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

Now in the days after Malcolm and Martin, the Mecca was changing again. Dad sold books at conferences that promised a new order, ushered in by poetry, independent schools, and bricks. But more than all the new slang and ways of being he beheld, it was an elder who gave the lesson that pointed out the path for his kids. This man had worked at Howard in a low honorable way, sweeping the floors, raking the grass, sanctifying the toilets. I know nothing of his life, except that he found great peace that the Mecca’s bylaws granted a free education to all children of the school’s employees. Dad heard this and was struck. Now many years later, he’d procured a job working in Moorland-Spingarn. With seven kids the need was extreme. But already my sisters Kris and Kelly were enrolled. What was left were five boys, two of us sitting out there nodding to this new and lovely noise.

It was the sound of our era, and in it we beheld all our wants and great fears. Big Bill was under pressure. Murphy Homes had left him exposed and open to the knowledge that there were many moments when all he would have was himself. This was 1986 onset of the Crack Age. People started dying all around us — Nana, Aunt Joyce, Bill’s grandmother Ms. Verla, and then the record 250 other Baltimoreans gone missing by murder. That year, my man Craig was butchered on his way home from work. He was the poorest kid in a class where everyone was on lunch tickets. His shoes talked; he wore a red plaid lumberjack shirt many days out of the week. He had several siblings. Now the orcs had ambushed and taken him out.

I came into all of this dazed by the lack of shade, by the quickness between child and child-man. But, as always, Big Bill was clear, and after Murphy Homes he probed his connections until he found a merchant of arms. He stashed it in our bedroom, in his brown puff leather jacket. He showed it to me without bravado, its weight gave it authority, and I knew it was real. And from that point forward when walking the land, my brother Big Bill was strapped.

When crack hit Baltimore, civilization fell. Dad told me how it used to be. In his time, the beefs were petty and stemmed from casual crimes: bopping too hard down an alien street, spitting game at somebody’s little sister. There were gangs who lived to throw down, and, true, every full moon or so a killer would reach into his houndstooth coat and make it rain. But there were rules and even when Dad was caught off guard and faced with a hostile crew, he knew he could throw up his dukes and yell “fair one,” and tackle their champion one-on-one. The bad end of a beef was loose teeth and stitches, rarely shock trauma and “Blessed Assurance” ringing the roof of the storefront funeral home.

In Dad’s days, we were a close-knit circle, but a circle surrounded by dire wolves. All we had to hold us up was the next man. But as time went on, we forgot ourselves and went cannibal — the next brother became a meal to feed our rep. At night, Action News unfurled the daily scroll, and always amid the rescued dogs, the lost toddlers, the scandalous bankers, there was us, buckled by the pop-pop of a.22, laid out on a sad stain of blood.

I didn’t fully get it then, but this was an inglorious turn. The world was filled with great causes — Mandela, Nicaragua, and the battle against Reagan. But we died for sneakers stitched by serfs, coats that gave props to teams we didn’t own, hats embroidered with the names of Confederate states. I could feel the falling, all around. The flood of guns wrecked the natural order. Kids whose minds should have been on Teddy Ruxpin now held in their hands the power to dissolve your world into white. But Dad pledged to sire us through. With the aid of many mothers we were pushed through science camp, music lessons. Thick books were hurled at us from across the room.

In his tenth grade year, the year after the Murphy Homes incident, Dad enrolled Big Bill in Upward Bound, one of the remnants of the Great Society and the days when bureaucrats dreamed of free gas, water, and Ph.D.s for all who wanted. Bill was caged by a backward psychology. He saw himself strictly in the mode of athletes and rappers, and put no value on his own intellect and bookish wits. My father struggled to make Bill see what he covered with a street pose, what he didn’t even know was there.

Saturday mornings, Upward Bound pulled Bill and a bevy of West Side kids up to the local community college to reinforce Pythagoras, Fitzgerald, and Newton. There was a freedom here — Upward Bound kids were sent by their parents, not ordered by the state, and so a certain level of bullshit was immediately cut out. Then in the summer, after weeks of taking college classes, they were treated to the full-blown campus experience out at Towson, where they stayed in dorms for the week.

This was Bill’s first taste of university, the first time that it occurred to him that higher ed may not be beyond him. But this new idea didn’t exactly exert a radical influence on him. My brother was immovable back then. He could be dead wrong and still steady talking to you like you’d never laced up Jordans or dribbled left. Once we spent the day at his mother’s crib out in Jamestown, trying to destroy each other on Atari boxing. Presumably, I was left in his care, and though he knew the laws of Tioga banned the consumption of beef, he managed to convince me that a can of spaghetti and meatballs would pass Dad’s muster.

Bill: Man, it’s no big deal. When Dad comes he won’t even know. And if he finds out, I’ll just tell him. It’s only once. What will he care?

Me: Okay.

But my brother’s wits trailed his will, and when Dad came, he saw the emptied can, the two dirty bowls still in the sink. Of course, he went off, did not start swinging but let us know that we had violated. I sat on Linda’s couch, absorbing the verbal onslaught, cursing how wrong my know-everything brother Bill was. Bill sat next to me, impassive, another lesson failing to connect.

He listened selectively, and cared most about his own internal compass, which he believed was attuned to the way the world should work. He was a bull, thought in straight lines, and though I found this trying, and I wasn’t alone, his certitude engendered great respect. My brother was not reflective, but that made him unafraid. He would see you in a brawl, leap in swinging, but take many days to ask you what the fight was all about. Bill was a constant and this won him allies wherever he dropped his B-more Bad-boys cap.

In the dorms of Towson over that summer, he expanded his affiliations. He started hanging out further north up Liberty Heights, at the corner of Wabash and Sequoia, about a mile from Mondawmin. He did not abandon Tioga, but an aspiring king needed vassals from all over. Your army was all you had, and the speed with which they appeared when it went down, boosted or pruned your rep. Bill’s new friends — Marlon, Joey, Rock — were boys of our ilk, stuck in that undefined place between the projects and the burbs. They did not live in squalor. Their mothers tried their best. But still they had to confront the winds of the day. The most ordinary thing — the walk to school, a bike ride around the block, a trip to the supermarket — could just go wrong. And when it happened, we were only hands, and those hands pledged to us, and then the fire some of us kept between the belt buckle and waist.

When Bill was burned by Murphy Homes, he promised to never again be helpless. A rep was preventive medicine. If you were from one of the lucky slums that struck fear, you could walk where you pleased. It was what we all wanted, even tender me, to be seen out there, and, on the strength of my pedigree, turn any street into home field.