Beautiful Struggle

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  He was assigned to a weekly political education class—a sort of vetting that weeded out the agents and crazies who did not so much believe in dialectical materialism and great leaps forward as in the sheen of guns and shooting at cops. It was supposed to be about more than that, which suited Dad’s bearing and penchant for books more than guns. He would listen to the autodidacts break down capitalism and the means of production. He would listen to them turn around the great conflicts many ways, and he would say nothing; until one day he saw a clear through line, then they could not shut him up. They could not turn him away.

  There were no berets and powder-blue shirts. Often there weren’t even guns. Dad began as the Panther who wasn’t. He was designated a “community worker”—a tag ranking him slightly above hanger-on and giving him sleeping rights at the collective’s HQ. He would rise at five A.M., head over to the Martin de Porres Center, talk with the radical Catholics, and then head to the kitchen. The revolution was centered around pancakes, bacon, and grits; and by seven A.M., a stream of poor black kids would move through for their daily free meal. In the afternoons, he studied with his comrades. At night he worked at the airport. Somewhere in between he was a father.

  This creaky arrangement held until he was busted for moving guns. He lost his job. The newspapers published his name and address. He called Linda, and she just hung up the phone. The dead connection broke his bonds to the mortal plane. He saw himself now freed from this world and all its trappings, which would soon be nil anyway. He went to work full-time for the uprising, and found his place among the great change that was burning through the city.

  Dad rose through the ranks that had been thinned by arrests, underground escapes, and stupidity. He was the Maryland defense captain, head of the Baltimore branch. But he planned no insurrections and avoided the grand suicidal gesture that seduced others of his age. Instead, Dad mostly thought of survival. For sure, there was the threat of cops kicking down doors, infiltration by agents and operatives. But these were secondary. Dad was responsible for a commune, and when he woke in the morning he thought not of guns but of oil, electricity, water, rent, and groceries. He turned to Brother Reginald Howard, his minister of distribution and right-hand man who worked down at Bethlehem Steel.

  Howard, Dad would say, we don’t have any money.

  Formally, Howard’s charge was the delivery and flow of Panther newspapers, the funds from which were the lifeblood of any Panther chapter. He was a hustler in the righteous sense, the type who sold Panther newspapers at that plant between shifts. Dad would send him out into the street and Howard would speak with local grocers, highlighting all the kids the Panthers had fed, all the free shoes they’d handed out, and the mothers they’d tested for sickle cell.

  Then there was the plight of the community. They would start to roll in early, drawn by the luster of the party or referred by some overwhelmed city agency, and all of them needed help. Someone got harassed by white people in East Baltimore. A husband arrested and couldn’t afford a lawyer. Someone else had been evicted and sat out.

  And then there was the struggle of managing the soldiers of the impending guerrilla war. Dad was not in the company of flower power. It took all kinds, bourgeois college students, teenage mothers, plumbers, and professors. But the beloved and honored foot soldiers hailed from the back end of the world. They were risen armies of the dead—cutthroats, rapists, brigands, and murderers—who in other lives feasted on their own people’s toil. Now they’d gone Conscious and trained their guns on the System. But the reformation varied in scope. Some were as real as Malcolm straight out the joint, while others were just looking for new ways to launder their dirt.

  Back in Washington, Hoover was wild and aflame. Later it all came out—reams of FBI files where agents fomented beef, trumped up charges, and coaxed the vanguard to suicidal acts. The Panthers needed only their eyes to understand. Across the country, police armed with blueprints and intelligence above their grade kicked in doors at perfect hours. They murdered Fred Hampton. Bound and gagged Bobby Seale. Eldridge was out. Attica and the Jackson brothers were on the way.

  In Baltimore it went like anywhere else, and among the matters my father inherited in his new role were the numerous cases of shackled Panthers. He focused on Eddie Conway, indicted for the murder of a policeman. He was pinned by the slimmest of evidence—a jailhouse snitch and an officer who claimed to have seen his face for a few seconds in the dead of night. But the Panther leaders were only half concerned with the particulars. The romance of the movement, the theology of revolution tomorrow, made them see not one man in the balance but a symbol of the grander war.

  The leadership sent orders to Dad. Conway was to boycott the trial and expose this rotting system of justice, from the pigs to the preening judge, for the bane that it was. They placed their faith in the jury, convinced that they, too, would see the sin of it all. But the Panthers’ faith exceeded their resolve, and all the talk drove them to delusion. Brothers out west promised big-shot lawyers—Charles Garry and William Kunstler. Instead, Conway got a public defender who spent all of an hour with him before the trial. In the end Conway—Brother Eddie as I came to know him—went to jail for life plus thirty-seven years and, of the many things from this time which Dad would have to carry on his conscience, that was king.

  Across the nation Panthers shouldered the burdens of their comrades and the community. It was what they’d asked for. And then, in 1972, they were ordered to stop. It fell apart on bullshit rhetorical points, a game of who was really ready to go for the guns. Eldridge Cleaver allied with the New York branch, and after that it was gang war. Panthers killing each other. First the rebel Robert Webb, then party loyalist Sam Napier was found bound, gagged, burned, and shot in New York. Only weeks earlier he’d been with my father, and they’d narrowly escaped the justice of the New York faction. Dad was summoned to the headquarters in California and has remained puzzled by what he saw ever since. It was about that time it dawned on him: the world was going to go on as it was.

  In California, the higher-ups informed him that Oakland was the only front that mattered, that beefs with local liquor stores were the real makings of this new world. They shut down all the regional offices, and Dad was left to stew on the many Eddie Conways, Panthers who had acted in this theater, now left in jail. Then there were the communities, where Panthers provided shoes, doctors, breakfast, and lawyers, abandoned and left to their squalor. And Dad had his own kids, now, five of them, back in Baltimore with a father away on the other side. This was too much for Dad to take. He was identified as a noncompliant and put under house arrest by the Panther Party. He scrounged together money from family and friends and flew back home.

  It could’ve been worse. Whatever he faced—pissed-off mothers and grandparents, old taxes and new debt—was nothing like the chasm that swallowed others. Dad believed in revolution, but the truth is, he was always eminently suitable to the world as it was. He was an intellectual, born as it happened among people who could not see a college campus as an outcome.

  He thought his country rotten, but he was a better fit than he knew. His comrades were ill equipped. This was about more than shackles of color. They flocked to their revolution because the real revolution, the one that won out—with its marching automation, its theology of efficiency and goods—had nothing for them. A radical undoing was their only way out. Behold how they died: scrounging for crack rocks; infested by AIDS; or, if lucky, under the honorable hail of gunfire.

  I begin many years later, After the Fall, after the terrible dawning that the revolution had gone bacchanal, and devolved into shakedowns of drug dealers and parlor games with starlets and playboys who longed to look like danger. Dad and many of his Baltimore comrades had left the Panthers. The final hours of their youth were heartbreaking. They picketed liquor stores for donations, shook cups in Berkeley next to the white homeless, and financed a nightclub. For leaving, the Panthers condemned my father. They instructed Patsy to not allow Dad
to see Johnathan. Dad wrote a letter to the central committee. There was no answer.

  He was caught somewhere between the old socialism and the understanding that the people could not be moved without capital. Still, he left the Panthers with a basic belief system, a religion that he would pass on to his kids. He jettisoned Christmas and saw the great apostasy of the Fourth of July. He took a pact with a group of brothers and sisters to fast on Thanksgiving in protest over Attica, the Indians, and the sheer gluttony of Satan. Through the years, these brothers fell away. But Dad carried on.

  Now he thought back to the Panthers’ heyday and his old friend Walter Lively, who like him, was young, black, and out of Philly. But Lively had an instinct for the inside, and was thus adept at moving the gears of power in the proper direction. He was a shocking blizzard of things. He was named to the city council at twenty-five as a Republican. Finagled a farm in rural Pennsylvania where Dad would stash Panthers on the run. But what struck Dad the most was Walter Lively’s dream of a propaganda machine—a vertically intergrated entity that printed, published, and distributed Consciousness to the people. Lively had assembled many pieces of printing equipment, but before bringing it to be, he was on to something else.

  Dad picked up the idea. He thought back to the Panthers and their study of Kim II Sung and his parable of the One Hero. It was said that when the Japanese invaded, all the men reached for their guns, but the One Hero grabbed a mimeograph machine. A bullet could fell one enemy, a grenade a few more, but the mimeograph could kill the hearts and minds of thousands and resurrect many more of your own. Dad conceived a new revolution in Lively’s three parts—a bookstore, a printer, and a publisher—that would give the people control of information.

  He convened many disaffected revolutionaries. They were a mix of cultural nationalists, militant unionists, and draft resisters straight out of the brig. They did not cohere. They fought over intercommunalism and dialectics. They fought over the working class and the precise calibrations of the petit bourgeoisie. They split and went their separate ways. Dad and Brother Howard, his comrade from the Panther days, carried on. They moved forward with their plans for a propaganda machine, called it the George Jackson Movement. Its namesake was the incarcerated scholar and Black Panther, who predicted ghettos surrounded by barbwire, grenade launchers smuggled into Watts. Jackson took Angela Davis as a spiritual lover, published two books mulling the coming rebellion, and was martyred in San Quentin, after supposedly having concealed a pistol in his Afro. The George Jackson Movement acquired a storefront on Pennsylvania Avenue. Dad and Brother Howard painted and did repairs. They threw a cabaret, played music, served food, and took donations of books, which became the first seeds of a bookstore. They mailed some of these books to the brothers in prison. Some of the brothers traded the books for cigarettes.

  It is now 1973. My mother is living with Grandma on Penhurst Avenue. Grandma had come up from the Eastern Shore, endured a broken marriage, raised kids in the projects, and now owned her own home. My mother was her last daughter. She was just out of college, teaching school in Baltimore, and on her way, like her sisters, into the soft, safe arms of the middle class. Had it gone the way it should have, my name might be Otha or Ray. I might have played soccer, worshipped Christmas, joined the Scouts. Ma was from a righteous old-school black family. They believed in the supremacy of God and country and the grand power of hard work. My father was not a detour, was not a hard right but a parallel universe—Stormshadow and Spirit—where each one of those values was worshipped to a different end.

  But my mother was done different. She was one of three sisters. The oldest, Ava, was dubbed the smart one. The middle girl, Jo-Ann, was brown and lovely. Ma scrounged for her place. She was skinny. She wore Coke bottle glasses. She had bad hair and a gap between her teeth. She failed third grade and did not learn to read until she was nine. Around the way, kids teased her and laughed. She was slow with her words and quick with her fists. She was the sort of girl whose aunts told her that personality would take her a long way. There was truth there. She was tough but magnetic, lived to entertain and make family and friends laugh. She was a lovely dancer—once stood in her uncle Otha’s record shop with a Dreamsicle and did the twist until the ice cream shot off the stick and flew away.

  She grew up around her own. White people were absent, theoretical, and subject to unsubstantiated conjecture. She remembers the assassination of Martin Luther King most clearly because the rioting interrupted her senior prom. Still, there was that same vague sense that something was wrong, and in her already alienation, she felt that gnaw. She went natural in high school, and only permed her hair again for her sister’s wedding after Grandma threatened to leave her out. At college, she was arrested for protesting. She hung posters of the Panthers in her dorm room.

  She briefly met Dad once, after she donated to the Panthers’ free clothing program. And then again when her best friend suggested they visit the George Jackson Prison Movement. She was one of many who came there to study various books. Dad made an unromantic impression. He wore cheap clothes. His hair rebelled against combs. He had five kids, who at any moment could be roaming about the bookstore. He wore old shoes. He lived with various women. But he was all brainpower. He had dropped out of high school but could think in ways that the credentialed class could not conceive. He helped my mother get an A on her senior thesis. He preached about the people’s need for books, and he provided them. He organized social activities—celebrations of the family or children’s books. His kids were always with him. His various lovers were put to work.

  By now, Linda had thrown him out. He erected a partition in the back of the Jackson Movement’s headquarters and lived in this makeshift half-room for many months. Ma would come to the festivals and discussions, and then tease him for being homeless. At the time she was in love with an ex-con. She gave this man an autographed copy of Black Man of the Nile, one of the texts Dad had prescribed. The book had no effect, and instead of grabbing the mantle of his ancestors, Ma’s paramour robbed a church. Ma was carrying his baby. He called her—

  Cheryl, the money is hidden in my apartment, in my bedroom. Please take it to my lawyer.

  Ma went and got the cash, took what she needed for an abortion, and gave the rest to his lawyer. She did not answer any more of his calls.

  When she returned to the bookstore, she was solo. She had graduated from college, now teaching. She bought an orange Volkswagen bug.

  Dad: When do I get to ride in your car?

  Ma: Let’s go.

  Dad was ill acquainted with the social intricacies of courting. No woman affiliated with him can remember anything resembling a date. He was not cheap or dispassionate as much as he was uncouth and all about business. Even among the Conscious brothers he was different. He seldom wore dashikis. His Afro was negligible. He would not light the candles of Kwanzaa. He was a world my mother had not seen. He cooked beans without meat. He bought fried fish from Ray’s Seafood near North and Smallwood and poured on hot sauce until she cried. After hours, she would stop by and find Dad in the back with brother Howard tackling a pint of Jack.

  He chafed at the thought of more kids. But when my mother saw him, she thought of redemption. Whenever he appeared, Bill, Kelly, Malik, or some other child was hanging on his neck, and he was so in love with them all. They were out driving to anyone knows where. She was firm and direct. Dad pulled the Volkswagen bug over to the side of the road.

  Dad: Cheryl, I can’t have more kids. I have five. I can barely provide for the ones I have.

  Ma: You have five, but I have none. And I don’t need you to provide—I can do that on my own. What I need is someone to be a man, and I think you’re a wonderful father. I think you are raising beautiful kids.

  Dad’s ego swelled all over him. It was the winter of ’74. I was born in the fall of ’75. My father was twenty-nine. My mother was twenty-four. Dad had evolved and was present for my birth. I was brought home to a broken row house on Park He
ights Avenue. Rats sped down the storm drain. They moved further down Park Heights. The weekly rent was $41, and it was the hardest money Dad ever had to earn in his life.

  The life of a revolutionary was not paying off. He was conned into becoming a better man. The VA promised checks in compensation for each of his kids, if he would go back to school. He enrolled at Antioch College with no plans for graduation, strictly in it for the checks. And then he watched as brothers who came after him left before. He was thirty, an age he never expected to reach, and he began to comprehend the need for some sort of plan.

  When I was three, he got his BA, then shipped off to Atlanta University for a master’s. He came back and took his first professional job sorting histories for the official library of the Mecca. By then, he boiled down his dream of vertical integration to the step that fascinated him most. He’d begun publishing just before he left for Atlanta. Now he plumbed through all the old works by black scholars, works lost to time, and brought them back, restored in all their splendor.

  Among the Conscious, a man is only worth his latest reading. Each page pulled you farther out of slumber, and among the most enlightened it was not uncommon to hear an entire conversation composed of footnotes.

  In his bookstore days, Dad would sit behind the counter, nodding his way through the zealous interrogation of a new convert, who had nothing better to do than go to school.

  Conscious: You read J. A. Rogers’s “Hitler and the Negro”? Do you carry 100 Amazing Facts?

  Dad: It’s in the back.

  Conscious: Yeah, I see you got that. But what about As Nature Leads?