The Beautiful Struggle

by Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Love was how he got caught up. All boys were judged by arm strength, our varying ability to turn chance encounters into digits and then belt notches. Bill was tall, stylish, and kept a fresh fade. But most important, he did not half step, mumble, or stare at the ground. That certitude was in demand among the girls we knew, in fact, was a prerequisite to any exchange. And so Bill became profligate with the jennys and then, later, sloppy. The girl showed up at Linda’s house in need of some recognition, a sliver of respect. Bill answered the door. He did not usher her in. Linda sat in the back.

  She had come up pregnant weeks earlier. Bill had agreed to cover half, and she’d agreed to not bring in any adults. But the child in my brother still caged him. Half of him hoped the whole deal would just vanish. The other half was just dead wrong. Bill played her to the left, did not answer her calls, and went off in pursuit of other pleasures. All she wanted was for him to honor his word. They argued. She yelled and banged on the door. He ordered her to adjust her tone. She didn’t and now he became angry, grabbed all, maybe, hundred pounds of her, and slammed her to the ground.

  That was enough to bring out Linda—

  Have you lost your mind? I didn’t raise you to put your hands on women. Get in the damn house.

  Inside, old girl broke it down, while Bill sat and stewed. Of course it was out of his hands now. Linda called Dad and Bill was ordered to be responsible for his half and make the trek out Route 40 to a country clinic and see the thing done.

  After that, Dad cut Bill loose. They’d been at war all his life, but now Bill was seventeen, a grown man in my father’s eyes, and mostly set on whatever path would be. He was remanded back to Tioga, but there was no more checking homework, reviewing report cards, or upbraidings for cutting class. Dad issued the simple ultimatum that all of us lived under—at eighteen you will leave this house—and left the rest in the hands of Big Bill.

  Back at Lemmel, the Marshall Team came to an understanding with 8-07. A few fights followed mine, but once respect was assured, our meetings lost their sinister edge and diffused into the everyday roughhousing of boys anywhere. In our second semester, we took gym alone and were left to spar with one another. The boys were still desperate to prove their hand speed and ability to dominate. Me, I just threw enough combos to send the message that I was willing, a few slaps to keep the peace. That accomplished, I came to an accord with my gifted brothers.

  There were only seven or eight of us, but a year earlier they could not help but broadcast their contempt whenever I was near. Now, we would build on what we had in common: an obsession with Dan Marino’s rifle. At lunch, we would spread the lore of Mike Tyson, how he knocked niggers out southpaw, how they danced as they fell, rose, and fell again. Our deepest dream was to move through the world with that sort of constant thundering force. Failing that, we banded together and tried to project an aura that guarded against assault.

  My pre-school ritual came to include a larger circle of friends. The gifted kids had to be bused in from deeper sections of the West Side. They altered their trajectory and would stop and meet on my porch in the morning. Then we would begin our march forward, shielded by the security of one another. I swooned in the turnaround, and marveled at my own power to remake myself not at some private or county school, where I was unknown, but here on my own soil where once I’d feared for my skin.

  On weekends, I did projects for school and wrote rhymes. I played tapes of Gil Scott, Malcolm’s “Message to the Grass Roots,” and continued my quest to ingest anything in my father’s book collection relating to the Panthers. It was all so romantic to me. I’d replaced one pantheon for another, Spider-Man and Goose for Robert Williams and Huey. This was not joyful, exactly, but offered me freedom. I could not escape who I was, but now didn’t want to. My new heroes and narrative gave meaning to everything I’d once hated about my life—the banned holidays and fasts, the assigned reading, the angry young boys all around me. Dad noticed, but uttered not a word of pride. Still, I knew how he got down, reserved, with most of his more positive emotions inferred.

  I carved out safety at Lemmel, but knew that if I could go to a school where I did not require a security detail, I should do it. My sights were set on the majestic stature of Baltimore Polytech and its twin school Western. In my early days down near Mondawmin, Kris was a junior at Western. On school days we would take the same train to West Cold Spring. I would walk a few blocks over to fifth grade. Kris would wait on the street under the elevated subway tracks. Often I’d see her bus, the number 33 with Poly/ Western scrolling electronically across the front, and I thought it incredible that two schools could hold such sway that mass transit was turned to charter.

  The Poly/Western complex was a royal seat in Baltimore. Once they were the exclusive domain of white kids in uniforms. Now like all the old white neighborhoods with prewar homes and yawning streets, they were ours. But unlike everything else we inherited, the great traditions carried on. Western was the oldest all-girl public school in the country. It emerged as a funnel to exclusive schools in the Northeast. Traditions were minted. Big sister juniors adopted little sister freshmen. Seniors wore all white to inaugurate the start of the year. The mascot was the dove. The basketball team was hot and dominant.

  Poly stood across the quad, equally venerable and exclusive. Once all boys, it had gone progressive, admitted girls, integrated before any other high school in the city. No boys of sense disputed the presence of young women. Besides, the old ways endured—the orange and blue colors, the great football teams, the rivalry with City College, and most important a steady stream of young scientific minds. Everyone from Poly/Western went to college.

  I did well that year, which for me meant a high C, and only one beating from Dad or Ma. I must have done really well, because I don’t even remember who administered it. I was always better when the repercussions were immediate, and the threat of heading to my zoned high school sent me to homework and study. They notified us in the spring. It was like a miniature ritual of college admissions. You could tell that we were different in the gifted program, because while most of the school knew where they were headed, we buzzed with expectation. No one wanted to go to their zoned school.

  When I got the news, my mother was at home. I do not remember the color of the envelope or the length of the letter. But I remember jumping up and down and hugging my mother. I remember her smiling at me in actual pride, and this was new. She was often proud of me and demonstrated as much, but it was over potential and possibility, something I had said which made her expect that at some unknowable future date, I would amount to something more than what I seemed to be. Now she smiled at the tangible, at the real, not at what I dreamed I’d be but at that moment what I was.

  It was the season of expectations for all of us. Dad had left Bill to his fate. Bill, though oriented to the streets, still had enough wits to know that no one ever pulled a girl by bragging about being a high school dropout. Bill did not even bother applying anywhere aside from the Mecca. By now he’d visited Kris and Kell, had seen the parties, which were next level, and had some sense that college was more than a collection of eyeglasses. That was enough to pull from him the first mature effort of his life—and thus the first meaningful result. He was accepted, the third among three that Dad had steered to Howard.

  The rest of my year felt easy and musical. Classes were more relaxed. I wrote rhymes at night. All of us were anticipating the annual eighth-grade trip to Patapsco State Park. My mother took me shopping up at Reisterstown. I bought a fresh blue sweat suit with a matching Duke tee shirt, Starter hat, and a pair of blue-and-white Airs. Afterward we ate fried chicken, corn, greens, and biscuits. I dressed the next day with pride—I had never been so in style in all my life. We were told to bring our boom boxes and dress in our flyest gear. Teachers provided food for a cookout, footballs and softball equipment. They piled us into buses and rolled us out of the dense city for a forty-minute drive into the open. I rolled down the cheese bus window a
nd tasted the air. I had hayfever then, but it must not have mattered because I don’t remember a single sneeze or eye rub.

  We walked all across the state park that day, tossing the football, running routes and calling out Henry Ellard or Jerry Rice. And that’s when we saw them coming over the hill, running our way. We were not the only middle-school seniors on the trip. 8-07 in all their deep glory were running down an asphalt path. We made them from a distance, and, not knowing what to expect, we were ready and we were cocked.

  We did not run, and as they closed, it became clear that we could never escape, the mentality of war must always be at the ready. Someone would have had a boom box. I like to think “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” was on the deck. But that would be a year too soon. This was spring 1989. I was still a reluctant warrior, artless and gauche. But I had done the Knowledge, and pledged my unwieldy ax to upholding the code.

  They slowed down as they came to us, out of breath, some of them putting hands on their knees. They began laughing and a few of us started to soften our stance. But I stood off to the side, confused and convinced that whatever respect was accorded to the other brothers could never extend to me. One of them approached me—What’s up, nigger?—and extended his arm. I tightened in a mix of fear and frustration. I thought of how this would end, just as it began. But then he smiled. I looked down and saw his open hand, universal and at peace. I reached out and gave him a pound.

  CHAPTER 5

  This is the Daisy Age

  I wore a powder-blue short-sleeved shirt, matching navy Travel Fox, and stonewashed jeans. I had a green tie-dye book bag, with twin yellow ropes in place of straps. The back festooned with buttons, the totems of my champions—Bob Marley, Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X. Nigger, I was fly—my cut, two days old, tops. The angles of my lineup could have cut the chains, freed the slaves. Likely, I hung a wooden ankh from my neck. Likely, I was armed with Knowledge of Self—The COINTELPRO Papers or A Panther Is a Black Cat.

  I was thirteen, but I carried that thing, stepped off the porch with the bop of God’s son, floated across the black parking lot of Mondawmin, paid my fare, descended the cavernous escalators, then trained up to Rogers station. I was still a transfer and bus ride away, and yet I was overcome by status. Through all my terror and trembling, through all my torpor and dim wits, I had conjured this passport into the royal city. I wish I had paused on that long subway platform, closed my eyes, and inhaled. I wish I had acknowledged the feeling, held it close, and understood that it was not forever. But I was young and immortal, so I bounded down two escalators, walked a few yards, then emerged into the sunny basin beneath the station.

  Word to Mark Garvey, the West Side was in effect. Everyone had run through Charley Rudo’s, High Energy, Shoe City, and Robert C’s, until we emerged with piles and piles of school clothes that would have us styling for months. Rogers Avenue was humming, dozens of buses bound for everywhere pulled in and out of their hubs. Kids gathered in smiling packs, more free than any school children I’d seen in two years. I was alone, but now Original Man and unafraid. I had survived jumpings and kids in hoodies, hands in deep pockets threatening to pull out. I had survived my father, his many books and hands that were boulders. I had survived the shadow of Big Bill and emerged not a man of streets but of Knowledge.

  I stood off to the side, all Nobody Smiling, affecting a measure of cool, representing William H. Lemmel. I caught the publicly chartered 33. Poly/Western scrolled across the front like destiny. When I boarded at Rogers it was half full, but as we rolled down Wabash and across Cold Spring Lane it swelled with other kids like me but not. They were gifted, but had been sheltered in more forgiving schools and hailed from neighborhoods with detached houses and lawns built for tackle football in the fall. This was still the West Side, and so they wore the reserve of that shackled land. But they had reclaimed their laughter, and deployed it without regard for weakness or what it might say.

  I had spent that summer in early college prep out at the nearby campus for the University of Maryland, yet another of the programs my parents were always putting us in, hoping that whatever messages we missed from them might connect from another angle. For a month, I lived in a dorm with kids cropped from all over the city. We bunked together in suites, and during the day took lectures in the sciences and field trips to various points of interest in the city. We ate in the school cafeteria. Our downtime was spent swimming, hanging out in the dorm lobby, watching cable videos, or sitting outside our rooms bumping “Back to Life” on our boom boxes. Fridays our parents came for us, or we boarded the 20 bus and looked out the windows as it wended its way through the roads and stations of the open county. There were talent shows. A few of us lip-synched Slick Rick’s “A Children’s Story.” I was the narrator. My boy Isaac acted it out, snatched the lady, pulled the automatic.

  At night, suite doors were left unlocked and jimmys and jennys would float through each other’s rooms. We did not know what to make of the girls or of ourselves, but felt the deepest need to express the burgeoning adult inside. Kiesha breached the portal of my room at a heathen hour. The dawning light from outside woke me up, and against the darkness, she was angelic. During the day our conversations had been friendly and vague. She was slender, brown, and from Cherry Hill, where they beat niggers with scrap metal and threw ’em off the Key Bridge. We had exchanged numbers and had talks on three-way. She lay down next to me with her hands around her chest.

  Are you good? I asked.

  She said something affirmative. I went back to sleep. The next morning, all the girls giggled and asked if I was gay. They were so advanced. I was only thirteen. This was 1989. There were still things I did not understand.

  We dismounted the 33 bus in front of the campus, and joined a gathering throng buzzing about the first day. I was amped, but played low-key. I scouted immediately for girls, and what I saw disrupted cognition. There were honeys from across the city—Westport, Hollander Ridge, Gwynn Oak, Northwood. They were everything from redbone to yo-yo darkskin. The dimes among them carried Benetton bags, were dolled up like Lily Powers—finger waves, a head of dyed blond, and eyes like enchanted daggers. I saw we were outnumbered, as brothers who try the civilized way always are. But in this instance, it was thrilling.

  I caught flashbacks, and saw faces that took me back to Callaway Elementary and Ms. Rhone. I saw a few from that summer at UMBC, and two or three from Lemmel. There was no bell that I remember. We just all filed in at the proper time, and made our way to homerooms inscribed on letters we’d received some days before. Here I found my first white teacher, bespectacled, old, and balding, a holdover from the days when Poly was a different fraternity. We were a different breed, cut from something different than the boys he first taught or the old teachers in short-sleeved white shirts with ties and inconspicuous haircuts.

  Poly changed with the culture and demography of Baltimore. It was now our time. The pall was slowly coming off, and we were recovering from crack, though still caught in the aftershocks. I worried less about getting jumped. Weathermen talked more sun. Reports of school shootings were replaced with black is back. Chuck D still preached: Elvis was exposed. Our heroes did not appear on stamps. At night, I pumped “Strictly Snapping Necks” and brought forth lyrics. My daydreams were all on stage. It was black and silent, until I raised my ax and touched the mic with literature and fables.

  Big Bill was transitioning into life at the Mecca. In his dorm, among the piles of clothes and kicks, the CDs and tapes, the yellow notebooks of lyrics, he packed his gun. He was charged with the possibilities of this second life—no regulations, no chores, the chance to burn consecutive Els. And he was slowly evolving. He carried a couple of Dad’s books and began to feel the call of the People. But he feared the loss of his essence, a slow erosion of the extrasensory gifts imparted by the streets. College was a cartoon to him, flush with bumblers, gophers, and kids who could calculate the temperature on Mars but could not tell you the time. Bill was moved by laws of sur
vival. He was a soldier, insistent that he would not be caught out there. But the “out there” was bigger than he ever dreamed.

  His prejudice melted in his first week. He found his eggheads, for sure, walking the city like it couldn’t happen, and returning to campus battered, scraped, and a few bills lighter. But this was the Mecca—the incredible cosmopolis of blackness. Nigger, the whole campus was radioactive. White folks would roll through aimlessly, catch a tan, and start quoting Cabral. There were legacies in their third generation. There were Greeks leaping across the Yard. There were dime pieces, thousands, all different shapes, flavors, and accents. There were kids in cultures and subcultures, organizing around robotics, badminton, real estate and Baha’i.

  There was the campus, infused with the spirits of alumni, who jettisoned lives and careers for the People’s war. The great halls, like at Lemmel, were named for patriots—Douglass, Drew, Tubman, and Bethune. There were football games, where in the midst of the school song, the crowd would yell out in time, “It’s not a white school!” There were classes, where debates glowed and stretched into the hallways. It could have been anything from Contras to global warming, but the filter was always Garvey’s. The effect of it all—the ancestral ghosts, the naming rites, the seminars—was a shared consciousness, a constant drumming that promised a new, more advanced Knowledge.

  Bill was dazzled, and amid all the sects, he found his own—survivors hailing from the ruins of Lansing, New York, Detroit, who’d seized the gift and advanced. Down at Sutton Hall, they convened over blunts—the antidrug of our generation. Cocaine had turned their childhoods spastic and sensational. They flew through preteens in speeding cars. All the lovely scenery of puberty and just beyond, first kisses and fucks, were blurred with murder rates and babies breeding babies. Everything happened too fast. So they founded cults of forest fire, then huddled in ciphers and passed. The burning bush was “Kumbaya,” a group hug, a chance to slow shit down.