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

The righteous third were still marshalling their forces. Grandmothers rode up from the Carolinas, snatched boys off the street ear first and into flagging homes of worship. Uncles came home from Germany, Korea, and went upside knuckled heads. Banished fathers in their county blues pleaded on collect calls, across plastic dividers. Around my way, the great autodidacts and awesome seers — Dr. Ben, John Henrik Clarke, Asa Hilliard, Tony Browder, Marimba Ani — searched our history for any way out. What they sought were artifacts of culture that once kept us whole, relics of rituals lost to the Cataclysm. From their work, the elders of NationHouse emerged with the Great Rites, a series of labors meant to instill the warrior code in boys who would, always too soon, be men. Across the land, babas, like the ones at NationHouse, carried the ritual, until now, anywhere you find the Conscious, you find these ancient rites of redemption.

Every Saturday morning for six months, me and Kier came to NationHouse and were drilled on all the rudiments of what awaited. We started with self-defense and calisthenics at seven A.M. Then moved to elementary plumbing, history told from our side, and the cosmology of the Dogon. Later we learned the correct posture for firing a rifle. But I left the iron alone. Something about it never felt right. The end was enthronement in the House of Ankobia, NationHouse’s fraternal order whose hierarchy and rituals were borrowed from ancient stately kingdoms. Among the Twi, the Ankobia were the standard-bearers, the vanguard of the people. I was senior on my line of boys, and thus handed the lead. The thought was that I would be a leader in deed, setting an example for my younger brothers. And though in theory, I believed in what was to be done, I half worked my way through the entire piece. During the week, I skipped calisthenics. I just barely memorized the Ankobia pledge. That was the old me. Even reborn, a part of me stayed in the old world where I was still a teenager and bucked authority like it was my job.

But I had made it to this final test. The night before our group of imminent Ankobites stayed at the home of an appointed elder. Kier and I played Super Nintendo until we were sent to bed. A few of the babas woke us only a few hours later, sent us to get dressed; and when we saw them next, they were in their winter coats, wiping no sleep from their eyes, clutching blindfolds, and guiding us out of the house and into the back of a van. The van would stop every twenty minutes. The door would slide open with a rusty crash, and under our blindfolds we could feel the seats pressing further down and buckling under the extra weight of additional boys. Under the overpass, we were hustled out onto a street, where we stood in a blind gaggle by the van. Baba Yao, one of the kindest of the elders, removed the blindfolds and returned to the driver’s seat. He lowered the window.

Be back to NationHouse by dawn, he told us.

Then he drove off.

We stood there for a moment gathering our faculties and blinking in the dark. I was on alien land, a forty-minute ride out of Baltimore, but the D.C. boys figured things out quick. We were in Blackbyrd’s woods, and to make dawn we had to get moving. Despite our slothful resistance, we’d been made fit by thousands of jumping jacks, and ably assumed a light running pace. It was dark almost the entire way. We did not talk much, except to complain, and guess which baba had come up with this stupid test, and how it had anything to do with Kemit, Kush, or Punt.

And then the babas’s minions arrived, brothers who’d gone through the Rites the year before and now had their chance to give out some of the hardship they’d taken. We were jogging down Georgia Avenue, the main artery of black D.C., when we saw them pulling up in another minivan. I think back on it now, and am amazed at how violence was everywhere, even in our theater. In their minds they were prepping us for some amorphous war. By now the Conscious had come to grips with the nonrevolution but still clung to the hopeful thought that an army in waiting was needed for the moment when things turned.

The minions hopped out, threw up their hands, and started dancing like boxers. We went at it — right there in the street — no closed hands to the face, but everything else allowed. All I remember is the flailing limbs, half nelsons, and headlocks, and then the older brothers laughing and driving off. We picked ourselves up, kept moving.

The sun was just barely out when we got back. Baba Yao saluted us at the door and gave us black sweats, our medallions of initiation, then marched us inside.

That’s as far as I can go. I haven’t been Ankobia in years, can’t recall a word of the pledge. But I honor what they did for me, the aim of those reclaimed rituals, and how they saved us from a savage time.

I was anchored. Against everything we saw, against all the wild stories of sisters turned night hags and brothers gone ronin, every Saturday morning we would drive to NationHouse and be greeted by a squadron of the unbroken who recalled the days of old splendor, of Nefertari, Askia, and Akhenaton, and instructed us to bring it back. On our shoulders they loaded a nation, and every elder who knew us believed we were prophetic, that we’d pull Celestia from the Nine Hells of Baator, that we’d bring sun and oceans to this wasteland.

It was a slow-acting drug. But through the years I came to know that in the galaxy of DuBois and Booker T., of Cheryl Waters and Paul Coates, of Mama Makini and Baba Jules, my errors were never borne solo, my accolades were never mine alone. So many of us had turned to henchmen and mercenaries. Whether bourgeoisie in Woodlawn or thugging in Flaghouse, niggers were acting like it could not happen, like their lives were only theirs alone. But the Rites were a great web tying me to all my people in all times, from West Baltimore to Dakar, from Mondawmin across the haunted waves to Gorée.

The Ankobia elders brought us back the next week for a public entrance into the world of men. We were swaddled in all white and each handed a spear. In age order, we were led out through the broken streets of Chocolate City, but wherever we walked the concrete shifted, glowed, and healed. The stunned community turned to the processional, which wasn’t just the newly minted men I was with but all of Ankobia’s mamas and babas and the girls too, our counterparts, who’d undergone their own private rites. In these darkening years, even the Unconscious had some sense that things had gone bad, and thus they took anything upright among children as a righteous step. So the old heads on the corner, the mothers with their heads under scarves, they all smiled and clapped as we walked past silently, even if they knew nothing about what we were.

Ankobia rented out a middle school cafeteria for our final ceremony. We walked in, and family and friends stood in ovation, spines of the great web. We were introduced by name and accomplishment. We recited our pledge, holding spears aloft. But I did not come completely into focus until I heard the djembes. It was like a girl you’d seen once, exchanged everything but numbers and had been plotting on for weeks. In our final days we learned a sacred dance that we performed with the drums. But hearing it there, watching big Kwaku go off and the crowd clap and cheer, I was entranced.

Mornings I’d wake up with old rhythms in my head, drum patterns that I could not even name. My mother saw no future for me in drumming. But still it was one of my parents’ approved activities, the sort of thing that would further strengthen my bond with the community. My time with my folk was close to the end. I was the last of a group of Dad’s children born into uncertain times. We were poorly planned for and chaotically conceived. In two years they would see me off, and turn their attentions to Menelik, eight years my junior, whose only great concerns were dinosaurs and the cycles of active volcanoes.