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

For their efforts, they were forgotten. Their great works languished out of print, while those they sought to save grew fat on integration and amnesia.

Dad tracked the autodidacts and relatives of the ones who’d passed. Over tea in their living rooms, he unfurled his ambition. Dad proposed restoring these lost geniuses to their esteemed chairs in the university without walls, through a publishing operation he built from saddle-stitch staplers, a table-top press, and a Commodore 64. Never had republishing been so radical. He called this basement operation Black Classic Press, and for the Coates family there was no escape. All of that house was bent by the mad dream of mass resurrection.

He covered the crib with Knowledge, until rooms overflowed with books whose titles promised militant action and the return to glory. Wonderful Ethiopians and Black Egypt and Her Negro Pharaohs . He found others like him, formed collectives, held festivals in honor of Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey and the taking of arms. Brothers and sisters would drum and dance the unearthed rhythms, poets revealed words with teeth. Even the food was conscious — wheat bread and veggie burgers, cookies sweetened by fruit. Dad just played the back, peering from behind his table covered with African cloth and the awesome spread of books brought back from the dead.

This bounty drew the survivors, the ones who outlasted Hoover and COINTELPRO. They approached the tables with expectations so great that they dispensed even with English, opting for Swahili, Arabic, or Twi. All week they swept streets, worked day care, drove buses, taught piano, counseled the high school youth. You would know them by their dreads, their stoicism, the scent of sandalwood and licorice.

They would see me hustling books at these affairs with Ma or Big Bill, and go to school, because the Movement was all that they were. They’d start with the significance of Nkrumah or assail us for not carrying books by Dr. Clarke. They’d pause for libations, shout for Bunchy Carter, Nat Turner, and Aunt Grace. Then mellowed by the ancestors, they would smile. I was Coates’s boy, though they did not know which one. I was young, and unconcerned with why Denmark Vesey did not come off, how the Belgians tackled Lumumba, or the slave-king Sakura’s return.

But out on the block, the hoppers draped themselves in Starter, Diadora, and Lottoes. Then they’d roll onto corners and promptly clutch their nuts. Big Bill was there. He rolled through the streets in a brown puff leather, and captained a minor gang of Mondawmin kids. When bored, they brought the ruckus, snatching bus tickets and issuing beat downs at random. They gave no reason. They published no manifestos. This was how they got down. This was the ritual.

They spent summers hunting for girls. The jennys would catwalk through Mondawmin in stonewash with wide red hands spray-painted across their asses. They gilded their namesakes in triple bamboo earrings, and when they heard your call — hey, yo, shortie, come here — they did not look back to flip a bird. They did not crack smiles for anything. Their focus was on hair, mounds and mounds of hair, gelled, fried, french rolled, finger waved, extended into a dyed and glittered crown. They were of the moment. They took one look at West Baltimore and understood that they were the best of it. So they walked like they were all that mattered, like they had no time.

You had to be harder then. You could not bop through Park Heights like the second coming of Peanut King. Even the skating rinks demanded six deep. Lexington Terrace was hot with gonorrhea. Teen pregnancy was the fashion. Husbands were outties. Fathers were ghosts.

Here’s the cast of my last name: My father has seven kids by four women. Some of us were born to best friends. Some of us were born in the same year. My elders come first, in chronology: Kelly, Kris, William Jr. — all born of my father’s first marriage to Linda.

John was born to Patsy, Malik born to Sola.

Then me and Menelik, the children of my mother, Cheryl. This is all a mess on paper, but it was all love to me, and formed my earliest and still enduring definition of family.

Big Bill and John were both born in 1971. Dad was married and two daughters deep. He was a veteran, and must have seemed to Linda to be a stand-up ordinary guy. But he lurched radical and enlisted in that subgeneration overwhelmed by the rigid ethics of picketing elders and the creaking pace of change. He joined the Black Panther Party, rose to lead the local chapter. He lost his union job. He went to work overtime for the impending revolution. His family went on relief.

Dad missed the birth of Kris and Kell, and was away again when Linda went into labor with Big Bill. Something always seemed to happen — a phone was off the hook, one of the Panthers took a shoddy message. On the day of Bill’s birth, Dad pushed Linda’s 1966 Mustang across town to South Baltimore General. He was carrying some measure of spiritual weight. He was twenty-five, at the height of all his vigor, and out to get his share. He lived with Linda and the kids at the top of a winding road out in South Baltimore’s Cherry Hill. But he wore no rings, felt marriage was day-to-day, and was out to fulfill the general destiny of young men, and the particular one of his father.

The Panthers brought politics to match his studly quest. They lived in a commune, shared socks, and swapped beds. They were comrades, partners in the great unmaking, the fall of families, governments, economies defined by systems of profit and greed. In this new world, nothing was stamped as exclusive. Dad took to this naturally, and soon it seemed whenever a woman smiled his way, she’d already begun dividing her life into trimesters.

What Linda knew of the Panthers was that Dad had gone from honorable, hardworking vet to someone who justified food stamps and the projects. Dad arrived at the hospital the night Bill was born, and found his wife laid up and lovely in all her postpartum glow, and that made him confessional and bold. He had planned no speech, or special way, but just blurted it like bad soup: Linda, I have another child on the way. There was no good time to drop this, but there were many really bad ones and Dad had picked from this lot.

Even young, Dad had more vision than most for the big picture, but paired this with a stunning blindness for the intricacies of actual people. So he performed this ignominious feat again. That October, he came to the hospital to see Patsy and newborn John. Again he found a mother of his child laid up. Again he dropped the same load but with a twist. He had another child on the way, by Patsy’s best friend and comrade in the party.

My father knew how to hurt people without knowing how he’d hurt them. And maybe in the end this is what saved him. He was shameless in his pursuit of women. He was perpetually broke. But he never shirked when his bill came due. He hustled for his baby’s new shoes, while his frayed at the seams. Among the Conscious, he was known for the books he exhumed and breathed back. But he was known just as much for the constant presence of his brood, even as the specific makeup of the brood rotated. This is a low bar, I know. But we lived in an era of chronic welchers, where the disgrace was so broad that niggers actually bragged of running out on kids.

You could find my father at the kitchen table shaking his head at the Sunday paper, in the living room stewing over the evening news. His charges were five boys and two girls, and when he died, they would be his only words. He was called to fatherhood like a tainted preacher. The root was his own alcoholic father, who seeded so many children that Dad simply lost count. He impregnated three sisters, and so Dad had aunts doubling as stepmothers.

His father was intellectual, forced him to recite Bible verses, lectured from the morning paper. But anger and cheap wine soiled the best of him. He’d snap on a dime and fling five-year-old Dad clear across the living room. Aunt Pearl would step up and take the beating for him. When he was nine, Dad came home from school and found his life out on the sidewalk. He spent the following weeks living in a pickup truck with his father, two brothers, and Aunt Pearl. Later his father dropped him and his brother David off at his mother’s house and faded out.