Beautiful Struggle

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Where others saw the love moment, Bill saw his chance. Their ritual was to put in together for a dime sack. But half the session was spent moaning over headache weed and not enough blunts. Bill was too original for that, thought it would be better to save up some paper, step up his game to an ounce, sell enough for re-up, and keep the profit for his personal. In that fashion he became the dorm connect, and that status plugged him into networks around campus not unlike the ones he’d enjoyed back home. He got bent and partied with his new friends. After class, they dribbled the rock to the local court and, understanding the rules, stayed together to ward off these D.C. niggers who took them for college soft. Bill had his close shaves. At the court, he was always running his mouth, dunking on the underregulation rim, then bellowing and beating his chest. One local soldier got tired of the talk, went to the car, and came back swinging an aluminum bat through air. But Bill was cool. He knew that at any moment, he could reach into his dip and unveil the last word.

  The family expanded. I had not been back to Barrington Road in years and, since Lemmel, had ceased all fantasies about a return. The magical house was sold to the Solomons, a young couple with a son a year younger than me. The father was Wellis. The mother was Jovett. The son was Kier. Back when Dad was first selling it, the Solomons would visit us on weekends, handling the sort of real estate arcane, which children have no desire to comprehend. Me and Kier would stand on the front lawn tossing the football, or sword fight with sticks and the tops of metal trash cans. It was to be one of those brief friendships that dot childhood and disappear at the end of parental business.

  But then the Solomons returned, trilling the dirge of our time—no father. Dad and Ma sat in Jovett’s living room—a misdirected package had brought them there—and the small talk gradually extended and swelled. Wellis had passed away. Jovett was alone, not working, and charged with a son. Dad had turned conservative, but not in the way of the demonologists who sold us out for tenure and crumbs. More like a man who spurns the false talk of revolution for the humbler mission of resurrecting one soul at a time. One of his order had fallen. Who would carry his colors and sword?

  My folks went home and talked about their needs. They both commuted to Washington for work and ran the Press by night and weekends. From time to time, they hired folks to man the shop. Business was growing. They’d gone from a few J. A. Rogers pamphlets and a desktop press to becoming a lynchpin of the Baltimore Conscious, their books sold all over the country. They would need more. Jovett came to work in the basement of Tioga, and grew closer and closer to the family. Her son was a brother to me by circumstance. He would come to the house after school and wait for his mother to get off, or on weekends if she happened to be working.

  We were not the same—like Bill, the street life made him glow, while I was convinced that there was no future for me out there. But I was mischievous enough and, like most boys, out to test the limitations of the world. Kier was a year younger, but this was not knowable from the way we rolled. We would go up to the alley and shoot on the crate or catch midnight features down at Harbor Park. We paid off winos to buy us forties of Red Bull and, while sauced, tried to walk in a straight line and touch our noses.

  Our mothers united on their common charges. Though we were both a couple years away, they started a program of practice SATs. We were drilled on vocabulary and math and taught guessing strategies. My mother had been pushing kids all her adult life. At night, Ma and Jovett would drive down to the Blue Caribbean and salsa with the men. They vacationed in Barbados and then Jovett and Kier joined us on our yearly pilgrimage to my mother’s homeland—the Maryland Eastern Shore. We stayed with Aunt Toppie. She made us waffles for breakfast. We were a family beyond borders.

  My Consciousness grew, until I was obsessed with having been birthed in the wrong year. All the great wars had been fought, and I was left to rummage through the myths of my fathers. But oh how I longed to take the rope for John Brown or snuff the peon who dimed out Vesey. I would hang out at bookstores built for the people, flipping through Chancellor Williams and Kwame Ture. I put “Ballot or the Bullet” on my Walkman, pinned more buttons of Garvey in imperial regalia to my book bag, and wore a tee shirt with the authoritarian motto “One God. One Aim. One Destiny.” I read The Iceman Inheritance and flirted with the supremacy of melanin. We had been down so long, and were desperate for anything that told us we were something more. So we embraced the charlatans and their stupid science, until all the old mythologies were remixed and the savages were not drummers and dancers but Hera and Thor.

  I became a plague upon my father’s books. He treasured them as much for what they said as for what they were. But I cared only for what was inside. I devoured the books, then flung them aside like emptied husks. My father found the ripped-up cover of Die Nigger Die! and pushed me to the floor. He did not ban me, instead, after cooling down, explained that I was living in a temple and privy to Knowledge that many had forgotten. What I owed in return was some reverence and tribute.

  But I was a chaotic mind. When obsessed, I wanted only what I wanted and could give no attention to other matters. Urges would whisk through me every fifteen minutes, each one discarding the former. I could not focus. In a white room, sealed and empty, perhaps. But against all the incipient impulses of manhood, I was one big glass jaw. At school, I became a problem, and by the end of my first semester, I was failing three classes. I considered myself capable of student awards and honor, and sometimes I even longed for them. But I longed more to live in my own head, emerging only to laugh or watch the streets on my way home.

  I believed in the intellect of all of us, that mine was the legacy that aligned pyraminds and spotted the rings of distant planets with only the naked eye. That was my great inheritance. But I turned this good news to bad ends, and ran with the sort of crew that surveyed all these new teachers, and picked out the ones who would never understand. The ones who should have been out at Bryn Mawr or Calvert Hall. They did not know where we were from. And this was my out. We would sit in the back of the class talking during lectures and throwing paper balls at girls. I asked for bathroom breaks every ten minutes, and then walked the halls making dumb faces at friends in other classes. I prayed for substitutes, would walk in, stare them down like, you know what this is, and then it was on—paper footballs flying, the end of assigned seating, rubber bands armed with paper clips plucked across the room.

  And I laughed through it all, had a rag of a time, until Dad showed up. After PTA meetings where I was held to account, Dad started popping up at school and sitting in on random classes. He never caught me mid-act, just sat in the back in his Clarks and slacks, looking on and embarrassing the fuck out of me. But it was not enough. I required more than I deserved. I had made it through Lemmel because my teachers blocked all other doors. They met, organized, double-and triple-teamed us, held us after school, pushed, prodded, until they obliterated job descriptions and fell somewhere between pastor, parent, and counselor. I could match passion with passion. But at Poly teaching was a job. Teachers did what was expected, and thought they could get the same. I demanded more of them, and virtually nothing of myself.

  So this is how my first year in the royal city ended—handcuffed in the office of the school police. My second semester English teacher was a small man with a small voice. He was my last period, and talked with the sort of dead voice that bore down on my eyelids. I accorded him all the esteem of an anthill, and expected great deference in return. It was one of those spring afternoons at the end of the year, when all your hormones are fighting to break loose. But still, we had to stomach some boring zero prattling on about adverbs, clauses, and conjunctions. Who gives a fuck when you spent the whole day watching Tamara Garrett in tight jeans, and you know she’s gonna be on the 44 bus, after school, her lush brown eyes dazzling all comers.

  I walked into class in this state of mine, half looking for any way out. I stood at the front joking with a buddy, while all the other students took their
seats. I was asked many times to sit down, until the teacher just lost his cool and sunned me in front of the whole class. I don’t even remember what he said, but he’d raised his voice, and in front of a crowd, I could not back down.

  I raised my hand and mushed him in the face. “Don’t you ever yell at me again in your life.”

  He quietly ordered me outside, and then summoned the school police. And so hyped on ego and image was I that I mouthed so much to the officer that I was put in cuffs and escorted to his office where he prepared a report. I was suspended immediately, potentially expelled, and told not to return without a parent. I caught the 33 home by myself and that was when it all began to set in. All my life, I played my position. I was tired. Here was my declaration of borders and respect. But of course there was a price. And the merchant was my father.

  He was waiting in the foyer at the door, again magically off work at the worst possible time. He was there with Ma and Jovett, half smiling through an awkward mix of shock and anger. Jovett walked out of the room and then it came. He threw an open hand and I hit the floor.

  My mother stepped in.

  Paul, Paul.

  He shoved her away.

  Woman, get off me.

  And then he was swinging away, channeling a chi ancient as Equiano. The power was passed down from mothers guarding their sons from the lash, and later from the pyre, rope, and fat sheriff. My father swung with the power of an army of slaves in revolt. He swung like he was afraid, like the world was closing in and cornering him, like he was trying to save my life. I was upstairs crying myself to sleep, when they held a brief conference. The conference consisted of only one sentence that mattered—Cheryl, who would you rather do this: me or the police?

  I saw my mother some hours later in our small kitchen. She tried to explain what she felt, but began to cry instead. She knew that I had no idea how close I was, would always be, to the edge, how easily boys like me were erased in absurd, impractical ways. One minute we were tossing snowballs at taxis, firing up in front the 7-Eleven, speeding down side streets and the next we’re surrounded by unholstered guns, a false move away from going down. I would always be a false move away. I would always have the dagger at my throat.

  This was the first time my parents pleaded me back into school. That night, we walked over to Mondawmin and ate at Long John Silver’s. Our talk was regular. They held no debt. They met with the school principal to testify to my character. They met with my English teacher to assure him I was no threat. They met with the school police officer so that he knew there was no history of drug use. They met with a local magistrate to assure him there was no need for the State.

  I returned a week later, and a few weeks later I was off to summer school. My mother took me over to archrival City College and wrote a check. After class, I’d come home—and a fresh box of books would greet me. I spent my weekends with the neighborhood boys. Every weekend night someone’s mother—except mine—was off working the night shift. We’d gather at that unchaperoned house, dial up the jennys, throw on some club tapes, and sip from bottles until we were five steps beyond nice.

  There I am outside Mondawmin Mall, bribing alcoholics into copping cheap fortified wine. I walk back to the anointed crib, bid my slaps of five, and pass out brown paper bags. An hour in, and I am floating, freaking some girl completely off beat. I wake up with bells ringing outside each of my temples and birds of pain circling overhead. I continue like this for months, until on a dare I down a forty of Red Bull solo, and spend a morning massaging the toilet bowl.

  My parents never caught me like that, but they could see me running off the rails. Dad looked south to D.C., and called in old alliances formed years ago selling books at the Mecca. He contacted NationHouse, a coalition of brothers and sisters who, like my father, believed that the revolution could not be blustered into existence but must be built. Their group had purchased a building in the heart of the ravaged northwest of Washington, a command center from which they plotted the creation of a state within a state.

  As in the Akan tradition, all their children were named according to days of their birth—Kofi for born on Friday, Kwaku for Wednesday. NationHouse flowered with Knowledge and culture—jazz recitals, spoken word, and regular lectures on our regal past and methods of return. They organized a school to educate their kids, sent them off for college credits at fourteen, and then for a bachelor’s two years later. Everyone wore dashikis and lappas, kufis and head wraps. There were no perms.

  Then, deep in the heart of Jeff Davis, in old Virginal, they purchased hallowed ground. The acres consecrated a century earlier through the toil of our mothers were the site of a great spiritual renewal. There was an unmarked slave graveyard, noticeable only by depressions in the land. There was a path where Gabriel Prosser, all glory to him, had walked while planning his great slave rebellion, before the deceivers dropped dime.

  One Sunday, my father packed me, Kier, Jovett, and Ma into the yellow and brown station wagon, and compared a white sheet of directions with his road atlas. It was hot August. Me and Kier had been remanded to NationHouse, and their plot of land. In the summer they ran a camp, in hopes of deprogramming kids from the lies of the great Satan. Dad drove down a long highway, till it connected to another highway, and that highway became a street, and that street turned into a narrow dirt road. The liberated acres were not formidable. What I saw was a big house presiding over sprawling fields, a valley, and forest. There was orientation and the completion of some forms, and then we were left there with our hooded sleeping bags, bug repellant, army surplus flashlights, and spare clothes.

  We were not afraid, even though we knew no one. We arrived early, and shot hoops on a netless rim behind the house. All that Sunday, kids arrived until we had enough boys for fifty putout, then three on three. By then, I had learned that the rock and hoop were the king of icebreakers. All the other kids were camp vets, but by dinner we were joking and doing two-man military satire—Back in the war, you didn’t have dinner. Someone passed you sticks and gruel, and you liked it.

  I was teased those next two weeks, as always. Big, awkward, and still without a jump shot, I was too tempting a target. But I fell in with these kids in a way that I had fallen in with no one before. All of us knew why you abstained on the Fourth and the meaning of Nkrumah.

  All our names were alien—Kwame, Jua, Ansentewaa—and traceable back to the continent of the originators. It was as if, on this holy plot of land, the revolution had come off and the world had been remade as the brothers envisioned it in ’68. I lost myself there, felt confirmed and the freedom of being unoriginal.

  We were forbidden to eat candy, cookies, and cakes. We were fed oatmeal in the morning, sandwiches for lunch, and groundnut stew in the evening. On Fridays they set us free with turkey hot dogs and potato chips. All the elders were addressed by the title Mama or Baba. We had to run a mile every morning, then shower, and participate in the day’s ordained activities. We had free time, and played pickup football or three on three. We camped out and swapped off guard duty in the middle of the night.

  I remember sitting in a small makeshift conference room on the first floor of the big house. It was film night, but our babas even invested this with meaning. We watched Three the Hard Way and giggled at the boom of Jim Brown’s cannon compared with the pop-pop of his racist foes. The next night, we saw the film version of The Spook Who Sat by the Door, Sam Greenlee’s tale of black revolution. For the next hour, one of the babas led us in discussion. Was any of it plausible? What had we learned about the nature of white supremacy?

  But most of us were occupied by smaller things. I was like any other fourteen-year-old boy, assaulted by internal chemistry and in the presence of jennys, subject to forgetting my name, address, and other vital information. Of course they were there, remanded from across the East Coast and regal in all their original blackness—dreads, braids, cornrows, short naturals, and head wraps for the two or three who’d foolishly permed. Kier scooped one r
ight away, and these two spent the remainder of camp disappearing at random hours. I was, even in my newfound naturalness, profoundly still me—awkward and perpetually offbeat, crumbs in my hair, juice stains on my tee shirts. So I played my position and sought other outlets to deal with all the improper energy.

  Toward the end of camp we were practicing for a final performance to be put on for our parents. There was to be a session of drumming and dancing, rhythms and moves imported from the west coast of Africa in the days when the Conscious folks thought the answers for all our problems lay in connections with back home. By then I was an MC, and thus feeling that the marriage of beats and lyrics was a charter ship back to the Knowledge of the elder world. The current was powered by all the usual angst and alienation of this age. An hour, a pen, a pad and I was plugged in, the material plane falling away, and the world remade along the lines of my yearning imagination. In those years, hip-hop saved my life. I was still half alien to the people around me. I loved them, mostly because I’d realized that there was no other choice. Hip-hop gave me a common language, but that August, on liberated land, I found that there were other ways of speaking, a mother tongue that, no matter age, no matter interest, lived in us all.

  The djembe is a drum, carved from wood. Its bottom is a wide outlet. If you trace its outline upward, you find the drum narrows until about halfway through its length. From there, it gradually blooms outward until, at its crown, it is as much as three times the size of its bottom. This crown is covered with the shaved skin of a goat. Rope running along the drum’s side is tightened to effect a sharper sound. The drum is played with bare hands. Its sound varies from a piercing slap to a deep tonal moan and a barely inaudible bass. A djembe drummer is usually accompanied by a djun-djun player, the djun-djun being a giant bass drum played with a stick.