayed together to ward off these D.C. niggers who took them for college soft. Bill had his close shaves. At the court, he was always running his mouth, dunking on the underregulation rim, then bellowing and beating his chest. One local soldier got tired of the talk, went to the car, and came back swinging an aluminum bat through air. But Bill was cool. He knew that at any moment, he could reach into his dip and unveil the last word.

The family expanded. I had not been back to Barrington Road in years and, since Lemmel, had ceased all fantasies about a return. The magical house was sold to the Solomons, a young couple with a son a year younger than me. The father was Wellis. The mother was Jovett. The son was Kier. Back when Dad was first selling it, the Solomons would visit us on weekends, handling the sort of real estate arcane, which children have no desire to comprehend. Me and Kier would stand on the front lawn tossing the football, or sword fight with sticks and the tops of metal trash cans. It was to be one of those brief friendships that dot childhood and disappear at the end of parental business.

But then the Solomons returned, trilling the dirge of our time — no father. Dad and Ma sat in Jovett’s living room — a misdirected package had brought them there — and the small talk gradually extended and swelled. Wellis had passed away. Jovett was alone, not working, and charged with a son. Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time. One of his order had fallen. Who would carry his colors and sword?

My folks went home and talked about their needs. They both commuted to Washington for work and ran the Press by night and weekends. From time to time, they hired folks to man the shop. Business was growing. They’d gone from a few J. A. Rogers pamphlets and a desktop press to becoming a lynchpin of the Baltimore Conscious, their books sold all over the country. They would need more. Jovett came to work in the basement of Tioga, and grew closer and closer to the family. Her son was a brother to me by circumstance. He would come to the house after school and wait for his mother to get off, or on weekends if she happened to be working.

We were not the same — like Bill, the street life made him glow, while I was convinced that there was no future for me out there. But I was mischievous enough and, like most boys, out to test the limitations of the world. Kier was a year younger, but this was not knowable from the way we rolled. We would go up to the alley and shoot on the crate or catch midnight features down at Harbor Park. We paid off winos to buy us forties of Red Bull and, while sauced, tried to walk in a straight line and touch our noses.

Our mothers united on their common charges. Though we were both a couple years away, they started a program of practice SATs. We were drilled on vocabulary and math and taught guessing strategies. My mother had been pushing kids all her adult life. At night, Ma and Jovett would drive down to the Blue Caribbean and salsa with the men. They vacationed in Barbados and then Jovett and Kier joined us on our yearly pilgrimage to my mother’s homeland — the Maryland Eastern Shore. We stayed with Aunt Toppie. She made us waffles for breakfast. We were a family beyond borders.

My Consciousness grew, until I was obsessed with having been birthed in the wrong year. All the great wars had been fought, and I was left to rummage through the myths of my fathers. But oh how I longed to take the rope for John Brown or snuff the peon who dimed out Vesey. I would hang out at bookstores built for the people, flipping through Chancellor Williams and Kwame Ture. I put “Ballot or the Bullet” on my Walkman, pinned more buttons of Garvey in imperial regalia to my book bag, and wore a tee shirt with the authoritarian motto “One God. One Aim. One Destiny.” I read The Iceman Inheritance and flirted with the supremacy of melanin. We had been down so long, and were desperate for anything that told us we were something more. So we embraced the charlatans and their stupid science, until all the old mythologies were remixed and the savages were not drummers and dancers but Hera and Thor.

I became a plague upon my father’s books. He treasured them as much for what they said as for what they were. But I cared only for what was inside. I devoured the books, then flung them aside like emptied husks. My father found the ripped-up cover of Die Nigger Die! and pushed me to the floor. He did not ban me, instead, after cooling down, explained that I was living in a temple and privy to Knowledge that many had forgotten. What I owed in return was some reverence and tribute.

But I was a chaotic mind. When obsessed, I wanted only what I wanted and could give no attention to other matters. Urges would whisk through me every fifteen minutes, each one discarding the former. I could not focus. In a white room, sealed and empty, perhaps. But against all the incipient impulses of manhood, I was one big glass jaw. At school, I became a problem, and by the end of my first semester, I was failing three classes. I considered myself capable of student awards and honor, and sometimes I even longed for them. But I longed more to live in my own head, emerging only to laugh or watch the streets on my way home.

I believed in the intellect of all of us, that mine was the legacy that aligned pyraminds and spotted the rings of distant planets with only the naked eye. That was my great inheritance. But I turned this good news to bad ends, and ran with the sort of crew that surveyed all these new teachers, and picked out the ones who would never understand. The ones who should have been out at Bryn Mawr or Calvert Hall. They did not know where we were from. And this was my out. We would sit in the back of the class talking during lectures and throwing paper balls at girls. I asked for bathroom breaks every ten minutes, and then walked the halls making dumb faces at friends in other classes. I prayed for substitutes, would walk in, stare them down like, you know what this is , and then it was on — paper footballs flying, the end of assigned seating, rubber bands armed with paper clips plucked across the room.

And I laughed through it all, had a rag of a time, until Dad showed up. After PTA meetings where I was held to account, Dad started popping up at school and sitting in on random classes. He never caught me mid-act, just sat in the back in his Clarks and slacks, looking on and embarrassing the fuck out of me. But it was not enough. I required more than I deserved. I had made it through Lemmel because my teachers blocked all other doors. They met, organized, double-and triple-teamed us, held us after school, pushed, prodded, until they obliterated job descriptions and fell somewhere between pastor, parent, and counselor. I could match passion with passion. But at Poly teaching was a job. Teachers did what was expected, and thought they could get the same. I demanded more of them, and virtually nothing of myself.

So this is how my first year in the royal city ended — handcuffed in the office of the school police. My second semester English teacher was a small man with a small voice. He was my last period, and talked with the sort of dead voice that bore down on my eyelids. I accorded him all the esteem of an anthill, and expected great deference in return. It was one of those spring afternoons at the end of the year, when all your hormones are fighting to break loose. But still, we had to stomach some boring zero prattling on about adverbs, clauses, and conjunctions. Who gives a fuck when you spent the whole day watching Tamara Garrett in tight jeans, and you know she’s gonna be on the 44 bus, after school, her lush brown eyes dazzling all comers.