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

But most of us were occupied by smaller things. I was like any other fourteen-year-old boy, assaulted by internal chemistry and in the presence of jennys, subject to forgetting my name, address, and other vital information. Of course they were there, remanded from across the East Coast and regal in all their original blackness — dreads, braids, cornrows, short naturals, and head wraps for the two or three who’d foolishly permed. Kier scooped one right away, and these two spent the remainder of camp disappearing at random hours. I was, even in my newfound naturalness, profoundly still me — awkward and perpetually offbeat, crumbs in my hair, juice stains on my tee shirts. So I played my position and sought other outlets to deal with all the improper energy.

Toward the end of camp we were practicing for a final performance to be put on for our parents. There was to be a session of drumming and dancing, rhythms and moves imported from the west coast of Africa in the days when the Conscious folks thought the answers for all our problems lay in connections with back home. By then I was an MC, and thus feeling that the marriage of beats and lyrics was a charter ship back to the Knowledge of the elder world. The current was powered by all the usual angst and alienation of this age. An hour, a pen, a pad and I was plugged in, the material plane falling away, and the world remade along the lines of my yearning imagination. In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I’d realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all.

The djembe is a drum, carved from wood. Its bottom is a wide outlet. If you trace its outline upward, you find the drum narrows until about halfway through its length. From there, it gradually blooms outward until, at its crown, it is as much as three times the size of its bottom. This crown is covered with the shaved skin of a goat. Rope running along the drum’s side is tightened to effect a sharper sound. The drum is played with bare hands. Its sound varies from a piercing slap to a deep tonal moan and a barely inaudible bass. A djembe drummer is usually accompanied by a djun-djun player, the djun-djun being a giant bass drum played with a stick.

I was transfixed from first time I saw this combination. This is half true. At every affair throughout my childhood where my father sold books there was someone at least playing a djembe, and some head-wrapped mama singing the Swahili prayer “Funga Alafia.” But my new fascination corresponded to my age, I think, because the djembe, the way it hangs between the legs, is virility itself and has a special call to young boys looking for ways to express the change popping off inside. There was a boy playing. In his hands the drum sounded like a gun, if guns were made to be music. The boy, only slightly older than me, affixed it between his legs with the aid of a long strap, and ever so casually began to make it sing. We were learning the dance steps culled from the Mandé, the traditional gyrations made to heal the insane, celebrate the harvest, or inaugurate a tournament of wrestlers. I could not move. True enough, the initial cause was great fear — everyone knew I danced as awkwardly as I moved through life. But more so, I was held by how the brother played, and how unconsciously it all came out. It was like he had no plans. I could catch the basic beat, but what he brought out of it showed that he heard more. And as I listened, I became bewitched.

The djun-djun held a steady rhythm, and the boy on djembe would follow until the spirit got the best of him and he was off on his own solo. He would beat out a series of rhythms meant to match particular dance steps. The drum had a sharp, piercing sound, and followed the heartbeat of the djun-djun. It was like watching a great MC rhyme wordlessly, scatting almost, pulling new patterns and rhythms from the air. My breathing quickened whenever the drumming began. I would bob and nod unconsciously. My hands would move involuntarily.

And I was not even the hardest hit. On our last day we did our performance, a spirited bit of dancing and singing anthems that connected us to the Mother. At the end, we gathered with our smiling, proud parents. My mother told me I looked straightened out, slimmed down, and all in all more assured. I walked back to say my good-byes and found a group of kids circled around our dance instructor. She was a lovely woman with a short natural and glasses — a second wife, in the old Akan tradition, taken in with her young son by one of the community patriarchs.

She walked back and forth in a line, bouncing almost, her arms akimbo, her eyes rollicking wildly in their sockets. At her side stood her husband, who explained that the drums had called in the old deities and now one of them had taken her body as its own. She was now an oracle of sorts. Each of us approached individually and on our knees, and through the fog of tongues, we were each given a word of heeding in scattered English. None of this was planned. Our parents stayed back.

I did not understand, nor remember, what was said to me. I had no context for what I saw. I was raised godless, and in place of the One True, given a pantheon of ancestors, some direct, some in spirit, who had made my life, as it was, a possibility. I don’t know, still don’t know, if I believed the possession. Still, when the djembe called, I knew I had felt wild ecstatic energies coursing through me over which I lacked control. The thought of touching that sort of power, the direct current to the Motherland, sent me reeling. And as we drove home that Sunday night, through the Virginia darkland, I thought only of djembes. I had only drumming running through my head.

The babas dropped us off in the blackness, at the tip of Washington, D.C., Chocolate City, in the midst of late winter rain. Above, we heard cars screeching through puddles, water splashing off to the side. There were five of us, all told, five with names as heavy as my own — Ibrahim, Changamire, Banatunde, Kier — and me, the oldest, presumptive leader of this line. A week before, we were back in the liberated lands in Virginia, where they worked us all day, then made us spar outside with the older, bigger boys. I stood in my fighting stance, in the manner of our self-defense trainer, Baba Mike, my elbows bent, holding back my power right. But when they paired me off with big Kwaku, who’d crossed over the year before, all that technique went to the wind, and I was swinging for creation. He slapped me up for a good two minutes, which sounds short — but in a fight, it’s enough time to put a mind out, or at least remove all its higher brain function. We were just sparring, but I don’t think I even landed a jab. Still, afterward, they fed us fried chicken, biscuits, greens and built us all back up.

Now, it was breakdown time again. They’d dropped the five of us in the wild, charged us with finding our way back home. This was the last private ritual in our transition into manhood. We were still admonished for leering at girls, expected to live under the orders of our babas, and perform at the top of our class. But the world was opening fast upon us, and few among our generation had been prepared.

This was 1991. The mania was declining and the crack era was fading into a haze of stuffed White Owls and reconstructed Phillies. Still, at night the Enchantress appeared before my brothers and implored them to madness. They’d wake up the next morning, lumber down to the corner, the rec centers, the ball courts, talking up their parish’s murder numbers, scheming on the murder capital’s crown.