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

Nigger, you wanna see me? You got something you wanna say to me, mutherfucker? What’s up, nigger? What’s up?

He was not so much afraid as stunned by the vehemence of things. We had never beefed before, and here I was off, one inane comment escalating and lobbying for war. Neither of us was built like that, the exploding of fists was unnatural to us, only adopted when it was felt that something precious was at stake. But I was of my time, and this was it. Painfully I’d come to know that face must be held against everything, that flagrant dishonor follows you, haunting every handshake with all your niggers, disputing every advance on a jenny. Shawn was, at first, true to his better nature, and backed down and held up open hands. But I’d come too far to be gracious. I stuck my finger in his grill—

That’s right. ’Cause you a bitch-ass nigger.

— and walked out.

Nowadays, I cut on the tube and see the dumbfounded looks, when over some minor violation of name and respect, a black boy is found leaking on the street. The anchors shake their heads. The activists give their stupid speeches, praising mythical days when all disputes were handled down at Ray’s Gym. Politicians step up to the mic, claim the young have gone mad, their brains infected, and turned superpredator. Fuck you all who’ve ever spoken so foolishly, who’ve opened your mouths like we don’t know what this is. We have read the books you own, the scorecards you keep — done the math and emerged prophetic. We know how we will die — with cousins in double murder suicides, in wars that are mere theory to you, convalescing in hospitals, slowly choked out by angina and cholesterol. We are the walking lowest rung, and all that stands between us and beast, between us and the local zoo, is respect, the respect you take as natural as sugar and shit. We know what we are, that we walk like we are not long for this world, that this world has never longed for us.

I was sitting at the lunch table, shooting that Shawn ain’t shit, when he ran out, and wiped my memory. Who knows what his boy told him in that bathroom after we left, what stories and taunts he used to hype him into frenzy? What he knew was that something had been stolen from him, not by the local badass but some kid in contacts who was barely king of himself. Later, they told me he ran out screaming, the steel trash can above his head, and when it landed it boomed so loud that the whole cafeteria turned. That I crumpled to the white bench, and said nothing. That he dropped the can, held his hands over his head like Sweet Pea Whitaker, and started to dance. That he was off in a dreamworld, his honor restored, and my own stolen, added to his. That his back was turned when I rose up, and unfurled the green David Banner. That I grabbed him from behind, slammed him onto the white tabletop, and climbed up.

That was when I returned to myself, and what I felt was not pain but a sick power. What I wanted was to banish this kid to the prosthetics ward, to turn his whole grill piece into a project for surgeons. I pinned him on top of the table and swung with both hands. To the right I saw one of Kier’s old girls yelling — Ta-Nehisi, Ta-Nehisi! Stop! But I was time traveling back to the days at Lemmel and all the razors I’d swallowed for ignorance of rules. Now it all flew back out, and though I was aware, I felt an enveloping rage, as my hands were lifted from the controls.

I was pulled back by two of my more responsible friends who were above the howling and instigation. I touched the side of my face and saw red on fingers.

Yo, what did he hit me with? What the fuck did he throw at me? A juice?

Naw, man, he hit you with a trash can.

I’ma kill that nigger.

I started rushing back his way, but they grabbed me and took me up to the office. I was a mess. Vice principals and secretaries gasped. Someone called the ambulance. My buddies got early dismissal. There was blood all over their clothes. Dad met me at the hospital.

He was about as comforting as I can ever remember him in all our time in that house, which meant asking if I was okay and not saying much on the ride home. But I didn’t need comfort. I felt, for the first time, what I wished I had felt years ago, that someone had tried to take something from me, that he’d attempted to reduce me to a status below my station. And that I didn’t let it happen.

I came back the next day, staples in my head, but not to laughter and taunts. They said I was the brown bomber, that they’d never seen a nigger lose it like that, and to top it off, Shawn — not me — had been expelled from school. I reveled for a week. Jennys from freshman year stepped to me, flush with vapors, and I was king until I started rifling through my backpack. My English paper was gone. I had lost it in the commotion.

That year, I tried to turn it around. But everything caught up with me. All my past failures from years before heaped onto my two assaults on teachers, to my fight in the cafeteria, and to my failing of English, and I was banished for good. My parents could not intercede here. My father was sitting in the living room on our gray sectional couch, and this is how I knew it was over. He wasn’t even angry. He just sat there blank and went into a speech from which I only remember one line—

Ta-Nehisi, you are a disgrace to this family’s name.

That hurt, and not because, before my father, mostly Coates had meant alcoholic, and orphaned kids. Because my father was Superman, the dude who pushed through Murphy Homes in search of Bill, the cat who was dealt a hand of seven kids by four women, and did his best to carry it, and I had completely let him down. But more than that was how I’d failed myself. No matter what the professional talkers tell you, I never met a black boy who wanted to fail.

As for Dad, of course he was always more complicated than what I allowed myself to see. He wore no cape and had his own questions to grapple with. This I was coming to know.

Months earlier I’d seen him sitting outside the office with Jovett in her maroon Saturn. It was dark winter, and I was coming home from school. I approached and was greeted without nervousness or alarm. But I knew my father, and could feel that, in the way they were sitting there, that evening, there was something that I had not been told.

You may note that all my references to girls have been brief, and mostly touched by failure. My catalog was comic.

Page one: I sat on a fence in early June 1985, my last years of boyhood drawing to dark. I was waiting on Brenda Neil, who I knew had to walk this way to make it home. Soon, she’d be off to Fallstaff, or one of those boarding schools way out with horses and fencing teams. Of course, she was brown and lovely, her eyes were great planets, but what I remember most was how the world would pause and come to her, how she spoke and walked easily, like fifth grade, with all its giant uncertainties, was just her personal ballet. When she laughed, her voice lightly cracked, and with it something inside me, too, took days to set right. She would tap her number two pencil against a desk and look up and away for an answer, and even that dumb look thrilled me. Then I knew how the damned dinosaurs died, that even here, in Miss Boone’s ordinary classroom, cataclysm awaits.

I was on the fence at Cold Spring and Callaway, a block away from the 7-Eleven where I saw my first gat, across the street from where the highwaymen of Wabash snatched my black skullie, sat there nursing my last chance. I don’t remember what I said, but in response she walked past and would have smiled and said something nice, because she was not the type to get loud on you, and for now had rejected the seductive venom and back talk that is the birthright of all black girls. What I know is that I did not say what was needed, what ached beneath every rib, that I watched her walk away with, at best, good-bye and good luck.