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

I walked into class in this state of mine, half looking for any way out. I stood at the front joking with a buddy, while all the other students took their seats. I was asked many times to sit down, until the teacher just lost his cool and sunned me in front of the whole class. I don’t even remember what he said, but he’d raised his voice, and in front of a crowd, I could not back down.

I raised my hand and mushed him in the face. “Don’t you ever yell at me again in your life.”

He quietly ordered me outside, and then summoned the school police. And so hyped on ego and image was I that I mouthed so much to the officer that I was put in cuffs and escorted to his office where he prepared a report. I was suspended immediately, potentially expelled, and told not to return without a parent. I caught the 33 home by myself and that was when it all began to set in. All my life, I played my position. I was tired. Here was my declaration of borders and respect. But of course there was a price. And the merchant was my father.

He was waiting in the foyer at the door, again magically off work at the worst possible time. He was there with Ma and Jovett, half smiling through an awkward mix of shock and anger. Jovett walked out of the room and then it came. He threw an open hand and I hit the floor.

My mother stepped in.

Paul, Paul.

He shoved her away.

Woman, get off me.

And then he was swinging away, channeling a chi ancient as Equiano. The power was passed down from mothers guarding their sons from the lash, and later from the pyre, rope, and fat sheriff. My father swung with the power of an army of slaves in revolt. He swung like he was afraid, like the world was closing in and cornering him, like he was trying to save my life. I was upstairs crying myself to sleep, when they held a brief conference. The conference consisted of only one sentence that mattered — Cheryl, who would you rather do this: me or the police?

I saw my mother some hours later in our small kitchen. She tried to explain what she felt, but began to cry instead. She knew that I had no idea how close I was, would always be, to the edge, how easily boys like me were erased in absurd, impractical ways. One minute we were tossing snowballs at taxis, firing up in front the 7-Eleven, speeding down side streets and the next we’re surrounded by unholstered guns, a false move away from going down. I would always be a false move away. I would always have the dagger at my throat.

This was the first time my parents pleaded me back into school. That night, we walked over to Mondawmin and ate at Long John Silver’s. Our talk was regular. They held no debt. They met with the school principal to testify to my character. They met with my English teacher to assure him I was no threat. They met with the school police officer so that he knew there was no history of drug use. They met with a local magistrate to assure him there was no need for the State.

I returned a week later, and a few weeks later I was off to summer school. My mother took me over to archrival City College and wrote a check. After class, I’d come home — and a fresh box of books would greet me. I spent my weekends with the neighborhood boys. Every weekend night someone’s mother — except mine — was off working the night shift. We’d gather at that unchaperoned house, dial up the jennys, throw on some club tapes, and sip from bottles until we were five steps beyond nice.

There I am outside Mondawmin Mall, bribing alcoholics into copping cheap fortified wine. I walk back to the anointed crib, bid my slaps of five, and pass out brown paper bags. An hour in, and I am floating, freaking some girl completely off beat. I wake up with bells ringing outside each of my temples and birds of pain circling overhead. I continue like this for months, until on a dare I down a forty of Red Bull solo, and spend a morning massaging the toilet bowl.

My parents never caught me like that, but they could see me running off the rails. Dad looked south to D.C., and called in old alliances formed years ago selling books at the Mecca. He contacted NationHouse, a coalition of brothers and sisters who, like my father, believed that the revolution could not be blustered into existence but must be built. Their group had purchased a building in the heart of the ravaged northwest of Washington, a command center from which they plotted the creation of a state within a state.

As in the Akan tradition, all their children were named according to days of their birth — Kofi for born on Friday, Kwaku for Wednesday. NationHouse flowered with Knowledge and culture — jazz recitals, spoken word, and regular lectures on our regal past and methods of return. They organized a school to educate their kids, sent them off for college credits at fourteen, and then for a bachelor’s two years later. Everyone wore dashikis and lappas, kufis and head wraps. There were no perms.

Then, deep in the heart of Jeff Davis, in old Virginal, they purchased hallowed ground. The acres consecrated a century earlier through the toil of our mothers were the site of a great spiritual renewal. There was an unmarked slave graveyard, noticeable only by depressions in the land. There was a path where Gabriel Prosser, all glory to him, had walked while planning his great slave rebellion, before the deceivers dropped dime.

One Sunday, my father packed me, Kier, Jovett, and Ma into the yellow and brown station wagon, and compared a white sheet of directions with his road atlas. It was hot August. Me and Kier had been remanded to NationHouse, and their plot of land. In the summer they ran a camp, in hopes of deprogramming kids from the lies of the great Satan. Dad drove down a long highway, till it connected to another highway, and that highway became a street, and that street turned into a narrow dirt road. The liberated acres were not formidable. What I saw was a big house presiding over sprawling fields, a valley, and forest. There was orientation and the completion of some forms, and then we were left there with our hooded sleeping bags, bug repellant, army surplus flashlights, and spare clothes.

We were not afraid, even though we knew no one. We arrived early, and shot hoops on a netless rim behind the house. All that Sunday, kids arrived until we had enough boys for fifty putout, then three on three. By then, I had learned that the rock and hoop were the king of icebreakers. All the other kids were camp vets, but by dinner we were joking and doing two-man military satire — Back in the war, you didn’t have dinner. Someone passed you sticks and gruel, and you liked it.

I was teased those next two weeks, as always. Big, awkward, and still without a jump shot, I was too tempting a target. But I fell in with these kids in a way that I had fallen in with no one before. All of us knew why you abstained on the Fourth and the meaning of Nkrumah.

All our names were alien — Kwame, Jua, Ansentewaa — and traceable back to the continent of the originators. It was as if, on this holy plot of land, the revolution had come off and the world had been remade as the brothers envisioned it in ’68. I lost myself there, felt confirmed and the freedom of being unoriginal.

We were forbidden to eat candy, cookies, and cakes. We were fed oatmeal in the morning, sandwiches for lunch, and groundnut stew in the evening. On Fridays they set us free with turkey hot dogs and potato chips. All the elders were addressed by the title Mama or Baba. We had to run a mile every morning, then shower, and participate in the day’s ordained activities. We had free time, and played pickup football or three on three. We camped out and swapped off guard duty in the middle of the night.

I remember sitting in a small makeshift conference room on the first floor of the big house. It was film night, but our babas even invested this with meaning. We watched Three the Hard Way and giggled at the boom of Jim Brown’s cannon compared with the pop-pop of his racist foes. The next night, we saw the film version of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Sam Greenlee’s tale of black revolution. For the next hour, one of the babas led us in discussion. Was any of it plausible? What had we learned about the nature of white supremacy?