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

Beneath it all, I saw her wounds, the thing that makes men run into burning houses. Here was my damsel. All her demons were hidden, but I could feel them baying out from within and activating something immutable in my DNA. My grades improved in direct proportion to the time I spent around her. I got extracurricular. I did a Garvey speech for the school in the black awareness assembly. I became a peer counselor. They’d pull me out of class for workshops on conflict resolution.

My motives were impure, like my brother’s: Ebony was involved in all of these things. She was one of those kids. She caught me in the hallway after sixth period. She’d been gone all day and was wearing a dress that seemed like it was bought for church. She’d just been honored for grades, for extraordinary effort or some such accolade of overachieving. She was always overachieving. She handed me an envelope and told me not to open it until after school.

I had to go to Mondawmin that day for shopping, and thought little of what I’d mindlessly stuffed in my backpack. I opened it after I got off the subway. It was the program from her ceremony, and on the side was a love note that I could not recognize as such. It was written in that vague, noncommittal way of a girl who wants you to know what she feels but wants to protect herself all the same. I did not know what I was holding, and was caught on the price in self-esteem for figuring it out. I talked to her that night and thanked her, but I did not push like I was supposed to. I could not see that beneath the shield, beneath the smiles and laughter that were her armor, behind the glowing ax, all of us are waiting to be swept away.

My mother extended her SAT classes for the kids at Sankofa. I would come downstairs on Sunday mornings and make faces at them before I headed out. I was looking out the window into manhood and independence. No one hassled me about my grades. No one checked on me in my room. My parents went out of town and left me with now nine-year-old Menelik. I took him to his Little League football games. That was a great season, the first time in my life where I’d been turned loose from the parental vise grip. Still, you could not dent the expectations of my mother. She would bring me college catalogs. Dad took me down to the civic center for the historically black college tour. I imagined myself in Tougaloo, Tennessee State, Dillard, or Johnson C. Smith, somewhere else with a different way of living and perhaps the sort of standards that would admit a screwup like me.

At school, I caught the attention of teachers and counselors who tried to move me into Advanced Placement. I politely declined, no need to soil my last year. Still, in spite of me, some of them managed to place road signs in my life path. My English 12 teacher, Mrs. Effron, saw my papers and short stories and was the first person, outside of my mother, to tell me that in this I may have a gift. My guidance counselor, Mr. Herring, took to me immediately and put out of his mind my earlier transcript and three years of ineptitude. When the applications began to fly, he wrote me a recommendation that was beyond anything I felt I had earned. I saw in myself the disgrace to my father’s name. But Mr. Herring was a black man, Conscious like my father, and thus desperate to reclaim troops for the field.

That winter, I applied to four schools — all in the area, in hopes of never saying good-bye to my drummers. The shortest application was for Howard — a gamble, a pebble slung into the dark. Then I returned to the last leisurely half of senior year. That was the year, the only year of my childhood, that I took off from hip-hop. The older gods were falling off. EPMD were breaking. Chuck and Flav had taken us as far as they could, and already the new voices were being hijacked by the death cults. Brothers who last week were shouting out Malcolm were flipped into studio gangsters, killing every nigger in sight. I felt some part of that need to stand on the corner of the world and grab your nuts. But I was at the gates of manhood, and they could not fade me. They were hard where it mattered least — attacking whole genders, claiming to run the street, and then fleeing in the wake of the Beast.

By then, Big Bill had brought home other gifts — Bob, Steel Pulse, and Burning Spear. He would gather his friends at our home, my parents gone for the week, and blaze out back, banging Babylon by Bus . They were all nouveau Conscious, had dropped their slave names for handles taken from Zulu and Swahili. Bob Marley had been dead for a decade, and yet he emerged to us as the great bard of our people. Later I found the frat boys had ruined him, like they do everything they touch. But back then, he was prophetic. That year I did not know where I was headed, but I knew that I was mortgaged to the grand ideal — the end of mental slavery and the fulfillment of the book.

In those last lazy months of senior year — half days and free periods — I was admitted to Morgan State, sent a dorm room assignment and glossy package extolling my new independent life. It was my third acceptance, all to local schools, and all the product of three quarters of grinding from a 1.8 to a respectable 2.4 grade point.

Who was I in those moments of acceptance but a boy finally realized? All my years my family pounded me in hopes of something more. My mother told me I was sharp, but would never make it this lazy. My father could drown a whole weekend into chores. Big Bill would punch me in the arm, warning that out there was a world out of control and the safeties were permanently disengaged. My mother used to say I was going to fly, but I could not see how. And now I’d come home and in the mailbox, each month, I found a fat packet with my name on it. I was not made complete, but I felt worthy of my mother’s praise.

I didn’t show for graduation. I took on my father’s aversion for ceremony, and had only a year of ties to Woodlawn. I dismissed senior prom from the day I came to Woodlawn. The year would be a trip of unfortunate business — there was no time for flowers. But then this girl Ebony, and this silly compulsion within, clouded my logic and I could not see. Plus, as always, I missed the intricate signs, the hints, and head fakes, the looks when I was not looking. I did the math too late, and by then she’d taken up with another dude. Man, listen, he was straight Christopher Williams, the sort of pretty boy who pulled strictly redbones, until he heard Mike G, got on that blacker-the-berry shit, and came to the other side. Of course, I wasn’t that far off, but when I saw them walking the halls, it felt wrong as Winnie and Kirk McCray.

I stopped calling after that. What did it matter — I was on my way, stepping out of the world and into my next self. My mother demanded proof, suspected another scheme ending in the repetition of the twelfth grade. She knew her child, and in some way could not believe that the saga was coming to an end. Until I brought the diploma home from the principal’s office, opened the hardcover vinyl folder, and placed it in her hands, she did not believe. When she saw it, she just half smiled, no big hug, no inspiring speech, just happy to see the end.

I had the vague sense that something different was afoot. Dad ambushed me in the brown Honda Accord, our third one, because Ma had crashed up the other two. We were driving from the new office. Dad turned down Wabash, pulled into a tiny shopping mall, and parked in front of Kmart. Dad owed me nothing, except fatherhood and that was how he always carried it. My father never apologized for one minute of parenting. He didn’t start there in that parking lot, and yet he talked in a manner that was less sure.

Son, he told me. I have begun another relationship. I am in a relationship with Jovett. Me and your mother thought you should know. I love Jovett and your mother very much. We all thought you should know.