Beautiful Struggle

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  I lost count of how many times Fruitie got banked. The accounts came back as oral history with variations on the same heroic theme: There Fruitie stood at the base of the school steps, surrounded by vandals who dared not shoot the fair one, even though Fruitie was chill and always at ease. Instead, they circled, looking for the perfect angle to sucker punch. Niggers never even saw Fruitie’s ax, only the surge of boys flinging themselves at him and then flying away, no longer under their own power. He fought fiercely, repelled waves, before going down. With each telling, the deeds became greater, the villainy swelled in number, their methods grew in atrocity. They came from Douglass High School, damn near grown men. They lumbered out of the woods by the score. They pulled up in paint-splattered work vans. They wore hard hats and steel-toe boots. They swung two-by-fours, pipes, and brickbats. Not once did Fruitie prevail, and yet for the sheer will to war, he was John Henryed and the Marshall Team conferred on him a sort of respect that no jump shot or dime piece could give. The Gods of the Avenue mocked him. The time and the era outmatched him. But he would not be contained.

  Out on the bus stop, where Garrison and Liberty meet, he revealed the source of his power while I stared on, unbelieving. We were catty-corner from a fire station and across the street from Jim Parker Lounge. I was shivering in the winter, having just had my sky blue Nike skullcap snatched.

  This is the sort of dumb shit that slowly takes us out. There existed a Baltimore where school is for school’s sake, where a kid’s greatest worries were spelling tests and the first awkward juvenile crush. Neighborhoods like Rolling Park had bullies, fat kids, and badasses in a rebellious phase.

  But in Mondawmin the vultures among us corrupted everything. They were not growing into something better; they were not finding their deeper selves. The Knowledge was a disease. Some took to it faster than others. But eventually we all got it. We all grew tired of getting touched. We were just like boys everywhere, dreaming of model trains, Captain Marvel, and chemistry sets. But for us there were orcs outside the door, blood in their teeth and always waiting. At some point we grew tired of crumbling under their boots and embraced the Knowledge, became like all the rest groping for manhood in the dark.

  Each black boy must find his own way to this understanding. Fruitie was a blue jay in the meadow, and that made him remarkable, because even he had come to Know. That winter afternoon, while the vultures swooped in and took off with my hat, all I had to do was whistle and Fruitie would have been at them. But I did nothing. After the spot rushers had gone, Fruitie stepped into the awkward air and dropped a jewel. He confessed to me that he was afraid, but when surrounded by henchmen, he’d quote a line from Rakim Allah and he was harder than he’d been in the moment before.

  I nodded, but pushed his words into the back of a basement. Some weeks later, on the field across from Lemmel, we were shortcutting to the M-1 bus stop—he was headed home, I was off to see my grandmother. And then here these mutherfuckers came, with more numbers than us, running across the field between west of Dukeland and south of Liberty. I’ve forgotten how they looked on purpose, but I remember that again they grabbed for my Raiders fitted, yet another hat, and then snatched something from Fruitie that I didn’t see. They offered to let us go with no further damage. I accepted. But Fruitie had grown tired long ago. There is no other way to say this: I walked away.

  From the safety of the bus stop I watched him. He was not Thor. When he swung his long arms, nothing shook on its axis. Within seconds he was on the ground. It was horror. They were on top of him, wailing away. Fruitie was gone. He thrashed wildly, kicked his legs. How could this sight, him helpless on the ground, pinned in a one on six be poetry? I was a boy like all boys, selfish in my own particular way. What I could not understand was something that seemed elemental to everyone else around me—that a kid who lost his heart was worthy of nothing.

  The next day at school, the whole affair, like always, had gone around the Marshall Team. Someone approached me in science class—

  Fruitie should fuck you up.

  But that was never my nigger’s style. He gave a pound when he saw me, and kept joking like nothing had happened, like nothing had gone wrong. His kindness wounded me. And I knew then that I was alone.

  CHAPTER 3

  Africa’s in the house, they get petrified

  My father was not a violent man. He went organic in the ’70s, before Whole Foods became fashion, and kept a vegetable garden in our small backyard. I never saw him argue in public. I never saw him hit anyone but his kids. He kept one gun in the house. It was a relic—a broken rifle from his Panther days, stowed at the bottom of our coat closet beneath old jackets and desert boots. He loved foreign movies, and would make a weekly hajj to the artsy Charles Theater downtown for a taste of Truffaut. But his aspect deflected the shuck and jive, and he believed in man’s inescapable lower nature.

  He took a broad view of scholarship, and expected that I’d leave junior high with the rudiments of manhood. He was like all parents, urging for the grades that he believed matched my potential. But more so, he expected I’d leave Lemmel with Knowledge, Consciousness, and the sense to deploy each in its appropriate place. Dad had seen more than just the streets by then, and at every station he noted the people who staked their lives on turning you to their ends. Today, he told me, it was wild boys in search of skullies, later it’d be a girlfriend subbing you in for her no-shit father or supervisors who pushed you into taking their weight. The Knowledge Rule 2080: From maggots to men, the world is a corner bully. Better you knuckle up and go for yours than have to bow your head and tuck your chain.

  Dad wanted me present to everything, my entire neurology cocked. But I sleepwalked through the world, hoping one day to wake up on a fantastic other side and realize that this had all been a dream. I was clueless to more than just the street shit—I was the type of child who lost his hats and jackets on the first warm day of the year. Dad would lecture, and the words would fly straight past. It was like I heard them but could not translate.

  When I turned nine, I got my first set of house keys, and lost them an average of once a month. This was heresy and Dad’s warnings stretched into double digits, until follow-through was all that was left.

  Where’re your keys? he demanded.

  I don’t have them, I mumbled.

  He was standing in the living room, off from work, always off from work at the most awful times. House keys seem small, but to my father they embodied everything about me that could someday get me killed.

  Well, where are they?

  This kid at school took them from me and threw them in the trash.

  Did you pull them out?

  No.

  Did you pop the kid in the mouth?

  No.

  What did you do?

  Nothing.

  This is when Dad snapped. There was some calculation and illusion here. Dad wasn’t the type to have a bad day at work and come home and start swinging. Equally, there would be days when the teacher called home and you were certain a beating was on the way, and he would sit at the table and talk. But this made it worse, because when we were wrong, we felt trapped in a horror movie. We never knew what was coming, how it was coming, or when.

  Dad walked up the steps and came back with his black leather belt, folded so that the buckle met the tip. He jabbed me in the chest and asked who I was more scared of—him or them.

  I bring this here to intimidate, he said. To show you what I am. To show you that I mean business. But this isn’t what it’s about anymore.

  Then he dropped the belt on the brown carpet and started swinging.

  My father fought his whole life, but once he’d been like me—from the street but not of it. He was indoctrinated at eight. Dad lived with his tangled family on Markoe Street in West Philadelphia. His father had kids by three sisters, so that Aunt Pearl, who Dad loved, defied classification, and his four brothers and sisters were also cousins. My grandfather was in his late forties, and winding
down his reign as the satyr king of North Philly. He was profligate, and seemed to reveal new children the way others revealed ordinary vases, penny loafers, and belt buckles. He was pretty—tall, light, and did not need stocking caps, hot water, and Murray’s grease for waves. He loved the newspaper, and it fell on my father to feed this daily hunger. He did this faithfully until one evening, he returned holding nothing, crying about kids on the corner who’d roughed him up.

  Go get my paper, my grandfather told him. If you come back without it, you’ll have to fight me.

  Dad protested.

  Son, he told him, the first one who says something, you pop him in the mouth and try to kill him. You do that and I promise you’ll have my paper.

  This is one of those stories where the feeling of the moment stands in for visual detail. In Dad’s telling the fight is two shadows rolling around, but what is solid is the feeling, not of explicit triumph but of an awkward victory—the win that does not come from vanquishing a foe but fear. Conjuring the will to campaign. Now he was armed with that magic, that first taste of freedom earned, and he knew he could walk his block as he pleased, could buy his father’s paper at midnight under a starless sky, if that’s what he wanted. Predators would never see him as easy, because he’d reached out and tapped into the great forces that ward the vultures away. That Knowledge was for beyond Markoe Street. Years later, these same kids would be adults, subtle and dignified. But Dad could see their beaks, red eyes, and battered black wings.

  Still even then he was Dad, not meant to make a life on the block. He had no real swagger or pose. He was an incompetent thug, the sort of boy who knew how to keep the heat off but not how to bring it. He got caught stealing and throwing bottles at white boys. He dropped out of school, bragged that there was nothing there for him to learn. He haunted libraries at odd hours in search of more Mickey Spillane. You could have asked him what he wanted to be back then, and though he could not name it, he would have told you about the trips downtown, how’d he run his hand across the base of tall buildings that he was sure he would one day own.

  Dad was of that era, an acolyte of that peculiar black faith that makes us patriots despite the yoke. So he worshipped JFK, got amped off old war movies, dreamed of leaping over sand hills, driving tanks, and tossing grenades. He was semi-Conscious then. He worked delivering groceries for A&P on Broad Street, a few doors down from the Uptown. Next door was the state liquor store and on the second floor a Nation of Islam mosque. He saw Malcolm in the flesh, and noted with interest the nationalists out on Columbia Avenue and their posters of noble Ethiopians, the ones who would not beg. Martin Luther King was just beginning his tour of the South. Dad had never seen a water fountain or toilet reserved by race, and could not access the Other Knowledge that called on young men to sing while barbarians swung clubs and unleashed dogs.

  There were few options in his vicinity, no collegiates on his block, and whenever he strayed from his own street the reception he got was Hey, mutherfucker, where you from? So he fell back on his dreams of John Wayne. In the army, he handled dogs for the military police, was shipped to Vietnam with only the vaguest sense of its place in politics or history. He was the only brother in his unit. It was like anything else—some of the white boys were human, but others ran cock block between Dad and the Vietnamese girls. When he busted out his battery-powered record player and threw on the latest Stax, they’d howl and laugh. While on leave he concocted payback, bought an armful of Dylan records, knowing only that Dylan sounded hillbilly.

  In the tent he shared with his unit, he played “Masters of War,” and mocked them, but more mocked himself. They loved Dylan like Dad loved Pat Boone, which is to say not at all. But his image of whiteness was so flat that he assumed they all banged to the same soulless beat. Then the plot inverted. Dylan’s voice was awful, an aged quaver that sounded nothing like the deep-throated or silky R&B that Dad took as gospel. But the lyrics wore him down, until he played Dylan in that addicted manner of college kids who cordon off portions of their lives to decipher the prophecies of their favorite band. Dad heard poetry, but more than that an angle that confirmed what a latent part of him had already suspected. This war was bullshit.

  Even then, in his army days, Dad was more aware than most. Back in training he’d scuffled with a Native American soldier, who tried to better his social standing by airing out the unit’s only black. After they were pulled apart, Dad walked up to his room, calmed down, and then returned to the common area. On a small table, he saw a copy of Black Boy. He just knew someone was fucking with him. But he picked up the book, and discerned that it was Nobody Smiling. He took it up to his room, mostly because he was touched but also to keep the book from playing a part in any further racist slights.

  In Richard Wright, Dad found a literature of himself. He’d read Manchild in the Promised Land and Another Country, but from Wright he learned that there was an entire shadow canon, a tradition of writers who grabbed the pen, not out of leisure but to break the chain. He bubbled on the edge of Consciousness. The night they gunned Malcolm down, Dad and a few black soldiers were headed into town to carouse and drink. The message came over the radio, but the rest of the car kept talking.

  Quiet, Dad told them. Did you hear what they just said? Malcolm is dead. There were a few looks of shallow concern and then the conversation picked up, like only a strong wind had interrupted the flow.

  Now he began to come to. When on leave, he stopped at book stands in search of anything referencing his own. He read Malcolm’s memoir, and again saw some of his own struggle, and now began to feel things he’d, like us all, long repressed—the subtle, prodding sense that he was seen as less. He went back to Baldwin, who posed the great paradox that would haunt him to the end: Who among us would integrate into a burning house?

  He was discharged in 1967 and married Linda, in love, but mostly because he knew nothing else. It was wrong from the moment they left the courthouse. Afterward, they gathered with Dad’s family to talk, laugh, and drink. Halfway through the day Linda left the small party, and said she was just stepping out to visit her mother. But she never came back, and Dad spent that evening at Ms. Verla’s house pleading for his new wife’s return. She did, but they argued regularly. They’d take turns leaving and coming, and during periods of intermittent warmth, children would appear.

  By the time the second child arrived, my big sister Kris, six years my senior, he was in bloom. You know one way or the other we all get touched. A Jersey housewife strolls through the supermarket and, suddenly caught by the sheen of an apple, decides to give abortions in small-town Kansas. A washed-up middling exec, who’s thrown his life away to the bottle, hears organs, finds the Word. In the midst of a Hawthorne lecture, a drug-addled sophomore is taken by dreams of the Peace Corps. All the truly living, at least once, are born again.

  Since childhood, Dad had read constantly but without direction or edge. Baldwin, Wright, and Malcolm were the first signs that led him onto another path, one he followed until enveloped by a forest of black books. He lived in a busy house, but in stolen moments alone he considered the world around him, the quaking from war, riots, and assassinations, and saw in this new Knowledge a way of drawing a line.

  When the years of slumber passed, and he emerged fully Conscious, everything was skewed. Was like the whole world needed a shot of V8. Where others saw America in lovely columns, marvels of engineering, and refined democrats, Dad saw only masks concealing the heralds of woe. He was a slave still, and all around him black people heaved under the invisible yoke. He could not talk like before. Everything felt corrupted, until he found himself sitting at cookouts, wondering how, in the world of Medgar Evers, a man could sidle up, crack a beer, and spend hours essaying on Earl Weaver and the Oriole way.

  Dad was working for United Airlines, unloading luggage and maintaining the cabin after passengers deplaned. In downtime, he brought back his father’s old ritual and fell into the newspapers left behind from distant cities and s
tates. He only barely knew California, but it was in a story from that other country that Dad found his muse. His muse carried a gun.

  Television remembers that era for the blown churches, Mississippi savages, and sharecroppers gone philosophical. All those great stories are Southern and built on Christ. But Dad wasn’t from those parts. He hailed from the black metropolis, walked with the great black masses, down on the Markoe Streets of the world, where we had all been down so long. He stood with those who had come to believe that our condition, the worst of this country’s condition—poor, diseased, illiterate, crippled, dumb—was not just a tumor to be burrowed out but proof that this whole body was a tumor, that America was not a victim of great rot but rot itself. Dad found Gandhi absurd. Much more native to Dad were these fab headlines touting the exploits of the brothers and sisters from Oakland who did not dance, who preached righteous self-defense and Fanon.

  Word to John Brown, my father was overcome. It was the spring of 1969. He began checking the schedule for planes coming from the West Coast. On board, after cleaning, he now searched for California papers, then searched through those papers for any updates on the machinations and movements of the Panther Party. He finally discovered the local Panthers after a night of cocktails with a girl who was not Linda but claimed to be down and, as proof, that very night, pointed Dad to the local office.

  The next day, he arrived at the branch cocked and ready to serve. But the Panthers were in the throes of Hoover’s scripted paranoia. Everyone was a presumed agent. Members were purged. This was not a game. Alleged informants were found decomposing in the woods of Leakin Park. When Dad walked in, dripping revolutionary fervor, they held back. They wanted to know how he found them. They did not recognize the girl who pointed him their way.