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

And she was Conscious. She was president of the cultural enrichment club, a black student union, but in deference to Woodlawn’s nonblack 30 percent, no one called it that. I started going to meetings, mostly still just playing the back but occasionally piping up to interject a minor suggestion. We became closer this way, began to talk after health class or at the public library after school. I got the math in my usual, flicted way. Sidled with homework help, which of course, I did not need. I just wanted to see her alone, where all the grinning would belong to me.

In the dance studio, the sound of my djembe was forming.

That year, with all the adult drummers gone, we held it together.

After classes, I’d take my djembe out into the garage and practice until my muddy sound was cleaned. It was not the song of morning birds but still clearer than that old muffled groan. And I got better as the year went on, until finally I could play my own solos and lead the dancers in class down the floor.

Nothing short of religion can explain the molten feeling I derived from it all. Amid my failure and sudden parental abandonment, drumming was like a séance, a very loud séance — the drums, song, and dance whipped us into fury. You could hear us yelling over the roar as the currents of older gods rolled over us, and when fully on, we played in such unity that we were joined — all of us played our own part with our own sound, but we were one.

At night I went further, soaking goatskins in my parents’ basement and shaving off the hair. I’d place them between three rings and affix this tightly to the top of a wooden djembe shell. With mountain-climbing rope, I’d tie the top rings to a smaller ring at the drum’s belly and give it a day to dry. Then the next night I’d pull the rope with a stick and pliers until the skin was so tight over the drum that it felt like wood, and when you tapped it, the chained undead wailed out from under the Atlantic.

I had never done anything like this before. At first it all looked so impossible, and now that I’d been washed and baptized, drum solos I once marveled at now looked like three-year-olds banging at buckets. Then there were the djembes themselves. I built them not by parental edict, not under threat, but because of my own native yearning. This was a giant step toward seeing more. Across the country our elders were battling the shades that shrank our minds and abbreviated our world. We thought the corner was cool, but more than that we deeply believed that we could do no better, that this tiny parcel was all we deserved in this world of sin.

I was exposed at Lemmel. To be a black male is to be always at war, and no flight to the county can save us, because even there we are met by the assumption of violence, by the specter of who we might turn on next. I was ravaged by the plague of my fallen old town and reengineered. They took my wings, handed me a blade. I lost so much of myself out there. My dreams shrank into survival and mere dignity and respect. But in my djembe, I found art and my lost imagination, and now from heavy hands to making a drum sing — what more was out there? How far did it all really go?

That year, the Mecca sent me a letter. Kelly had graduated. Kris was still there. Bill was hanging on. I had long ago given up, and though I now felt I might actually become something, I was resigned that the Mecca was out of reach. But the old temple was hurting. Children of the integrated class were now gunning for white people’s ice. I had done well enough on my PSAT to attract their attention, which apparently did not extend to my grades. They invited our family to a dinner, along with a pool of other black potentials. I walked into a ballroom filled with round tables and black kids seated with their parents. They served us three courses and the usual parade of speakers vouching for the great esteem of the Mecca. The university president stood last, and his were the only words that stuck with me. His topic was the ubiquity of Howard across everything from dentistry to architecture to education. Anywhere you go in the world, he told us, you can find one of us.

Afterward in the car, my parents asked what I thought. It was okay, I guess. It didn’t seem all that. Truth was, I was covering. I was convinced that over my high school career was so marred that I’d never really be considered for admission. So I covered with apathy. Dad went ballistic—

Boy, this is an opportunity, and the best you can do is sit back there and mumble and shrug your shoulders?

I should have taken heart from Big Bill, who through it all had found his way in. Of course, he was now alone. He stopped checking in with Dad, though Dad lessons and words were now working harder on him. He’d come to Howard with cartoon ideas to gird him against failure. Only the weak, with their fucked-up jump shots, off-brand kicks, and feeble arms could thrive in class. That was his defense, because he was sure that he could not make it himself. But now broke, flunking, and on the verge of an escort back home, he confronted the truth. There were brothers here like him, paladins of the streets, who swore to the same codes, and yet they were getting over. What would be his defense now?

He still could not see the merits of scholarship, independent of all else. But he loved the life, the parties, the herb sessions, the controlled independence, and the waves of Jennifers for as far as he could see. He could go back home and invest in his old ties. He could work in the district and spend his lunches and off days with an empty book bag, perpetrating on the yard. But inside, he was not a half stepper. If it was going to be school, then it would be all the way. It was time to play his part.

The transition did not come easy — he never learned to sit down for hours every night with his head in a book. But he started showing up for class, and found that he liked the methodology, the back and forth of debates. He partied less, cut off old friends, and mastered the great art of the cram. Slowly it came together, and at the end of his first semester of any effort, he saw what he could do — a C plus GPA — if he only tried.

Dad was ecstatic, and for the first time he got some idea that all his labor might not be washed away.

I took my last SAT in November of my senior year, and what I remembered most was that it meant an exit from the prep classes taught by Jovett and my mom. Kier was out of Poly, too, and began hanging with new friends near Barrington. It was no longer the island I remembered, for not even the great cloud giants could keep the rotting city at bay. Kier ran into Barrington’s collapse, and whereas I was unsure of what I wanted and how I would get there, Kier was on intimate terms with his own desires. He wanted a mass of ends, accessible by a shortcut, and so he turned to the drug trade.

We parted ways there. I was too formed by then, and firm in my own ethics and beliefs of what crack had done to us all, clawing out the eyes of our cities with its steel-white talons. At school, I cut off Ebony at every pass. We talked almost every night for hours about all the nothing that young people feel the fate of worlds hinges on. After school, we’d hang out at the library or the sub shop across the street. I gathered her life story, how she was originally from Jersey, and how drugs had taken both her parents down. She moved in with a godmother out in the county and came to high school away from all the problems of the city. Of course, by then Woodlawn was also shifting over. In ten years, the neighborhood mall would go from the Gap, arcades, and Hecht’s to check-cashing joints, fast-food, and plus-size clothing stores.

On the surface of it all, she was unbroken and serene. Once, she challenged my father to a debate over his revolutionary credentials — made him justify a Black Panther who’d moved to the suburbs. He was forty-six, and was moving toward a lighter touch with my younger brother, Menelik. He did not preach much now, as he was entering into the twilight of his parenting years. My mother might go away for a weekend, and Dad would cook, wash dishes, and take us to the movies. He walked in on us studying, wearing reading glasses, pulled low on his nose. He looked down at us sitting at the table and then pulled up a seat. She grinned immediately, and then grilled him on the ethics of talking black while leaving the least among us behind. It was good and spirited, and Dad’s logic was indomitable as usual. Still, it didn’t stop Ebony from asserting my claims to the West Side were little more than fraud.