The Beautiful Struggle

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Saturday mornings, Upward Bound pulled Bill and a bevy of West Side kids up to the local community college to reinforce Pythagoras, Fitzgerald, and Newton. There was a freedom here—Upward Bound kids were sent by their parents, not ordered by the state, and so a certain level of bullshit was immediately cut out. Then in the summer, after weeks of taking college classes, they were treated to the full-blown campus experience out at Towson, where they stayed in dorms for the week.

  This was Bill’s first taste of university, the first time that it occurred to him that higher ed may not be beyond him. But this new idea didn’t exactly exert a radical influence on him. My brother was immovable back then. He could be dead wrong and still steady talking to you like you’d never laced up Jordans or dribbled left. Once we spent the day at his mother’s crib out in Jamestown, trying to destroy each other on Atari boxing. Presumably, I was left in his care, and though he knew the laws of Tioga banned the consumption of beef, he managed to convince me that a can of spaghetti and meatballs would pass Dad’s muster.

  Bill: Man, it’s no big deal. When Dad comes he won’t even know. And if he finds out, I’ll just tell him. It’s only once. What will he care?

  Me: Okay.

  But my brother’s wits trailed his will, and when Dad came, he saw the emptied can, the two dirty bowls still in the sink. Of course, he went off, did not start swinging but let us know that we had violated. I sat on Linda’s couch, absorbing the verbal onslaught, cursing how wrong my know-everything brother Bill was. Bill sat next to me, impassive, another lesson failing to connect.

  He listened selectively, and cared most about his own internal compass, which he believed was attuned to the way the world should work. He was a bull, thought in straight lines, and though I found this trying, and I wasn’t alone, his certitude engendered great respect. My brother was not reflective, but that made him unafraid. He would see you in a brawl, leap in swinging, but take many days to ask you what the fight was all about. Bill was a constant and this won him allies wherever he dropped his B-more Bad-boys cap.

  In the dorms of Towson over that summer, he expanded his affiliations. He started hanging out further north up Liberty Heights, at the corner of Wabash and Sequoia, about a mile from Mondawmin. He did not abandon Tioga, but an aspiring king needed vassals from all over. Your army was all you had, and the speed with which they appeared when it went down, boosted or pruned your rep. Bill’s new friends—Marlon, Joey, Rock—were boys of our ilk, stuck in that undefined place between the projects and the burbs. They did not live in squalor. Their mothers tried their best. But still they had to confront the winds of the day. The most ordinary thing—the walk to school, a bike ride around the block, a trip to the supermarket—could just go wrong. And when it happened, we were only hands, and those hands pledged to us, and then the fire some of us kept between the belt buckle and waist.

  When Bill was burned by Murphy Homes, he promised to never again be helpless. A rep was preventive medicine. If you were from one of the lucky slums that struck fear, you could walk where you pleased. It was what we all wanted, even tender me, to be seen out there, and, on the strength of my pedigree, turn any street into home field.

  This was the motive for even Wabash, with its modest lawns, brick homes, and absent public housing, to expect or incite beef. Conflicts bloomed from a minor remark or misstep, and once in motion everyone stayed cocked and on alert. This is what beef is: Baltimore was too primitive for gangs, everything relied on natural or man-made borders. The duchy of Wabash and Sequoia was marked off by train tracks. North of there was Tawanda, a parallel world, that saw Wabash like Wabash saw them. You only crossed those tracks if you were out of your mind. Whatever you needed—cheesesteak, dish detergent, girls—you had on your requisite side.

  It was night, and like all the others, Big Bill, Joey, and Marlon were out on their home corner. There was the normal high that comes from the hormones of youth, that fresh sense of being unchained. But also there was the omnipresent feeling that It could go down. In those moments—which back then were all of our moments—your neurology was always code red. Bill’s crew was hyper-tensed—the laughter was controlled, smiles had edges, and no one stared too long at one spot.

  And then It happened. Someone—no one ever remembers who—yelled, Yo, it’s them, coming across the tracks.

  There was no math. Bill just reached in his dip, and, like his friends, shot out in the appropriate direction.

  He could have been a headline, some fool whose stray ripped through a bassinet. The rush blinded them, not one of them got eyes on a clear target. But in the yellow glare of streetlights, phantoms fell before them. Someone screamed “five-oh!” and there was a hectic dash down the now-quiet streets, up to Marlon’s porch, and then down into his basement. They took a few breaths, settled some, and then got to yelling, high-fiving, and beating their chests. Yo, I hit one. Hell, yeah, I got at least two of ’em. When I heard about it, it sounded like something out of Looney Toons or the farcical West—a lot of gunfire, no blood or injuries. But that was not the point.

  Bill heard the admonishments of my father, but Dad couldn’t walk the path for him. We were divided—one foot in America, the other in a land of swords. They told us to act civilized, but everywhere bordered on carnage. Bill became uncomposed. To be strapped was to grab the steering wheel of our careening lives. A gun was a time machine and an anchor—it dictated events. To be strapped was to master yourself, to become more than a man whose life and death could be simply seized and hurled about.

  Bill’s logic was taken from the Great Knowledge, the sum experience of our ways from the time Plymouth Rock landed on us. To this compendium each generation added its volume. Our addition was the testament of the broken cities—West Side, Harlem, the fifth ward. The Knowledge Man knew that death was jammed in us all, hell-bent on finding a way out. So he never measured his life in years but style—how he walked, who he walked with, how he stepped to jenny, where he was seen, where he was not. This man turned his life into art and pledged himself to the essential truth: No matter what Civilization says, academic intelligence is overpraised and ultimately we are animals. When I saw one of these true disciples, almost-men like my brother Bill, I knew there were vital things that I had missed.

  The Knowledge was taught from our lives’ beginnings, whether we realized it or not. Street professors presided over invisible corner podiums, and the Knowledge was dispensed. Their faces were smoke and obscured by the tilt of their Kangols. They lectured from sacred texts like Basic Game, Applied Cool, Barbershop 101. Their leather-gloved hands thumbed through chapters, like “The Subtle and Misunderstood Art of Dap.” There was the geometry of cocking a baseball cap, working theories on what jokes to laugh at and exactly how loud; and entire volumes devoted to the crossover dribble. Bill inhaled the Knowledge and departed in a sheepskin cap and gown. I cut class, slept through lectures, and emerged awkward and wrong.

  My first day at Lemmel, I was a monument to unknowledge. I walked to school alone, a severe violation of the natural order of things. I got my first clue of this standing on my front porch, my canvas backpack slid across one shoulder, watching as small groups of kids make their way down the green hill that sat at the end of the Mondawmin parking lot. All the way to school, everyone rolled like this—three deep or deeper. There was a warped affection among them, the kind born from a common threat. They constantly looked around. They tossed ice grills like there was no other choice. They exchanged pounds with each other frequently, as if to say I am here, I am with you. All their Starter caps were cocked at the appropriate angle. Everyone moved as though the same song were playing in their heads. It was a song I’d never heard. I shrugged my backpack a little tighter on my shoulder and made my way.

  Later I’d understand that the subaudible beat was the Knowledge, that it kept you ready, prepared for anyone to start swinging, to start shooting. Back then, I had no context, no great wall against the fear. I felt it but couldn’t say it.
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  I paid little heed to great injustice, despite my mother showing me blueprints of slave ships and children’s books tracking the revolution of Dessalines and Toussaint. Still, I could spot even small injustices when they shadowed me personally. I knew that to be afraid while on the way to school was deeply wrong.

  I walked the hill alone, the error of my way now dawning on me, but reached the doors of Lemmel with everything intact. I climbed the long flight of concrete steps and stood in a corner of the school, waiting on the bell, staring at the ground, trying to vanish.

  I emerged into a morass of numbers and bureaucracy. Lemmel was partitioned into three grades, four tracks, and sixteen classes, ranging from special ed to gifted. Each track was then given the name of a champion—Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, Carter G. Woodson. My class was 7-16. We were one of six gifted classes on the Thurgood Marshall Team. I don’t know how gifted any of us were—more likely we had parents in the race, mothers who worked for the city, got their degrees from Coppin State. They’d gone far enough to know what was out there and what they’d missed in the manner of their coming up. These are the parents the intellectuals erase in their treatises on black pathology. But I saw them in effect at Lemmel, that and teachers always with an eye for children who were two seconds faster and seemed to be bound for something more than the corner or Jessup. From the hallway’s rafters these teachers hung propaganda: It is by choice not chance…that we choose to advance, The Marshall Team; We can achieve…We will achieve.

  The many problems of the city came to rest at the Lemmel’s doorsteps. Kids hailed from the projects, foster care, from homes without lighting, from parents who still shut down Odells while their children ran the streets. Lemmel stood out, because all the chaos of West Baltimore swirled around it but never inside. The school’s guardians believed in the vocabulary of motivation and self-help. Their favorite phrases featured words like “confidence,” “push,” and “achieve.” They saw Lemmel as a barracks, themselves as missionaries called to convert us to the civilized way.

  My homeroom was ruled by the crusader, Ms. Nichols, who traded her government name of Eleanor for the freed handle of Sadiqan. Dreads flowed down her back. Her skin was dark and smooth. She was like the women Dad and the rest of us sold books to, the ones who’d pore through the selection on the tables, convinced that something between their covers could close the gap. I could not have been in her class more than twenty minutes before she started to curse. It flowed from her natural—Oh, that’s bullshit; fuck that. I giggled like the rest of the class, but not too hard because she bore the seal of black matrons. Her eyes held razors; she sliced into boys who talked out of turn. You could see she came from somewhere hard like Walbrook Junction, that she’d risen off the block, even if the block had not risen off of her. But she was a philosopher. She used the great breadth of social studies to hold forth on sex, vegetarians, Reagan, apartheid, Akhenaton, and the origins of God.

  This was all my father wanted—for the long struggle to wake us up to be present in class as it was at home. The struggle infused all his dealings with me. Whenever he could, he violated my weekends with his latest pet lesson.

  Dad: Ta-Nehisi, cut off the cartoons. You’re coming with me.

  Me: Can I have another hour?

  Dad: (The Look of Not Playing.)

  Me: (Cutting off the TV ) Okay. I’m getting my jacket.

  And then we were off in the brown minivan, across the city, public radio our soundtrack, my father telling me again the story of black folks’ slide to ruin. He would drive down North Avenue and survey the carryouts, the wig shops, the liquor stores and note that not a one was owned by anybody black. We would stop at Brother Kinya’s printing shop, and Dad would sit down and talk that brother/ nation/black talk.

  When we got home, I’d go upstairs and flop on the bed. But Dad never knew when to quit. Instead, he’d call me down to the basement and assign another book, another history that traced our days from the Nile Valley to the Zulus’ last stand. When I turned the pages, I could feel the Something More, like a smoldering fire across the room. Days later Dad would ask for a report. But try as I might, I could only half remember what I’d read, and what I remembered I could not really recite. My dad’s response—a sudden shining in his eyes at the sound of certain words or at my stuttering approximation of some crucial idea—suggested to me that even the little I retained had gold in it. But none of it made sense. I was young and could not see the weaponry my ancestors had left for me, the shield in the tall brown grass, the ax lying right next to the tree.

  My math teacher was Ms. Chance, who seemed to love only her kids more than math. She had style: an almost Southern accent, red highlights, and acrid perfume. Her zeal was so complete that it pulled us in, made us brag to friends that here we were at twelve, and we knew what it meant to add with letters. She whizzed through lectures, held coach classes after school. She was not Conscious in the way of my father, but in a different way that I couldn’t name but could spot from one hundred feet away: the general manner of black people who simply wanted to compete and see the good works of their own brought forth. I was my own greatest foe, she told me. She’d be off on quadratic equations, then catch me in her periphery with my head in the sky.

  Ta-Nehisi, wake up.

  I was not a studious boy. I came to conclusions easier than most, but was increasingly disappointed in the world as it was, so invested almost nothing in studying it. But what I was inspired to know, I learned. I read my social studies text like a great novel. I was a novice at algebra, but I was so drawn in by the promise of Ms. Chance that I showed for coach class until I brought home an 80 average, which counted for a triumph on my report card.

  These were the exceptions. In second grade my teacher told my mother she suspected that I was mildly retarded. But at Lemmel I truly indulged. I slept through French class, dreaming of pencil fights and paper football. We were blessed with Latin, but I spent most my time talking out of turn and finding excuses to leave my seat. I probed teachers for weakness, then proceeded to make them believe that my parents were on drugs.

  Walking home from Lemmel, I couldn’t shake free of my native dreamy state. I thought of everything and noticed almost nothing around me. I could have stumbled just out of the reach of an onrushing fender and felt only a light breeze. Still, I was smart enough to start walking home with friends—Leroy and some others from around my way, about my age. We took the grass hill, but by the time we got to the bottom, I was usually lagging behind the pack. And that’s where I discovered all that I’d been warned about, cracking knuckles and looking my way.

  I saw only one of them at first, but these things were three-card monte, and you never knew if there were ten others in camouflage waiting for you to swing or stumble on a rock. He came to me like he had no ill will, but his talk of peace was a lie. While I slowly focused, he quickly explained his pretext for approaching me. He acted confused, looked at me like I had an answer. It could have been a cousin with a snatched chain, a younger brother banked down at the harbor. It didn’t matter because it was fiction. It’s true our laws had mostly forsaken us, but we were not without shame. In deference to the statutes of yore, a boy always had to state the offense before he and his friends started swinging. But in deference to the perverted times, the charges were always pulled from the air, excuses.

  I didn’t respond. I didn’t know what was going on. Three more appeared, flustered, abandoning this fake diplomacy, and one of them, with yellow skin, in a maroon tee and jeans, stepped to me waving his hands—

  Mutherfucker, what’s up?

  But by then my group saw I was missing, and made their way back. I was saved by Leroy, who happened to be in one of their classes—

  Naw, yo, he cool.

  They looked me up and down, and backed away.

  Warm Fridays, like that one, always meant fight season. The climate pulled the boys out in their shell tops and sweat suits. Later I came to know the crew that r
olled on me—the Mighty Hilton-Beys. Lemmel kids, but the type who slept through middle school and were usually done by tenth grade. What they lived for was after school, slouching sinister in front the 7-Eleven at the bottom of Dukeland hill. That was where the hoppers lifted Hostess and reached for the burgeoning asses of young girls.

  There were any number of crews like them, carving up Lemmel into fiefdoms. They were assembled by shared neighborhoods, classes, and elementary schools. Their minds were made small by scrambling at the bottom. So they stood on bus stops, in subway stations, flocked to sidewalk sales, tipped drunks for fifths, and flocked to the Civic Center and bumrushed the show. They would lamp outside Mondawmin Mall, between the Crab Shack and Murray’s Steaks, attempting to invent a rep.

  I was raised on the struggle of elders—iron collars, severed feet, the rifle of dirty Harriet, and down through the years, the Muslims and regal Malcolm. But mostly what I saw around me was rank dishonor: cable and Atari plugged into every room, juvenile parenting, niggers sporting kicks with price tags that looked like mortgage bills. The Conscious among us knew the whole race was going down, that we’d freed ourselves from slavery and Jim Crow but not the great shackling of minds. The hoppers had no picture of the larger world. We thought all our battles were homegrown and personal, but, like an evil breeze at our back, we felt invisible hands at work, like someone else was still tugging at levers and pulling strings.

  The vagueness of the struggle made most of these kids barbarians, but there were a few like myself who were still noncombatants. My cheeks were fat. I talked a lot, laughed in such a way that I gave the hardest kids around me permission to laugh. That same easiness made me soft, and as I bounced awkwardly through the crowd of ungifted kids on my way to class in the morning, I became a confirmation of all the most dangerous rumors about the Marshall Team. Most of the Marshall Team were from further south, where the new nastiness of the city had already settled into a natural and unquestioned state. They understood their place in this new ecology. But still they would not play dumb. They were sharper than their friends, uncles, and cousins. And a couple of them even combined that with the grace of the street. Charles Davis could glide into algebra with perfect rhythm and a black leather bomber on his back, one of the rare kids who knew how to carry a textbook like it was fashion.