Beautiful Struggle

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Afterward in the car, my parents asked what I thought. It was okay, I guess. It didn’t seem all that. Truth was, I was covering. I was convinced that over my high school career was so marred that I’d never really be considered for admission. So I covered with apathy. Dad went ballistic—

  Boy, this is an opportunity, and the best you can do is sit back there and mumble and shrug your shoulders?

  I should have taken heart from Big Bill, who through it all had found his way in. Of course, he was now alone. He stopped checking in with Dad, though Dad lessons and words were now working harder on him. He’d come to Howard with cartoon ideas to gird him against failure. Only the weak, with their fucked-up jump shots, off-brand kicks, and feeble arms could thrive in class. That was his defense, because he was sure that he could not make it himself. But now broke, flunking, and on the verge of an escort back home, he confronted the truth. There were brothers here like him, paladins of the streets, who swore to the same codes, and yet they were getting over. What would be his defense now?

  He still could not see the merits of scholarship, independent of all else. But he loved the life, the parties, the herb sessions, the controlled independence, and the waves of Jennifers for as far as he could see. He could go back home and invest in his old ties. He could work in the district and spend his lunches and off days with an empty book bag, perpetrating on the yard. But inside, he was not a half stepper. If it was going to be school, then it would be all the way. It was time to play his part.

  The transition did not come easy—he never learned to sit down for hours every night with his head in a book. But he started showing up for class, and found that he liked the methodology, the back and forth of debates. He partied less, cut off old friends, and mastered the great art of the cram. Slowly it came together, and at the end of his first semester of any effort, he saw what he could do—a C plus GPA—if he only tried.

  Dad was ecstatic, and for the first time he got some idea that all his labor might not be washed away.

  I took my last SAT in November of my senior year, and what I remembered most was that it meant an exit from the prep classes taught by Jovett and my mom. Kier was out of Poly, too, and began hanging with new friends near Barrington. It was no longer the island I remembered, for not even the great cloud giants could keep the rotting city at bay. Kier ran into Barrington’s collapse, and whereas I was unsure of what I wanted and how I would get there, Kier was on intimate terms with his own desires. He wanted a mass of ends, accessible by a shortcut, and so he turned to the drug trade.

  We parted ways there. I was too formed by then, and firm in my own ethics and beliefs of what crack had done to us all, clawing out the eyes of our cities with its steel-white talons. At school, I cut off Ebony at every pass. We talked almost every night for hours about all the nothing that young people feel the fate of worlds hinges on. After school, we’d hang out at the library or the sub shop across the street. I gathered her life story, how she was originally from Jersey, and how drugs had taken both her parents down. She moved in with a godmother out in the county and came to high school away from all the problems of the city. Of course, by then Woodlawn was also shifting over. In ten years, the neighborhood mall would go from the Gap, arcades, and Hecht’s to check-cashing joints, fast-food, and plus-size clothing stores.

  On the surface of it all, she was unbroken and serene. Once, she challenged my father to a debate over his revolutionary credentials—made him justify a Black Panther who’d moved to the suburbs. He was forty-six, and was moving toward a lighter touch with my younger brother, Menelik. He did not preach much now, as he was entering into the twilight of his parenting years. My mother might go away for a weekend, and Dad would cook, wash dishes, and take us to the movies. He walked in on us studying, wearing reading glasses, pulled low on his nose. He looked down at us sitting at the table and then pulled up a seat. She grinned immediately, and then grilled him on the ethics of talking black while leaving the least among us behind. It was good and spirited, and Dad’s logic was indomitable as usual. Still, it didn’t stop Ebony from asserting my claims to the West Side were little more than fraud.

  Beneath it all, I saw her wounds, the thing that makes men run into burning houses. Here was my damsel. All her demons were hidden, but I could feel them baying out from within and activating something immutable in my DNA. My grades improved in direct proportion to the time I spent around her. I got extracurricular. I did a Garvey speech for the school in the black awareness assembly. I became a peer counselor. They’d pull me out of class for workshops on conflict resolution.

  My motives were impure, like my brother’s: Ebony was involved in all of these things. She was one of those kids. She caught me in the hallway after sixth period. She’d been gone all day and was wearing a dress that seemed like it was bought for church. She’d just been honored for grades, for extraordinary effort or some such accolade of overachieving. She was always overachieving. She handed me an envelope and told me not to open it until after school.

  I had to go to Mondawmin that day for shopping, and thought little of what I’d mindlessly stuffed in my backpack. I opened it after I got off the subway. It was the program from her ceremony, and on the side was a love note that I could not recognize as such. It was written in that vague, noncommittal way of a girl who wants you to know what she feels but wants to protect herself all the same. I did not know what I was holding, and was caught on the price in self-esteem for figuring it out. I talked to her that night and thanked her, but I did not push like I was supposed to. I could not see that beneath the shield, beneath the smiles and laughter that were her armor, behind the glowing ax, all of us are waiting to be swept away.

  My mother extended her SAT classes for the kids at Sankofa. I would come downstairs on Sunday mornings and make faces at them before I headed out. I was looking out the window into manhood and independence. No one hassled me about my grades. No one checked on me in my room. My parents went out of town and left me with now nine-year-old Menelik. I took him to his Little League football games. That was a great season, the first time in my life where I’d been turned loose from the parental vise grip. Still, you could not dent the expectations of my mother. She would bring me college catalogs. Dad took me down to the civic center for the historically black college tour. I imagined myself in Tougaloo, Tennessee State, Dillard, or Johnson C. Smith, somewhere else with a different way of living and perhaps the sort of standards that would admit a screwup like me.

  At school, I caught the attention of teachers and counselors who tried to move me into Advanced Placement. I politely declined, no need to soil my last year. Still, in spite of me, some of them managed to place road signs in my life path. My English 12 teacher, Mrs. Effron, saw my papers and short stories and was the first person, outside of my mother, to tell me that in this I may have a gift. My guidance counselor, Mr. Herring, took to me immediately and put out of his mind my earlier transcript and three years of ineptitude. When the applications began to fly, he wrote me a recommendation that was beyond anything I felt I had earned. I saw in myself the disgrace to my father’s name. But Mr. Herring was a black man, Conscious like my father, and thus desperate to reclaim troops for the field.

  That winter, I applied to four schools—all in the area, in hopes of never saying good-bye to my drummers. The shortest application was for Howard—a gamble, a pebble slung into the dark. Then I returned to the last leisurely half of senior year. That was the year, the only year of my childhood, that I took off from hip-hop. The older gods were falling off. EPMD were breaking. Chuck and Flav had taken us as far as they could, and already the new voices were being hijacked by the death cults. Brothers who last week were shouting out Malcolm were flipped into studio gangsters, killing every nigger in sight. I felt some part of that need to stand on the corner of the world and grab your nuts. But I was at the gates of manhood, and they could not fade me. They were hard where it mattered least—attacking whole genders, claiming to run the stre
et, and then fleeing in the wake of the Beast.

  By then, Big Bill had brought home other gifts—Bob, Steel Pulse, and Burning Spear. He would gather his friends at our home, my parents gone for the week, and blaze out back, banging Babylon by Bus. They were all nouveau Conscious, had dropped their slave names for handles taken from Zulu and Swahili. Bob Marley had been dead for a decade, and yet he emerged to us as the great bard of our people. Later I found the frat boys had ruined him, like they do everything they touch. But back then, he was prophetic. That year I did not know where I was headed, but I knew that I was mortgaged to the grand ideal—the end of mental slavery and the fulfillment of the book.

  In those last lazy months of senior year—half days and free periods—I was admitted to Morgan State, sent a dorm room assignment and glossy package extolling my new independent life. It was my third acceptance, all to local schools, and all the product of three quarters of grinding from a 1.8 to a respectable 2.4 grade point.

  Who was I in those moments of acceptance but a boy finally realized? All my years my family pounded me in hopes of something more. My mother told me I was sharp, but would never make it this lazy. My father could drown a whole weekend into chores. Big Bill would punch me in the arm, warning that out there was a world out of control and the safeties were permanently disengaged. My mother used to say I was going to fly, but I could not see how. And now I’d come home and in the mailbox, each month, I found a fat packet with my name on it. I was not made complete, but I felt worthy of my mother’s praise.

  I didn’t show for graduation. I took on my father’s aversion for ceremony, and had only a year of ties to Woodlawn. I dismissed senior prom from the day I came to Woodlawn. The year would be a trip of unfortunate business—there was no time for flowers. But then this girl Ebony, and this silly compulsion within, clouded my logic and I could not see. Plus, as always, I missed the intricate signs, the hints, and head fakes, the looks when I was not looking. I did the math too late, and by then she’d taken up with another dude. Man, listen, he was straight Christopher Williams, the sort of pretty boy who pulled strictly redbones, until he heard Mike G, got on that blacker-the-berry shit, and came to the other side. Of course, I wasn’t that far off, but when I saw them walking the halls, it felt wrong as Winnie and Kirk McCray.

  I stopped calling after that. What did it matter—I was on my way, stepping out of the world and into my next self. My mother demanded proof, suspected another scheme ending in the repetition of the twelfth grade. She knew her child, and in some way could not believe that the saga was coming to an end. Until I brought the diploma home from the principal’s office, opened the hardcover vinyl folder, and placed it in her hands, she did not believe. When she saw it, she just half smiled, no big hug, no inspiring speech, just happy to see the end.

  I had the vague sense that something different was afoot. Dad ambushed me in the brown Honda Accord, our third one, because Ma had crashed up the other two. We were driving from the new office. Dad turned down Wabash, pulled into a tiny shopping mall, and parked in front of Kmart. Dad owed me nothing, except fatherhood and that was how he always carried it. My father never apologized for one minute of parenting. He didn’t start there in that parking lot, and yet he talked in a manner that was less sure.

  Son, he told me. I have begun another relationship. I am in a relationship with Jovett. Me and your mother thought you should know. I love Jovett and your mother very much. We all thought you should know.

  He asked if I had questions, how I felt, what I needed to say. I have never expressed anger with my father, to my father. Fear clouded every word. But here was an open shot. I could have yelled, stepped out of the car, slammed the door. I could have run away for a week, told him I hated him like white kids I’d seen in movies. Here was the chink in his armor, the flaw which had always been theory finally confirmed. Even the general falls down, though it must be said, fallen is not how he saw himself at the time. Still, I did nothing. I said nothing, just nodded my head and listened until it was time to drive away.

  CHAPTER 8

  Use your condom, take sips of the brew

  When I was young, my father was heroic to me, was all I knew of religion. His word was the difference between pancakes and oatmeal, between Speed Racer and yard work. Every trip to the Food Barn was epic. We’d hop out of the car, and I’d try to shut the door in rhythm with him, like on detective shows when they meant business. He was heroic because I was a child, because my worldview didn’t extend past Lode Runner, Train 9, or Warren Moon’s rookie card. The first time Dad beat me, I was six and the subject of my first-grade teacher’s phone calls home. In those days, all the kids anyone cared about got beatings. But that black leather belt, folded on my parents’ bed was still terrible, and this was my clearest illustration that fatherhood was dictatorship, that its subjects were at the mercy of a tyrannical God.

  By the time I hit Lemmel, my appraisal of Dad depended on the year, how I woke up, the number of hours I’d worked in the basement. There were days I would have wished him into nothing, so that I could be free to relish in dumb shit with all the other laughing, orphaned boys. There were others, when I looked around and saw that, though the birthright of every child was a manned fortress, we lived in unnatural times. All the guardians had fled their posts, and here was mine, his hand on his sword, his armor glimmering in the light of moons. Now he sat in his car, across from me, unveiling his true face, unveiling a tangled humanity that made all my foibles look elementary.

  In his mind he was righteous, and still wedded to the old Panther idea of free, unbound love. He did not speak to me in shame so much as struggled to display himself to a child. But Dad was obsessed with the world as he thought it should be, and his ideals were a bright light, blinding him even to his beloved. So the losses my family took were not spoken, and, as we rejected Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth, we were swaddled in a great cloak of alone. Even the most mundane act—refusing the Pledge of Allegiance, sitting mute for the flag—pushed us farther down the path of resistance and alienation from the rest of the world. He didn’t acknowledge this truth because the superseding truth was that he was right about it. He wouldn’t bend to the will of a backward world and wouldn’t allow us not to bend either. I was sure that everyone else my age was frolicking in pagan October masks, eating hamburgers and pie à la mode, backstroking through a lake of Christmas presents, while I meditated among stacks of tofu and books. Even after I got Conscious, I felt I’d been robbed of time, that I had been isolated from a series of great childhood events. In my father’s house, values ripped us from the crowd. Dad called it enlightenment. But to me it just felt lonely.

  My mother had fallen out of step with the world she once knew and looked sideways at her family’s everyday values. Even without my father, she would have been a dissident, cracking wise in the corner at reunions. But Dad could not come to even that sort of détente. And so with each new revelation he laid upon our family—no meat, no Thanksgiving—she grew further apart from her peoples. Once we drove to Columbia for a family portrait with all my maternal uncles, aunts, and cousins. My grandmother stood in the back, proud matriarch who’d battled her way up from Gilmore Homes. The photographer was gregarious and white and late. I could feel the sharp edges of Dad’s painted smile.

  Afterward, everyone went for dinner, everyone except us. I had cousins who’d been off to Germany, who I hadn’t seen in years, but I just climbed into the car, sulked in the back, and looked out the window at the highway dark. We were halfway home. Dad was frustrated because the photographer had been late. And then he popped—

  Son, do you know how many black photographers there are in Baltimore, struggling? Why am I driving all the way to Columbia to help out the other man? I’m sorry, Son. They’ve gotten enough of my money for one night.

  His logic cut through my anger, and the sense of it left me reeling for weeks. But I still just wanted him to let it go, if only for that evening.

  This
was how my mother was walled off from everything, her own past, her family, choices about her present. Every bold idea took us further out. From our very names, my mother had so much to explain to the world—and now this—a man out of pocket, with his woman’s insane blessing. She buckled in shame, and the thought of explaining this one, of going out into the world smiling and claiming the high ground, was too much.

  She knew that this was the reality for so many women, but she was robbed of even the cover of fake ignorance. She was ashamed, and the fact that things were not public was little help. You must know that my mother was hard as hell, would beat children like a street fight, and then drill us on long division. But Ma was of her time and that giant sect of black women, who, rendered fatherless, would have gone barren before staging a repeat.

  For the gift of having a father around for her children, something the rest of this thieving country took as natural as rain, so much else suffered. There was never music playing when my peoples walked into the living room. You could not catch them on old choppy home videos, making out under a summer tree, laughing, holding up their protesting hands as the lenses closed in. They were not for the smoky jazz clubs, dinner reservations, or walks down at the harbor. They barely marked anniversaries. As for me and that time, there were the facts my mother laid down to me from the day I could talk—that people were people and their covenants were sealed with subterfuge, conspiracy, and denial. When my father opened his marriage, when he explained this new joining in that brown Honda Accord, it was just another bizarre step in our bizarre lives. It was how I was raised. It was what I’d come to expect.

  I never talked to Kier about any of this, though I was told that he’d been informed. What I saw of him and my father continued as normal—Dad would hand him parables from Up from Slavery, or Kier would perfect his imitation of Dad’s ’70s cadence. By then, Kier had chosen the glittering path. I always thought he had what mattered—the cool hand, the fresh Ewings, Champion hoodie, the badass dimes. Yet he craved frenzy, life on the random and quick. Like all boys, I saw the appeal. I would not live on lucky numbers but a long blessed grind. I thought Kier labored in the shadow of his father’s death, and even today I’m not sure that Dad helped. By the time that last summer came, the footprints we left were hardening in the sun.