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

He asked if I had questions, how I felt, what I needed to say. I have never expressed anger with my father, to my father. Fear clouded every word. But here was an open shot. I could have yelled, stepped out of the car, slammed the door. I could have run away for a week, told him I hated him like white kids I’d seen in movies. Here was the chink in his armor, the flaw which had always been theory finally confirmed. Even the general falls down, though it must be said, fallen is not how he saw himself at the time. Still, I did nothing. I said nothing, just nodded my head and listened until it was time to drive away.

When I was young, my father was heroic to me, was all I knew of religion. His word was the difference between pancakes and oatmeal, between Speed Racer and yard work. Every trip to the Food Barn was epic. We’d hop out of the car, and I’d try to shut the door in rhythm with him, like on detective shows when they meant business. He was heroic because I was a child, because my worldview didn’t extend past Lode Runner, Train 9, or Warren Moon’s rookie card. The first time Dad beat me, I was six and the subject of my first-grade teacher’s phone calls home. In those days, all the kids anyone cared about got beatings. But that black leather belt, folded on my parents’ bed was still terrible, and this was my clearest illustration that fatherhood was dictatorship, that its subjects were at the mercy of a tyrannical God.

By the time I hit Lemmel, my appraisal of Dad depended on the year, how I woke up, the number of hours I’d worked in the basement. There were days I would have wished him into nothing, so that I could be free to relish in dumb shit with all the other laughing, orphaned boys. There were others, when I looked around and saw that, though the birthright of every child was a manned fortress, we lived in unnatural times. All the guardians had fled their posts, and here was mine, his hand on his sword, his armor glimmering in the light of moons. Now he sat in his car, across from me, unveiling his true face, unveiling a tangled humanity that made all my foibles look elementary.

In his mind he was righteous, and still wedded to the old Panther idea of free, unbound love. He did not speak to me in shame so much as struggled to display himself to a child. But Dad was obsessed with the world as he thought it should be, and his ideals were a bright light, blinding him even to his beloved. So the losses my family took were not spoken, and, as we rejected Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth, we were swaddled in a great cloak of alone. Even the most mundane act — refusing the Pledge of Allegiance, sitting mute for the flag — pushed us farther down the path of resistance and alienation from the rest of the world. He didn’t acknowledge this truth because the superseding truth was that he was right about it. He wouldn’t bend to the will of a backward world and wouldn’t allow us not to bend either. I was sure that everyone else my age was frolicking in pagan October masks, eating hamburgers and pie à la mode, backstroking through a lake of Christmas presents, while I meditated among stacks of tofu and books. Even after I got Conscious, I felt I’d been robbed of time, that I had been isolated from a series of great childhood events. In my father’s house, values ripped us from the crowd. Dad called it enlightenment. But to me it just felt lonely.

My mother had fallen out of step with the world she once knew and looked sideways at her family’s everyday values. Even without my father, she would have been a dissident, cracking wise in the corner at reunions. But Dad could not come to even that sort of détente. And so with each new revelation he laid upon our family — no meat, no Thanksgiving — she grew further apart from her peoples. Once we drove to Columbia for a family portrait with all my maternal uncles, aunts, and cousins. My grandmother stood in the back, proud matriarch who’d battled her way up from Gilmore Homes. The photographer was gregarious and white and late. I could feel the sharp edges of Dad’s painted smile.

Afterward, everyone went for dinner, everyone except us. I had cousins who’d been off to Germany, who I hadn’t seen in years, but I just climbed into the car, sulked in the back, and looked out the window at the highway dark. We were halfway home. Dad was frustrated because the photographer had been late. And then he popped—

Son, do you know how many black photographers there are in Baltimore, struggling? Why am I driving all the way to Columbia to help out the other man? I’m sorry, Son. They’ve gotten enough of my money for one night.

His logic cut through my anger, and the sense of it left me reeling for weeks. But I still just wanted him to let it go, if only for that evening.

This was how my mother was walled off from everything, her own past, her family, choices about her present. Every bold idea took us further out. From our very names, my mother had so much to explain to the world — and now this — a man out of pocket, with his woman’s insane blessing. She buckled in shame, and the thought of explaining this one, of going out into the world smiling and claiming the high ground, was too much.

She knew that this was the reality for so many women, but she was robbed of even the cover of fake ignorance. She was ashamed, and the fact that things were not public was little help. You must know that my mother was hard as hell, would beat children like a street fight, and then drill us on long division. But Ma was of her time and that giant sect of black women, who, rendered fatherless, would have gone barren before staging a repeat.

For the gift of having a father around for her children, something the rest of this thieving country took as natural as rain, so much else suffered. There was never music playing when my peoples walked into the living room. You could not catch them on old choppy home videos, making out under a summer tree, laughing, holding up their protesting hands as the lenses closed in. They were not for the smoky jazz clubs, dinner reservations, or walks down at the harbor. They barely marked anniversaries. As for me and that time, there were the facts my mother laid down to me from the day I could talk — that people were people and their covenants were sealed with subterfuge, conspiracy, and denial. When my father opened his marriage, when he explained this new joining in that brown Honda Accord, it was just another bizarre step in our bizarre lives. It was how I was raised. It was what I’d come to expect.

I never talked to Kier about any of this, though I was told that he’d been informed. What I saw of him and my father continued as normal — Dad would hand him parables from Up from Slavery, or Kier would perfect his imitation of Dad’s ’70s cadence. By then, Kier had chosen the glittering path. I always thought he had what mattered — the cool hand, the fresh Ewings, Champion hoodie, the badass dimes. Yet he craved frenzy, life on the random and quick. Like all boys, I saw the appeal. I would not live on lucky numbers but a long blessed grind. I thought Kier labored in the shadow of his father’s death, and even today I’m not sure that Dad helped. By the time that last summer came, the footprints we left were hardening in the sun.

But soon I’d be loose from it all, and I felt the freedom of eighteen on the approach. I was a high-school senior, with an assigned dorm room. Everything in front of me was green sky.

All year, I’d been working toward better drumming, showing up early for classes, teaching young children, and tinkering with the threading and tightness of my own djembe. I bought a third drum, decked out with carvings of the Continent, a brown stain, and a polyurethane glow. By March, even my breath was a djembe beat, and everything revolved around my next rehearsal, drum class, or show. In the meantime, Sankofa was prepping for our biggest concert of the year, the spring recital.