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

I saw it coming. That fall, Dad drove us down Liberty Heights until it became Liberty Road and the streetlights became less frequent. There, up a forested hill with houses tucked in the right side, he revealed our new manse on Campfield Road. It was astonishing. Six bedrooms, a breezeway, garage, barn, grassy acreage so sprawling that you’d need a tractor to keep it in shape. It was Barrington Road and more, a haven out in the county near enchanted woods. I should have been relieved, struck that the great horror initiated with the snatch of a skullcap was now at end. But I was old school like Charlie Mack and Ready C. I had made my home among an alien Tioga, had learned the customs, made it native to me, earned my colors so wherever I walked if I wasn’t Little Melvin, I was West Baltimore all the same.

And there was politics. For years, we’d held out against the scourge, like the last lost platoon, and now we were folding our red, black, and green in retreat.

I took it to my father. He was seated in the basement of Tioga, and all around were shelves of books. Two steel desks were jammed together, with invoices and paperwork scattered on top. I told him of my concerns, that there were — ideals at stake, principles in living where the struggle was, in never moving or giving up.

This is what I said. But underneath was also the fact that I’d become proud that Mondawmin, with all its allure of danger, was my backyard. That I survived it daily and could raise my hand when anyone yelled Is West Baltimore in the house? Maybe Dad heard that in my protest, because he just listened and nodded, did not offer a counter, just leaned back and took it in. When I was done, he lowered his head until he was looking above his reading glasses and spoke.

Son, all my life I’ve lived among the people. I’ve lived in cramped quarters since I was born. I am forty-four. I have never had a big yard.

He caught me flush with that one. I thought my science triumphant; I knew I had no answer for all his years. I had never been evicted. My house was strange, but none of my brothers doubled as cousins, and I had never tangled with the gangs of North Philly. My dad had come up among a sort of mayhem. They were at war. That was all. So in the autumn we moved north, and I was left wondering what it all — Lemmel, Mondawmin, the Great Rites — had been worth. Just as soon as I dropped anchor I was afloat again.

But I got my drum, a dark brown djembe with a wide mouth and rich, deep sound. At first I took a Saturday train to Chocolate City for lessons, and practiced alone during the week. I got nowhere. A natural can pull from a simple palette of sound and paint you the universe. His technique is to ride out with his brother drummers, then at the ordained moment take the lead and find rhythm where others hear none. But when I touched my drum there was nothing but a muddy, plodding groan. I spent six months like that, traveling to D.C. for lessons and coming back with only a murmur for a sound. After school, I’d practice out in the breezeway, desperately trying to play anything distinct. But all I got back was that old dirty rumble.

There was drumming in Baltimore, too, and I banded with the Sankofa Dance Theater. In the heyday of the movement ’60s, my elders reached back for anything original they could grab — plantain, kufis, a new name. Then they saw gorgeous West African ballets, with their fervid dancing and drumming, and knew that the tradition had to be brought to the other side. They founded dance companies with names taken from Swahili. They convened at megashows in which each of them would perform in successive order. It became a religion of sorts, like hip-hop, or football down south. My parents saw me embracing the reclaimed culture and it filled them with hope.

That year, I drummed with some brothers from Sankofa. My technique was still invisible, but the events of the day outstripped personal concerns. We were in a church. My old friend Salim’s father had died. We were the sort of boys who were close at a young age, who played together and slept over, whose parents would babysit the others’ children, and then for reasons that are never explained to kids, just drifted apart. His mother, Mama Kabibi, was a beautiful dancer, who’d founded the Sankofa Dance Theater, and I remembered his father as healthy and robust. But when I last saw him at a Sankofa drumming class, he was depleted, and thin, a victim of years of HIV, which was roiling all of Baltimore.

He had fallen, like so many fathers of that time, and in his place had stepped another, Baba Kauna, who took up with Mama Kabibi and assumed the four kids who were left behind. When he picked up the sword, Baba Kauna became mythical to us, much like my own father, so much so that we simply addressed him as Baba. His new charge, Salim, was golden and at thirteen could make a drum do things that a lifetime in Senegal would not teach. He led Sankofa’s drum squad with another sun child, Menes, and always they subtly competed to see whose hands would carry the day.

They were not supposed to be Sankofa’s lead drummers. But every time an older god was brought in to take the reins, he’d give it a few months and then fade out. And so the drumming was handed over to the kids. I played with them at the funeral for Salim’s father, and immediately felt a bond that went beyond the actual drumming. Later, as I played more with them, as my hands were cleaned, I came to understand what was between us. We’d come up much the same way, raised with the same traditions, abhorrence of pork and the Fourth of July. Here, like Ankobia, was a place where I need not explain my name. So I joined up, and in that I mean I simply made myself a regular, and though still I had hands of stone, they took me on as one of their own.

Back at the Mecca, Big Bill spent more time managing his herb stash than his accumulating studies. He was completely unprepared. He’d been dragged through his school years by parents, and the occasional teacher with whom he shared some mutual interest beyond the syllabus. But the study-sense that by then was natural to so many students was nowhere within him, and now unmoored and unchained from Dad’s discipline, he was free to indulge all the hedonism his parents had kept at bay.

By second semester he’d assembled a collection of brothers who reflected the old West Baltimore values of loyalty and furious fists. All around him were people swimming in light, rising above the plagues that afflicted the untalented 90 percent. They were fifth-generation black bourgeoisie, project prodigies straight out Cabrini, Merit scholars waving off Harvard, progeny of black flight starving for a cocoon of their own kind. And while big trumpets heralded our Fall, these kids presented beats and rhymes to let the world know that the struggle was epic and continued, that the strugglers were immortal. Slowly Bill was creeping up on Consciousness again, seemed on the verge of awakening, but mostly he was trapped in the smaller war, the skirmish for identity and respect.

His weekend nights were aimless. He would sit up drinking with his New York homeys, David and Mitch, and spark up a session. One night it was all dying down. David called his girlfriend and a dude picked up the phone. Everyone was hot with liquor, and in the background Bill and Mitch started blowing up this kid’s head, goading him and pushing him deeper until he ended the phone call with a Nigger I’m on my way, you better not even be in the same hemisphere when I step up.

David gets off the phone. He is not a big or foolish man, and, if left solo, it would have died there. Words thrown into the air, while better sense prevails. Already he is shrinking back. But Bill and Mitch are in his ear, breaking out with the Nigger represent, and You ain’t no punk, inflating him until they are piling into David’s car and heading to his girlfriend’s dorm.