Beautiful Struggle

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Dad: We don’t carry either.

  Conscious: See, that’s the problem with black bookstores. Can’t have enough J. A., brother.

  Dad: Right, right. Mmmhmm.

  Conscious: See, brother, those books are out of print. You know what that means? The white man ain’t gonna let you see those. He don’t want those books in print.

  But Dad was not half stepping. And where others talked and complained, he journeyed through the library stacks, found a trove of books and pamphlets that expressed the world from our angle. Then he followed the notes from these books until he was enmeshed in a forgotten world of black literature and scholarship. The titles ran the gamut from lynching to ancient Ethiopia to the memoirs of cowboy Nat Love.

  He began in the basement of our Park Heights row house, with a tabletop offset printer and four out-of-print pamphlets brought back from the edge. It was 1978, and this was a different magic. The Panthers were a sweeping romance—the young promise of shooting and fucking your way out of Donna Reed and into Pam Grier. But when Dad went to publishing, he scaled back into matrimony and left the world of mass upheaval. History would be altered, not in the swoop but with the long slow reawakening.

  In my early years, I only barely understood how different my family was. When I was six we moved to a lovely house on Barrington Road. Our neighborhood was an island in the sky. There were windows everywhere, each with a different, awesome view of the world. A broad wooden porch extended from the front door and around to the side, until it formed a large L. When it rained, I’d sit outside listening to thunder, counting the seconds between sound and light. In the attic, I threaded trains and tracks through green foam mountains and imagined stops in sleepy towns far to the north.

  I was down with my brother Malik. With three years between us, and a shared interest in alternative reality, I was closest to him in age and disposition. On weekends, we would sprawl across the living room floor in front of the wood-burning stove, and go rooting through the Isle of Dread or In Search of the Unknown. When I held polyhedral dice, their many sides were all futures, shards of other worlds where Medusae flashed their dead gazes and my dwarven thrower shattered against stone. I was young, chubby, and still completely smiles. My skin was clear and brown. My eyes were wide like my name. My styleless haircut was the work of my father, my widow’s peak crawling out like a spy. Life was as open and possible as those emerald dice from Geppi’s.

  Ma would say that one day I would fly. She did not know. On the living room floor I had papers spread in front of me, with wisdom, saves, and spells. Those papers were lives. They unfurled scrolls and spoke words to animate the dead. They were cursed by intelligent swords that hungered for the blood of elves. They courted pegasi in old tongues, then soared over hills that billowed green, glacial mountains dusted white, bogs sagging with plague and dead hope. They were honored in Kara-Tur, Greyhawk, and Krynn.

  What did I know of white kids gone demonic, Patricia Pulling, and steam tunnels? Fuck the dumb dichotomies and what people think this means. Even then, I was dreaming of Raistlin’s black robes one moment, and Dorsett’s spin move the next. This was what my father deeded—that our Knowledge of Self be more than America, that we understand the brain death that sprawled from the projects to the subdivisions. Consciousness was a beginning, but the imagination that could turn straight 18s into paladins in plate, could make warrens in tunnels from graph paper, could pull armies of gnolls from miniatures—this was the Knowledge that ultimately would find a way out.

  My father was black as the universe, but the doctrinaire could get the bozak. He tried his hand at jewel crafting, until the cadmium almost killed him. Behind our crib on Barrington, he kept bees in a hive of movable frames. On weekends, you’d see him and Brother Howard spacewalking in white masks and giant suits. They’d return with trays of honey and wax. Big Bill would chew the wax like tobacco. The raw honey made me sick. Once a drone stung my mother, and Dad joked that these were the origins of young Menelik, born early that next year.

  These were the years where I knew six brothers and sisters were a gorgeous gift. Me and Menelik were the only permanent residents of Barrington Road. But then on weekends—or when Patsy, Selah, or Linda just got sick—any combination of kids could appear, and with them another world. My sister Kris brought boxes of dubbed tapes, put me on to New Edition and later Big Daddy Kane. Bill would ball up socks and pillowcases into a makeshift football, and on our knees we’d crash into one another until someone hit the floor.

  Our best days were those weekends, when all the kids flowed through on Friday night. They always stuck me with the itchy cover. I was too young to put up a fight. Saturday, Dad would make pancake batter from scratch, then pull a bottle of Alaga syrup from the fridge and set it in a pan of boiling water. He would fire up his old black griddle and I would stand back and watch. Dad loved to take chances—once he tossed in a can of corn. Another time it was cottage cheese for milk. Either way we all would pile into the kitchen and eat pancakes in stacks of three. When I’d go back for more Dad would claim my stomach was smaller than my eyes.

  By noon we were out on the front lawn. Dad would fiddle with his secondhand camera, which hung from a long black strap around his neck. Everyone feared that strap, because Dad could also deploy it to enlighten children and bring them into balance. Ma would arrange us into a giggling pyramid, with Menelik up top. Dad would flick away until Kelly, John, or Kris—someone at the bottom—got restless and shook the core. We’d tumble to the grass like clowns out of a rainbow-colored car, then shove, stumble, and laugh. Ma would step back and pull Menelik close. Dad just flicked away, until these moments were encased in amber.

  By Sunday night, it was me and Menelik again, all alone as we were, and I was lost in the sprawl of this house and its many doors, stairs. On Monday, I’d eat a bowl of Chex, grab my lunch, and head up Ayrdale. I’d stop off at Butch’s and reveal four nickels, enough for ten Squirrel Nuts and ten lemon cookies. At Callaway Elementary, I’d stand out front, hoping to get a look at big-eyed Terry or her mom. Grandma lived a few blocks away, right off Penhurst. In the daytime she drove a big white car to somewhere near Reisterstown and took care of grown white people who could barely spell their names. Sometimes I’d show up after school, and I will always remember her smiling and saying—Boy, you ain’t worth two cents—before making me a plate of french fries.

  All my classmates were gifted and talented. But twice a day, Ms. Rhone pulled five or six and took us to a room with a fountain, brown tables, and walls painted sea blue. We tended a hermit crab and came to understand that all animals, even us, have a habitat. All our homework was weird and open-ended. We made dioramas that moved and told stories, and concocted creatures of papier-mâché.

  We fielded a team for the Olympics of the Mind. When we practiced, Ms. Rhone played Danse Macabre, and the strings jabbed like many shards of ice. Then she’d ask us to meditate on the color blue, and go around the room awarding points to whoever’s answers were most surreal. We competed over at the local liberal university and lost to a group of white kids, who looked like they did this thing in their sleep. I fantasized about taking them on again, but that would not happen. At the end of the year my parents removed me from these special classes, because I was screwing up in the part of school that mattered. From that point forward no part of any school mattered to me again.

  Dad pushed me out of the island in the sky, citing a sack of problems that I couldn’t understand. The oil went too fast. The basement constantly flooded. Mr. Wilder built his fence onto our backyard.

  My folks sold the house, and after a stint renting in Edmondson Village, we came to Tioga. This was 1984. I was older. I played Little League football. I traded World and Ranger Rick for Computer Gazette. From the back I’d transcribe programs in BASIC that predicted elections and sent hot air balloons in varying colors falling across the screen. I was like that for a year or so before things changed.

  Back in West Baltimore—the land
scape gutted, dead eyes all around, and hundreds of kids slain every year from gunshots and bricks to the skull and every other undignified means to their end—it became clear that we were all in proximity to great heaving change. Bill and I couldn’t name it, but felt it as a fear that jangled like the change in our pockets when we walked to the corner store. Dad responded to the radicalism of the moment with more radicalism that extended the bounds of rational thought. He refused to buy air-conditioning and insisted Baltimore’s muggy summers were best left to Zen: Son, son. The only heat is inside your head.

  He deployed many fans, with white plastic cages that swiveled on axes and dual blade systems that could reverse and forward all at once. But all they did was blow the hot air more efficiently. He pushed Black Classic on me even more. He saw me as a special candidate for this. His political harangues had not yet sunk in; still, no one in the house devoured books like me. I read about everything I could find—dolphins and killer whales, volcanoes and alien life, histories of robotics, the gods of ancient Rome. I read to retreat into other worlds, but these Conscious books Dad pushed were just confirmation of the nightmare. And so the Knowledge of Self piled up next to my bed, unfinished.

  No matter. Dad had other ways of making his point. I was impressed into the most mundane and monotonous services. In the garage behind our house Dad kept boxes of Black Classic books. My job was to open each box and place a mailing list card into each book—the idea being that each of these cards would float back from around the world requesting our catalog, and the senders would eventually buy books. On weekends, I might watch wrestling all morning, content in my own frantic idleness. But Dad would have been working since seven, and at noon he would appear and send me out back. I dreamed of a day when I made a dent in the inventory and there would be no more books to card. Instead, every weekend the boxes regenerated and overflowed. For this service I was paid the Paul Coates wage—a dollar an hour and no plucks upside the head. Once I protested—

  Me: But this isn’t even minimum wage.

  Dad: Son, this business puts food on your table. Your minimum wage is the shirt on your back.

  This was not true. The press was not profitable. It took food off our table—whatever was left after the basics was reinvested. But in a broader, cosmic sense, he was correct. Black Classic Press—like Lemmel, like the many books suggestively strewn across the house, like Upward Bound—was another tool Dad enlisted to make us into the living manifestations of all that he believed and get us through.

  But then, in bed at night, I conspired on many ways out. I thought of allegations of child abuse—certainly this work camp qualified. I thought of matches dropped in the garage, book burning as liberation. I thought about the romance of runaways and living in bus stations with friendly drunks, freight trains that cast about America, and fantasies of squatting in shopping malls where the mannequins came to life when the doors closed. But I never advanced these plans beyond the fantastical mind space that kids reserve for windfall fortunes and birthdays every day. Meanwhile, I was oppressed, persecuted under the rule of this enlightened despot.

  The true resistance was led by Big Bill, my bridge to all the illicit and dangerous things that a young man must come to know. Once I came home from a half day at school and found Dante, Jay, and Bill assembled at the table in our small living room, presiding over several bottles. The bottles were filled with different colored liquid, to varying capacity.

  Me: Yo, whattup?

  Them: (Glass-eyed nothingness, blank stare, incomprehensible slurring.)

  Me: (Creeping past to the kitchen.) Oookkkkaay…

  Them: (Looking up, laughing) Mad dog, mad dog, mad dog!, MAD DOG!

  Bill stood up and filled a plastic cup halfway, then passed it to me. Anything to be worthy of manhood and dap. I snatched the cup and took it to the head. It was like Kool-Aid laced with hot sauce. Applause all around.

  But more potent than minor acts of rebellion was the new slang Bill brought to bear on our oppressed situation. This was before Eazy-E brunched with Bush, and in radio there was still money to be had in boasting, “No rap.” Up North, the new sound was the regional anthem and broadcast to whole communities. But where I was from, the word didn’t come around on radio until all the streetlights were lit.

  Some of you were there at the proper moment: sprawled across a homeboy’s bed, your back to the mattress, tossing a tennis ball to yourself, debating this year’s O’s. Driving your mother’s blue Cressida down Dolfield, and to all your niggers pointing out the window at Charmaine and then “lying” on your dick. In your cousin’s basement, clutching a joystick, wondering how they could call this single-player fraud Double Dragon. Then the magic moment, when a homey puts the tape in the deck and everything inside gets very quiet.

  In Baltimore the feeling was cultish, and taken in only by a few. The music of the city was the erotic throb of house. I followed Bill, but—even at that young age—believed that the times demanded something that spoke to our chaotic, disfigured, and gorgeous world. Bill’s hands were Promethean. He would walk into our small bedroom, toss off his Alabama Starter jacket, throw a tape in the deck, and pump up the volume. Then he’d nod his head to the beat, rhyming along, pointing and waving his hands for emphasis on favorite lines and quips. This was the first music I’d ever known. I’d heard Luther and Deniece Williams, and like all my brethren, I hummed along. But it was nothing that I could own. What I loved about the New York noise was that, like our lives, none of it made sense. Viola loops got the best of me, garbled voice samples flying in from impossible angles, and then where there should have been a bridge, melody, a jangling hook, there were only drums—kicking, booming, angry 808 drums.

  Here I am, standing before my small black stereo. Jungle Brothers is spinning on the turntable. Q-Tip pierces the fog with a nativist sword. I am on my third listen and still I do not understand.

  They fought back with civil rights

  That scarred the soul, it took the sight.

  The album is a jumble. I can’t tell you what Mike G is running from. I have never heard of the Violators. I scrounge around the house in search of my father’s atlas, flip pages until I arrive at a map of their great and mythical realm, Strong Island. I expect a kingdom, but all I see is a bunch of dumb islands waiting to float away.

  The mystery, those great expansive plains of unsaid, sucked all of us in. No one knew how Kane came to spit in such a way that the roughest breakbeat turned coquettish, a lady in roses on a Saturday evening stroll. I’d search the liner notes for clues, play back lyrics until they were memory, and then play back memory until I gleaned messages, imagined and real. And slowly I began to pull something from the literature. Slowly I came to understand why these boys needed to wear capes, masks, and muscle suits between bars. Slowly I came to feel that I was not the only one who was afraid.

  CHAPTER 4

  To teach those who can’t say my name

  Big Bill’s next step was natural in that age. Across the country black boys were begging their parents for a set of Technic 1200s and an MPC. Failing that, they banged on lunch tables and beat boxed until they could rock the Sanford and Son theme song and play it underwater. Up on Wabash, Bill stood in Marlon’s basement, holding the mic like a lover. They called themselves the West Side Kings, which meant Marlon cutting breakbeats and Bill reciting battle rhymes he’d scrawled on a yellow notepad. He would return to Tioga with demos, play them for hours, and rap along with himself. This went on for two years before I saw the West Side Kings in action. By then the game had changed, and brothers had gotten righteous.

  That was the summer of 1988—the first great season of my generation. The Grand Incredible was dead, KRS converted to Consciousness and assumed the sentinel pose of Malik Shabazz. All the world’s boom boxes were transformed into pulpits for Public Enemy. Before now, the music was escapist and fun—some beats and the dozens, fat chains and gilded belt buckles. But Chuck D pulled us back into the real. He premiered in the c
olors of Al Davis, did not dance; and when he grabbed the mic, it transformed into the lost rifle of Robert Charles.

  Here in Baltimore, brothers would put on the Enemy and recoil. We had never heard anything so grating—drums crashed into whistles, sirens blared off beat. But the cacophony was addictive and everywhere. In the alley behind Liberty, “Don’t Believe the Hype” was the loop. On weekends, amid modules, the Player’s Handbook, and dice, Malik would play “Cold Lamping” and quote Flavor Flav. Dad heard “She Watch Channel Zero?!” and pointed at Ma—That’s how I feel about them damn romance novels. She reads. She reads. She reads. I was a reluctant convert but captured by the many layers, the hints at revelation, and a sound that I did not so much enjoy as I felt compelled to understand. Every track was a disheveled history of music. And armed with an array of sonics, Chuck D came forward and revealed a new level of Knowledge.

  His style was baffling. I caught disjointed phrases and images, times and places that did not cohere—“goddamn Grammys,” a “government of suckers,” “they see me, fear me.” By the tenth session, the sonic blur sharpened into a recovered collective memory. The story began in our glory years with the banishing of Bull Conner and all his backward dragons. Never had the mountaintop seemed so close at hand. But marching from victory we stumbled into a void. And now we were here in the pit, clawing out one another’s eyes. We were all—even me—so angry. We could not comprehend how it came to this. Dad tried to explain the Fall, but he was an elder and full with his own agenda. Chuck was one of us, and once we got it, we understood that he spoke beautifully in the lingua franca of our time. He took us back to ’66, showed us Hoover and his array of phone taps, the grafted devils with their drugs and guns like pox blankets for Indians. We fell, blinded, corrupted, consumed by Reaganomics, base heads, and black on black. But now was the hour of ’88. Now was the time to reverse our debased years, to take over, grab our guns again, and be men.