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

She was still working in D.C., and weekly she would appear, unannounced, in the admissions office and demand a status report. That June, Howard sent notice that they wanted to see my final grades and another letter of recommendation. Ma felt the walls weakening and continued her assault — morning prayer, regular visits where she dropped Dad’s name and those of the three kids who had, by now, either graduated or were still on campus.

The fat packet struck, like LT from the blind side. There I am, having the summer of my life, and then this day I walk up Campfield hill, my bagged drum strapped to my back, and checking the mail, see this envelope long and heavy and when turned over note that it bears the seal of the Mecca. By Gabriel Prosser’s ghost, I thought. This is it. I ripped it open before I made it in the front door, and did not even have need for the acceptance letters. They don’t send brochures and leaflets to rejects. When Ma came home, I showed her the packet and she laughed in that loud, joyous, voluminous way that is the signature of all her proper sisters. She would have leaped and pumped her fist, if that was how she got down. This was her acceptance, after all. What had I done my whole life but obstructed my own way out?

Back when I first got Conscious, the Mecca seemed natural, the only place to bring me into line with spirit of the El-Hajj Shabazz. But with each failing year, I lowered myself, once to the point that I didn’t even think a college would take me. True, the Mecca was only an hour away, and there were drummers in Chocolate City. But the bond I felt here was more than music: it was an enveloping community, a circle so tight that it reverberated in me even when I was gone for days. What I knew even then was that I would never be in love like that again, was that nothing that healthy would ever feel that carnal, lush, and complete.

I’m going to Morgan, I told my parents. They were sitting down in my father’s office. My mother gave a speech about opportunity and responsibility. Dad sat back, with his patented face of stone and just listened to me and Ma go back and forth. At the end, he placed his palms on his lap and said, Son, it’s your choice. You’re grown. You can make up your mind.

I walked out of the office with a fool’s smile. How I ever thought I’d prevailed, how I ever thought that I would win against my mother is beyond me now. I had turned it around, but not so much that I was scholarship worthy — my parents would still be carrying the bill. And I was in the burgeoning class of kids whose families made too much for financial aid but not enough to make tuition payments anything less than a war.

We had two more conversations. In the first, Dad continued the charade of options. Son, it’s still your choice. But your mother is my woman, and, Son, she has power. I think she’s right, but you’re grown and can make your own decision. I am trying to let you know that. But your mother, Son. Your mother has power.

I want to go to Morgan, I told him.

Okay, Son.

But by the next week, he was flipped. We were in his office again. My mother had that thin smile like You Know What This Is. The conversation was short.

Dad: Ta-Nehisi. You’re not going to thirteenth grade.

And like that, it was done. All over again, I was exiled from home and destined for Mecca.

Or this is what I saw. Fact was, I was only months from eighteen, and could have done what I wanted. I was split on leaving Baltimore, and the wishes of my parents were an easy out. I did not know then that this is what life is — just when you master the geometry of one world, it slips away, and suddenly again, you’re swarmed by strange shapes and impossible angles.

But I had survived my formative world and all its trappings. Down on Tioga, the reports of my old friends floated back to me. Their fates were maddeningly clichéd. Even the ones in whom I saw a tighter head game fell into shadow, became a statistic in the cold hands of some pundit, who looked out on our streets and rolled up his windows. I still walked under a cloak of doubt. I could wake up one morning like — Time to start the revolution, or I could wind up in rags, sleeping on heating grates, permanently retired to the dreamworlds that I’d conjured since childhood.

I spent my last week closing it all out. I played a final set with my Sankofa brothers. We argued because the sound wasn’t tight. We said that it wasn’t the end, that I was merely a weekend commuter train away. But already, I felt the distance. I said good-bye to Ebony the way we did everything important — over the phone. I took one of the teen dancers to see some smooth jazz. Another girl from my Poly days visited the night before I left. The weathermen were predicting a meteor shower behind heavy cloud cover, and when we looked up we could see the sky flashing like lightning in a thunderless storm. She must have handed me a gift. We talked for an hour or so on my back porch, then she rose, gave me a hug, and pulled off in a blue minivan.

The next morning, I brought boxes and suitcases to the front door. Jovett and my parents were seated at the dining room table. On the table were various gifts from Jovett — a set of screwdrivers, a fire extinguisher, a flashlight, several packs of rubbers. Dad would not have loaded up that car without a lecture, but what he said, I can’t even remember. I was caught between competing things — the bliss of leaving the dominion of my father and the sorrow of the impending loss of my brothers.

We pulled off, drove down Campfield hill, up Liberty Road, to the Beltway, and down 95, until we reached the new world. We found Big Bill right off Georgia Avenue, sitting on the shallow wall in front the Howard Plaza Towers — where he had once let off, sprayed the night sky with a gun — which was now my home. He was sitting with two of his friends, in a fisherman’s cap, khaki shorts, white tee shirt, Timbs. He had never looked so at ease. He was sitting there talking when we pulled up, loose with the sort of casual humanity that Baltimore never allowed. The old anger, which guarded him and maybe saved him during the days of Murphy Homes, was drained and what was left was all my father, all my people, ever wanted. Was a man.

When I took hajj at the Mecca, my parents didn’t open an ancient bottle of wine. They didn’t take any vacations. I was not the last child but the last of that perilous bunch, the sixth in seven years, born into lust, a frenzy of variables, and many futures tossed in the air. Now, for the first time in almost twenty years, there was space to reflect. Who would they be now that the great labors lay behind them? Now that they’d shielded the kids from the era of crack?

There was still my young brother, Menelik. But the air and water just weren’t the same. He had a Sega Genesis. He went to Fallstaff. His only vice was Gundam Wing. He was not a wanderer or insurgent but was balanced, had a sort of everyday aesthetic that I’d always wanted. He was mostly quiet, and on the weekends would go see foreign flicks with my father. He barely remembered Tioga; and Campfield, the sort of Avalon I prayed for back at Lemmel, was his formative home.

For him, for everyone, the old rules were falling away. A month before I left, Sankofa had a cookout in a small park in Woodlawn, to celebrate the Fourth of July. It was my father’s birthday, but we’d never celebrated the date. Babas and mamas brought out potato salad, grilled turkey burgers, and veggie dogs. That was the summer, when Super Soakers were wild. I had never owned so much as a water gun, because in our time, so many kids were falling that such toys were a mark of the enslaved 85. But that whole afternoon gunfights broke out. Some fool strapped two tanks to his back and started spraying like Blowtorch. I grabbed someone else’s double barrel and went to work. Amid the crossfire, the whole cookout laughing and wet, I saw my brother, small and shirtless, clutching a baby water pistol with a orange neon tank on the top. Menelik ran through the streams of water, until he found himself in the clear. Then he raised the iron at an oblivious target, smiled, and fired.